World Wide Words -- 19 Jan 13

[Michael Quinion]

--------------------------------------------------------------------
WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 815         Saturday 19 January 2013
--------------------------------------------------------------------
       This mailing also contains an HTML-formatted version.
          A formatted version is also available online at
             http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/nyzh.htm


Contents
--------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Prestidigitator.
3. According to Cocker.
4. Elsewhere.
5. Virotherapist.
6. Sic!
7. Subscriptions and other information.


1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Marsano wrote about the "hash" sign, mentioned last time: "I've 
always known it as the trepan. Brain surgeons having to put a hole 
in a patient's skull at one time used four shallow saw cuts to do 
so, as using a conventional drill bit would almost certainly injure 
the brain. The procedure, called trepanning or trepanation, works 
well on any spherical form." Lots of others pointed out that in my 
brief list of names for the sign - not intended to be comprehensive 
- I'd omitted "octothorpe", a less common term but one with a tale. 
(See http://wwwords.org?OCTT.) John Gray commented that in the UK 
you would never hear the equivalent of "hit the pound key". "In our 
gentler society we simply 'press the hash key'."

Statistics about the pronunciation of "GIF" came from Stan Carey: 
"In a post on my Sentence First blog a few weeks ago, I conducted a 
poll to informally quantify people's preferences. At the time of 
writing, it's 69% hard-G and 23% soft-G (the remaining minority 
pronounce the letters individually)." Rowan Collins added: "As a 
footnote, you might be interested to note that the official standard 
for another image format, 'PNG', explicitly states that it should be 
pronounced 'ping'. The existence of an official pronunciation was 
frequently listed among its advantages over the earlier format." 

"Your item on Jobation," Anthony Massey e-mailed, "referred to a 
'cabin lecture', which reminded me of the British Army term for a 
dressing down of an officer by his superior, 'an interview without 
coffee'. Apparently the next stage, when you're really in trouble, 
is to be ordered to attend a 'carpet parade'. In the Royal Navy I'm 
told that the standard admission of guilt, again by an officer to 
his superior, is to say at the very beginning of the hearing, 'I'm 
thinking of buying a pig farm, sir'."

At one moment it felt as though every Australian subscriber was 
communicating with me about the term "fibro majestic". They all 
pointed out that it was a local joke on a once-famous up-market 
hotel in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, the Hydro Majestic. Tony 
Rodd revealed, "In our younger days it was renowned as the place 
Sydneyites took their mistresses off for what was then called a 
'dirty weekend', no questions asked." Christopher Yates recalled, 
"Rumour had it that the staff would ring a bell at 6am as a cue for 
philandering guests to return to their own beds, such was the 
reputation of this pretentious pile." Margaret Neville categorised 
the phrase as "another typical Aussie tongue in cheek case of naming 
something as its opposite." Jack Harvey corrected my description: 
"'Fibro' does not specifically refer to asbestos. It's a contraction 
of 'fibro-cement sheet' and variants thereof - thin cement sheeting 
reinforced with fibres - formerly asbestos, now cellulose." David 
Barklay noted: "Fibro was a very common building material in the 
post-war building boom and enabled many people to build their own 
homes". The Maquarie Dictionary's voting page, by the way, does 
include a fuller description of "fibro", together with the origin of 
the joke; I didn't include it, not wanting to overload what was 
intended to be a brief note accompanying a link.

Numerous readers responded to my piece on "swiz" by mentioning its 
appearance in the Molesworth books by Geoffrey Willans, especially 
Down with Skool! of 1953: "A chiz is a swizz or a swindle as any 
fule kno." "Chiz" is almost certainly an abbreviation of "chisel", a 
slang term first recorded in 1808, meaning to act deceitfully or to 
cheat (the image must be of slicing material from the person being 
cheated). Willans is the first known user of "chiz" as a noun (one 
earlier example is known for the verb) and it would seem that he 
modelled it on "swiz".


2. Prestidigitator /,prestI;dIdZIteIt@/
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Etymologically speaking, a prestidigitator is a person with nimble 
fingers, an entertainer for whom in the cry of the old-time three-
card-trick men, "the quickness of the hand deceives the eye".

The word was created in 1823 in French as "prestidigitateur" from 
"preste", an adjective meaning quickly that had been borrowed four 
centuries before from the Italian "presto". To this the unidentified 
inventor added the Latin "digitus", finger. He may not have known of 
the classical Latin "praestigia", a trick or hocus-pocus, nor of 
"praestigiator", a juggler or trickster. 

English was well ahead of him, since "prestigiator" had been in the 
language since about 1595. Though "prestidigitator" appears in an 
uncompleted work by the third Lord Shaftsbury dated 1712, it wasn't 
published until 1914, so our word has definitely been borrowed from 
French.

Mildly exotic and not a little grandiose, it's hardly suited to the 
banalities of everyday speech. It demands to be said in exaggerated 
Gallic fashion, accompanied by an eloquent gesture and the swirl of 
an imaginary cloak. Or at least by words similarly resplendent:

    Famously, [Stephen] Fry is a gothically logorrhoeic 
    consumer of, and dealer in, words. He is the Warren 
    Buffett of adjectives, verbs and nouns, speculating and 
    accumulating. He likes to pile them up into steepling 
    edifices. He loves the way they tintinnabulate and 
    cascade; he likes the playfulness of double meanings. He 
    yearns to toy with them, cavort and gamble with words. He 
    is a human Scrabble bag, a consonant-juggler, a gerund 
    prestidigitator.
    [AA Gill, in the Sunday Times, 2 Oct. 2011.]


3. According to Cocker
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. An expression I have heard before but just encountered again in 
the works of Austin Freeman is "according to Cocker". Where does it 
come from and who was Cocker? [Sheila Napier]

A. R Austin Freeman wrote his detective stories, which featured the 
medico-legal forensic investigator Dr John Thorndyke, in the first 
three decades of the twentieth century. By then I think the idiom 
was well on its way to falling out of common use. Its heyday was the 
previous century - Freeman would have learned it in his youth in the 
1870s. This is one example in his works:

    There was no sign of the driver, and no one minding the 
    horse; and as this was not quite according to Cocker, it 
    naturally attracted his attention.
    [Pontifex, Son and Thorndyke, by R Austin Freeman, 
    1931.]

Something done "according to Cocker" was done properly, according to 
established rules or what was considered to be correct. 

The etymological story starts in 1678, when John Hawkins published 
the manuscript of a book which Edward Cocker had left at his death 
two years earlier. Cocker had been the master of a grammar school in 
Southwark, across the Thames from the City of London, and Hawkins 
was his successor in the post. (It has been claimed that the book 
was actually by Hawkins, trading on Cocker's name, but the current 
view is that Cocker really had written it.) The book, after the 
fashion of the time, had an expansive title - Cocker's Arithmetick: 
Being a Plain and familiar Method suitable to the meanest Capacity 
for the full understanding of that Incomparable Art, as it is now 
taught by the ablest School-masters in City and Country.

The Arithmetick (like "musick" and other words it has since lost its 
final letter) was an enormous success. It had reached its twentieth 
edition by 1700 and went through more than a hundred altogether. It 
was widely used to teach basic arithmetic in English schools for 
well over a century ("if 13 yards of velvet cost 21 l. what will 27 
yards of the same cost at that rate?" - "l" here stands for pounds, 
as in the old "LSD" for pounds, shillings and pence). One of the 
main reasons for its popularity was that Cocker directed it at the 
needs of practical men of business, and included examples of real 
transactions in commerce, the building trades, and elsewhere.

The book was so much part of every educated person's childhood that 
it became the authority to which everybody turned when in need of 
confirmation of the accuracy of a calculation. This lies behind this 
early appearance of the phrase, in a letter from a lady complaining 
that she had had no success getting up a game of cards to be played 
for guineas:

    Mrs. Buckram, wife to the deputy of Portsoken ward, 
    purtested [protested] she never played for above 
    sixpences, and added, that her husband had calculated, 
    according to Cocker, that an alderman might be ruined in a 
    month, if his wife cut in for shillings.
    [The Town and Country Magazine, Mar. 1785.]

Many other examples of this appeal to arithmetical authority are 
recorded in the years that follow ("The Dividend payable at the Bank 
upon 23l. 8s. is (according to Cocker) 23s. 22d. per annum." - 
Morning Post, 25 Oct. 1816; "In this house it happened that the ale 
was sevenpence per quart, at which rate, according to Cocker, it 
would be three halfpence and a farthing per half-pint" - Aberdeen 
Journal, 12 Aug. 1829). (These aren't quite according to Cocker to 
me, having grown up with this monetary system. There were 12 pennies 
to a shilling, so "23s. 22d" would have been better rendered as 
"24s. 10d." And, a farthing being a quarter of a penny, "three 
halfpence and a farthing" would surely have been simpler said as "a 
penny three farthings".) 

It was easy to extend an appeal to arithmetical authority to any 
action that was carried out according to an established rule or 
convention.

Curiously, Edward Cocker wasn't known in his lifetime for his skill 
in arithmetic. He was an expert engraver and what was then called a 
pen-man, a calligrapher. Samuel Pepys praises him several times in 
his Diary, in particular because Cocker was the only man Pepys found 
with the skill to engrave his new slide rule.

There are several related expressions. The most famous is "according 
to Hoyle". Edmond Hoyle wrote several works on card games from the 
1740s onwards and was often cited as an authority on their rules, in 
particular whist. At one time, an equivalent Americanism was 
"according to Gunter". Edmund Gunter was an English mathematician of 
the sixteenth century who invented the Gunter's chain, widely used 
in surveying, and Gunter's rule, an early type of slide rule.


4. Elsewhere
--------------------------------------------------------------------
A couple of weeks ago, New Scientist magazine published an article 
arguing that the Inuit really do have many words for snow, despite 
linguists' arguments that this is a mere folk tale. Geoffrey Pullum, 
Professor of General Linguistics at Edinburgh University, satirised 
the tale in an article (download as PDF via http://wwwords.org?GWVH) 
which appeared in his 1991 book, The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax. 
The New Scientist piece is available only to subscribers but the 
Washington Post (http://wwwords.org?EWFS) has reported it, which has 
prompted a rebuttal by Professor Pullum (http://wwwords.org?GPRBL).


5. Virotherapist
--------------------------------------------------------------------
This term is currently very rare. The name for the field of study, 
virotherapy, has been known for a decade but has only occasionally 
strayed outside specialist or academic publications. The magazine 
Scientific American explained its meaning succinctly in a headline 
to an article in October 2003: "virotherapy harnesses viruses, those 
banes of humankind, to stop another scourge - cancer". 

Anecdotal reports have appeared for more than a century that certain 
viruses can counter tumours, but it has only been in the past couple 
of decades that a growing understanding of genetics has enabled 
medical researchers to begin developing treatments using oncolytic 
(cancer-attacking) viruses. The then state of the art was summed up 
in a report two years ago:

    Research has shown that virotherapy, in which viruses 
    are programmed to attack cancer cells, leaving healthy 
    cells undamaged, could be beneficial, but this treatment 
    is at present experimental.
    [Daily Telegraph, 21 Mar. 2011.]

The field has moved on since then. A viral therapy to treat prostate 
cancers and one to help treat head and neck cancers are currently 
working their way towards approval in the US. Others are stymied for 
lack of funding.


6. Sic!
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Warren Quinton noticed an English-language menu item for Lasaña 
Vegetariana in what he described as a fairly decent restaurant in 
Lima, Peru. As well as zucchinis, grilled mushrooms, spinach and 
other "delicious veggies", it was said to contain "aborigines".

You may have heard of the snake that stowed away under the wing of 
an aircraft in Australia. Michael Duffy tells us that ABC North 
Queensland reported on 10 January the words of the passenger, Rob 
Weber, who had photographed the snake: "Believed to be a scrub 
python, Mr Webber [sic] wrote that he felt sympathy for the scaly 
reptile."

The crash of a Second World War fighter plane at the East Midlands 
Airport led to a Daily Telegraph report on 7 January, spotted by 
Roger Downham: "The spitfire, which is based at the airport, is one 
of around 35 still able to fly around the world." 

Bill Schmeer found this on MSN (it appeared on other news sites, 
too): "Reputed Detroit mobster, 85-year-old Tony Zirilli, says he 
knows where Teamsters Union boss, Jimmy Hoffa's body is buried. 'All 
this speculation about where he is and he's not,' Zerilli said. 
'They say he was in a meat grinder. It's all baloney.'"

Department of Unfortunate Headlines, from the Seattle Times site on 
10 January: "With Dicks in, all 6 WA congressional Democrats favor 
repeal of gay-marriage ban." It was rapidly changed to remove the 
name of Democrat congressman Norm Dicks.


7. Useful information
--------------------------------------------------------------------
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.

SUBSCRIPTIONS: The website provides all the tools you need to manage 
your own subscription. Please don't contact me asking for changes 
you can make yourself, though if problems occur you can e-mail me at 
wordssubs at worldwidewords.org. To change your subscribed address, 
leave the list or re-subscribe, go to http://wwwords.org?SUBS. This 
e-magazine is also available on RSS (http://wwwords.org?RSSFD) and 
on Twitter (http://wwwords.org?TWTTR). Back issues are available via 
http://wwwords.org?BKISS.

E-MAIL CONTACT ADDRESSES: Comments on e-magazine mailings are always 
welcome. They should be sent to wordseditor at worldwidewords.org. I do 
try to respond, but pressures of time often prevent me from doing 
so. Items for the Sic! section should go to sic at worldwidewords.org. 
Questions intended to be answered in the Q and A section should be 
sent to wordsquestions at worldwidewords.org, not to me directly.

SUPPORT WORLD WIDE WORDS: If you have enjoyed this e-magazine and 
would like to help defray its costs and those of the linked Web 
site, please visit the support page via http://wwwords.org?SPPRT .

COPYRIGHT: World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2013. All 
rights reserved. You may reproduce this e-magazine in whole or part 
in free newsletters, newsgroups or mailing lists or as educational 
resources provided that you include the copyright notice above and 
give the web address of http://www.worldwidewords.org. Reproduction 
of items in printed publications or commercial websites requires 
permission from the author beforehand.


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/worldwidewords/attachments/20130118/befb91a2/attachment.htm>