World Wide Words -- 07 Jan 12
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Sat Jan 7 04:19:19 UTC 2012
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 768 Saturday 7 January 2012
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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: Paraprosdokian.
3. Wordface.
4. 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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COMPETITION TIME World Wide Words has been nominated in the Best
Website About the English Language category in the Love English
Awards 2011 run by the Macmillan Dictionary. Voting is open until
midnight GMT on 31 January. Your support is requested. To vote, go
via my link http://worldwidewords.org?MCMVC. (Currently World Wide
Words is on page two of the list.)
YEDSIRAG Australians and New Zealanders wrote following this piece,
with its mention of the old British colloquial expression "head sir-
rag", to ask about a local expression that looks hauntingly similar:
"head serang", or "head sherang", for a boss or a person in charge.
It is now known mostly among older people. Beth Shaw commented that
"The Head Serang was anyone in charge of anything, not necessarily
something terribly important; if you were setting up tables for the
Sunday school picnic and didn't know where to put yours you might be
told to go and find the Head Serang. It was used in a slightly
mocking or ironic way - an important-sounding title for a less
important position."
It has a very different origin, from the Anglo-Indian "serang" (the
spelling that appears in the Macquarie Dictionary), originally from
the Persian "sarhang", commander. Yule and Burnell defined it in
Hobson-Jobson, their huge compilation of Anglo-Indian expressions,
as "a native boatswain or chief of a lascar crew; the skipper of a
small native vessel." However, the similarity to the older British
expression, which would certainly have been known to nineteenth-
century migrants, is so striking that it must surely be linked and
presumably accounts for the addition of "head" to the Anglo-Indian
word.
Mark Whitehead remembers its use in England: "My first career after
leaving school, in the early 1970s, was in textile dyeing. The first
company I worked for was in Basford, Nottingham, and the word was
often used there. Sometimes it would refer to the Dyehouse Foreman
for the shift - not a technical man (that was the Dyer - me, after a
while), but a very experienced operator with extra training. It was
pronounced without the 'y' and often with the 'i' silent; 'eds'rag'.
It was also used sarcastically. 'Look at 'im - thinks he's the
'eds'rag.' With some of the younger operators who had obviously not
heard this term before, it soon became the ''Ed Scrag' - which
showed how they felt about their foreman!"
Several readers commented on Mont Abbott's use of what looked like
the plural form of the past tense of "to be" ("Chisel were the only
true ringer among us") when the singular would be used in standard
English. This verb is notoriously complicated and irregular, as the
result of the historical fusion of elements from four distinct older
verbs. It's unique in that the past tense has different singular and
plural forms ("was", "were"). All other verbs make do with just the
one ("he taught", "we taught", "they taught"). As a result, there
has long been a tendency for speakers of non-standard Englishes to
settle on one form or the other. Some dialects use "was" all the
time ("we was", "they was"), but others employ "were" ("I were", "he
were").
2. Weird Words: Paraprosdokian /para at prQs'doUki at n/
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Dorothy Parker once quipped about a Yale Prom, "If all the girls
attending it were laid end to end, I wouldn't be at all surprised."
Some decades earlier Oscar Wilde wrote, "It is perfectly monstrous
the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind
one's back that are absolutely and entirely true." (He liked this
enough to use it twice, in A Woman of No Importance and The Picture
of Dorian Gray.) Herman Mankiewicz said of Orson Welles: "There, but
for the grace of God, goes God". (It's also been claimed for Sir
Winston Churchill, as a put-down of Sir Stafford Cripps, but Herman
Mankiewicz got there first.)
What connects the witticisms is that their endings are unexpected, a
violation of expectations whose surprise provokes laughter. It's a
favourite trick of comedy writers. "Paraprosdokian" is the learned
term for this trick. It has turned up in recent years in lots of
places, mainly online, probably because mentioning it is a good
excuse for repeating choice quotes from witty writers.
The word hasn't yet reached any dictionary that I know of and that
includes the recent revision of the letter P in the Oxford English
Dictionary. That's led some, including the Canadian broadcaster and
writer Bill Casselman, to argue it's not a proper term in rhetoric
but a recent invention: "The word 'paraprosdokian' was made up by
some semiliterate doofus late in the 20th century". He challenged
those who thought otherwise "to show me one single citation for the
word paraprosdokian earlier than 1950 CE". No problem:
The humourous incongruity and unconscious cynicism of
their utterance, and the paraprosdokian of their dialogue,
with their perilous approach to caricature, all seem to
show that Mrs. Craigie is developing a talent all her own
for rendering bucolic character.
[The Echo (Middx.), 10 Nov. 1896. This is in a long
review (on the front page: different times) of the novel
The Herb Moon, by John Oliver Hobbes, pen name of Pearl
Mary-Teresa Craigie.]
And, in a piece written by Sir Compton Mackenzie three decades
later:
It is long since I have sat at the feet of this
minstrel; and I quote from memory; but I think another
verse of the same poem thus illustrated the same
paraprosdokian or concluding jerk of disappointment.
[Illustrated London News (London), 18 Jul. 1931.]
I haven't been able to uncover who coined it, though as it appears
in Die Sprache als Kunst by Gustav Gerber, dated 1884, I suspect
this German philosopher of language to be responsible. Whatever its
genesis, there's general agreement that it was borrowed from the
Greek "prosdokia", expectation (whether for good or ill, hence Sir
Compton Mackenzie's comment), prefixed by "para-", beside, in the
sense of something outside the normal that's found in words such as
paranoia and parapsychology.
Mr Casselman criticised it because, though a noun, it includes the
adjectival form of the Greek root. Indeed, in English the "-ian"
ending does usually makes adjectives. It also forms nouns - though
never abstract ones - for a individual who uses or works with the
thing in the stem. Such as a comedian.
3. Wordface
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WORDS OF THE YEAR The American Dialect Society, meeting this year
in Portland, Oregon, voted last evening for its 22nd annual Words of
the Year. This is always a light-hearted event, though underlying it
is a serious message , that language change is normal, ongoing, and
entertaining. To preclude any snarky comments, the ADS broadly
interprets "word" here to mean "vocabulary item", which covers
phrases as well as single words.
As usual, words were first chosen in five individual categories. The
Most Useful Word winner was "humblebrag", a term coined in April by
comedy writer Harris Wittels on Twitter for the deceptively self-
effacing boasting by celebrities. Most Creative was the dreadfully
stretched "Mellencamp", after the American American rock singer John
Mellencamp (also known as Johnny Cougar), meaning a woman too old to
be a cougar, one who dates much younger men. The actor Charlie Sheen
created the term that was voted Most Unnecessary - "bi-winning" -
which he used to describe himself in dismissing accusations of his
being bipolar. By a substantial majority, the word "assholocracy"
(government by obnoxious multi-millionaires) was voted the Most
Outrageous Word of the Year. Most Euphemistic was "job creator",
much used by candidates aiming for the Republican nomination in the
2012 US presidential election, who argue that it's the top 1% of
rich people who generate jobs. The most fashionable computer term of
our times, "cloud", online space for the storage and manipulation of
data, was voted the Word Most Likely to Succeed (though many of us
would argue that it has already succeeded). Contrarywise, the Word
Least Likely to Succeed was the curious "brony", an adult male fan
of the My Little Pony cartoon franchise.
The Occupy movement has been so significant in the last months of
2011 that a special category was created for terms linked to it,
including "human microphone" or "people's mic" (the low-tech method
of amplifying a person's speech at an Occupy gathering by having
surrounding people repeat it line by line) and "twinkling", the
silent way to register approval or disapproval by wiggly hand
gestures. The winner in this category was "99 percenters" or "the
99%", the vast majority of ordinary people held to be at a financial
or political disadvantage to the top moneymakers, the 1%.
With that special category, there was little doubt in the minds of
most observers that "Occupy" would be the Word of the Year and so it
proved. The lexicographer and columnist Ben Zimmer, Ben Zimmer, co-
chair of the meeting, commented that "occupy" was "a very old word,
but over the course of just a few months it took on another life and
moved in new and unexpected directions, thanks to a national and
global movement, a movement that itself was powered by the word."
At the same meeting, members of the American Name Society voted for
their names of the year. For the Trade Name of the Year they chose
Siri, the almost-human robot personal assistant of Apple's iPhone;
the Place Name was Fukushima, the Personal Name Qadaffi (however you
spell it), the Fictional Name Lisbeth Salander from Stieg Larsson's
Millennium Trilogy and the overall Name of the Year was Arab Spring.
4. Sic!
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Journalists in a rush often pick the best word they can think of at
the moment. Sometimes it's the wrong one. On 28 December, Bob Hughes
noted the Daily Telegraph had this: "Though [Kim Jong-il] secured
his regime with nuclear weapons, that process earned international
approbation at a time when as many as two million people died from
famines."
There must be something in the water at the Telegraph. Terence Riley
was looking through the picture gallery of "Worst dressed 2011: the
25 worst outfits of the year" and encountered one of Penelope Cruz,
whose caption commented she "made her first public appearance since
giving birth to her first child at the Oscars back in February."
A news report by Vanguard Media of Nigeria about the arrest of a
fake Catholic nun detected by a priest in Owerri caught the eye of
Fr Eric Funston: "The Catholic priest said that 'a thorough search
of the luggage she was carrying was most revealing, adding that
several bank tellers and varying documents were recovered'."
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