World Wide Words -- 27 Apr 13

[Michael Quinion]

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WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 829           Saturday 27 April 2013
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       This mailing also contains an HTML-formatted version.
          A formatted version is also available online at
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Carbon bubble.
3. Facinorous.
4. Career versus careen.
5. Sic!
6. Subscriptions and other information.


1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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SCRUMPTIOUS  Most of the comments on last week's issue concerned my 
notes on this word the previous week. Several readers argued that in 
mentioning scrumping, I should also have included "scrumpy", a once 
local but now widely-known term for a rough form of cider (in the UK 
cider is always alcoholic). This is also from "scrump", a withered 
apple. Scrumpy was farmhouse cider given to workers at haymaking and 
harvest time; often crudely made on the farm from windfalls and 
other unselected apples, it was a beverage that, in the words of one 
old farmer to me in Herefordshire nearly 40 years ago, needed three 
people to consume it: one to drink it and two to hold him up while 
he did it.

Others found words that seemed to be related. Mike Page recalled, 
"When I were a lad in Lincolnshire, if one were especially hungry, 
one would ask the chip-shop owner for some 'scrumps', in addition to 
one's order. These were bits of batter that had fallen off the fish 
and cooked to a crisp. The chip-shop owner kept them separate and 
doled them out to the favoured without charge." John Howe remembers 
them by the same name from his Welsh valley childhood of the late 
1950s.

Ed Vanderkloet commented from the other side of the Atlantic: "When 
I moved to Newfoundland 4 years ago I learned that part of the local 
cuisine is something called scrunchins (or scrunchions), which is 
commonly served with cod. It is diced salt pork, pan fried. When 
visiting friends ask me to describe it, I tell them to imagine bacon 
without the red and pink parts. I haven't acquired a taste for it so 
I wouldn't use the adjective scrumptious to describe scrunchins, but 
I'm sure others would." This seems to be an accidental similarity of 
form, a relative of "scrunch" or "crunch", since an old name for the 
dish is "cruncheons".

GOOSE IS COOKED  "An explanation I heard," wrote Charlotte Bulmer, 
"was that the 'goose' is an old smoothing-iron, heated on the stove.  
When the goose is 'cooked', it is far too hot to be used. Another 
false folk etymology?" Almost certainly, though "goose" is an old 
name for a tailor's smoothing-iron (from the shape of its handle), 
which is ancient enough to have been mentioned by Shakespeare.


2. Carbon bubble
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A report published on 18 April accused stock markets of over-valuing 
the world's oil, coal and gas reserves. It argued that at least two-
thirds of the reserves will have to remain underground, and hence be 
valueless, if we are to avoid the worst effects of climate change. 

The prediction came from Professor Lord Stern at the London School 
of Economics in a report entitled Unburnable Carbon 2013, a follow-
up to a report published two years ago. He suggested that fossil-
fuel reserves were being valued by speculators on the assumption 
that governments would take no action to reduce carbon emissions or 
that the speculators would get enough warning to bail out before 
prices crashed.

    With the dash for gas effectively boosting an already 
    overblown carbon bubble, it's up to the gas industry 
    itself to decarbonise the supply to safeguard its place as 
    a primary global energy source. 
    [Oil and Gas News, 17 Apr. 2013.]

The term "carbon bubble" began to appear in 2009 among warnings of 
overheated speculation in carbon credits. These permit industry to 
burn fossil fuels and so emit the carbon dioxide that is the main 
contributor to global warming. It became linked to speculation in 
the value of the underlying fossil fuels themselves in 2011:

    Fund managers are pushing for listed energy companies 
    to take restrictions on carbon emissions into account when 
    they report oil, coal or gas reserves in the wake of 
    research that argues the potential bursting of a "carbon 
    bubble" could hit share prices. 
    [Financial Times, 17 Jul. 2011.]

The "bubble" part of this newish term has meant something fragile, 
unsubstantial, empty or worthless since the end of the sixteenth 
century. It started to be applied to some commercial or financial 
scheme that wasn't all it seemed with the infamous South Sea and 
Mississippi bubbles of 1720. The image is of intense speculation 
inflating values followed by an abrupt collapse and failure like a 
bursting bubble. Since then we've had lots of bubbles, such as the 
US stock-market bubble of the 1920s that led to the 1929 crash. The 
term has become much more widely used in recent decades, such as in 
"financial bubble" and "commodities bubble". The past decade alone 
has given us "dot-com bubble", "banking bubble" and "housing bubble" 
among others. In a "bubble economy" a national economy is inflated 
by a financial boom.


3. Facinorous  /fa'sIn(@)r at s/
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Welcome to another in my occasional series of obscure insults for 
unpleasant people. This one isn't to be wielded lightly - if you 
hurl it you're saying your opponent is immoral, grossly criminal, 
extremely wicked, vile, atrocious, heinous or infamous.

The word comes to us from Latin "facinorosus", criminal or wicked, 
whose base is "facinus", a deed, especially a bad one.

It is most commonly to be found in works of the seventeenth century. 
Shakespeare employed it in As You Like It, though its known history 
predates him by 50 years; it appeared first in a work by one of the 
sources for his history plays, the Tudor chronicler Edward Hall. The 
latter was fond of richly uninhibited adjectives, in this case 
describing the wickedness of the Yorkist aggressors in the Wars of 
the Roses.

"Facinorous" remains too rare for most people to have encountered 
it, though it occasionally and unexpectedly surfaces:

    Some people called this man wicked. Some called him 
    facinorous, which is a fancy word for "wicked." 
    [The Slippery Slope, by Lemony Snicket, 2003.]


4. Career versus careen
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Q. "Career" appeared in two quotations in your issue of 6 April, the 
first about bathwater sent "careering" away, and later in the more 
common sense of a long-term occupation. The first seems related to 
"careen", and I have even read criticism of the use of "career" in 
its place. I wonder if you might sort out the two words and explain 
the strange relationship between them. [Wendy Magnall]

A. I'm with the traditionalists on this one, because I learned the 
meaning of both words umpty-flump years before the arguments began. 
"Careen" has always had the sole meaning for me of turning a ship on 
its side for cleaning, caulking or repair (it comes from the Latin 
"carina", a keel). "Career" meant a person's employment path through 
life, with a side sense of rapid and uncontrolled headlong movement.

The pair has provoked dissent in the US in the past half century or 
so, most of it disapproving of the way that "careen" has to a large 
extent usurped "career" in the movement sense.

"Career" began life in English linked to medieval knights competing 
in tournaments. This involved riding horses at great speed in short 
bursts while nimbly changing direction. To describe this, English 
writers borrowed the old French "carrière", a racecourse. It's from 
late Latin "carraria via", a carriage-road, from "carrus", a wagon 
(the source of our "car" and "cargo"). So the rapid movement sense 
is the original one. By the seventeenth century it had started to be 
applied figuratively to any continuous course of action, and by the 
early nineteenth century was being used for the course of a person's 
professional life or employment.

The traditional sense of "careen" does also imply movement, though 
only from side to side. It was applied by obvious extension to a 
ship heeling to one side through the action of wind or wave. It was 
also used for vehicles on land rocking from side to side or even 
overturning:

    They were attempting to drive faster than Mike Binder 
    and in making a short turn at the Edgarton the buggy 
    careened so as to throw them all out on the stone 
    there.
    [Appleton Post-Crescent (Wisconsin), 17 Aug. 1861.]

Accidents involving vehicles tipping over would often have been due 
to excessive speed. This would have confused people about the true 
meaning of "careen", though the close similarity in spelling between 
it and "career" probably helped. The growth of the sense of speeding 
out of control is for good reason connected to the introduction of 
the motor car:

    Pennell did everything in human power to regain control 
    of the vehicle where it careened toward the chasm. The 
    brakes were tightly set, the power indicator pointed 
    "reverse" and the track of the wheels in the soft earth on 
    the ridge between the street pavement and the quarry 
    showed that the wheels were turning backward when the 
    ponderous machine sped forward to destruction.
    [The Lowell Sun (Massachusetts), 12 Mar. 1903.]

By the middle 1960s, when the critics started to object to "careen" 
in this sense, the shift had already gone too far to be influenced 
by rational argument and has since become accepted in the US by many 
authorities - a usage note in the American Heritage Dictionary says 
that "it is by now so well established that it would be pedantic to 
object to it." It's notable that you have come across criticism of 
"career" for an uncontrolled movement - it confirms that for many 
Americans the shift is now complete, with "careen" the only word to 
use in that sense and with "career" restricted to employment.

Reference works sometimes say that this "careen" usage is limited to 
the US, but it has now spread to other English-speaking countries, 
including the UK:

    Candy-coloured visuals burst with colour and detail, 
    and the 3D version makes excellent use of the eye-popping 
    format in stomach-churning action sequences that careen up 
    and down undulating race tracks at dizzying speed. 
    [Bristol Evening Post, 8 Feb. 2013.]


5. Sic!
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"I think something sinister is going on here," Greg Balding remarked 
about the Wikipedia entry for handedness: "Left-handed people are 
more dexterous with their left hands when performing tasks."

Erin McKean submitted this from last Monday's Printing Professionals 
Executive Briefing: "It's unfortunate that the paper industry gets 
the stigmata that it is bad for the environment." Not stigmata, I 
suspect - more likely paper cuts.

Jack Bottomley sent the current issue of Powys County Council's free 
newspaper for residents, Red Kite. The council advertised their pest 
control services and added, "Rice, mice (indoors) and cockroaches 
treatments are also available from the council." You've got to watch 
that pesky pestiferous rice.

"But possibly not in that order," was Paul Braithwaite's comment on 
a Guardian article of 21 April: "In Brooklyn, New York, an off-duty 
police officer used her department-issued Glock 9mm handgun to kill 
herself, her boyfriend and her one-year-old child."

Carol Bates reports that in an article about abortion issues in the 
Tampa Bay Times for 21 April, it was said that it was illegal in the 
state of Florida to terminate a pregnancy after 24 months. If not 
illegal, then certainly unecessary.


6. Useful information
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ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER: World Wide Words is written and published by 
Michael Quinion in the UK. ISSN 1470-1448. Copyediting and advice 
are provided by Julane Marx in the US and by Robert Waterhouse in 
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