World Wide Words -- 16 Mar 13

[Michael Quinion]

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WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 823          Saturday 16 March 2013
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       This mailing also contains an HTML-formatted version.
          A formatted version is also available online at
             http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/osto.htm


Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Swanning around.
3. Landing.
4. Solutionism.
5. Sic!
7. Subscriptions and other information.


1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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BETWIXT  Following my piece on this word last week, several readers 
asked about "twixt". Randall Bart recalled the one-time slogan of 
the Yorkshire Post, "Twixt Trent and Tweed", in reference to the 
rivers that border its circulation area. Grammarians call this an 
aphetic form, in which an unstressed syllable at the beginning of a 
word has been lost. "Twixt" was often written with an initial 
apostrophe to indicate this.

TAFFY  Other readers followed up my item on "toffee-nosed" two weeks 
ago that mentions this word by asking about the nickname "Taffy" for 
a Welsh person, which notoriously appears in the old nonsense rhyme 
that begins "Taffy was a Welshman / Taffy was a thief". It has no 
connection with the toffee sense, being supposedly from the Welsh 
pronunciation of the common personal name "David" ("Dafydd" in 
Welsh, said rather like "davith"). 

SITTING BODKIN  As an addition to the original story I have since 
found this further definition for "bodkin":

    Amongst sporting men, applied to a person who takes his 
    turn between the sheets on alternate nights, when the 
    hotel has twice as many visitors as it can comfortably 
    lodge; as, for instance, during a race-week.
    [The Slang Dictionary, by John Camden Hotten, 1869.]

What, if anything, this has to do with "sitting bodkin" escapes me!

BOONTLING  Despite my assertion in the last issue, there is no such 
place as Anderson County, Northern California. It's Anderson Valley 
in Mendocino County. And it was incorrect to describe Boontling as a 
dialect, though this was the term Time magazine used. It's actually 
a private vocabulary, a jargon or cant.

FOREFRONT  In the last issue I wrote "at the forefront", a form that 
Warren Montgomery queried, since he felt it was correctly "in the 
forefront". It's worth mentioning as an example of a recent change 
in prepositional usage that has gone largely unnoticed. In works of 
the nineteenth century and before, the "at" version was rare. The 
Google Ngram viewer, based on an analysis of Google Books, suggests 
it has greatly risen in popularity since the 1960s and overtook the 
"in" form around 1995 (I've included the Ngram graph in the online 
version of this issue). Current newspaper databases suggest that the 
shift is much greater even than this, with the "at" form more than 
five times as common as the "in" one. The original idea was of being 
in the front ranks of an army rather than being at a specific place, 
and it's the loss of the specific military image and the conversion 
of the phrase into an idiom that has led to the shift.

SIC ITEM  Numerous readers commented on my inclusion of the second 
Sic! item last week, "Baby born after crash kills parents". The 
usual response was puzzlement, those readers only having read it as 
the intended "(baby born after) crash kills parents" and failing to 
spot the alternate reading "(baby born after crash) kills parents". 
I included it as an example of a type of syntactic ambiguity which 
linguists have taken to calling (perhaps all too appositely in this 
case) a crash blossom. The name was coined following a headline in 
the newspaper Japan Today in 2009, "Violinist linked to JAL crash 
blossoms". Three readers found its inclusion to be in bad taste. If 
I had had known more about the circumstances, I might well have 
avoided including it.


2. Swanning around
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Q. Reading about "peacocking" as a descriptor of promenading brought 
to mind the English "swanning around", which as an American I found 
highly amusing when I first heard it (we don't, or haven't, used 
it). How and why did the English pick up on swans, rather than 
peacocks, for this showy form of ambulatory display? [Dvora Yanow]

A. We Brits are thoroughly conversant with peacocks and find them to 
be an excellent analogy for ostentation. If we say that somebody is 
swanning around we may indeed be implying that they're doing it to 
impress, but the key idea we're trying to express is that they're 
being irresponsible or carefree, doing exactly as they like. Envy or 
disapproval often lies at the back of it - they're a useless drone, 
the thought goes, and wouldn't it be nice to be like that?

    But the main point of buying one of these things [bus 
    passes] is to get to school and back, not to swan about 
    the further reaches of the West Country.
    [The Bath Chronicle, 11 Oct. 2012]

    Where do they get their money from, I want to know? 
    Swanning about big cities with champagne lifestyles but 
    never struggling.
    [The Herald (Glasgow), 17 Nov. 2012.]

The early examples are from the end of the nineteenth century and 
simply refer to swimming like a swan. Since swans glide through the 
water without any apparent effort, seemingly aimless and laid-back, 
the idiom "swan about" came to mean ambling about without a care in 
the world or travelling idly or purely for pleasure. 

Curiously, the evidence suggests this was initially military slang 
of the Second World War. The Oxford English Dictionary has this 
rather opaque example, which I think refers to the German Field 
Marshal Erwin Rommel in North Africa, but can't get access to the 
original story to confirm it:

    Breaking up his armour [armoured vehicles] into 
    comparatively small groups of ... tanks, he began 
    "swanning about", feeling north, north-west and east for 
    them [ie, British tanks].
    [Daily Telegraph, 3 Sep. 1942.]

The idea of movement has become less significant as the idiom has 
wandered away from its avian roots:

    There are kayaks for hire (from $15), or if that's too 
    strenuous you can take a yoga class, swan about in a 
    hammock, strum a guitar or drip in the sauna.
    [New Zealand, by Charles Rawlings-Way, 2010.]


3. Landing
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Q. I recently heard on BBC Radio 2 that "landing" came from the days 
when people were transported in carriages and then carried up the 
stairs and deposited on the landing in the house. I have my doubts.
Could you help? [Nick Redmond]

A. You are wise to doubt this. Either the speaker had his tongue 
firmly - though necessarily figuratively - in his cheek or he was 
making a wild guess. 

This isn't to say it never happened. Sick or disabled individuals 
must have been carried up and down stairs but it could hardly have 
been commonplace. I suspect there's a confused memory here of ladies 
in previous centuries being carried from their carriages to the door 
to save their shoes and clothes from the mud and muck of the street.

"Landing" started out in the seventeenth century as the obvious word 
to use for a place where one alights from a boat - where one comes 
to land. It was applied for the first time to the action of bringing 
an aerial vehicle to ground when the Italian balloonist Vincenzo 
Lunardi made a famous ascent from the Honourable Artillery Company's 
Artillery Ground in London on 15 September 1784. He wrote that year 
in his Account of the First Aërial Voyage in England, "My principal 
care was to avoid a violent concussion at landing."

Coincidentally, or even perhaps not, the Oxford English Dictionary 
has its first example of the word in your sense in an architectural 
treatise published the year after. It's an extension of the same 
idea. Having ascended the stairs, the landing is where you "come to 
ground" and perhaps may rest before attempting the next flight.


5. Solutionism
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This word is in the news because Evgeny Morozov uses it in a deeply 
derogatory sense in his polemical book, To Save Everything, Click 
Here, which was published in Britain this week. 

By "solutionism", he means the mistaken belief that technology can 
benignly and efficiently solve all our problems and produce a world 
that is trouble-free. The temptation, he says, is to assume that a 
easy technological solution exists for all problems - from crime to 
corruption to pollution to obesity - which can be eliminated by 
digitally measuring, tracking and correcting our everyday behaviour. 
He argues that digital engineers, however expert in their fields, 
lack the skills to address issues with ethical, philosophical and 
human implications that derive from our natural states of being.

Two recent examples from discussions about the book:

    It's a book littered with -isms and -ists, pejoratives 
    and insults: "solutionism", "epochalism", 
    "Internetcentrists", "technoescapism", "technonaivety" 
    (they're all bad things). Everyone who disagrees with 
    Morozov is blind or stupid or corrupt.
    [Daily Telegraph, 9 Mar. 2013.]
    
    Morozov says people like Zuckerberg and Bell espouse 
    Silicon Valley philosophies that are pervasive but 
    shallow. Bell's desire to catalogue everything, for 
    example, is an example of "solutionism": the relentless 
    drive to fix and to optimise; to take problems - in this 
    case an imperfect biological memory - and propose 
    solutions.
    [New Scientist, 23 Feb. 2013.]

The term isn't new - its relative "solutionist" is recorded from 
1885 and came to mean a solver of crossword puzzles. "Solutionism" 
was used during the Troubles in Northern Ireland as a derogatory 
term for those people, also called "solutionists", who urged facile 
solutions which ignored the complex human problems of the Province. 
The earliest example of "solutionism" that I've so far found is in 
The Soldier and the State by Samuel P Huntington, published in 1957. 
Two years later Edward Hodnett commented in The Art of Working With 
People: "Beware of 'solutionism' - the flabby optimism that there is 
a simple answer and that it will yield to the magic of a 
personality, brainstorming, sitting down and talking things over, or 
other tribal nostrums." In the way Morozov uses it, it can be traced 
back at least to this:

    The rejection of politics among intellectuals often 
    takes the subtler form of what I call technocratic 
    solutionism. Experts who practice solutionism insist that 
    problems have technical solutions even if they are the 
    result of conflicts about ideas, values and interests.
    [Engines of Culture, by D M Fox, 1963.]

In the US, "solutionism" is a registered trademark of The Dow 
Chemical Company, which employs it in the baffling advertising 
slogan "Solutionism: the new optimism".


5. Sic!
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William C Popik submitted a headline from the Hartford Courant of 8 
March: "Middletown Man Hides Crack In His Buttocks". Don't be shy, 
we all have one ...

Evelyn DeLuna was intrigued to learn from a website about ulcerative 
colitis that "Yogurt was thought to be the reason for the extra long 
life-span of Bulgarian pheasants."

Leon Hides points us to a link in a search result on the Australian 
PhysioAdvisor website: "PhysioAdvisor provides a lower back pain 
diagnosis guide for patients suffering from back injury created by 
experienced physiotherapists."

On the Etsy website, Wilson Gray found the heading "Leonard Cohen 
Felt Finger Puppet". Not a news story but an item for sale.


6. Useful information
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Michael Quinion in the UK. ISSN 1470-1448. Copyediting and advice 
are provided by Julane Marx in the US and by Robert Waterhouse in 
Europe. Any residual errors are the fault of the author. The linked 
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