World Wide Words -- 28 Jul 12

[Michael Quinion]

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WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 795           Saturday 28 July 2012
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Weird Words: Concinnity.
3. Wordface.
4. Q and A: Dint.
5. Sic!
6. Useful information.


1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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TIT FOR TAT  Numerous readers echoed Roger Downham's comment: "There 
was I, happily assuming that 'tit for tat' was a corruption of 'this 
for that', when you came along and complicated it all!"

ABECEDARIAN  Michael Lean added another layer of complexity to this 
word's senses, "There's also the abecedarian insult, which requires 
vocabularian talent: 'You alopecian, bombastic, curmudgeonly, 
dilatory, egregious, fawning, gluttonous...'. You get the idea. I 
can't remember where it cropped up now." He may be thinking of this 
modern example:

    ABECEDARIAN INSULT "Sir, you are an apogenous, 
    bovaristic, coprolalial, dasypygal, excerebrose, 
    facinorous, gnathonic, hircine, ithyphallic, jumentous, 
    kyphotic, labrose, mephitic, napiform, oligophrenial, 
    papuliferous, quisquilian, rebarbative, saponaceous, 
    thersitical, unguinous, ventripotent, wlatsome, 
    xylocephalous, yirning zoophyte."
    [The Superior Person's Book of Words, by Peter Bowler, 
    1985. He appends an explanation but I leave it as an 
    exercise for the reader.]

Teresa Folkes commented, "Aleric Watts, who I had never heard of 
otherwise, wrote a poem that I learned in childhood, which began 'An 
Austrian army, awfully arrayed' and on to the end of the alphabet. 
Not good verse, but very appealing to a child." Aleric Watts, whose 
middle name was "Attila", as in the Hun, is usually credited with 
the poem but there's some doubt over authorship. The verses were 
published in the Literary Gazette of London on 23 December 1820 to 
illustrate alliteration rather than abecedarianism, though they are 
abecedaric as well. To give you the whole thing might induce 
alphabetical surfeit, but this is how it begins and ends:

    An Austrian army, awfully arrayed,
    Boldly by battery besieged Belgrade.
    Cossack commanders cannonading come,
    Dealing destruction's devastating doom. 
    ...
    Why wish we warfare? Wherefore welcome were
    Xerxes, Ximenes, Xanthus, Xavier?
    Yield, yield, ye youths! ye yeomen, yield your yell!
    Zeus', Zarpater's, Zoroaster's zeal. 


2. Weird Words: Concinnity  /k at n'sInItI/
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My old dad once advised me never to mix the grape and the grain, a 
proverbial dictum which has served me well. The Romans seem not to 
have learned the precept, as they had a drink, cinnus, which the 
grammarian Hesychius of Alexandria explained was a mixture of wine, 
honey, water and either barley or spelt (an ancient type of wheat). 
I presume the grain was steeped in the wine to make a sweet 
alcoholic soup and not brewed into ale first, though some sources 
disagree. 

You may hazard a guess as to its effect on the Roman constitution by 
one of the other senses of "cinnus" being of a facial distortion or 
grimace. The scholar Johannes Scapula wrote in 1790 that it could 
also mean "a promiscuous conglomeration of many things of various 
kinds" or as Dr Adam Littleton defined it in his Latin Dictionary of 
1715, "A mingle-mangle or gallimaufry of several things together; a 
hotchpotch or mish-mash, a medley." Contrariwise, Latin evolved from 
it the verb "concinnare", to join together skilfully, which suggests 
some Romans must have liked the mixture.

When "concinnare" arrived in English in the 1530s, as "concinnity",  
it took on only the last of these senses, a harmonious arrangement 
or fitting together of the different parts of something or a studied 
elegance of literary or artistic style. The word is now rare, though 
it may be found lurking in some unexpected places, ready to surprise 
the reader:

    The decor was stylish to a point where it transcended 
    style and entered the realms of perspicuous harmony, 
    shunning grandiloquent ornamentation in favour of a visual 
    concinnity, garnered from aesthetic principles, which 
    combined the austerity of Bauhaus and ebullience of Burges 
    into an eclectic mix before stripping them down to their 
    fundamental essentials, to create an effect which was 
    almost aphoristic, in that it could be experienced but 
    never completely expressed. So there is no need to bother 
    with a description. But trust me, it was sheer poetry. 
    [Waiting for Godalming, by Robert Rankin, 2000.]


3. Wordface
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BOLD AS BRASS  Linda Hull mentioned that a Canadian wordsmith named 
Rex Murphy had been asked recently on CBC TV about his favourite 
word. He replied "chalcenterous" but wasn't able to say more about 
it. Could I enlighten her? It's hardly likely to be encountered by 
anybody other than a confirmed browser of really big dictionaries. 
Only a handful of appearances are on record since it was introduced 
to English in an article in the Times Literary Supplement in 1946. 
CHALCENTEROUS literally means "brazen-gutted" or having "bowels of 
brass", or in more conventional language "indefatigable". It comes 
from Greek "chalkos", either copper or brass, plus "enteron", the 
intestines. The word was applied as a nickname to the first-century 
Greek grammarian Didymus, who became known as Didymus Chalcenterus 
because of his prodigious industry and vast output of books.


4. Q and A: Dint
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Q. A search of your site shows four uses of the phrase "by dint of" 
but no entry on it. It seems to have become a fixed expression. Is 
there a good tale in the history of "dint"? [John Branch]

A. I hope you'll find it so.

"Dint" belongs to another of those sets of words that I wrote about 
last week, whose members are linked by shifts in an internal vowel. 
In this case, "dint" belongs with "dent" and "dunt".

"Dint" is by far the oldest of the three, being recorded from the 
ninth century in Old English. The original meaning was of a blow, 
especially one with a weapon during warfare. The other spellings 
appeared in Middle English, largely as a result of dialectal or 
regional pronunciations; "dunt" was probably in part created by 
imitation of the dull sound of such a blow.

"Dint" and "dent" are both still around as alternatives. In more 
recent centuries, the main sense of both has been of a depression in 
a surface, perhaps one caused by a mishap. This is a natural enough 
shift in sense through the word coming to mean the result of a blow 
rather than the blow itself.

Another factor was the arrival in English of the verb "indent". This 
is a quite separate word, from the Latin verb "dentare", to furnish 
with teeth. The first sense of "indent" in English was to make a 
serrated tooth-like series of incisions. This led to "indenture", 
whose name came from the practice of producing two copies of an 
agreement on a single sheet of parchment or paper and separating 
them by cutting along a jagged path; this made it obvious that the 
two halves were part of a single document (people would talk of "a 
pair of indentures"). 

Under the influence of "indent", the "dint" spelling progressively 
lost out to "dent". In addition, the senses of "dent" and "indent" 
began to influence each other.

One result has been that the verb "indent" is a doublet, one member 
being from the Latin verb, the other from "dent" with the prefix 
"in-" attached. Because both involve making changes to the shape of 
something, the two verbs have become mixed up in people's minds and 
are frequently thought of as different senses of the same verb. This 
is especially true of their compound "indentation", which can mean 
tooth-shaped notches, recesses (as in a coastline or paragraphs of 
prose) and dents (or dints) in a surface.

Back to "by dint of". In medieval times, "dint" came to mean not 
just a single blow but an attack or assault. As a result, Englishmen 
spoke of overcoming an enemy "by dint of sword", that is, by force 
of arms. This eventually led to the phrase "by dint of", meaning "by 
force of". Over time this has weakened to mean little more than "by 
means of", but it still often has associations with vigour or 
perseverance.

    Apprenticed as a gardener, he rose through the ranks by 
    dint of hard work, discretion, honesty and yet more hard 
    work.
    [Guardian, 26 Mar. 2011.]

These idioms became established long enough ago that they weren't 
affected by the shift to the "dent" spelling.


5. Sic!
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The Risks Digest on computer security of 17 July reported on an 
aircraft that had had to circle for hours over Las Vegas to use up 
surplus fuel: "Professional opinion also included the possibility 
that the passenger nausea was only to be expected in flying a tight 
holding pattern over hot dessert for three hours."

"I hope it was worth it!" e-mailed Bob Taxin, who had seen a report 
of a court martial in the San Francisco Chronicle of 21 July: "One 
of the other instructors charged in the case, Staff Sgt. Peter Vega-
Maldonado, pleaded guilty in June, admitting he had sex with a 
female trainee in exchange for a sentence of 90 days' confinement."

"I spotted this little gem on the Canberra, All Homes real estate 
website," wrote Pattie Tancred: "The master bedroom has a king size 
leather slay bed."

Meg Gagie found a report in the London Free Press of Ontario on 19 
July of a crash involving a city bus and an SUV: "Four people were 
taken to hospital, including the bus driver, a passenger on the bus 
that is six-months pregnant and the driver and passenger of the 
Lexus". "Is there anything cuter than a baby bus?", she asks.


6. Useful information
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