World Wide Words -- 12 Jan 13

[Michael Quinion]

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WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 814         Saturday 12 January 2013
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Jobation.
3. Taphonomist.
4. Swiz.
5. Sic!
6. Elsewhere.
7. Subscriptions and other information.


1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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A smaller postbag than usual came in after last week's issue. Thanks 
to everybody who said it was good to have World Wide Words back and 
a fond farewell to the few who welcomed us back by unsubscribing. 

Several pointed out that I'd spelled the noun "prophecy" as though 
it were the verb "prophesy": blame late-night composition following 
the ADS vote in Boston. Others - mostly from the Silicon Valley area 
- commented that for them the graphics format called GIF was always 
said with a hard "g". I'd not heard it said much (it doesn't come up 
in conversation very often around my way), but always as "jif", so 
the report I read of Oxford's announcement that it was said like 
that raised no doubt in my mind. Oxford's press release is more 
nuanced and informative:

    GIF may be pronounced with either a soft g (as in 
    giant) or a hard g (as in graphic). The programmers who 
    developed the format preferred a pronunciation with a soft 
    g (in homage to the commercial tagline of the peanut 
    butter brand Jiff, they supposedly quipped "choosy 
    developers choose GIF"). However, the pronunciation with a 
    hard g is now very widespread and readily understood. 
    Whichever pronunciation you use, it should of course be 
    the same for both the noun and the verb.

More significantly, several Americans argued that the name of the 
"#" character isn't "hash" but either "number sign" or "pound". (I 
have heard that some older Americans prefer "crosshatch".) Bryon 
Moyer wrote, "I frankly thought that 'hash' was a Briticism. I'd 
heard it, but not often. On a phone, for example, you'd never hear 
'Hit the hash key'; you'd hear 'Hit the pound key'." It may be that 
"hashtag" is, indirectly, a British contribution to the language.

Several readers said they had difficulty in voting in the Macmillan 
Dictionary's Love English Awards 2012. The design of the page isn't 
optimum, especially for users with small screens or older browsers. 
World Wide Words *is* there, if you scroll to the end of the long 
list of nominations: http://wwwords.org?MMDB .


2. Jobation
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A particularly erudite thesaurus may offer you in its place rebuke, 
scold, tell-off, lambast, censure, give a piece of one's mind, read 
the Riot Act, criticise, take to task, haul over the coals, or some 
dozens more - such is the size of our vocabulary when it comes to 
giving somebody an earful.

"Jobation" may have been an academic joke. At least, it turns up in 
A Collection of College Words and Customs, an obscure American work 
of 1856 by Benjamin Homer Hall. He defined the word thus: "At the 
University of Cambridge, England, a sharp reprimand from the Dean 
for some offence, not eminently heinous." The Oxbridge connection 
may be supported by its appearance five years later in Tom Brown at 
Oxford, Thomas Hughes's sequel to Tom Brown's Schooldays: "Don't be 
angry at my jobation; but write me a long answer of your own free 
will." The recently revised entry in the Oxford English Dictionary 
online counters that it is more likely to be an English colloquial 
or regional term. Since it is recorded in Admiral Smyth's Sailor's 
Word-Book of 1867, in which he says it is like a cabin-lecture, a 
private but severe reprimand, we must accept the colloquial part. In 
the speech of some English regions it has appeared as "jawbation", a 
neat version that evokes extended exertion of the mouth muscles in 
castigation.

The origin is biblical, from the Old Testament book of Job. You may 
recall that the poor man was much troubled by sanctimonious friends 
who reproved him at length. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth 
centuries, to "Jobe" was to harangue somebody about their personal 
failings.


3. Taphonomist
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"Change and decay in all around I see", hymned Henry Francis Lyte in 
Abide With Me. Nobody is more conscious of that than a taphonomist. 
I found the word over Christmas in a dystopian SF book, Zero Point 
by Neal Asher, in which a future dictator used computer technology 
to simultaneously kill off eight billion human beings and then had 
to work out what to do with the bodies.

Asher defined the word as a specialist who studies the decomposition 
of dead organisms. That's pretty much correct, though there's more 
to it and the timescales can vary hugely. A sub-discipline, forensic 
taphonomy, takes a relatively short-term view, looking into the ways 
in which human remains decay through natural processes as a way to 
guide police investigations - you may have heard of macabre studies 
in which corpses are left out in the open so their decomposition can 
be studied. The main focus of taphonomy, however, is on processes 
that take much longer - ones by which dead organisms transform into 
fossils.

"Taphonomy" was coined in 1940 by a Russian palaeontologist (and SF 
author), Ivan Efremov. He took it from the classical Greek "taphos", 
a grave, plus the "-nomy" ending for a specified area of knowledge 
that originated in "nomos", law. German scientists had been working 
in the field since the 1920s but the specialism gained much greater 
prominence in the 1970s.


4. Swiz
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Q. Do you know where "swizz" is from?  I used it as an exclamation 
of disappointment when I was a boy growing up in England, "Bloody 
swizz!" My British dictionary says it comes from 'swindle' but I was 
trying to explain it to an American who was dumbfounded by the term. 
[Joe Fordham]

A. I know it well. As with you, it was a word of my youth. All the 
reference works I've consulted agree that it's from "swindle". But, 
as so often, there's more to it.

"Swizz" (or "swiz" as modern dictionaries prefer to spell it) is a 
shortened form of "swizzle". This is a late-eighteenth-century word 
for what a slang dictionary of the following century defined as "a 
compounded intoxicant". It was usually rum or gin with bitters, made 
frothy by stirring. Hence "swizzle-stick", which survives as a term 
for a stirrer of liquids, usually alcoholic. The origin of "swizzle" 
is unknown; it's first recorded in Captain Francis Grose's Classical 
Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue in 1788. This is from a few years 
later:

    The landlord I soon found to be a knowing little chatty 
    fellow, and one who knew how to please his guests. Never 
    was I more entertained in my life than by his company. He 
    was not one of your common dry brained swizzle venders 
    [sic]; no, sir; he had read several characters carefully 
    in the book of nature, and knew how to render a reason.
    [The Freemasons' Magazine (London), 1 Aug. 1795.]

There are some signs that a century later the word had become 
shortened to "swiz", a development that was hardly surprising. The 
slang lexicographer Jonathon Green found it in the London humorous 
magazine Punch of 11 October 1884: "Political picnics with fireworks 
and plenty of swiz ain't 'arf bad."

What happened next is obscure, but we know that by the first years 
of the twentieth century the word had shifted into schoolboy slang 
for a cheat, scam or disappointing outcome. The first example in the 
slang dictionaries is from a letter from the poet Wilfred Owen dated 
March 1915 but a syndicated anecdote turns up in a number of 
transatlantic newspapers a few years earlier. It hadn't become an 
Americanism - it had been borrowed from the British magazine Tit-
Bits, a little tale in a careful transcription of contemporary 
London pronunciation:

    "Now, there's Jimmy Simpk'ns. 'E tell me only the other 
    day that every time 'e takes a dose o' cod liver oil 'is 
    ol' woman puts a penny in 'is money box. 'E must be 
    gettin' rich." "No, I ain't!" bawled Jimmy. "W'y, I've 
    found out it's all a swiz! When it gets ter 'arf a crown, 
    she takes it out and buys anuvver bottle."
    [La Crosse Tribune (La Crosse, Wisconsin), 26 Feb. 
    1909. Cod liver oil was a medicament with an unpleasant 
    taste often given to children by the spoonful at the 
    period to help prevent rickets; "half a crown" in old 
    British money was two shillings and sixpence or thirty 
    pence; "old woman" here must be the boy's mother.]

The missing link is how "swiz" changed its meaning from alcohol to 
swindle, if it did and wasn't a reinvention. "Swizzle" and "swindle" 
are similar but not sufficiently so for the one to easily transform 
into the other, even though the former was a fixed and frequent 
element of English vocabulary at the time. There has to be more to 
it.

Eric Partridge suggested in his Origins in 1958 that the original 
swizzle, like other mixed drinks, was pleasant to drink but very 
treacherous. I wonder whether the reputation of licensed victuallers 
in the nineteenth century for cheating their customers might have 
had something to do with the shift of meaning.


5. Elsewhere
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It transpires that we're not quite done with the words of 2012. The 
Macquarie Dictionary of Australia is running its sixth annual poll 
to find words in various categories. Among them are "alive call", a 
telephone call allowed to an asylum seeker to ring relatives to let 
them know they're alive, and "fibro majestic", a disparaging term 
for a house built from asbestos ("fibro" locally), which Sue Butler, 
editor of the dictionary, said in a report in the Australian 
Financial Review was her favourite: "I think it's very funny in an 
Australian way." Details and voting here: http://wwwords.org?MQWY .


6. Sic!
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John Neave learned of a previously unknown royal occupation from the 
New Zealand Herald of 28 December: "Jiroemon Kimura, who was born on 
April 19, 1897, when Queen Victoria was on the throne and worked as 
a postal employee, is particularly fond of red bean cake and rice, 
his family says."

Tony Morris encountered this headline in the online issue of the 
Irish Independent of 3 January: "High street bubble set to burst 
asshoppers embrace e-tail therapy."

Another textual confusion confronted Dennis Ginley in a piece on the 
DailyTech site on 4 January. It reported on proposals to counter the 
loss of fuel taxes from electric or hybrid vehicles: "Oregon isn't 
the only state considering charging drivers of fuel-efficient 
vehicles attacks on the miles they drive."

Vivian Pryles thought we might enjoy this from The Sunday Age of 
Melbourne of 6 January about re-opening a pub: "Having lain dormant 
and empty for nine months, a group of 10 locals bought the three-
acre site".

The recent floods in the UK provoked a comment which David Parlett 
found in the New Statesman's issue of 4 January: "The Swilgate, the 
tributary of the Avon that runs round the southern edge of the town, 
had overflown its banks four days earlier."


7. Useful information
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ABOUT THIS E-MAGAZINE: 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 Robert Waterhouse in 
Europe. Any residual errors are the fault of the author. The linked 
website is http://www.worldwidewords.org.

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