World Wide Words -- 14 Jan 12
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jan 13 09:06:29 UTC 2012
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 769 Saturday 14 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: Toploftical.
3. Wordface.
4. Q and A: Have no truck with.
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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PARAPROSDOKIAN Numerous readers better acquainted with rhetorical
devices pointed out that "para prosdokian" does occur in classical
Greek literature as a phrase meaning "contrary to expectations". The
final "n" on the noun marks the accusative case that followed the
preposition "para"; it doesn't indicate an adjective, as a writer
that I quoted in the piece suggested. What has changed in modern
times is that the two Greek words have rather barbarously been run
together to make one word. It would be better as "paraprosdokia",
using the root form of the noun. That word does occasionally appear
in scholarly literature, though it's not in any of my dictionaries
either. A revised piece is at http://wwwords.org?PRPDK.
WORDS OF THE YEAR We haven't quite reached the end of this season's
lists, as the Macquarie Dictionary of Australia has yet to announce
its findings (it has the strange idea that we should wait until the
year is over before summarising its lexicographical highlights).
Nevertheless, I've written a summary of the Words of 2011 that you
will find here: http://wwwords.org?WRDS11.
COMPETITION UPDATE Your votes last week instantly put World Wide
Words into the lead in the Macmillan Dictionary contest for the 2011
Best Website About the English Language. We have almost twice as
many votes as the nearest contender. Many thanks to you all. But the
situation can change quickly, so if you haven't yet voted, please do
so - go via my link http://wwwords.org?MCMVC. (Currently World Wide
Words is on page two of the list.)
2. Weird Words: Toploftical
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This may look and sound like one of those grandiloquent words that
arose on the American frontier, alongside sockdolager, hornswoggle,
dumfungled, absquatulate, goshbustified and their kin.
No, it's British, dammit! To be more accurate, it's Scots, as it
started life in 1823 in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, in one of a
series of imaginary conversations entitled Noctes Ambrosianae that
were set in a tavern in Edinburgh. One member, Odoherty, whom you
may conclude was Irish, commented sarcastically on a snatch of a
poem by Lord Byron: "Very toploftical, to be sure."
It was a slang term - roughly translatable as high-flown, high and
mighty, highfalutin or stuck-up - that was rarely to be found in
printed texts of the nineteenth century. It seems to have caught on
soon after (Thomas Carlyle used it in a letter in 1824) and we know
it had reached Ireland no later than the early 1840s:
Thomas Wilson, who spoke in a strain so ambitious and
toploftical as to be scarcely intelligible to the
magistrates, succeeded after much ado in making their
worships comprehend that on the night previous he had had
a jollification with a friend in Merrion-street.
[Freeman's Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser
(Dublin), 21 Mar. 1842.]
It was taken to the US around this time and had greater success
there, no doubt because it fitted the extravagant lexicality of that
rambunctious nation. In the 1850s "toplofty" was formed from it.
Though the heyday of both words is long over and "toploftical" has
vanished, on rare occasions the shorter word still graces our
private conversations and the public press.
Its origin is disputed. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests it
comes from "top loft", though it has no entry for the term. Examples
in books indicate that it was literally the topmost storey of a high
building, usually a storage area. Presumably its height above the
ground was the stimulus for the figurative expression.
3. Wordface
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CRUEL SPORT The sudden disappearance of domestic cats has often
been blamed on thieves. Years ago, it was commonly said that the
animals were sold for their fur to make fake mink coats. In the last
couple of months claims of a darker nature have been made, mainly in
the north of England, that the cats were being stolen to be pitted
against fighting dogs, an urban equivalent of badger baiting. The
practice has become known as CAT COURSING, by strained analogy with
the equally illegal hare coursing.
GET PHYSICAL Have you noticed how "physical" has begun to be more
popular as one element in retronyms relating to the online world? If
you actually go into a store to buy something, instead of ordering
online, that's PHYSICAL SHOPPING. Similarly, a PHYSICAL BOOK is one
made with ink on dead trees, in contrast to a digital e-book. Both
terms have been around for more than a decade but my impression is
that they've only recently gone mainstream.
TAKE A BREAK At the very beginning of the year, JANOPAUSE (also as
JANUPAUSE) appeared from nowhere in several British newspapers, the
Daily Mail in particular. It is a month-long period of abstinence
from alcohol designed to detoxify the body after the excesses of the
holiday season. Its arrival was prompted by a New Year message from
the British Liver Trust arguing that it was useless - that a short
period of complete abstinence doesn't improve your liver and that it
was better to stay off alcohol for a few days every week throughout
the whole year. The initial Daily Mail article was copied around the
world, including New Zealand and India. Why it should mostly be
written as "Janopause" than the more obvious and better "Janupause"
is curious, as is its sudden arrival. There is one previous use on
record, also in the Daily Mail, from 31 January 2002. Did somebody
on the paper trawl the archives and decide it was worth using again?
BANISHED WORDS Not to be taken too seriously, the Banished Words of
2011 - the Anti-words of the Year - have been selected by visitors
to the website of Lake Superior State University. They include the
buzzword of the moment, "occupy", which its advocates considered to
be both overused and abused. Others nominated were "pet parent",
"man cave" and "win the future" (which has generated a new meaning
for "WTF"). But the winner was "amazing", widely regarded as a tag
word of every American TV host who was short of a pithier epithet.
One contributor complained, "I saw Martha Stewart use the word
'amazing' six times in the first five minutes of her television
show."
4. Q and A: Have no truck with
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Q. I used to think that the expression "to have no truck with" - to
disagree with or refuse to be involved with - was strictly rural
American dialect, until I read it recently in The Economist. Where
does this come from? Was there once the opposite usage in the sense
that sharing a truck meant to go along with someone? [Louis Cohen]
A. The evidence suggests that the expression is actually British.
The first example I've so far turned up is this:
"I think," said Corney, "we'd better get him up to bed
at once?" "Do what yow like," replied aunt Ann. "It makes
no odds to me: I'll ha' nothing to do with him! - I'll
have no truck with a tocksicated man."
The Steward, by Henry Cockton, 1850. Cockton was a
minor English writer of the period, best known in his
lifetime for his novel The Life and Adventures of
Valentine Vox, the Ventriloquist. "Tocksicated" =
"intoxicated".
For the genesis of the term we must go back to medieval England.
"Truck" had been borrowed from Old French "troquer", which meant to
obtain goods by barter or to give in exchange. It still does in
expressions such as "truck farm" for a market garden, because its
produce was often bartered rather than sold. "Truck" here has
nothing to do with vehicles; that sense comes from a different
source, a Latin word meaning the sheaf of a pulley, later a small
wooden wheel.
In order to barter you had to negotiate with the person you were
dealing with and "truck" later extended to refer to dealing or
trading in all sorts of commodities. By the seventeenth century it
had broadened and weakened into the idea of communication in general
or of being on familiar terms with another person.
It was then only a short step, though it seems to have taken quite a
while, to generate "have no truck with", meaning not only that you
didn't want any commercial dealings with a person but that you
didn't want to know them at all.
It's sometimes suggested that the expression developed during the
mid-nineteenth-century railway age in Britain. The gangs of navvies
employed to drive the rails through Britain were often exploited.
One method was, in effect, to pay them in goods rather than money.
Railway contractors gave workmen vouchers that were redeemable for
poor-quality food and other necessities at inflated prices only at
company stores called truck shops - a further extension of the idea
of "truck" meaning barter. This abuse was widely deplored, although
it took until late in the century for it to be finally stamped out.
It might seem that the exploitation generated the idiom among its
opponents, but the etymological evidence argues otherwise.
5. Sic!
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This one belongs in the I-know-what-you-mean-but-it-could-have-been-
better-expressed department. Michael Tremberth saw it in the blog at
findmypast.co.uk about public access to the 1911 British census: "On
the census transcriptions, you'll also be able to see any recorded
details of children born to women in prison who were aged three or
under at the time of the census."
Don Wilkins tells us that on 6 January the Sydney Morning Herald
began a story, "They approached the four-wheel drive parked outside
the Sans Souci apartment block allegedly armed with a loaded gun,
knuckle dusters and a knife".
A caption to a video on the Weather Channel, dated 6 January, was
submitted by Randall Bart: "Ishin Ueyama was driving on an icy I-77
in West Virginia when he lost control of his vehicle and nearly
missed crashing into several cars."
Victor Steinbok found a report in the Lake Wylie Pilot that quoted
Kevin Shwedo, director of the Department of Motor Vehicles in South
Carolina. The piece revealed that 900 people listed as deceased have
recently voted. Mr Shwedo said: "If you have voted after you are
dead, there is a good, strong possibility that you did something
illegal." Not to say miraculous.
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