World Wide Words -- 01 Sep 12
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Aug 31 16:01:17 UTC 2012
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WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 799 Saturday 1 September 2012
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This mailing also contains an HTML-formatted version.
A formatted version is also available online at
http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/clog.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Weird Words: Cynosure.
3. Wordface.
4. Q and A: Left in the lurch.
5. Sic!
6. Useful information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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WARDOUR STREET ENGLISH Many readers responded to this piece in the
previous issue. To a person, they dismissed Fowler's list of pseudo-
archaic words to be avoided and commented that they regularly used
several of them, including "withal". Kim Braithwaite said: "It is
the perfect word in the right context - which, to be sure, doesn't
come around often, and won't in this e-mail. I use it gratefully,
joyfully, whenever the discourse warrants, in casual e-mails and
(though rarely) in conversation with friends. 'Albeit' is a good
word too, in the right place." It was good to learn that I'm not
alone in liking it.
Anton Sherwood and Rob Kerr told me about a famous piece by the SF
writer Poul Anderson, Uncleftish Beholding, which explains atomic
theory using only Old English roots: "The next greatest firststuff
is sunstuff, which has two firstbits and two bernstonebits. The
everyday sort also has two neitherbits in the kernel. If there are
more or less, the uncleft will soon break asunder." The full text is
online here: http://wwwords.org?UNBE2.
TRUMPET-BLOWING TIME With issue 800 imminent, it was a pleasure to
learn from new subscriber Sandra Boedecker that a piece written by
Mark Peters in the current issue of Copyediting newsletter contains
these comments: "As one of the most reliable, well-researched, and
intriguing resources in the lexical world, World Wide Words is a
treasure. ... I've written hundreds of language articles, and I
would sooner write in pig Latin than neglect to consult this vast
archive." That online archive currently contains 2601 items. See the
full index: http://wwwords.org?GNNDX. Enjoy!
2. Weird Words: Cynosure /sIn at Usj@(r)/
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If you were to be uncivil enough to describe somebody as a "dog's
tail", that person would almost certainly be offended. Changing the
epithet to "cynosure" would evoke the opposite reaction, since the
latter means a person at the centre of attention. And yet in origin
they're the same.
The connection is astronomy. Like other ancient civilisations, the
Greeks were thoroughly familiar with Polaris, the North Star, until
very recent times a vital aid to navigation. It lies at the end of a
constellation that we sometimes call Ursa Minor (the little bear) or
more colloquially the Little Dipper, with the handle of the dipper
having the pole star at its end. Greek mariners called the handle
"kunosoura", dog's tail, from "kuon", dog, plus "oura", tail. They
also attached the same name to the pole star itself.
(The dog's tail should not be confused with the dog star, Sirius,
which was given that name because its constellation of Canis Major
(the Great Dog) seems to follow at the heels of Orion the hunter, as
does his other dog, the constellation of Canis Minor, which contains
the lesser dog star, Procyon.)
The name was taken into Latin as "cynosura". From there it moved
into French and eventually into English - as "cynosure" - at the end
of the sixteenth century. The meaning at first remained that of the
pole star. In 1596, Charles Fitzgeoffrey wrote in a book about Sir
Francis Drake: "Cynosure, whose praise the sea-man sings." He also
used it figuratively for a guiding light. Within a few years people
transferred it to something that was the centre of attention, as the
Pole Star was to seafarers. It was only a minor step to using it for
any focus of attraction, interest, or admiration.
We still use it that way, though it has so often fallen into cliché
as "the cynosure of all eyes" that wise writers have to be careful
of it.
3. Wordface
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GALACTIC DOG HUNT While we're on the subject, another celestial dog
turned up in a BBC report on Thursday. NASA's Wide-Field Infrared
Survey Explorer (WISE) has found examples of a previously unknown
type of galaxy. They are very hot, extremely bright and shrouded in
dust that has until now hidden them. Astronomers have given the name
HOT DOG to objects of this class, where the second word is short for
"dust-obscured galaxy".
A DASH OF PUNCTUATION Rules for hyphenating words are notoriously
very complicated. I encountered an arcane example this week. Both my
copyeditors argued that phrases that I'd written as "Wardour-Street
English" and "Old-English roots" shouldn't contain hyphens. A search
in the Chicago Manual of Style, Hart's Rules from Oxford University
Press and The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language proved them
right. Such forms are indeed frequently (but by no means always)
hyphenated: "affirmative-action policy", "city-council elections".
However, all three references assert that modifying phrases that are
proper nouns should not be hyphenated: "North Central region",
"British Museum staff", "New Testament Greek". Hence this issue has
"Wardour Street English" and "Old English roots" without hyphens.
Well, I did say it was arcane.
NUMBER SENSE At one hotel during my recent trip, the dinner menu
offered a "selection of cheeses and biscuits". Disappointingly, the
plate that came contained merely two types of cheese. I felt that a
selection in this sense implies at least three items, a view that
was supported by the dictionaries, which define it along the lines
of "a range of things from which a choice may be made". It would
have been entertainingly pedantic, though I suspect ultimately
futile, to have tried to convince the hotel of this significant
linguistic fact. Perhaps it considered the biscuits to be part of
the mix?
4. Q and A: Left in the lurch
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Q. While reading to my two nieces, we came across the phrase "left
in the lurch". The older girl questioned this, saying that lurch was
what someone did, not a place to be left in. I wondered if there was
more to this odd expression. [Graham C Reed, South Africa].
A. Your niece could hardly be expected to know that there were two
quite different senses of "lurch" with no connection between them.
Both can or could be both verbs and nouns.
The sort of lurch that she was thinking of, a sudden uncontrolled
movement, comes from a naval expression, variously "lee-larch",
"lee-latch" or "lee-lurch". It described a ship that suddenly heeled
over or shifted abruptly sideways to leeward. Landsmen borrowed it
around the beginning of the nineteenth century.
The lurch one may be left in is actually from a sixteenth-century
French gambling game. It was played with dice and was supposedly a
bit like backgammon, though nobody now knows the details. It was
called "lourche" or "l'ourche", which the Oxford English Dictionary
suggests may be from a regional German word recorded as "lortsch",
"lurtsch", "lorz" and "lurz". A phrase, "lurz werden", meant to fail
to achieve some objective in a game. The term was taken over into
French, not only as the name of the game but also in the phrase
"demeurer lourche", to lose embarrassingly badly.
We're fairly sure about this last part because "lurch" was borrowed
into English around the end of the sixteenth century to refer to a
situation at the end of a game in which one player is beaten by a
very large margin, perhaps even a "maiden game" in which a player
scores nothing at all. You said that you had found a reference to
cribbage: this was a similar situation, in which a lurch meant that
one player had pegged out with 61 before the other had reached 31,
halfway around the scoring board.
To be in the lurch was to be severely discomfited. Various phrases
built on the idea, including "to give someone the lurch" and "to
have someone at the lurch", respectively to get the better of a man
or to have the advantage of him. By the final years of the sixteenth
century, within a short time of the word arriving in the language,
"to be in the lurch" had appeared, meaning to be in difficulty and
without assistance. After all, it wasn't the job of the other player
to give any help to the loser.
The game has long since gone completely out of memory, as have most
of the usages of "lurch" for a bad playing position, but the idiom
survives, nearly always as "to leave in the lurch".
5. Sic!
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Bill Swanger found this in the police reports in the Zion-Benton
News of Illinois, dated 23 August: "Octaveous M. Gordon, 22, of the
500 block of McAlister Ave. Beach Park was stopped for having only
one head and was also charged with driving while license suspended."
Tim Hurley pointed out that a caption to a video dated 28 August on
the New York Times website read, "The former governor of New Jersey
John Sununu is a fierce supporter of Mitt Romney, and prone to going
rouge, often saying the things the Romney campaign can't." Going red
in the face, presumably?
The Reverend Dr Margaret Joachim noted that in her day ordination
training didn't include creationism. Her remark was prompted by this
headline on the BBC News site on 28th August: "A service celebrating
cows created by a priest for a farmer is officially published by the
Church of England."
Another story on the BBC website, this time of 20 August, surprised
Martin Turner: "Previously, Paralympians have performed in front of
half-empty crowds."
"A car-washing gang! Things are looking up!" Chris Little e-mailed.
He had found a Daily Mail report of 17 August: "Nathan McDonald, who
was jailed yesterday for almost ten years for his role in the raid,
had even visited millionaire Richard Barnfather's home the day
before the gang struck to wash his £190,000 Aston Martin."
6. Useful information
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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 the fault of the author. The linked
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