World Wide Words -- 07 Dec 13

[Michael Quinion]

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WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 861          Saturday 7 December 2013
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Antelucan.
3. Wordface.
4. Six ways from Sunday.
5. Sic!
5. Useful information.


1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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DROWN  My comment last time about a weakening in sense of "drown" 
drew numerous comments.

John Douglas noted that a similar shift has already taken place with 
"electrocute", which originally meant to execute a person by means 
of electricity. It soon shifted to include dying by an accidental 
shock and has since come to mean suffering either injury or death. 
Gregory Harris similarly commented on "starve", which originally 
meant to die by any means (its close relative, German "sterben", 
retains that meaning) but in Middle English that sense was passed to 
"die", a word from Old Norse, and "starve" took on a specific sense 
of dying through hunger; it has now become diluted in meaning to the 
point that it can colloquially mean merely that the speaker is very 
hungry; we have to say "starve to death" to make it clear that the 
process has been fatal. Michael Moore pointed out that a parallel 
change is beginning to take place with "drown" because we are seeing 
examples of "drown to death".

Dr John Smith added, "Common usage in the US medical community 
describes 'near-drowning' as the condition following immersion from 
which resuscitation is successful. If unsuccessful, the patient's 
death is due to 'drowning'."

The fuzziness about the finality of "drown" is not new. Dick Kenney 
reported, "In 1970, I went with a fellow worker onto a Massachusetts 
low tide flat to dig clams. He told me on the long way out that he 
drowned once and was wary of incoming tides. I was kind of startled 
by this statement as he looked pretty much alive as far as I could 
tell. Since then, I've heard other uses of 'drowned' where the 
victim survived." On the American Dialect Society list, John Baker 
noted a couple of examples from 1869 that referred to a person 
having drowned but then been resuscitated. 

THIRTEEN AND THE ODD  Several readers wondered if the term might be 
linked to the old superstition that it's unlucky for thirteen to sit 
down to a meal. It's an intriguing speculation but it's hard to see 
how the association might have grown up. Christopher Philippo asked 
if it might be an example of phrase inflation, as has happened with 
"the whole nine yards" (see http://wwwords.org/wnys), with the idiom 
having started out with a smaller number which has increased over 
time.

Brian Cassidy commented: "Being an English speaker living in Quebec, 
I have often heard the French expression 'se mettre sur son trente-
et-un' (literally 'to put on one's 31'), the equivalent of English 
'dressed to the nines' (see http://wwwords.org/drnn)." Might the 
American 13 be the Quebecois' 31 inverted? Alain Gottcheiner wrote 
from Belgium about the same idiom, noting that the usual explanation 
is that it derives from "trentain", a fine cloth. He wondered if the 
original English might have been a mistranslation of the French as 
"thirty and the odd", which might then have been confused with or 
influenced by the card game that I mentioned in the original piece.


2. Antelucan  /antI'l(j)u:k at n/
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In The Book of Hours in 2007, Kevin Jackson described this word as 
"rare and archaic", but also as "the precise or pedantic word for 
the gloom before dawn". There you have it in a nutshell.

Rare it certainly is, though a few well-known authors have taken 
advantage of its precision and its unusualness, among them Thomas 
Carlyle, Thomas De Quincey, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James 
Joyce. One more:

    Hardly anything could be more isolated or more self-
    contained than the lives of these two walking here in the 
    lonely antelucan hour, when gray shades, material and 
    mental, are so very gray. 
    [The Woodlanders, by Thomas Hardy, 1887.]

The word derives from Latin "lux", light, which becomes "luc-" in 
compounds. Put "-an" on the end to turn it into an adjective and 
"ante-" in front to mark it as referring to something beforehand, 
and it becomes a term for the moments before the coming of the 
light.

The first time that I encountered the word, in The Uplift War, an SF 
classic by David Brin, I was momentarily derailed from his narrative 
by being reminded of a famous missing-persons case in Britain, that 
of Lord Lucan. What came before Lucan? Presumably another Lucan, 
maybe the one who sent Lord Cardigan and his troops on the ill-fated 
Charge of the Light Brigade. But that was the wrong kind of light.


3. Wordface
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HARRIED  Richard Mellish asked about "by the Lord Harry". Who was 
Harry and why was he invoked? It's a mild oath with a long period of 
popularity, from the late seventeenth century down to the end of the 
nineteenth, and even beyond in humorous contexts. Mr Mellish found 
it in The Perishers, a British cartoon strip that began in the Daily 
Mirror in the 1950s and is still reproduced today. (It has also been 
made into a TV series.) In the cartoon, Boot the sheepdog often says 
it to himself and his gentle expletive has become so well known that 
many younger people think it was invented there. But the earliest 
example I've found is in a very different context, a translation in 
1688 of the Spanish classic Don Quixote: "By the Lord Harry, quo 
Sancho, these Men of Business are so troublesome." Lord Harry may be 
the Devil, as "Old Harry" is one of his many nicknames.

GEEING UP  We have begun to see the abbreviation "5G" in articles 
about advances in mobile telephone technology. It's short for "fifth 
generation", claimed by the Chinese firm Hauwei to be 100 times 
faster than the best speeds achievable with the fourth generation 
(4G) networks currently being rolled out in the UK and elsewhere, 
which reach speeds of 30Mbps or more. But why all these generations? 
Working back, 3G was the first generation that had internet access 
using smartphones, 2G phones could only make voice calls and send 
text messages, while 1G was the analogue standard used by those 
brick-sized devices of the 1980s. It's said such new technological 
generations become available to the public about every 10 years, so 
expect 5G early in the 2020s.


4. Six ways from Sunday
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Q. I'm unsure of the origin of "six ways from Sunday", but generally 
it expresses completeness. Could it refer to patterns of activity 
during a week, from one Sunday to the next? [Martin Schell]

A. You're not alone in feeling unsure of the origin; you are in the 
company of every etymologist who has looked at it.

People do often guess that it has something to do with the days of 
the week. One over-specific and quite certainly false tale lists the 
punishments once meted out on the six days following a Sunday to a 
person who failed to attend church. 

The problem with this derivation is the wide disparity in forms that 
have appeared down the years, such as "four different ways from 
Sunday", "eight ways from Tuesday", "forty ways till Sunday", and "a 
thousand ways for Sunday". The common factor is a day of the week 
and "ways", with the number and preposition variable at will. 

Clues to its origin may lie in two stories by the American writer 
James Kirke Paulding and an unanswered question posed to the British 
publication Notes and Queries in 1861. Paulding is the first author 
to record any version of the saying:

    The brow projected exuberantly, though not heavily, 
    over a pair of rascally little cross-firing twinkling 
    eyes, that, as the country people said, looked at least 
    nine ways from Sunday.
    [Cobus Yerks, a short story by James Kirke Paulding, in 
    The Atlantic Souvenir for Christmas 1828.]

"As the country people said" suggests that Paulding recognised it as 
a folk saying of some age. Later writers, such as Thomas Chandler 
Haliburton, also used this version. For them it meant askew, at a 
slant, in every direction. In another of Paulding's tales, Westward 
Ho! of 1832, a character criticises some needlework, "stitched with 
the needle of a compass that pointed nine ways from Sunday".

The correspondent to Notes and Queries asked, "Looking nine ways for 
Sunday (sometimes varied to 'Looking two ways for Sunday') appears 
to be used for being completely at a loss, 'nonplussed'. But why 
Sunday?" This is the only early example that I can find in a British 
source, but it hints that it may not originally have been American 
but an older British idiom. This ties up with Paulding's view of it 
as a folk saying. If so, it died out in the UK long ago and it isn't 
now known here except as an Americanism and - in the form "Six Ways 
to Sunday" - the title of a 1999 film starring Deborah Harry.

As well as the multitudinous versions, the sense has swung about 
like the needle in Pauling's story. One common one is "completely" 
or "thoroughly" or "by every imaginable method", as in this example 
from 1894: "if you want to collect any bills from them you will have 
to chase them seven ways from Sunday". Another one, from 2013: "They 
both insist that their staff are the best in the business, and have 
been checked five ways to Sunday before they get hired."

None of this gives much of a clue why Sunday was originally chosen, 
although it was short, simple and expressive and would have been 
regarded as the most significant or special day of the week. The 
most common form probably owes its success to the alliteration of 
"Sunday" with "six".


5. Sic!
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Reading a document about his dental insurance brought on an attack 
of "duh!" from Paul Brady. "IMPORTANT: Can you read this document? 
If not, we can have somebody help you read it. For free help, please 
call ..."

Military exercise: Naomi Rosen pointed out that on 20 November the 
Huffington Post suggested that "If you're having trouble losing 
weight or having trouble maintaining weight loss, just get out there 
and maintain a regular regiment of physical activity."

It's all too easy to misread this report of 28 November in the Wells 
Journal of Somerset, despite the careful commas: "The Journal has 
been inundated with tributes to Les Small, who could be seen playing 
his harmonica and chatting with passers-by, following his death." 
Thanks go to Ama Bolton for that.

A report on a care home published by the UK Care Quality Commission 
was sent in by Jeremy Shaw: "The provider did not always take proper 
steps to ensure that people were at risk of receiving care that was 
inappropriate." We must hope there's a missing "not" somewhere.

The builders of the hanging gardens of Babylon were clever, at least 
according to this ungrammatical sentence in the Sunday Telegraph of 
24 November, which Patrick Williamson told us about: "Knowledge of 
them is based on a few accounts, written hundreds of years after it 
was said to have been built by people who never saw it."

Yet another example of a misplaced modifier, found by Rupert Snell 
on 4 December in the BBC news magazine online: "Made out of wood and 
with a wheel at the bottom, Hamon has carried the cross throughout 
Britain and to remote parts of the world including Bangladesh, 
Nepal, India and Sri Lanka."


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, Robert Waterhouse, John Bagnall and 
Peter Morris. Any residual errors are the fault of the author. The 
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