World Wide Words -- 05 May 12
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri May 4 16:39:32 UTC 2012
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WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 785 Saturday 5 May 2012
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Weird Words: Ludibrious.
3. Wordface.
4. Q and A: No room to swing a cat.
5. Sic!
6. Useful information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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BOULEVARDIERS My listing last time of the many names Americans have
for the grass strip beside a roadway led to numerous messages from
Canadian readers. This comment comes from Elena Goodfellow: "I have
not heard of any of the terms you listed, neither the British or
American. I have always called it a boulevard. We also call a grassy
median dividing the two sides of a road a boulevard and in addition,
boulevard can be the name of a road. So where I live, our road is
named a boulevard. It has a boulevard running down the centre of it
and it has a boulevard beside the curb on each side of it. This part
of Canadian English I'm sure is very confusing to newcomers to the
country!" Lucie Singh mentioned that boulevard is also used in her
part of Wisconsin; the term does appear in DARE, with a map showing
evidence in that state but more commonly from the western states
bordering Canada. Not to be left out, readers in Australia and New
Zealand noted that their term is "nature strip".
SUBMARINERS Several readers queried my "sandwich" as a general
descriptor for the regional American po'boy, hoagie, sub, grinder,
hero and torpedo. They argued that, as they were usually long rolls,
to call them sandwiches was a misnomer. The Dictionary of American
Regional English calls them that, in part I suspect because most of
the terms were originally qualifiers to "sandwich". Torpedo appears
in the Newport Daily News in 1950 as "Torpedo sandwich. A meal in
itself." Sub is an abbreviation of submarine and appears first in
1940; Better Homes and Gardens wrote in 1943, "Submarine sandwich -
It's long, low and goes down easily." (It seems certain that this
colloquial term was directly inspired, or at least popularised, by
naval actions in the Second World War.) It may be their inventors
couldn't think of a good alternative term to "sandwich" for their
creations.
HOLIDAY BREAK There will be no issues for the next two weeks, as my
wife and I are away. The next issue will be that of 26 May.
VOTING World Wide Words was the April finalist in the LSOFT Choice
Awards (the Mailys) with an absolute majority of 61% of the votes.
Now on to May. Even during my holiday absence, don't forget about
the contest. To vote, go via http://wwwords.org?LSOFT . You can do
so every day if you wish.
2. Weird Words: Ludibrious /l(j)u: dIbrI at s/
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In 1807, the American diplomat, politician and poet Joel Barlow
published his epic, Columbiad, which was widely regarded as a
pompous and grandiose vision of the New World (even he admitted that
he was no genius as a versifier). A lesser criticism concerned the
many words he coined.
The Edinburgh Review wrote that some "were as utterly foreign, as if
they had been adopted from the Hebrew or Chinese" and that others
had been contorted from existing English words. The review recorded
multifluvian, vagrate, inhumanise, conglaciate, micidious, luxed,
fulminent, utilise (which has since had some success) and many
others. "His new words are not necessary," commented Washington
Irving, "and very uncouth, such as cosmogyre, cosmogyral, fiuvial,
ludibrious, croupe, brume, gerb, colon [not in the anatomical or
punctuation senses but meaning a colonist], coloniarch, numen,
emban, contristed, asouth ..."
Irving was wrong about "ludibrious", but it's noteworthy that he
believed it to be new. It had actually been in the language since
about 1570 but had never been common.
During its history it had done an about-turn. It meant at first that
the thing referred to was the subject of mockery, but Barlow used it
- in the line, "Leaves to ludibrious winds the priceless page" - in
its later sense of something that was itself scornful or mocking. It
appeared a few times in later works before finally dying out.
"I wonder where that Paddy of mine has spirited himself
away to," said I, in a tone meant to be ludibrious, but
really on the other hand somewhat lugubrious instead.
[Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Aug. 1863.]
Both senses are in its Latin source, "ludibrium", which could mean
playful behaviour or joking but also mockery or derision. It derives
from "ludere", to play.
At one time we had other words from the same source - and it's still
present in disguise in words such as "collude", "delude" and
"prelude" - but the one that we're most likely to recognise today is
"ludicrous", which started out with the idea of lightheartedness or
playfulness but moved to our sense today of something ridiculous,
which gives rise to laughter that's derisive rather than jolly.
3. Wordface
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HIDDEN WORD Linnie Worth asked me about "apocrypha". Her brother
tells her it's plural but they are puzzled to find its singular. Her
brother is correct, but it's usually treated as a singular, even to
the extent that a plural "apocryphas" appears on rare occasions. The
original was an adjective, in the ecclesiastical Latin "apocrypha
scripta", hidden writings, hence of unknown or spurious authorship.
The word derives from Greek "apokruptein", to hide away. In the days
when knowledge of Greek and Latin were widespread, the singulars
"apocryphum" and "apocryphon" were known (following respectively the
Latin and Greek models) but the former has long gone out of use. The
Greek form survives in titles such as the Apocryphon of Mark, a
supposedly expanded version of St Mark's gospel.
GAY RIGHT AND WRONGS Right-wing Christian groups have aroused a
controversy in London by attempting to place adverts on buses that
contain the message "Not gay! Ex-gay, post-gay and proud. Get over
it!", a riposte to earlier ads by the LGBT charity Stonewall, "Some
people are gay. Get over it!" The controversy was enflamed when
Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, banned them. Many readers of the
ads would have been confused by POST-GAY and EX-GAY, which are much
better known in the US than the UK. They are used in some Christian
circles to refer to homosexual men and women who have undergone
PASTORAL THERAPY or SPIRITUAL THERAPY in an attempt to change their
sexual preferences.
BRING IT ON The abbreviation "BYO" for "Bring Your Own" has had
many expansions, such as BYOB (Bring Your Own Beer or Bring Your Own
Bottle: there are many variations), BYOG (Grog, Girl ...), BYOH
(Herb, as in drug) or BYOJ (Joint), and BYOM (Music). Recently, I've
spotted one new to me: BYOD. It's short for BRING YOUR OWN DEVICE.
It refers to a trend for employees to bring their personal mobile
devices to work to access business information and resources instead
of going through company computers. There are security issues with
this, which has led to a new discipline of MOBILE DEVICE MANAGEMENT
(MDM) and to other jargon terms, such as CONTAINERISATION, which has
nothing to do with shipping goods but refers to the setting up of a
partition on the mobile device that keeps business data securely
away from the employee's stuff, hence contained. The abbreviation
BYOT (Bring Your Own Technology) is sometimes used instead.
WORD OF THE WEEK? Marina Hyde invented a word in her article in the
Guardian on 28 April for what she describes, in sarcastic inverted
commas, as "our 'political elite'". CACKIAVELLIAN, she calls them,
attempting to be Machiavellian but making a hash of it. Together
with last week's OMNISHAMBLES (online at http://wwwords.org?OMNSM),
the language of political invective seems to be having a good year.
4. Q and A: No room to swing a cat
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Q. I was discussing with my husband the other day the phrases "no
room to swing a cat" and "you can't swing a dead cat without ..." He
related the usual origin of the phrases as referring to a cat o'
nine tails, but this sounds suspiciously like a folk etymology to
me. Are the phrases really related, and do they refer to felines,
whips, or some other cat-like object? {Mindy]
A. The second of your phrases, which is variously completed, as "You
can't swing a dead cat without toppling a corrupt politician" or
"You can't swing a dead cat in the shipping industry without hitting
somebody with phoney papers" or "you can't swing a dead cat without
hitting a Starbucks", is a modern creation - I can't find an example
of it before the late 1980s.
It's almost certainly derived from your other idiom, which is some
centuries older. It is indeed frequently said to be from that awful
naval punishment. Most reference books say something similar to this
entry from the Penguin Dictionary of English Idioms of 2001: "The
original phrase was probably 'not room to swing a cat-o'nine-tails',
and dates from the time when sailors were flogged on board ship. The
floggings took place on the deck because the cabins were too small
to swing a cat in."
A nicely summarised explanation, it falls down on two counts. Ship's
cabins were for sleeping in and ship life took place elsewhere;
nobody would have even considered a flogging in a cabin because the
ship's company would have been mustered to witness punishment. The
only place to do that would have been on deck. (The cat-o'nine-tails
was also a prison punishment in some countries but similar comments
apply; the person to be flogged was tied to a post in the prison
yard for other prisoners to observe.) Secondly, I can't find a case
in the English literature databases that I've searched that mentions
swinging cats in the context of flogging, or even ships. Your view
that the story is a folk etymology is well-based.
The earliest example of the phrase is this:
Moreton is return'd to his old occupation, and Preaches
in a little Conventicle you can hardly swing a Cat round
in.
[Letters from the Dead to the Living, by Thomas Brown,
1702.]
Brown was a well-known author and his work was popular in its time,
being reprinted on several occasions in the following decades. It
may even have been the source, though I suspect not. It doesn't by
itself refute the cat-o'nine-tails story, since the instrument was
known by that name somewhat earlier (it appears in Congreve's Love
for Love of 1695 and in an English translation of Rabelais that's
said to be of 1665, though I can't confirm the date).
Why anybody should want to swing a cat at all is unclear. If they
did, then the idiom would have naturally followed. It's this puzzle
that leads so many reputable works to suggest the punishment story.
Could it have been from some child's cruel game? My guess is that it
was just an ingeniously inventive way to say that an enclosed space
was especially small.
5. Sic!
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Justin Beam was puzzled by a headline in an online Chicago Tribune
article of 27 April which read: "UPDATE 3-Armed police arrest man at
London siege." He would have liked to learn more about these
tribrachial cops.
Peter Ronai reports: "In commenting on the finding of a cow with
bovine spongiform encephalopathy in the USA, the CBS Evening News on
April 24 reassured viewers that 'No dead cow is slaughtered for
human consumption'."
A Telegraph headline on 26 April, since changed, provoked David
Bagwell and Peter Millington-Wallace to submit it: "Sadomasochism
interest no barrier to dead spy joining MI6".
Ted Brooks saw a New York Times report of 25 April about the parents
of Madeleine McCann: "Since their daughter's disappearance they have
traveled to the Vatican for an audience with Pope Benedict XVI, who
blessed a photograph of Madeleine, published a book and even
appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show."
6. Useful information
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