World Wide Words -- 27 Oct 12
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Oct 26 14:44:46 UTC 2012
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WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 807 Saturday 27 October 2012
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Weird Words: Sobriquet.
3. Miscellany.
4. Q and A: Hair of the dog.
5. Sic!
6. Useful information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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LUMP IT The most common query following last week's piece concerned
the word "lumpen", as in "lumpenproletariat". The term was coined by
Karl Marx in 1850. In German, "Lumpen" is a rag, "Lumpensammler" is
a rag-and-bone man, "Lumpengesindel" is the rabble or riff-raff, and
"Lump" is an outdated term for a rogue or blackguard. Marx meant by
"lumpenproletariat" the lowest and most degraded section of working-
class people. The word is related to the English "lump", though the
two languages diverged many centuries ago. Our "lumpen" was created
in the 1940s from the German word to mean boorish and stupid, though
in British English it can also mean lumpy and misshapen, ugly or
ponderous, which came about by association with "lumpish".
Others mentioned "lumper", in the US a labourer hired to load trucks
or a dockworker or longshoreman. Tom Halsted noted that lumpers in
Gloucester, Massachusetts, unload the catch from fishing vessels. It
is from "lump", an undifferentiated mass, plus the agent suffix "-
er" - the agent in this case being the worker who carries the
"lumps" of cargo.
RED CENT Richard Moloney commented: "An Irish phrase 'pingin rua'
(red or copper penny) has similar literal and figurative meanings. I
have often wondered whether it was a translation of, or source for,
the English phrase. Here is an example from the Irish Times, 18
August 2012 ('béal bocht', by the way, means 'poor mouth' - to play
up or overstate one's poverty): 'Broadly, the farmers' organisations
are doing the béal bocht; the poor farmers barely have the pingin
rua - why shouldn't their kids get the college grant?'"
HEBDOMADAL Many readers made the same point as David Pearson of Dow
Jones Newswires in Paris: "Just outpointing, as we say in cablese,
that French weekly publications are called 'la presse hebdomadaire'
and a magazine like Paris Match is referred to colloquially as 'un
hebdo'." Jacquelyne Lord wrote, "Though 'hebdomadal' seems to be
fading out in English, its French counterpart, 'hebdomadaire' is
alive here in Québec, where we have 'les journaux hebdomadaires', in
many regions. Our local paper, Le journal hebdomadaire de la côte
sud, Le Placoteux, is on the table next to me as I write this. The
word is used in other contexts as well, for meetings and the like. I
had not realised there was an English version of the word or what
its origins were, so thank you for the information."
Others mentioned that the ancient post of hebdomadar still exists at
St Andrews University in Scotland. The Dictionary of the Scottish
Language explains, "A name formerly applied in Scottish Universities
and Grammar Schools to the member of the staff whose weekly turn it
was to supervise the behaviour of the students or pupils." The CV
(résumé) of one Scottish academic notes he had been the hebdomadar
at St Andrews for seven years, responsible for student welfare and
discipline, so we must presume that the role has expanded somewhat
and that a link with a period of seven days has disappeared.
The term also survives in other forms, as Alan Harrison explained:
"'Hebdomadary' is most likely to be found on the notice boards of
Anglican cathedrals, indicating the name or title of the canon or
minor canon on duty during the current week as the 'hebdomadary
priest'." Michael Marett-Crosby added, "The shortened form 'hebdom',
usually capitalised, is used in Benedictine monasteries for the monk
who leads the prayers in rotation for a week and has duties in the
choir and refectory. It's a contraction of 'hebdomadalis', the word
used by St Benedict, and features not only in speech but on printed
lists of officials. It's not in the dictionary, but is familiar to
monks and those who visit them."
2. Weird Words: Sobriquet /'S at UbrIkeI/
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If some individual should adopt an undue familiarity and derisively
chuck you under the chin, you might think of several unkind words
for the action and your assailant. "Sobriquet" would not be among
them, though a direct connection exists.
It's a mildly weird word in form and spelling as well as sense. In
the 400 years it has been in English it has never lost its French
pronunciation, perhaps because it undoubtedly looks French. It has
never quite settled on a single spelling, the "soubriquet" version
that reflects an older French form still being fairly common.
In English, as in modern French, it means a nickname.
A 90-minute drive away is the beautiful Spanish
cathedral city of Salamanca, the warm glow of its
sandstone buildings giving rise to the sobriquet the
Golden City.
[The Times, 13 Oct. 2012.]
Nicknames can be familiar in a good sense - in some situations, to
have one bestowed is a mark of acceptance. But they may be derisive
(and divisive), picking on a negative characteristic of a person to
push them away from membership of a group. The former British prime
minister Margaret Thatcher may have been given the sobriquet of the
Iron Lady in admiration of her steadfastness, but it wasn't always
meant as a compliment.
We can't be sure of the origin of the term in French. It grew out of
the fifteenth-century "soubricquet" for a pat or tap under the chin.
But there's doubt about the second part of the word: it might be
from Old French "bequet", the nose, or from "brechet", the breast or
chest, the Old French equivalent of English "brisket". Whichever
part of the body was being tapped, it was certainly insulting. It
later shifted to mean a nickname, presumably at first meant to be
derogatory and only later a term of affection or friendship.
3. Miscellany
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VOTING BY GENE The term "genopolitics" turned up in Scientific
American this month. It's a newish field of study that investigates
whether there is a genetic reason why a person should decide to vote
for one party rather than another or indeed to vote at all. There
have been dozens of studies on this theme in the past decade, whose
results - despite claims to the contrary - have been inconclusive.
This isn't unexpected, as separating the influence of environment
from that of heredity is extremely difficult. It is said that the
word was coined by Emily Biuso in an article in the New York Times
magazine in December 2008.
SQUARING THINGS Jessica Thurtell asked me about the typographical
term "justify", to arrange text so that the margins are straight on
both sides. It's a derived sense from the Latin one of acting justly
towards a person, which has led to all our English meanings. Two
early senses were to make something right, proper, or reasonable or
to render something lawful or legitimate. The idea came from this of
making a thing exact or arranging it exactly, or adjusting something
to an exact shape or position. It appears first in the middle of the
sixteenth century but quickly became a technical term in printing.
Metal type was then composed one line at a time in a wooden handheld
frame called a stick. If the line was completely filled with type
(and equally spaced to fit), it was justified, made right or proper.
BLOWING IN THE WIND In 2009, a paediatrician in New York, Dr Nina
Pierpont, who campaigns against wind energy in North America,
identified what she called "wind turbine syndrome". A cocktail of
symptoms was said to include nervousness, fear, a compulsion to
flee, chest tightness, tinnitus and increased heart rate together
with nightmares and other disorders in children. The existence of
the syndrome was roundly denied by the World Health Organisation
later the same year, arguing that her study was unscientific, based
on a small sample of self-selected people and lacking controls.
Concerns over the health implications of wind farms have not gone
away and the term continues to appear, especially in reports that
cite Dr Pierpont's book. A report by Professor Simon Chapman in the
New Scientist last week argued that the syndrome is psychogenic, an
imagined condition communicated by anti-wind interest groups that
causes people to become sick from worry.
HETEGONIC Jae Kamel encountered this word online but he has been
unsuccessful in finding a definition for it anywhere, as have I.
This word is encountered in reports about cosmogony, in particular
the formation of the solar system and nebulae. My guess is that it's
a shortened form of "heterogonic", another specialist word which
refers to a process of differential formation or growth. Can a
cosmologist confirm or deny this?
4. Q and A: Hair of the dog
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Q. I've heard that "hair of the dog" originates in an ancient cure
for rabies, where the hair of the rabid dog is put into the wound as
a supposed cure. Is this right? If so how did it morph into a
remedy for a hangover? [Nicholas Brandes]
A. You have heard correctly.
The origin lies in ancient medical practice, which was based in part
on sympathetic magic. The ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, often
called the father of medicine, expressed it as "Like cures like". If
you had an ailment, it was argued, the cure would be found in some
stuff that mimicked the symptoms. The same idea was expressed in the
Latin "similia similibus curantur" and is the basis of homeopathy,
that was developed by Samuel Hahnemann in the eighteenth century. If
you were bitten by a snake, a medication incorporating snake venom
was thought to cure the sickness. If bitten by a mad dog, applying a
hair of the dog to the bite (sometimes roasted and made into a
poultice with honey and herbs) would spare you the risk of rabies,
because it was believed that every dog carried about with it an
antidote to its own poison.
Hence the oldest and fullest expression of the idea, "the hair of
the dog that bit me". Its specific application to a morning-after
dose of alcohol to relieve the effects of the previous night's over-
indulgence goes back at least to classical Greece. The aphoristic
phrase "to drive out wine with wine" appears in a play by Antiphanes
in the third century BC and in a work by Lucien of Samosata in the
first century AD. It's not quite so old in English:
What how fellow, thou knave,
I pray thee let me and my fellow have
A haire of the dog that bit us last night.
And bitten were we both to the braine aright.
[A Dialogue Conteinyng the Nomber in Effect of all the
Prouerbes in the Englishe Tongue, John Heywood, 1546.]
As a young man, the famous diarist Samuel Pepys recorded being
introduced to the remedy:
Up among my workmen, my head akeing all day from last
night's debauch. To the office all the morning, and at
noon dined with Sir W. Batten and Pen, who would needs
have me drink two drafts of sack to-day to cure me of last
night's disease, which I thought strange but I think find
it true.
[Diary, by Samuel Pepys, 3 Apr. 1661. Sack was a dry
white wine imported from Spain and the Canaries.]
It's still as popular a saying as it was in the time of the ancient
Greeks, though it isn't always applied to alcohol:
Dunbar thinks laughter may have been favoured by
evolution because it helped bring human groups together,
which I hope many readers managed to do over the holiday
weekend. But this morning there may be a need for a
humorous "hair of the dog". So today's column offers you
some medical humour with which to ease back into your
particular salt mine.
[Irish Times, 20 Mar. 2012.]
5. Sic!
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On the day that Frankel cruised to his record 14th straight win,
Michael Hocken found that Britain's Channel 4 news got themselves in
a muddle about how horses are made: "Frankel is the son of 2001
Epsom Derby winner Galileo - a leading stallion in her own right,
who won six races during her career."
Still in the UK, John Cragg reports that an advertisement in the 11
October issue of the Hampshire Chronicle promoted a Hallowe'en event
at his local countryside park. It exhorted visitors to "Drop in
anytime to have fun carving nocturnal animals into pumpkins."
The subject of Edwin Sundt's e-mail was "helping the voter". He was
referring to Question B on the annual ballot recently sent to every
voter in Montgomery County, Maryland: "Shall the Act to modify the
scope of collective bargaining with police employees to permit the
exercise of certain management rights without first bargaining the
effects of those rights on police employees become law?"
Kate Kelly found a sentence in the MetroHerald (a daily freesheet in
Dublin) on 23 October: "Thanks to the taxi driver who returned my
mobile phone to my house which I left in his cab at the weekend."
An Australian public-service e-mail about health and safety at work
arrived in the mailbox of Millicent Weber: "If in doubt, seek advice
before you sustain a debilitating injury."
6. Useful information
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