World Wide Words -- 07 Apr 12
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Apr 6 18:25:04 UTC 2012
--------------------------------------------------------------------
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 781 Saturday 7 April 2012
--------------------------------------------------------------------
A formatted version of this e-magazine is available
online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/ijbc.htm
Contents
--------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Weird Words: Zemblanity.
3. Wordface.
4. Q and A: Rozzer.
5. Sic!
6. Useful information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
--------------------------------------------------------------------
AND MORE ON SENTENCES Clark Stevens e-mailed: "Your discussion took
me back to my seventh-grade English classes, Mrs Isabelle Stead
presiding. Her unwavering opposition to beginning a sentence with
'and' or 'but' was matched only by her admiration for the novels of
Sir Walter Scott. One day, as we were plodding through Quentin
Durward, a smart aleck in the back of the room spotted a sentence
beginning with 'and'. Seizing the chance to ally himself with a
colossus of literature, he pointed it out and asked, 'Why can't we
do that?' All 4ft 10in of Mrs Stead was momentarily nonplussed. Then
she said: 'Young man, you may begin a sentence with "and" or "but"
when you can write like Sir Walter Scott.' And that was the end of
that."
Several readers pointed out that the many "ands" in the quotation
from Genesis in the King James Bible are a quirk of Hebrew. Shayna
Kravetz commented, "In part, the reason is the grammatical structure
known in Hebrew as the vav ha-hipuch or, in English, the conversive
vav. The letter vav, when used as a prefix, functions as 'and'. But
in biblical Hebrew a vav prefix also converts the tense of a verb
from past to future or vice versa. The phrase translated as 'and
there was light', is literally the conversive vav plus the future
tense. Modern translators usually don't bother to reproduce the
breathless narrative pulse that this string of 'ands' provides in
the Hebrew, and simply turn the verbs around and drop the 'ands'."
"And another thing...", e-mailed Anthony Massey, who went on to say
something I was groping to express. "While using 'and' at the start
of every sentence can give a childlike feel, in the work of a great
poet the effect can be one of tremendous power. Take the first half
of William Blake's Jerusalem, four sentences of which begin with
'and'. As Blake knew very well, if you take 'and' away it's not the
same at all:
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?
And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic Mills?"
SOOTH In giving its origin, I should have said that the Sanskrit
adjective "satyas" is a relative, not its origin. In the jargon of
the etymological trade, it's a cognate. Both words actually have a
common origin.
Speaking of common origins, others remarked on "soothe". Though its
meaning has substantially diverged, "soothe" has the same origin as
"sooth". In Old English "soothe" meant to verify something, to prove
it to be true. From the sixteenth century on, "soothe" successively
came to mean corroborate some statement, then to flatter or humour a
person by agreeing with them, then mollify or appease and so to our
current sense of rendering a person or animal calm or quiet. When I
searched current newspapers - for the most part unavailingly - for
examples of "sooth", I was intrigued to see how often "soothe" was
now being spelled "sooth". Those who make what is still regarded as
an error are actually returning to the word's roots.
COOKING WITH POO Gerry Foley wrote, "In Thai, the word for crab is
pronounced with an unaspirated 'p', which is something between a 'p'
and a 'b' - hence crab is sometimes written as 'bpoo'." So the word
doesn't really sound the same as English 'poo', though often written
that way. In the official transliteration of Thai to English, 'p'
represents the unaspirated 'p', while 'ph' represents the aspirated
'p' ('p' as in English 'poo'). That's why Phuket is spelt the way it
is - and not pronounced as a coarse expletive." Roger Denny added,
"The correct Thai response on being given a copy of the above book
as a gift would be 'Kop khun krap', or 'thank you'. 'Krap' is a male
participle used as a polite termination to a sentence or remark."
VOTING TIME AGAIN World Wide Words has once again been nominated in
the LSOFT Choice Awards (now the Mailys), in which you may recall we
gained an award in 2009. The contest is organised as monthly heats
from April to August; the winner of each becomes a finalist. You can
vote every day until 31 August if you want and you have the stamina.
To vote, go via http://wwwords.org?LSOFT .
2. Weird Words: Zemblanity
--------------------------------------------------------------------
In an ideal lexicographical world, every word ought to be provided
with its opposite, its antonym. Ever since 1754, when Horace Walpole
included it in a letter (see http://wwwords.org?SNDPTY), serendipity
has had to survive without one. It has only been very recently that
its opposite has appeared:
So what is the opposite of Serendip, a southern land of
spice and warmth, lush greenery and hummingbirds,
seawashed, sunbasted? Think of another world in the far
north, barren, icebound, cold, a world of flint and stone.
Call it Zembla. Ergo: zemblanity, the opposite of
serendipity, the faculty of making unhappy, unlucky and
expected discoveries by design. Serendipity and
zemblanity: the twin poles of the axis around which we
revolve.
[Armadillo, by William Boyd, 1998.]
It hasn't yet achieved mainstream status, though Mr Justice Michael
Peart used it in a recent legal judgment in the UK and it has been
borrowed as the title of a bit of madcap physical theatre, which was
performed, for example, at the 2009 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. It
has also featured in a book of endangered words. I hadn't realised
that it had been used enough to become endangered.
3. Wordface
--------------------------------------------------------------------
LUCK OF THE DRAW Some words culled at random from recent reading:
NETWALKING is similar to everyday networking with other people, but
it's done in an organised country walk with selected participants,
free from interruptions; BATHTUBBING is an eccentric water sport, so
far recorded only in the Welsh town of Llanwrtyd Wells (famous for
its annual bog snorkelling championships), in which you propel old
bathtubs with a kayak paddle (do remember not to pull the bathplug
out); PINK SLIME is slang for a form of reconstituted beef, known
formally as lean finely textured beef, or by its critics as ammonia-
treated beef trimmings, a controversial foodstuff in the US and now
also in the UK; MYSOPHOBIC refers to an irrationally intense fear of
dirt or disease (ancient Greek "musos", uncleanness); if your skin
is ERYTHEMAL, it's going pink through irritation or illness (that
is, you have erythema). And FORTUNOCRACY has been appearing in book
reviews to mean a successful group of people who have gained that
state not as a result of their abilities but from blind chance; it
was coined by Ed Smith in his book Luck: What it Means and Why it
Matters (I suspect "fortunocracy" may be a temporary formation,
unless it gets lucky).
BRADREE IN BRADFORD In Britain, the surprising victory by George
Galloway in a parliamentary by-election in Bradford West a week ago
introduced a new word to the political lexicon: BRADREEISM. It seems
to be from bilingual wordplay. The constituency has many second- or
third-generation British Muslim voters, mainly of Pakistani stock.
The word is from Urdu "biradiri", roughly meaning brotherhood,
family or kinship, but which also refers to social stratification
based on clan affiliations. It has been blended with the name of the
city to create "bradree" and then confirmed as an English word by
adding the "-ism" suffix. It refers to the way in which political
leaders from this community have in the past been chosen from a very
small number of families through their connections rather than their
talent.
4. Q and A: Rozzer
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. Too much Top Gear [a BBC television series on motoring] makes my
mind wander. I was wondering about the origin of the word "rozzers"
for the police, which is the one the presenters always use and which
I've not heard elsewhere. Any thoughts? [Andrew]
A. Off the top of my head, I would have said that "rozzer" is rather
out of fashion as a British slang term for the police and that the
Top Gear use of it was affected. However, I find that "rozzer" does
still have quite a wide currency, at least in newspapers, mostly in
a mildly deprecatory way:
The rozzers will lose money if they fail their fitness
tests - a drop in salary of £3,000 a year has been
suggested.
[Sunday Times, 18 Mar. 2012.]
As I noted in August last year, the current youth favourite is "The
Feds", though "the filth", "the pigs" and others are still current.
Older ones include "coppers", "the Bill", "Woodentops" (from a 1950s
children's television programme) and "The Plods". Slang terms for
police go back a long way, at least to Shakespeare's "bluebottles",
from the colour of watchmen's uniforms. "Peeler" derives from the
name of the founder of the Metropolitan Police in 1828, Sir Robert
Peel (as does "bobby"). From the middle of the nineteenth century,
"esclop" was in fashion, this being back slang for "police", though
it was usually pronounced (and often spelled) as "slop".
"Rozzer" is easily the most mysterious of the set and one of the
oldest still in use - it began to be recorded in the late 1880s.
This is the earliest that the Oxford English Dictionary knows of:
Up walks a rozzer and buckles me tight.
[Sporting Times, 26 May 1888.]
An early suggestion held it was a variation on "Robert", again from
Sir Robert Peel. Others have unsatisfactorily found a connection to
the early nineteenth century French criminal slang for a policeman,
"roussin" or "rousse", literally a redhead (from "roux"), considered
to be a despised or marginalised individual. A common supposition is
that it comes from Hebrew "khazeer" or Yiddish "chazer", a pig, but
this is almost certainly a guess derived from the 1960s slang term.
Yet another candidate is the Romany "ruzalo", strong. Some point to
"roosher", contemporary with "rozzer", which is listed in Farmer and
Henley's Slang and its Analogues of 1903, but that merely transfers
the problem to another word of which we know nothing.
None of these have any direct evidence to support them. Once again,
it's "origin unknown", I'm afraid.
5. Sic!
--------------------------------------------------------------------
An all-day visitor parking voucher issued by Islington Council to
Alan Clayton contained this warning: "You are liable to a penalty
charge if you ... do not use the voucher other than as described
above." He commented, "Damned if you do and damned if you don't!"
Paul Farrington-Douglas saw the headline over a report in the Prague
Daily Monitor of 31 March: "Thieves steal car disguised as towing
service".
An item in the Traverse City Record-Eagle on 29 March reported that
soil erosion enforcement was being transferred from the office of
the County Drain Commissioner to the office of County Construction.
The omission of an "f" from the headline led to its appearing as
"Drain enforcement duties shit away from McElyea". Michael Sheehan
saw it and sent a picture to prove it.
In the Daily Mirror of 3 April, submitted by Liz: "Sarah claimed to
have had an on-off affair with Gordon for seven years in 2008". That
year must have seemed awfully long.
Wayne Norton found an article from Postmedia News in the Victoria
Times Colonist on 2 April informing readers that an increase of 6.5
percent in local electricity rates will mean "an extra $5 a month
for the atypical customer." He wonders how much more the typical
customer can expect to pay.
6. Useful information
--------------------------------------------------------------------
ABOUT THIS E-MAGAZINE: World Wide Words is written and published by
Michael Quinion in the UK. ISSN 1470-1448. Copyediting and advice
are provided by Julane Marx in the US and Robert Waterhouse in the
UK. Any residual errors are fault of the editor. The linked website
is http://www.worldwidewords.org.
SUBSCRIPTIONS: The website provides all the tools you need to manage
your own subscription. Please don't contact me asking for changes
you can make yourself, though if problems occur you can e-mail me at
wordssubs at worldwidewords.org. To change your subscribed address,
leave the list or re-subscribe, go to http://wwwords.org?SUBS. This
e-magazine is also available on RSS (http://wwwords.org?RSSFD) and
Twitter (http://wwwords.org?TWTTR). Back issues are available via
http://wwwords.org?BKISS.
E-MAIL CONTACT ADDRESSES: Comments on e-magazine mailings are always
welcome. They should be sent to wordseditor at worldwidewords.org. I do
try to respond, but pressures of time often prevent me from doing
so. Items for the Sic! section should go to sic at worldwidewords.org.
Questions intended to be answered in the Q and A section should be
sent to wordsquestions at worldwidewords.org, not to me directly.
SUPPORT WORLD WIDE WORDS: If you have enjoyed this e-magazine and
would like to help defray its costs and those of the linked Web
site, please visit the support page via http://wwwords.org?SPPRT .
COPYRIGHT: World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2012. All
rights reserved. You may reproduce this e-magazine in whole or part
in free newsletters, educational resources, newsgroups or mailing
lists provided that you include the copyright notice above and give
the website address. Reproduction of substantial parts of items in
printed publications or built websites requires permission from the
editor beforehand.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/worldwidewords/attachments/20120406/eb477bfd/attachment.htm>
More information about the WorldWideWords
mailing list