World Wide Words -- 10 Sep 11

Fri Sep 9 16:38:11 UTC 2011

WORLD WIDE WORDS        ISSUE 753         Saturday 10 September 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: Carabidologist.
3. Wordface.
4. Turns of Phrase: Seasteading.
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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AHEAD OF THE CURVE  Dick Bentley mentioned that the aviation power 
curve, the origin of the idiom, is more commonly known as the drag 
curve, though the expression "ahead of the drag curve" has never 
reached the language. He also suggested a possible link with 
"learning curve". I debated whether to mention this in the piece 
last week, but it seemed already too complicated to introduce a side 
theme. "Learning curve" is much older than "ahead of the curve". It 
was invented by R S Woodworth, an American psychologist, in his 
influential book Psychology: a Study of Mental Life, dated 1922. 
This was likewise a reference to a graph, in this case one derived 
from research into animal learning (for example, how quickly rats 
learned to traverse a maze), which showed that acquisition of 
knowledge was swift at first but later slowed.

2. Weird Words: Carabidologist  /kae at brI'dQl at dZIst/
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This turned up recently in a newspaper report of a study into the 
probable number of living species. It was said to be a person who 
studied beetles. Up to a point, Lord Copper. The usual term for a 
beetleologist is "coleopterist" (from a Greek word that means 
sheath-winged), so "carabidologist" must mean something else.

Finding what it really meant required some minor delving, as it 
doesn't appear in any of my dictionaries, not even the huge Oxford 
English Dictionary, and it's clearly a specialist term even among 
beetle researchers. A carabidologist studies carabids, a large and 
diverse family of mainly nocturnal predatory ground beetles that 
includes bombardier beetles, sand beetles and tiger beetles. All 
carabids are beetles, but by no means all beetles are carabids.

If you relied on its etymology for help, you would be left utterly 
confused. "Carabid" is said by various dictionaries to derive from 
Latin "carabus". We can ignore its sense in late Latin of a small 
ship (which has bequeathed us "caravel", a small, fast Portuguese or 
Spanish ship of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries). The Latin 
meaning from classical times given in the dictionaries - a sort of 
crab, crayfish or crustacean - leaves us scratching our heads. Works 
of a more specialist nature help by pointing out that "carabus" came 
into Latin from a Greek word that could mean either a spiny lobster 
or a horned beetle (it seems that neither Greeks nor Romans were hot 
on detailed species identification).

"Carabid" has no link with "scarab", though that's indubitably also 
a beetle; several centuries ago the latter was a vague hand-waving 
term in English for any insect that was presumed to breed in dung.

3. Wordface
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CENTENNIAL WORDS  The old words BRABBLE, GROWLERY, IMPALUDISM and 
KHEDA have been in the news. They were all included in the first 
edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary, published in 1911, which 
has just been republished in facsimile to mark its centenary. It was 
a different world then. As the Oxford University Press put it in its 
publicity blurb, "A jet was a stream of water, computer was not 
recognized, a slogan was a Highland war-cry, a squadron referred to 
cavalry or ships, and holocaust primarily meant 'a wholesale 
sacrifice'." Some definitions would now strike us as strange. Take 
the one for "electricity": "Peculiar condition of the molecules of a 
body or of the ether surrounding them, developed by friction, 
chemical action, heat or magnetism." And some of the entries were 
for words that have since vanished, such as the four I quoted: 
"brabble" (a paltry noisy quarrel); "growlery" (place to growl in, 
private room, den. cf Boudoir); "impaludism" (morbid state, with 
tendency to intermittent fevers & enlargement of spleen, found in 
dwellers in marshes); "kheda" (enclosure used in Bengal &c. to catch 
elephants). The new edition of the Concise, published at the same 
time as the facsimile, has deleted some other faded words, including 
"Eurocommunism", "threequel", "cassette player" and "video jockey", 
replacing them with, among others, "upcycle" (reuse discarded 
objects or material in such a way as to create a product of higher 
quality or value than the original) and "domestic goddess" (a woman 
with exceptional domestic skills, especially cookery).

TRANSPORT OF DELIGHT  My wife and I were in the Scilly Isles over 
the weekend. To get there we had to travel to Penzance on a train 
that was too long for several of the little Cornish stations where 
we stopped on the way. The guard had to announce which carriages 
were alongside the platform at each railway station so passengers 
knew where to alight. There was plenty of time to muse on the way 
that the vocabulary of British railways has so much changed after 
privatisation in the 1990s that the previous sentence is archaic. 
The guard has become the train manager, carriages are coaches, and 
almost everyone now speaks of train stations. For a while, those who 
rode trains were referred to as customers rather than as passengers, 
but this bit of awful marketing-speak seems to have been reversed by 
some diktat from on high. Most significantly, the announcements 
introduced me to a new verb: "Only coaches A, B and C will be 
PLATFORMED", that is, only those three would lie alongside the 
platform at each stop.

4. Turns of Phrase: Seasteading
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There's a famous quip attributed to Mark Twain; he advised readers 
to buy land because they weren't making it any more. Since two-
thirds of our planet is ocean, there's still a lot of real estate 
out there, though admittedly rather damp and often inclement.

The idea behind seasteading is to establish miniature independent 
countries out at sea, perhaps initially on refitted oil rigs or 
cruise liners. The word is clearly a play on "homesteading". It's 
far from new: it first appeared in the Stratton Report, a US study 
of 1969 that developed a plan for innovative use of the sea, as 
reported here:

    One proposal of Stratton's group attempts to revive the 
    spirit of homesteading. To encourage aquaculture, 
    recreation projects and other uses of the sea, the 
    commission recommended the leasing of submerged lands on 
    easy terms to small investors. It proposes to call the 
    arrangement "seasteading."
    [Time, 24 Jan. 1969.]

The idea was taken up by individuals who were more interested in the 
potential for creating communities independent of existing national 
governments and what were seen as their onerous interference with 
personal liberty than in productive uses of the seas. Several tries 
at extra-national seaborne institutions followed, including various 
pirate radio stations and Seeland, based on a World War Two sea fort 
in the Thames estuary.

This century, a key focus for the movement has been the Seasteading 
Institute, founded in 2008 in California by Patri Friedman, which 
has gained from the support and investment of Peter Thiel, founder 
of PayPal. It was in the news in August as the result of a widely-
quoted feature in Details magazine. The vocabulary has extended: a 
seasteading community is called a seastead and its promoters and 
inhabitants are seasteaders.

    The ultimate goal, [explains] Patri Friedman, grandson 
    of Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, a former 
    Google engineer and the man behind a concept he calls 
    "seasteading," is to "open a frontier for experimenting 
    with new ideas for government," to build a country where 
    there is no welfare, little gun control, no minimum wage 
    and looser building codes.
    [The Globe and Mail, 19 Aug. 2011.]

    Friedman called on his fellow libertarians to give up 
    on the whole idea of the democratic nation-state and join 
    his movement in favor of "seasteading," or the creation of 
    new, microscopic sovereign states on repurposed oil 
    derricks, where people who think that "Atlas Shrugged" is 
    really cool can be in the majority for a change.
    [Salon, 30 Aug. 2011. Atlas Shrugged is a dystopian 
    novel by Ayn Rand, published in 1957.]

5. Sic!
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Ray Hattingh heard a news item on a local Cape Town Radio station 
that implied a previously unrecorded hotline: "The minister has 
personally sent his condolences to the deceased." 

Two items that might be headed "We know what you mean but ..."  The 
Nascar News site featured a headline on 31 August (sent in by Megan 
Zurawicz): "Naked man harboring a raccoon arrested for streaking 
during Bristol race week". And an item from the Canadian Press that 
appeared on Yahoo! News (noticed by John George) read "Verdict in 
December for Quebec motorist accused of killing toddler on his 18th 
birthday."

Department of Revisionist Astronomy. Rob Crompton saw this in the 
Independent on 3 September: "Do calories eaten closer to bedtime 
count more than those consumed earlier in the day? The debate rages 
on for dieters. But before you swear off food when the sun heads 
south, an expert weighs in with some practical advice." Setting in 
the west is so passé.

John McNeil wrote, "In a news item on Radio New Zealand reporting on 
a military plane crash off the coast of Chile, 'The pilot previously 
tried twice to land unsuccessfully.' Unfortunately, it appears he 
succeeded the third time."

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