World Wide Words -- 02 Feb 13

Fri Feb 1 17:10:34 UTC 2013

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WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 817         Saturday 2 February 2013
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Penny for your thoughts.
3. Sneap.
4. MOOC.
5. Elsewhere.
6. Sic!
7. Subscriptions and other information.

1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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Bill Heritage gently chided me for a comment in my piece on the word 
"pavonine": "You used the expression, 'the blue of the peacock's 
tail'. I know you are a stickler for accuracy yourself so I hope you 
will not mind my observation that the tail is predominantly green. 
It is the peacock's head and neck that are iridescent blue." Others 
noted that in Spanish "pavo", from the Latin for a peacock, means a 
turkey, a curious shift of sense (peacock is "pavo real" where the 
second word means "royal"). 

Ian Roberts noted that Saki (HH Monroe) uses "pavonicide" in a story 
in which a country house guest shoots a peacock ("Some hostesses, of 
course, will forgive anything, even unto pavonicide"). Saki's 
character adds "is there such a word?" There may be, but nobody 
seems to have ever used it except Saki. 

Several readers asked whether there's a link between "pavonine" and 
the stately old dance called the pavane. J Hogan wrote, "Dance 
history has it that the pavane, which swept the Continent in the 
Middle Ages and beyond, was named after the peacock, whose strut had 
already inspired the Italian verb 'pavoneggiare' for the kind of 
dainty striding best suited to display both dignity and fine 
voluminous robes at formal social events." In this case, dance 
history and lexicography are at odds, since the view of the latter 
is that peacocks aren't involved. The Oxford English Dictionary 
says, "this has previously been taken by many to be the etymology of 
the word, but is now generally rejected." Instead, it suggests that 
"pavane" is from the Italian "pavana", a rustic dance from the 
region of Padua.

Last week, I used "paywall" without any thought that it might be an 
unusual word for readers. Enough queries came in to show it wasn't 
as widely known as I had assumed. A paywall prevents visitors who 
don't have a subscription from accessing content on a website. It's 
an obvious play on "firewall", in the computing sense of security 
software that likewise prevents unauthorised access; in turn this 
derives from a wall or partition designed to inhibit or prevent the 
spread of fire. The Oxford English Dictionary's first example of 
"paywall" is from 2004.

2. Penny for your thoughts
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Q. A colleague here in Taiwan has just asked, "What does 'a penny 
for your thoughts' mean?" I would generally use it to ask someone to 
tell me what they're thinking, and my online search tells me that's 
the common use. But, so far, I've failed to find out the origin of 
the phrase. [Brendan Hale]

A. It's an odd little idiom, a colloquial way to speak to somebody 
who's daydreaming or lost in thought. It is used to ask what they're 
thinking about, but as often a gentle way to point out that they're 
preoccupied. 

    This was a long thought to think, and George looked 
    very serious while she was thinking it. Julian looked up 
    and caught her blue eyes fixed on him. He smiled. "Penny 
    for your thoughts!" he said. "They're not worth a penny," 
    said George, going red. 
    [Five On A Treasure Island, by Enid Blyton, 1942.]

Some people wonder if it might be insulting, since a penny is such a 
small amount of money, and might produce the sharp response "Is that 
all you think my thoughts are worth?" That certainly wasn't the idea 
behind it, since a penny was worth rather a lot more when the phrase 
was first written down about 1535. They were then silver coins and 
experts estimate on the basis of average earnings that they were 
worth in the region of 1600 modern pence (if the value is estimated 
on the basis of purchasing power, the figure drops to between 65 and 
120 pence). Alas, the idiom hasn't kept pace with inflation.

We have no idea who invented the saying. We know it from the works 
of Sir Thomas More, lord chancellor, humanist, and martyr, which 
were published posthumously in 1557. He wrote around 1535 that it 
was used with a note of reproach about a vagrant mind. A little 
later, it appears in a famous collection:

    Wherewith in a great musing he was brought, 
    Friend (quoth the good man) a penny for your thought.
    [A Dialogue Containing the Number in Effect of all the 
    Proverbs in the English Tongue, by John Heywood, 1546.]

3. Sneap
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This ancient word has a fine pedigree - Shakespeare used it a couple 
of times - with many relatives and variant forms in the older 
English dialects. 

However, it went out of the mainstream language in the nineteenth 
century, to the extent that an article in the Spectator in June 1888 
held it up as a specimen of the wonderful English of foreigners who 
compiled English dictionaries. (The writer might have had in mind 
that extraordinary New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and 
English by Pedro Carolino that had appeared five years before, whose 
preface asserted that its "translation what only will be for to 
accustom the Portuguese pupils, or foreign, to speak very bad any of 
the mentioned idioms", an ambition triumphantly achieved.) The 
renowned philologist of the period, Walter Skeat, criticised the 
Spectator article for its insufficiencies.

He might have said that he sneaped it, since the word's principal 
meaning was to reprove or chide. It's linked to Old Norse "sneypa", 
to outrage, dishonour or disgrace. In Henry IV, Part 2, Sir John 
Falstaff responds to criticism from the Lord Chief Justice that he 
had been imposing on the innkeeper Mistress Quickly: "My lord, I 
will not undergo this sneap without reply."

But when it was first recorded in English it meant to pinch or nip. 
The link is with another Scandinavian relative, the Swedish "snöpa", 
to castrate. Rebukes were presumably seen as the unkindest cut, an 
unmanning of one's power or reputation. Might "sneap" be linked to 
"snip", or even "snipe"? It would be good to uncover a connection, 
but the experts say there isn't one.   

Despite the Spectator, the word was far from dead. In the sense of 
biting criticism it was still to be found two decades later:

    "Now, Master Charles," Hilda could remember her saying, 
    "will you ask me for the next polka all over again, and 
    try not to look as if you were doing me a favour and were 
    rather ashamed of yourself?" She had a tongue for the 
    sneaping of too casual boys, and girls also.
    [Hilda Lessways, by Arnold Bennett, 1911.]

And, as Walter Skeat pointed out, it was in active use in English 
dialects ranging from Staffordshire to Cumberland, with meanings 
such as blight or wither, deprive, pinch or starve, or disappoint. 
Half a century after the Spectator article, a book of north-country 
childhood memories recalls some of these dialect uses:

    Anyone who had been snubbed or repressed into silence 
    before other people was said to have been "sneaped". A 
    haughty woman would sneap another, an overbearing man 
    would sneap his wife, the wintry-wind sneaped us to 
    silence.
    [The Country Child, by Alison Uttley, 1931.]

Memories of it have not entirely vanished. In 1998, a reviewer in 
the Birmingham Post of a fresh recording of Vivaldi's Four Seasons 
said of it, "Summer storms bring some exhilaratingly fierce bowing 
in a consistently dramatic account, and Winter opens with almost 
physically sneaping sounds", calling it "a good old Shakespearean 
Midlands word". 

4. MOOC
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Several decades ago, I read a science-fiction story which predicted 
that at some unspecified future date all college tuition would be by 
a form of networked television, with the best teachers becoming the 
well-paid equivalent of film stars. I've long forgotten the author 
and title of the story but I was reminded of its prescience by 
coming across "MOOC".

It's an acronym, for "Massive Open Online Course" (or "Massive Open 
Online Class"), a course of study indeed taught online using video. 
But a MOOC is more than that, as a recent article explains:

    MOOCs are more than good university lectures available 
    online. The real innovation comes from integrating 
    academics talking with interactive coursework, such as 
    automated tests, quizzes and even games. Real-life 
    lectures have no pause, rewind (or fast-forward) buttons; 
    MOOCs let students learn at their own pace, typically with 
    short, engaging videos, modelled on the hugely successful 
    online lecturettes pioneered by TED, a non-profit 
    organiser of upmarket mindfests.
    [The Economist, 22 Dec. 2012.]

In the 1960s the Open University in the UK was a pioneer of such 
distance teaching, in part using BBC radio and television. It has 
recently joined with other British universities to provide course 
content, lectures and assignments that follow the MOOC model. US 
institutions such as MIT and Harvard are providing MOOCs, as are 
several independent start-ups. They are proving popular, but for 
many students a downside is that few courses lead to a qualification 
and it is uncertain whether they can be economically viable in the 
long term.

MOOC borrows from online gaming acronyms such as MMOG (Massively 
Multiplayer Online Game) and MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online 
Role-Playing Game). It was coined by George Siemens, a prominent 
Canadian educator at the Center for Distance Education, who with 
Stephen Downes created the first MOOC in 2008.

5. Elsewhere
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If you have been put off contemporary art by the difficult language 
used to write about it, you are not alone. Many people just call it 
artspeak but the American writers Alix Rule and David Levine named 
it International Art English in an article in the magazine Triple 
Canopy last June, arguing that it functions as a dialect with its 
own rules. That article isn't available online but Andy Beckett has 
written about IAE in the Guardian: http://wwwords.org?UGIAE.

Details of the 2011 census that came out on Thursday shows that the 
second most spoken language in England is Polish. This is the result 
of substantial immigration in the past decade. It has overtaken the 
more established Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi and Urdu, which are spoken 
by immigrants from the Indian subcontinent. The Independent is one 
of many reporting the details: http://wwwords.org?PSLE.

6. Sic!
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David Weston came across a headline in the Leader-Post of Regina, 
Saskatchewan, dated 26 January: "Denise batters appointed senator". 
Initially startled, he was comforted by the lead sentence: "The 
contingent of Saskatchewan women in the Red Chamber has grown with 
the appointment of Denise Batters."

Jocelyn Dodd wondered at the strange names some parents give their 
children when she read this on the Optus Zoo online entertainment 
news on 25 January: "[Nicole] Kidman's hubby Keith Urban kicks off 
his latest Aussie tour in Brisbane tonight and the Paperboy actress 
is expected to bring their daughters Sunday and Faith Down Under at 
some point soon."

Thanks to Chris, we learn of an item in the January issue of the 
Hove Civic Society Newsletter, reflecting on a visit to the Old Ship 
Hotel in Brighton. It says: "In 1831 Paganani - who is now regarded 
as the master of modern violin playing - performed in the ballroom 
from a balcony above the audience, which is still in situ."

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