World Wide Words -- 17 Aug 13

[Michael Quinion]

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WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 845          Saturday 17 August 2013
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       This mailing also contains an HTML-formatted version.
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Lemniscate.
3. Part and parcel.
4. Sic!
5. Subscriptions and other information.


1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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AGOG  Dharmachari Padmavyuha commented, "I think you're right about 
this 'new' usage of 'agog' being confused with 'goggle', and I think 
it's happening by way of 'agape' (which has the same flavour of 
meaning as goggle, and which I suspect people are probably hearing 
in their heads when they use 'agog' that way). I'm most used to it 
in 'agog with anticipation', which invokes the spirit of spaniels 
everywhere." James McCrudden added, "When I was a child at convent 
school in the early 1950s in Australia I often heard teachers say to 
an excited pupil 'here he is all agape and agog'. I later found that 
'agape and agog' was in common use. Sometimes 'aghast, agape and 
agog'. It's definitely not rare."

SIC!  Many readers, as unversed as I am in the esoteric jargon of 
cricket, were aghast (or perhaps agape or agog) at one item in the 
Sic! section last week. The primary reason for including it was the 
reference to a ball dissecting fielders. Terry Walsh wrote, "Bizarre 
as it might appear to the uninitiated, to the cricket aficionado it 
is not only a poetic, but also a perfectly intelligible description 
of two different types of successful hit. I leave it to those better 
versed than I am to write with a translation, as, of course, they 
will." Nobody has yet, which will disappoint all those readers who 
have contacted me to ask what the devil it could possibly mean.


2. Lemniscate  /lEm'nIsK at t/
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Take a doughnut (not a traditional British one, but an American one 
with a hole in the middle). Lay it on a chopping block. Take a sharp 
knife and hold the blade vertical, positioning it so that its edge 
is exactly above the inside edge of the doughnut. Cut vertically 
downwards to split the doughnut in two. If you examine the cut ends 
of the pieces, you will find the smaller one has a cross-section 
like a figure eight or an infinity sign. You have just created an 
imperfect example of a lemniscate, a type of mathematical curve.

Lemniscates were named by the Swiss mathematician Jacob Bernoulli, 
who published a description of them in 1694. He took their name from 
the Latin "lemniscatus", decorated with ribbons, for no very obvious 
reason we can now understand except that perhaps the curves looked 
like ribbons tied into a bow. He is remembered for his studies of 
one member of the set in particular, now called the lemniscate of 
Bernoulli. The one in your doughnut (which is an approximation to 
the geometric shape called a torus) is the lemniscate of Booth, 
named for James Booth, a nineteenth-century mathematician of Irish 
birth who worked in the same field.

To attach Booth's name to it is to deprive a Greek mathematician of 
the fifth century CE named Proclus of the credit for discovering it. 
He called Booth's curve a hippopede, a horse fetter, because it 
looked like a device for hobbling a horse's feet.

Outside mathematics, "lemniscate" frequently takes on mystical or 
occult undertones because of the associations of the infinity symbol 
with the Tarot and the teachings of the Russian spiritualist Madame 
Blavatsky.

    The cosmic lemniscate, or sidewise figure-eight, the symbol 
    of infinity, hovered like a halo above the Magician's head, and 
    about his waist was clasped a serpent devouring its own tail: 
    the worm Ouroborus, a symbol of eternity. All things in all 
    space and time - that was the grandeur of the concept for which 
    this modern Magician strived.
    [God of Tarot, by Piers Anthony, 1989.]


3. Part and parcel
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Q. Has the "parcel" in the stock phrase "part and parcel" anything 
to do with the parcel handled by the Post Office? I recall resellers 
of war-surplus goods in the 1940-50s breaking their inventory into 
"parcels" that would have required a 3-ton lorry to shift. [Malcolm 
Ross-Macdonald, Ireland]

A. The Post Office kind of parcel (which Americans would prefer to 
call a package) is a very specific sense of a word that has had a 
large number of meanings down the centuries. 

In its widest sense it can mean an amount or quantity of something, 
an extremely wide-ranging usage - you can have parcels of land, for 
example. The OED illustrates its variety over the past couple of 
centuries with these: "parcel of work", "parcel of weather", "parcel 
of nonsense", "parcel of spray", "parcel of rogues" and "parcel of 
shares". It can also mean a quantity of a commodity offered as a 
single transaction, a lot, so a tiny package of diamonds offered for 
auction or your three-tonner load of equipment are both parcels.

All of these in various ways perpetuate the first sense of a parcel 
as being a constituent or part of some larger whole, a portion or 
division. This reflects its origins: "parcel" has come to us via Old 
French from the post-classical Latin "particella", a part or 
portion.

That makes "part and parcel" a tautology, since both words in effect 
mean the same thing. English loves this kind of doublet: "nooks and 
crannies", "hale and hearty", "safe and sound", "rack and ruin", 
"dribs and drabs". Many derive from the ancient legal practice of 
including words of closely similar meaning to make sure that the 
sense covers all eventualities: "aid and abet", "fit and proper", 
"all and sundry". 

"Part and parcel" is a member of this second group - it appeared in 
legal records during the sixteenth century. We use it to emphasise 
that the thing being spoken about is an essential and integral 
feature or element of a whole:

    "Do you believe in an afterlife?" "I believe that the energy 
    we have as living human beings is still part and parcel of the 
    universe at some level and makes a difference."
    [Financial Times, 6 Jul. 2013.]

US English has the mildly humorous variant "passel" - deriving from 
a nineteenth-century pronunciation of "parcel" and often preceded by 
"whole" - suggesting a largish group of people or things ("passel of 
problems", "passel of accusations", "passel of experts").


4. Sic!
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"While walking in AbbeyDore in Herefordshire," wrote Pete Sinclair, 
"we saw a plaque over a gate at the church: 'Erected to the memory 
of Capt R.C.B. Partridge, M.C. C. de G. Killed in action Sept 28 
1918 by friends in South Wales'."

Gerald Etkind found this headline over a story dated 10 August on 
the website of the Athens Banner-Herald of Georgia: "Man asked to 
clean up after dog pulls gun."

I quote from an article in The Independent on 12 August about the 
Australian general election: "On the campaign trail and addressing a 
Liberal Party event in the city of Melbourne [opposition leader 
Tony] Abbott said: "No one - however smart, however well-educated, 
however experienced - is the suppository of all wisdom."


5. Useful information
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Michael Quinion in the UK. ISSN 1470-1448. Copyediting and advice 
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