World Wide Words -- 03 Mar 12
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Mar 2 17:12:26 UTC 2012
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WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 776 Saturday 3 March 2012
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Feedback, Notes and Comments
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FORMAT CHANGE As forewarned last week, this week's issue has been
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Most online mailers (Google Mail, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL) will display
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at all. No two mailers reproduce the formatted version in quite the
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A formatted version is also online: http://wwwords.org?EGHDYH.
Weird Words: Imposthume /Im'pQstjUm/
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"Dost thou know me bladder, / Thou insolent impostume?" snarled a
character in John Fletcher's The Island Princess. That was in 1621,
when people had a more imaginative way with insults. "Impostume" is
now rare, its infrequent escapes from the less-thumbed pages of our
dictionaries being mostly in quotations from old herbals.
That's because an imposthume or impostume is an abscess. It's from
Greek via the Latin "apostema". The Oxford English Dictionary notes
that it's "a word which has undergone unusual corruption". On its
way to us through French it was successively modified to "empostume"
and then "impostume". Meanwhile, Middle English had "apostume",
taken directly from Latin. This lost its initial vowel by a process
called aphesis to become "postume". By confusion with "humus", an
"h" was inserted to make "posthume" (the same thing happened with
"posthumous", from Latin "postumus"). By analogy, people came to
believe "impostume" should similarly be spelled as "imposthume", the
most common form from about 1700.
By the seventeenth century, "impost(h)ume" had become figurative,
meaning a state of moral corruption, a festering sore on the body
politic, or somebody metaphorically swollen with pride. This last
sense was the way John Fletcher meant it. Much later, another writer
applied it to our language:
Studied obscurity of thought and language, verbal
finicalities and conceits, and mere ingenuities of any
kind, rhythmic, mental or sentimental, will not meet the
occasion: that sort of thing is overdone already. It is
the "swollen imposthume" of refinement, an excrescence on
culture, a penalty of which we have suffered enough.
[Lippincott's Magazine (Philadelphia), August 1878. A
"finicality" is something finicky or fussy.]
Q and A: Perfect storm
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Q. You know how it is when you hear a phrase for the first time, and
thereafter the damn thing seems to be everywhere. During the Michael
Jackson doctor trial a couple of months ago I heard the curious
comment that "a perfect storm of drugs" had overwhelmed the singer
and killed him. What, I thought idly, is a perfect storm when its at
home. (Don't get me started on "when it's at home".) Anyhow, ever
since, every day, I seem to be assailed by a perfect storm of
impeccable climatic disturbances. Help! Please explain what is this
and where it's blowing from. [Thomas O'Dwyer]
A. You're clearly not a follower of the cinema, Mr O'Dwyer. Some
readers may be wondering where you've been this past decade. The
term was popularised by Sebastian Junger's non-fiction book of 1997,
The Perfect Storm, recording the events that led up to the loss of
the fishing boat Andrea Gail and its crew of six off the Grand Banks
in late October 1991. The term was further popularised by the film
of the book, with the same title, that appeared in 2000.
Since then, the phrase has been taken up by writers clutching for an
evocative term with which to enliven their prose. In the immortal
words of the late Sam Goldwyn, it's a new cliché, one that in its
influence and ubiquity recalls the earlier "feeding frenzy". As
you've become all too aware, it has moved from its strict weather
sense to become a figurative way of saying that some situation is as
bad as it could be, or has reached a critical or extreme state. As
early as 2003, it was receiving adverse comment:
"SARS is a 'perfect storm' of a disease," according to
the Los Angeles Times. 50 Cent is the perfect storm of the
rap world, proclaims Billboard magazine. Newsweek has
designated Jayson Blair, the plagiarizing New York Times
reporter, as "journalism's perfect storm." The war on
terrorism is the perfect storm of the airline industry,
American recession is the perfect storm of European
tourism, conservative politics is the perfect storm of
public school orchestras everywhere. And somewhere,
beneath the thunder, you can hear an English professor
crying.
[Los Angeles Times, 27 Jul. 2003.]
Here's a recent example taken from some 25,000 uses of the phrase
since 1997 in one newspaper archive:
RMI petrol chairman Brian Madderson claimed a 'perfect
storm' of rising oil prices and worries about supply could
push diesel and petrol prices even higher by Easter.
[Daily Mail, 21 Feb. 2012.]
"Perfect storm" is said by the Oxford English Dictionary to be an
especially powerful one that's caused by a rare combination of
weather conditions, though in the forward to his book, Junger put it
slightly differently, "I had some misgivings about calling it The
Perfect Storm, but in the end I decided that the intent was
sufficiently clear. I use perfect in the meteorological sense: a
storm that could not possibly have been worse."
He is said to have got the term from a conversation at the time of
the storm with Bob Case, a deputy meteorologist with the National
Weather Service, though each claims the other said it. Case noted
later that Junker had the meaning wrong: the storm of October 1991
"wasn't the biggest, wasn't the worst, wasn't the most deadly. It's
not even in the top ten. It was a unique situation and took an
atmosphere that had the perfect elements in space and time to
occur."
Though it struck many people with hurricane force, it was far from a
new phrase. The Oxford English Dictionary has examples of the use of
"perfect storm" by weather forecasters from as early as 1936 and
points out that the phrase is much older. It's even older than the
OED believes:
All this Night the Wind so encreas'd, that in the
Morning it was grown to a perfect Storm, and the Sea into
a Breach; the Sky was so Black and Thick, and the Sun so
Red and Lowring, that signified the continuance of it; and
the Spray of the Sea, was so forcibly carry'd by the Wind
over the Ship, that Masts, Yards, and Decks, were cover'd
with a White Salt.
[The Turkish History, by Richard Knolles, Vol 2,
1701.]
But the OED argues that these, and the many other examples in the
record, aren't of an idiom but one example among many of "perfect"
in the long-standing and still current sense of something absolute,
unmitigated or utter, either in criticism or praise ("he blushed for
perfect shame", "he reduced himself to a perfect skeleton", "he was
a perfect child in the world's ways").
I have some slight doubts about this. "Perfect storm" had begun to
look like a fixed phrase by the early nineteenth century, its having
transferred from the sea and ships to the clamour of crowds: "the
overflowing audience burst into a perfect storm of rapture" (The
Morning Post, 11 Oct. 1827); "One of his supporters rose to second
the resolution, but was met by a perfect storm of uproar" (London
Dispatch, 26 May 1839); "No sooner was he recognised than he was met
with a perfect storm of groans and hisses (Bristol Mercury, 2 Jun
1855). The British Library newspaper archive has some 200 instances
from the 1840s alone, with that phrase being far more common than
any other that contained "perfect" in the particular sense that the
OED cites. The phrase's peak in popularity occurred in the 1860s, in
some part because of its use in reporting the Civil War in the US
("amid a perfect storm of bullets"; "a perfect storm of grape and
shell tore through their ranks"; "under a perfect storm of canister
and musketry").
The phrase slowly lost its popularity in the subsequent 140 years,
only to be revitalised by a chance conversation between a reporter
and a weather forecaster. It confirms yet again that there's nothing
deterministic in the way our language evolves but that - like a ship
in a storm - its future is dictated by uncontrollable and often
unpredictable circumstances.
Sic!
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Michael Hocken submitted a casting call (an advert for an acting
audition) spotted by an actor friend on the website CastingCallPro:
"We are making a short 3 minute comedy/drama about God coming down
to earth to enter into competitions and film festivals throughout
the UK."
"Was this the longest day of the year?" asks Leo Boivin. The lead
sentence of an editorial in the Washington Post on 26 February read,
"One day this month four murders occurred in the space of 72 hours
in Prince George's County."
A report on the CBC News site startled James Helbig. "A woman has
been found frozen to death at Apex Mountain Resort, confirm RCMP.
... Police do not suspect foul play and believe cold weather was a
factor in Marye's death." No, really?
On Oscar night, Grant Cribb tells us, the red-carpet correspondent
for BBC TV news was speculating about Meryl Streep's chances. He
concluded: "You might think that she's won a whole brace of Oscars
over the years. In fact, she's only won two."
Michael Robertson e-mailed, "I have a copy of the New York Times
Guide to Essential Knowledge, containing short biographies of
noteworthy people. The entry for Clark Gable concludes: 'In The
Misfits - his last film, made shortly after his death - he played a
tough, aging cowboy."
Admin
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