World Wide Words -- 23 Mar 13
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Mar 22 16:39:36 UTC 2013
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WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 824 Saturday 23 March 2013
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Nous.
3. De-extinction.
4. Elsewhere.
5. Asynartesia.
6. Sic!
7. Subscriptions and other information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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Thanks, as always, to everybody who wrote following the last issue.
Many more messages than usual came in and I've been able to reply
only to a few of them.
TAFFY My note in this section last time about a possible origin for
the Welshman sense of "Taffy" brought a cascade of comments from
readers who were certain that the nickname derives from the River
Taff, which flows through Cardiff. The explanation I gave, that it
was a modified form of the Welsh personal name "Dafydd", is the one
that appears in all the reference books that I've consulted. They
presumably know something the rest of us don't.
SWANNING Anne Umphrey wrote, "Your comment on 'swanning' led me to
think about the phrase, now out of common usage, but popular I think
in the rural eastern US in the 1800s or early 1900s. "I swan" was
used to mean I know or I believe. Is that correct, and if so what is
the origin of the word 'swan'?" The Dictionary of American Regional
English (DARE) has a detailed entry on it, which also appears in
other forms, including "I swain" and which continued to be used
beyond the early 1900s. DARE says that it derives from the Scots and
northern English dialect "I'se wan", a much-modified form of "I'll
warrant" or "I'll be bound". It could mean to swear to the truth of
something or more weakly to declare but it was also an exclamation
of surprise:
"There's a dead woman in the lake."
"Well, I swan."
[Trouble is my Business, by Raymond Chandler, 1934.]
LANDING Several readers pointed out that landing places in tidal
waters were usually built on several levels like steps to cope with
changing water levels. Landings would often also have steps up to
the quayside or ground level. These associations would have helped
give the name to a level area at the top of a staircase.
2. Nous /naUs/
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Do not fear that we have strayed into French. This is a good English
language word, though mainly of the British variety. To us Brits,
our nous is our common sense or practical intelligence. Though these
days it is principally a stalwart of the sports pages, it is also
found elsewhere:
A lengthy period of profound inaction by the
Republican-controlled House of Representatives and a
seeming lack of political nous in Obama's White House is
resulting in robotic government.
[Daily Mail, 2 Mar. 2013.]
Perhaps because of its wide popularity and the way that it's said
(as "nowse"), it feels like a native word, one that evokes hard-
headed practical north-country people. But it's actually classical
Greek, meaning mind, intelligence, or intuitive apprehension. One
ancient philosopher, Anaxagoras, held that nous was the universe's
controlling principle that brought all material things into being.
The English philosopher and theologian Ralph Cudworth argued in his
True Intellectual System of the Universe in 1678 that there was a
nous or intellect that was the architectural framer of the whole
world.
English adopted it in the general Greek sense, though it was taken
up by academic wits of Cudworth's time and the following decades as
a grandiose way to refer to the mind, pointing the joke by spelling
it in Greek letters. From there it expanded into general usage and
by the nineteenth century it had become an established and useful
part of everyday British vocabulary.
3. De-extinction
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This word has emerged, seemingly from nowhere, in the past couple of
weeks, led by the cover story in the April 2013 issue of National
Geographic magazine. Most of its appearances have been in news items
connected to a conference in Washington DC on 15 March on the
practical and ethical issues of reviving extinct species - to de-
extinct them.
A new organisation, Revive and Restore, formed by the
Long Now Foundation with the help of the National
Geographic Society and advised by a group of respected
scientists, has been created to examine the potential for
a new branch of zoology: de-extinction.
[The Times, 8 Mar. 2013.]
Genetic science is rapidly getting to the stage of being able to
regenerate animals and plants from preserved specimens. The
conference heard that a team led by Professor Mike Archer at the
University of New South Wales has created embryos of the extinct
Australian gastric brooding frog, which incubated offspring in its
stomach and gave birth through its mouth, though the embryos
survived only a short time. The extinct Pyrenean ibex was cloned in
2003 but the baby died shortly after birth. There are proposals to
bring back the Tasmanian tiger, the California condor, the American
passenger pigeon and the woolly mammoth. The subject divides the
scientific community. Some opponents consider de-extinction to be
valueless, while others feel it will divert attention and resources
from preserving living but endangered species.
The earliest scientific usage I've found is in a quite different
context, in a paper on cosmology published in 2008. As so often, a
SF/fantasy author got there first, in a story about a magician:
Again he hesitated - and was brought up short by the
coalescing vapor. Suddenly thirteen black cats faced him,
spitting viciously. Bink had never seen a pure cat before,
in the flesh. He regarded the cat as an extinct species.
He just stood there and stared at this abrupt de-
extinction, unable to formulate a durable opinion. If he
killed these animals, would he be re-extincting the
species?
[The Source of Magic, by Piers Anthony, 1979.]
4. Elsewhere
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A spokesman for the British government's Department for Communities
and Local Government issued a statement last Saturday: "Ministers'
view is that England's apostrophes should be cherished." Note the
careful placement of these endangered little marks. The statement
was provoked by reports that a Devon council is about to formally
decide not to include apostrophes on road signs. More on the story
here: http://wwwords.org?CCAC .
Goblinproofing One's Chicken Coop is the winner of the Diagram Prize
for the oddest book title of 2012, it was announced yesterday, 22
March. The custodian of the prize at The Bookseller, Horace Bent,
commented "The public have chosen a hugely important work regarding
the best way to protect one's fowl from the fairy realm's most
bothersome creatures." More: http://wwwords.org?BKDP.
5. Asynartesia
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Q. Do you know what "asynartesia" means, or if it is actually a
word? I ran across it in The Strange Case of Edward Gorey by
Alexander Theroux, in which he wrote about Gorey's "shadowy ...
world of attrition and asynartesia". [Elizabeth Sears]
A. It took merely a moment's search to determine that "asynartesia"
is a very rare word, though it is clear that it's of Greek origin.
One critic responded badly to Theroux's use of it:
If I sound cruel, it's because ultimately I can't
forgive any writer who can use the word asynartesia with a
straight face, as Theroux did in those doomful first ten
pages of his book. That's not taking joy in obscure words,
as Gorey often did. That's telling the reader that you've
got a bigger dictionary than he has.
[The Spook, Feb. 2002.]
Having a big dictionary doesn't help, alas. None that I consulted
included it, not even the multi-volume Oxford English Dictionary.
But a very few do have "asynartete" and its adjective "asynartetic",
of which "asynartesia" looks like a derivative. The Merriam-Webster
Unabridged Dictionary defines "asynartete" as "containing disparate
or unconnected rhythmic units" in two senses: "with unhomogeneous
rhythms in the two members distinguished by the caesura" and "with
diaeresis, hiatus, or syllaba anceps at the caesura so that a quasi
independence of the two members is effected." That deeply technical
definition isn't helpful unless you already know a bit about Latin
and Greek classical verse. The Collins Dictionary is usefully more
succinct: "having or containing two different types of metre". To
try to explain this more simply, I think "asynartetic" refers to a
line of verse in which a break occurs (the caesura), with the rhythm
of the verse on either side being different.
As one of the only two other appearances of "asynartesia" I have
found is in a work of AE Housman in which he is discussing the verse
of Bacchylides, a Greek poet of the fifth century BC, this seems to
be in the right area.
The third appearance is open to similar criticism of taking pleasure
from obscurity. It's in Thou Whited Wall, a story by R A Lafferty in
the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1976:
No good name had ever been found to describe the
excellence and many-leveled meaning of this testimony on
the walls. It had been called kakographia and syngramma
and scribble-schnibble. It had been called zographia and
ektyposis and ochsenscheiber. It had been called
chromatisma and schediasma and oscenite. It had been
called scherzi and motfi and asynartesia. The Italians
have called it graffita, and the name may have stuck.
I'm way outside my comfort zone with this fragment of sub-Joycean
exposition. It's obvious from the story that we are concerned with
the writing of gnomic and riddling messages on walls, confirmed by
the reference to graffiti. "Kakographia" is an old Greek precursor
of English "cacographia", bad writing or spelling; "syngramma" is
writing or prose; "zographia" might be related to "zoography", the
art of depicting animals (perhaps writing by animals); "ektyposis"
could be rendered as "ectopoesis", poetry of the street (one way of
describing writing on walls); "scherzi" is the plural of "scherzo",
the musical term, from the Italian for a jest; "ochsenscheiber"
looks as though it might be German, something done like an ox, so
crudely executed (spelled "Ochsenschreiber", it might be writing
done by an ox, though I can find the word in no German dictionary).
The rest I gave up trying to decipher.
The effort of deducing Mr Lafferty's meaning will attract those who
have superb vocabularies and the instincts of crossword-puzzle
solvers. The rest of us, I suspect, will be tempted to pass over
writing of this playful but self-consciously erudite complexity.
6. Sic!
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David Brown found a headline on ABC online in Australia on 16 March:
"Duck Hunting Protesters Urged To Respect Laws". The protesters were
not hunting ducks, quite the reverse, as they were members of the
Coalition Against Duck Shooting. Nor was a duck hunting them.
Robert Wake found a headline on CNN whose oddity seems to have been
missed by all the other news outlets that featured it on 14 March:
"Ship will fly passengers to Florida after troubled cruise".
An unfortunate juxtaposition in an article in The Independent on 15
March about keeping chickens amused Chas Blacker: "They do make a
bit of noise but I find the clucking quite soothing. The neighbours
have certainly never complained. Sometimes when I'm digging they
follow me around the garden and they will come and peck me on my
feet."
A headline over a story of on 19 March on the ABC website was sent
in by Brian Barratt: "Concussion treatment to bring football heads
together".
7. Useful information
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