World Wide Words -- 10 Oct 11

Fri Oct 7 16:38:39 UTC 2011

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 757           Saturday 8 October 2011
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Author/editor: Michael Quinion       US advisory editor: Julane Marx
Website: http://www.worldwidewords.org                ISSN 1470-1448
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Idioticon.
3. Wordface.
4. Q and A: Punt.
5. Sic!
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.

1. Feedback, notes and comments
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COLOUR ME PREFIXED  Following up last week's comments about words 
starting in "en-" and "em-" for imbuing something with colour, 
Andrew Palmer and Dave Cook supplied the first sentence of Thomas 
Hardy's Return of the Native: "A Saturday afternoon in November was 
approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed 
wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment."

Ian Paterson included "embrown" in his Dictionary of Colour (2003) 
and wrote, "Compare 'empurple' and 'embronze'. These appear to be 
the only three colours bearing the transitive em- prefix.  But see 
also 'encrimson', 'engolden', 'envermeil' and 'envermil'." Claire 
Nolan mentioned both "engolden" and "embronze"; the main meaning of 
the latter is to embody something in bronze, for example a statue, 
but can also mean to colour something bronze. She also listed the 
rare verb "emblanch", to make white. The OED has both "encrimson" 
and "envermeil", which means to tinge with vermillion. I can find 
few examples of its relative "envermil", to make red; this is from a 
poem about fish in the Gentleman's Magazine of May 1740: "The tench, 
and here the speary perch delight, / Envermill'd all with finns of 
rosy red". Edward Fisher mentioned that the OED also has "engreen".

Russ Willey echoed the comments of many subscribers: "You and Andrew 
Haynes are only right about the sparsity of verbs for instilling a 
colour if you're seeking discrete words created with an affix. But 
plenty of names for colours also act as 'instilling' verbs, without 
the need any extra letters. Paper yellows with age, campaigners 
advocate the greening of the environment, inapplicable options on 
forms are greyed out, fried potatoes are lightly browned, my hair is 
silvered in a distinguished fashion, and so on. And Shakespeare used 
'azured' a couple of times. In fact, the vast majority of colour 
names are also used as verbs in an instilling sense, although 'to 
orange' is rare and 'to pink' and 'to maroon' are generally eschewed 
because those verbs have other meanings."

Enough on this subject, I think!

CORRECTION  Professor Robert A Rothstein is based at the University 
of Massachusetts Amherst, not at MIT.

2. Weird Words: Idioticon  /,IdI'QtIk(@)n/
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If you came across this word in these internet times without knowing 
what it means, you might guess it refers to an image whose purpose 
is to flag something online as stupid or witless. No such marker 
exists, though if it did it would surely not lack application.

It does come from the same ancient source as "idiot". In Latin, an 
"idiota" was an ignorant or uneducated person, but not necessarily a 
fool or mentally inadequate. In classical Greek, "idios" referred to 
something private, hence "idiotikos" for a private person (the sense 
is still around in modern Greek; for example, "idiotiko scholeio" is 
a private school). "Idios" could also refer to somebody with his own 
ideas and ways of living, which survives in our "idiosyncrasy" and 
"idiosyncratic".

In Greek, "idiotikos" could also mean ignorant or uneducated; its 
neuter singular "idiotikon" was taken into Latin after the classical 
period in this sense. In the eighteenth century German scholars used 
it for a dictionary of a dialect or a minority language - the view 
that they were barbarous tongues spoken only by the unschooled was 
still very powerful. Early examples included the Idioticon Frisicum, 
the Idioticon Hambergense and the Idioticon Prussicum. Later it 
became a standard German word, spelled "Idiotikon".

"Idioticon" appeared in English in the early nineteenth century in 
the same sense but has always been extremely rare.

    I often wished for a Bronx idioticon and a Yiddish 
    dictionary to clarify some of the words.
    [Sydney Morning Herald, 6 Jul. 1996.]

3. Wordface 
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MAD ABOUT NUTS  Reports have been appearing in the English press to 
the effect that this year is a MAST YEAR, with especially big crops 
of nuts such as acorns or chestnuts. This might seem to be good news 
for the World Conker Championships, being held tomorrow in Ashton, 
Northamptonshire, since it relies on horse chestnuts to play the 
ancient game. However, the Campaign For Real Conkers, a group that 
opposes bans on conker playing, has suggested that it has actually 
led to a shortage because conkers have been ripening early; by mid-
September - the normal time for collecting championship conkers - it 
claimed that most had already fallen and been trampled or removed. 
MAST has nothing to do with the pole that holds up a ship's sails, 
but is an Old English word related to "meat" in its sense of solid 
food (as in "meat and drink"), and was a collective term for the 
fruit of woodland trees used as food for pigs and other animals.

We have personal experience of this year's mast, since we have two 
hazelnut trees in our garden (something that the local squirrels 
have learned to appreciate: we spend much of the summer uprooting 
hazel seedlings where the pestiferous beasties have buried nuts the 
previous autumn). It was only last week that, by virtue of having 
two trees, I learned that we might stretch language a little and 
call that part of the garden a hazel PLAT, though my wife joked that 
two trees do not a plat make and that we needed to have three (she 
was thinking of PLAIT). "Plat" is Middle English for a small patch 
of cultivated ground - you might have had a corn-plat for example; a 
grass-plat was a lawn. It's probably a variant of "plot". The 
spelling shift may have come about through a mental link to the 
adjective of the same spelling (from the French "plat") that meant a 
flat area. In a derived sense, "plat" could be a plan of an area of 
land. The idea of a plot of cultivated ground has fallen out of use 
in British English except very rarely in the phrase "hazel plat" but 
"plat" remains current in the US for a map or diagram showing the 
boundaries of plots on a site.

OH! FUCHSIA!  A Guardian article about the Labour Party conference 
misspelled the name of the plant as "fuschia"; the following day, a 
correction appeared: "Not always is the Guardian faithful to the 
memory of Bavarian-born botanist Leonhart Fuchs (1501-1566), for 
whom the fuchsia is named". The next day, a letter was published 
from a retired Scottish professor: "In my family, we have a mnemonic 
for remembering how to spell fuchsia: it's the only other word in 
the dictionary that begins with fuc." 

Neat. But if I may exercise my pedantry for a moment, a number of 
other words appear in several of my dictionaries to separate shrub 
from salacity, though if the prof had included the word "common" he 
would have been unassailable. They include FUCIVOROUS, feeding on 
seaweed, and FUCHSITE, a brilliant green mica mineral, named after 
another Fuchs, of the early nineteenth century. The Oxford English 
Dictionary has several other less common words, including FUCAL, 
specious or fair-seeming.

4. Q and A: Punt
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Q. I have tried, vainly, to discover the relationships among "punt" 
(a flat-bottomed boat), "punt" (a tactic in American football), and
"punt" (the dimple in the bottom of a wine bottle). Can you help 
with this mystery? [Peter Ingerman]

A. To respond with another question, I'd be interested to know why 
you might think a connection exists between them? Some background 
may help to explain what I'm getting at.

English is rife with words that are confusingly similar. Some are 
spelled differently but have the same sound (homophones), such as 
"break/brake", "heal/heel", "cereal/serial"; others are spelled the 
same but pronounced differently (homographs), such as "entrance", 
"invalid", "moped", or "wound". A third set (homonyms) - to which 
your group belongs - combine the similarities: they are said and 
spelled the same, but have different meanings: "bear", "distemper", 
"founder", "plain", "saw", "tender".

Native speakers are so used to them that we aren't in the least 
bothered that "rest" can mean both repose and remainder, that a bank 
may be both a financial institution and a place where the wild thyme 
blows, or that - lacking context - "spring" might refer to a jump, a 
rivulet or a season. Whole dictionaries have been dedicated to 
resolving confusions between such words for learners of English as a 
second language.

One reason why we have so many homonyms is that English is a mongrel 
language that has imported words from many sources, sometimes more 
than once, and has frequently modified them to generate new senses. 
Its utter lack of purity has been well expressed:

    The problem with defending the purity of the English 
    language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse 
    whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English 
    has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them 
    unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary. 

    [James Nicoll, in rec.arts.sf-lovers, 1990. Mr Nicoll 
    is a Canadian freelance games and science-fiction 
    reviewer.]

The result is that sets of homonyms rarely have a common source. An 
exception is the common senses of "rap" - a quick blow, a knocking 
sound, a type of popular music, talk or gossip, a commendation, a 
rebuke, a criminal charge - which all do seem to derive from the 
idea of a tap or blow.

Your word "punt" demonstrates this hybrid nature. The sense of the 
flat-bottomed boat comes from Latin "ponto" (which, at the risk of 
sending us on another homonym chase, is also where "pontoon" comes 
from); the sense of the hollow in the bottom of a bottle may be from 
"pontil", originally a French word for the iron rod that's used to 
hold or shape soft glass; the OED says it means a little point, but 
my French etymological dictionaries argue that it's a little bridge 
("pont", from the Latin "pons"); the sense in Rugby or American 
Football for releasing the ball from the hands and giving it a kick 
before it reaches the ground may be from "punt", to push forcibly, 
perhaps from the idea of pushing with a punt pole; it may also be 
linked with "bunt" - of unknown origin - to strike, knock or push, 
which is the source of the baseball term for gently tapping a 
pitched ball without swinging the bat.

There are other senses of "punt" beyond the three you've given. It 
might be a bet or gamble (hence the British English "punter" for a  
person who gambles or makes a risky investment), which dictionaries 
cautiously suggest may be from French "ponter", to bet against the 
bank in games of cards; before the Irish joined the Euro they had a 
monetary unit called the punt, which seems to be a variant form of 
"pound"; the mainly Commonwealth "punt around", to move around in an 
aimless or easy-going manner, is said to be from one-time British 
police slang for patrolling, which in turn probably comes from the 
idea of leisure punting.

5. Sic!
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David Elwen encountered a Daily Mail headline on 7 October: "Sharon 
Osbourne reveals she had her breast implants removed on chat show." 
He commented that, thankfully, he missed the programme.

A sign at the Slimbridge Wetland Centre that I came across earlier 
this week read: "Please ensure this gate is closed at all times." I 
had to abandon logic to pass through it.

The Guardian's page one headline on 29 September was submitted by 
Maurice Raraty: "Universities still failing poor students". His 
comment: "I should hope so!"

Roger Beale communicated: "In a guide to Montacute House, a National 
Trust property, I read the astonishing assertion that 'Death was 
commonplace in the 1700s'. It went on to tell of a mistress of the 
house who died in her 20s, so I suppose they had meant to say 
'premature death...'."

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