World Wide Words -- 14 Jul 12
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jul 13 21:09:08 UTC 2012
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WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 793 Saturday 14 July 2012
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Weird Words: Magnoperate.
3. Wordface.
4. Q and A: Touch and go.
5. Sic!
6. Useful information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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GOING DUTCH Several readers commented that these expressions are
indeed based on a Dutch national characteristic. Arthur Brede wrote:
"Dutch attitudes to money, debt, sharing costs and contracts are
different from those in England. For the Dutch, keeping track is
important, as is any implication that money can influence personal
relationships. I've been on holiday with Dutch friends who've kept
quite meticulous records of what was spent, and expected the same of
me and a 'reckoning-up' at the end. I find it very healthy and open,
although anyone English making a contract with a Dutch person would
do well to check up on who's paying for the teabags."
Richard Bos added, "The English habit of buying rounds has never
caught on over here. You will on occasion find someone buying a
round individually, perhaps to celebrate something, or to treat his
friends, but the regularised round-buying of the English is not
common. Possibly the most usual way of dealing with the bill is that
of divvying up the tab equally at the end of the evening; but going
Dutch is also considered quite normal in the Netherlands."
OTHER DUTCH EXPRESSIONS Several readers mentioned "Dutch wife", a
rattan open frame or bolster used in the Dutch Indies to support the
limbs in bed; Ian Williams told me of "Dutchman's log", an
improvised way to measure a ship's speed using any piece of rubbish
that was handy; Rhody Streeter remembers "Dutch tilt" or "Dutch
angle" from the film business, in which the camera was turned off
vertical to create a sense of disorientation or indicate
drunkenness. Bruce Brantley and Nicholas Brandes noted that
carpenters and masons use "Dutchman" for a piece of wood or stone
inserted as a repair; this is mainly US usage and was listed as long
ago as 1859 in John Russell Bartlett's Dictionary of Americanisms.
DEAD RECKONING Numerous readers queried a Sic! item last week in
which a report on the marketing of halal products used the phrase
"animals that were dead prior to slaughtering". To me this made no
sense, because "slaughter" means "kill". But Aelfwine Mischler e-
mailed from Cairo: "I hear things like this all the time from Arabic
speakers. They understand 'slaughter' to mean specifically 'cut the
throat' (the way Muslims kill animals for meat) rather than the
broader meaning 'kill'. It means that Muslims cannot eat meat from
animals that were dead before the throat was slit and the blood
drained." In a completely different context, Randall Bart found
references in US official documents about BSE that the slaughter of
dead animals was prohibited. So the original news report was right
and in certain circumstances "slaughter" can mean "butcher" rather
than "kill". Dictionaries haven't caught up with this specialised
usage.
STATE'S RIGHT Professor Gustavus Hinrichs, whom I mentioned in my
piece about "derecho" last week, was based at the University of
Iowa, not Ohio. I'm told that this confusion between the two four-
letter words isn't unknown even among natives, especially in speech
when local accents may blur the distinction. John Estill wrote, "An
old joke has an Ohioan introducing himself at a cocktail party as
being from Ohio. His hostess, condescendingly tells him, 'I hope you
won't mind, but around here we usually pronounce it "Iowa".'"
2. Weird Words: Magnoperate /mag'nQp at reIt/
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In July 1915, the local paper in Le Mars, Iowa (which I note claims
the title of ice cream capital of the world) reported on the curious
events in Remsen, a small community ten miles to the east that even
today has a mere 1,600 inhabitants. A man posing as a film-maker
from Chicago had persuaded local businessmen to put up money to make
a movie promoting the virtues of the town. His speech on the wonders
of his camera, as reported, was impressively extravagant, though it
ought to have reminded his hearers of the loquacity of a snake-oil
salesman:
This instrument's greatest achievement will be when it
portrays to the world the gorgeous glory, the
scintillating splendor, the cyclopean characteristics
which will not a little magnoperate the massiveness of
your wonderful community.
[Le Mars Semi-Weekly Sentinel, 20 Jul. 1915.]
Had the unidentified man really said "magnoperate", or had he been
grandiloquised by the newspaper? Either way, I suspect a prior
consultation of the M-Mandragon section of the Oxford English
Dictionary, which had been published in 1904. That recorded only two
occurrences of the word, its first being in 1610, in a dedication in
Baculum Geodæticum, an important work on surveying by the almanac
maker and mathematician Arthur Hopton. It was in a dedication, an
even more grovellingly flattering speech than that of the conning
cameraman, but its relevant part may remind you of his spiel: "[It]
will not a little magnoperate the splendor of your well knowne
honour to these succeeding times".
"Magnoperate" here means to enhance or make greater. It has nothing
to do with either magnets or magic but comes from classical Latin
"magnopere". That's short for "magno opere", which literally means
"with great labour", but "magnopere" was applied figuratively to
mean "to a great extent", "greatly" or "especially". We still know
the Latin root of "opere" as "opus", an artistic work; a close
relative is "opera", which came into English via Italian. Both
elements of "magnopere" appear in "magnum opus", great work, the
most important creation of an artist or writer. It's also, of
course, the source of "operate" and its compounds (and "opulent",
since for Romans the root of wealth was work).
The word, with compounds "magnoperation" and "magnoperator", popped
up a few more times in the twentieth century. It was a favourite of
the British theatre critic James Agate, who used it to mean doing
something in the grand manner ("I like women to write femininely and
cattily. They embarrass me when they magnoperate and magniloquise.")
Nobody since him has employed it, not even the most magniloquent of
silver-tongued persuaders.
3. Wordface
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PARANYMPHS AND SHEPHERDS I was reading a linguistics blog the other
day and came across a reference to a PhD candidate being assisted by
two PARANYMPHS. Two what? Some further enquiries showed that it's
mostly used in connection with European universities. A person who
is formally defending their doctoral thesis in public usually has
two attendants who provide moral and practical support. These are
the paranymphs. "Paranymph" comes from a classical Greek word for a
bridesmaid or (surprisingly in view of the exclusively feminine
nature of "nymph" in English) a male friend of the bridegroom, his
best man; it arrived in English in the sixteenth century via Latin
and French.
4. Q and A: Touch and go
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Q. How did "touch and go" come to mean dangerous or unsettled? Is
there any connection with touch-and-go practice landings in a plane?
[Peter Rugg]
A. I know the training method that you mention as "circuits and
bumps". The pilot lands but instead of stopping he takes off again
and makes a circuit of the airport to repeat the action. This sense
of "touch and go" does have a link to the origin of the idiom,
though that is centuries earlier.
The first meaning on record is of dealing with some matter merely
glancingly or momentarily (in the British sense of something that
happens for a very short time): to merely touch on it and at once go
on to something else. The earliest recorded user is Hugh Latimer,
the Protestant martyr who was burnt at the stake in Oxford in 1555
alongside Nicholas Ridley. He preached a sermon in front of Edward
VI in 1549: "As this texte dothe ryse I wyl touche and go, a lytel
in euery parte, vntyl I come vnto to muche." His meaning is roughly
that as he develops his argument, he will first briefly mention his
main themes before expanding on each. The same idea of brevity
appeared in a couplet the following century:
Madam, I'm gone, no wonder, for you know,
Lovers encounters are but touch and go.
[The English Rogue, by Richard Head, 1665. There's no
possessive apostrophe in "lovers" because the punctuation
mark wasn't then in use.]
Two separate strands of development in meaning began to appear in
the written record at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
One seems to have come out of literature and the theatre - at least,
the first examples relate to those arenas. This is the earliest:
There is an art in writing for the Theatre, technically
called touch and go, which is indispensible when we
consider the small quantum of patience, which so motley an
assemblage as a London audience can be expected to
afford.
[Rejected Addresses, by H Smith and J Smith, 1812.
Theatre audiences at the time had a notoriously short
attention span.]
"Touch and go" here means being so brief as to be utterly
superficial, so it's easy to understand how it could have evolved
from the sense that Bishop Latimer knew. It was later used of men
who were so casual or careless in their actions that they were
thought to be unreliable or untrustworthy. The 1913 edition of John
Camden Hotten's slang dictionary noted that "touch and go" referred
to men "with whom business arrangements should be of the lightest
possible character", presumably at the end of a bargepole. A few
modern dictionaries still include the superficiality sense, but I've
never come across it and presume it is no longer current.
The other sense that appeared is our current one of a precarious,
unpredictable or risky situation whose outcome is uncertain. "It was
touch and go whether he would survive the operation." There are two
possible sources on record for it.
One was given by Hotten in the first edition of his dictionary in
1859 as a coaching term: "The old jarveys [coachmen, thought to
derive from the personal name "Jervis"], to shew their skill, used
to drive against things so close as absolutely to touch, yet without
injury. This they called a toucher, or, touch and go, which was
hence applied to anything which was within an ace of ruin."
The other appears in nautical contexts and was summed up by Admiral
William Smyth in The Sailor's Word-book in 1865: "Said of anything
within an ace of ruin; as in rounding a ship very narrowly to escape
rocks, &c, or when, under sail, she rubs against the ground with her
keel, without much diminution of her velocity." The latter sense is
recorded from the beginning of the nineteenth century. One Admiralty
court case in 1817 noted that a temporary touching of the keel on
the sea floor "has been vulgarly described" as a touch and go, which
suggests that it had even then been in the language for some time as
sailors' jargon.
Which of these is the true origin, if either, is unknowable in the
present state of the etymological art. But both are based on the
same idea of momentary contact that exists in the aeronautical
"touch and go".
5. Sic!
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George Flowers forwarded an AP report. It concerned a wallaby that
escaped from a private owner in Houten in the Netherlands. The Dutch
police tried to sedate the animal but it continued to hop toward the
highway. The report ended, "The force said that 'for the safety of
the animal and of traffic, the animal was terminated.'"
Len Levine wrote, "I've often heard it (mis)quoted that, in a future
time of peace, 'the lion shall lie down with the lamb'. At my local
Gristedes supermarket in New York City I noticed a cut of meat
labeled 'lion lamb chops'. Perhaps peace has come earlier than we
thought and Gristedes is selling the offspring."
Sic Transit. The answer to the Question of the Week in the Money
Saving Expert Newsletter of 11 July surprised Nick Johns: "If your
spouse is no longer driving (or has passed away), it may be possible
for them [to] relinquish the [No Claims Bonus] and transfer it to
you by writing a letter to the insurance company."
6. Useful information
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