World Wide Words -- 30 Mar 2013
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Mar 29 15:45:19 UTC 2013
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WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 825 Saturday 30 March 2013
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Catchpole.
3. Predictive policing.
4. Fender.
5. Sic!
6. Subscriptions and other information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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ASYNARTESIA My squib about this and other obscure or invented Greek
and Latin derivatives, particularly in an extract from R A Lafferty,
provoked the detailed responses I was rather expecting.
Candida Frith-Macdonald defended him against my gentle criticism:
"Just read him aloud. There will always be enough in there to know
roughly what the more obscure words mean, and beyond that it's done
for fun, for the musicality of it, not for crossword puzzling. I
think he would have spent a good deal of his life listening to mass
in Latin, before the 1960s, and knew the magic of a tumbling stream
of beautiful syllables even when you couldn't make out, much less
understand, the individual words. For all his dryness and rigour in
some areas, I always think his language is that of a slightly tipsy
storyteller in full flight in the back room of the world's oddest
pub, including some words that aren't quite as they should be."
Terry Walsh noted about "asynartesia", the ostensible object of my
comments, "You are quite right about the metrical meaning and your
straightforward explanation is laudable. An analogy might be the
deliberate dissonance of the music of 20th century composers, such
as Stockhausen." He also provided explanations of several of the
words Lafferty used: "I am not sure that he means graffiti, in the
sense in which we use the word today. 'Ektyposis' suggests working
on pictures in relief; 'zographia' simply means drawing or painting
from life. As for 'oscenite', I suspect Lafferty has made it up; an
'oscen' in Latin is a bird that prophesies by its call, such as a
raven or an owl. However, any derivative would start 'oscin-'. On
the other hand, the word is supposed (wrongly, I think) to derive
from the root 'obscen-', which I will leave to your imagination. As
you do, I give up on 'motfi', presumably a typo for 'motifi', but
the word should be 'motivi', Italian for 'designs'."
Giles Watson commented on two others, "For Cicero, a 'schediasma'
was a literary caprice; the Greeks seem to have used the masculine
'schediasmos' to refer to offhand actions, speech and writing.
'Chromatisma' is the colour equivalent of a 'schediasma' so a
'chromatisma and schediasma' would be a daub and a scribbling."
Bessy Yannisi added, "Being Greek, I would humbly like to offer the
following clarification. 'Asynartesia' is an ancient and modern
Greek word, used in contemporary everyday speech, deriving from the
privative prefix 'a-' and the word 'synartisi' which means relation,
connection, cohesion (and a mathematical function). Therefore
'asynartesia' means 'incoherence'. Its plural form is 'asynartesies'
which translates as 'ramblings'. Also, 'chromatisma' is colouring
and 'schediasma' is a drawing, an outline, a design.
I suggested that Lafferty's "Ochsenscheiber" might be a misprint for
German "Ochsenschreiber". Several readers spotted that in the form
"Ochsenschreiben", it could be a literal translation of Greek
"boustrophedon" (http://wwwords.org?BSTN), but I didn't think this
was the intended sense. Andrew Wiese noted that the word exists in
German: "'Ochsenschreiber' is, like so many compound German words,
incredibly literal. It was at one time the title of an official who
recorded the sale of oxen, thus rendering transactions legally
binding."
DE-EXTINCTION Several readers pointed out that, strictly speaking,
it's not possible to de-extinct the California condor, since it is
not yet extinct, though despite a captive breeding programme it
remains endangered.
2. Catchpole
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We are most likely nowadays to encounter this as a family name. Like
Baker, Glover, Carter, Miller, Potter, Smith and many others, it was
originally taken from an occupation.
A thousand years ago, a catchpole was a tax gatherer. Unlike modern
tax collectors, a medieval tax gatherer worked on a contract system
called tax farming. He paid a lump sum to be authorised to collect
taxes from a given area or group of people; anything he collected
beyond this was profit. There were few constraints on how much he
actually collected or the methods he employed.
Later, the catchpole became an officer of the court, a subordinate
of the bailiff. He was mainly responsible for collecting debts and
his methods were scarcely an improvement on those of the tax
gatherer. A person he arrested for debt was commonly stripped of
everything that might be of value and imprisoned until he could pay
the debt. This continued into the nineteenth century:
In the city of London, in two contiguous thoroughfares
- the shabbiest, dingiest, poorest of their class - there
are two Houses of Poverty. To the first, entrance is
involuntary, and residence in it compulsory. You are
brought there by a catchpole, and kept there under lock
and key until your creditors are paid, or till you have
suffered the purgatory of an Insolvent Court remand. This
house is the Debtors' Prison of Whitecross Street.
[Gaslight and Daylight, by George Augustus Sala,
1859.]
You will appreciate that catchpoles were unpopular.
The origin of the name was obscure to people in the centuries before
etymology became the subject of scholarly study. A story grew up
that it was correctly "catchpoll", where "poll" is an old term for
the head. It has also been asserted that the catchpole seized people
around the neck with a device rather like a shepherd's crook. This
story has become wildly elaborated in some descriptions:
The 'catchpole' usually consisted of an eight foot
wooden pole with some sort of noose or barbed fork on one
end. Law enforcement officers (usually the Sheriff) would
place the noose around the neck of the criminal and use it
to lead them around and so forth.
[Wikipedia article on catchpole (accessed 27 Feb.
2013).]
No. A device rather like this and called a catch pole can be used to
restrain animals, but that wasn't the source of the name. Nor is the
origin the similar long hooked pole with which vaudeville and music-
hall managers dragged unsuccessful performers off the stage. That
was called "getting the hook".
But there's no puzzle about the origin. A catchpole is figuratively
a chicken-chaser. It's a mixture of Old English ("cace-", catch) and
medieval Latin ("pullus", a chick). The idea behind it was that
people who owed tax were as difficult to catch as farmyard fowls.
3. Predictive policing
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In the Steven Spielberg SF film Minority Report police use psychics
to predict when a crime is going to happen. Real police prefer
digital databases.
By entering detailed information about where, when and what types of
crimes have occurred, it is possible to forecast future crimes and
deploy officers accordingly. Predictive policing is now in use in a
number of US cities, including Los Angeles and - most recently -
Seattle, where a scheme went live in February. It is being applied
in other countries - West Midlands Police in the UK are trying out
the method; in South Africa, game wardens use the same tools to
identify likely poaching hotspots.
The technique behind it is well established. It's called predictive
analytics or predictive modelling; it uses mathematical algorithms
to mine data and spot links. The technique is already being widely
used by retailers. When Amazon, for example, suggests you might like
some book or film, the suggestion is based on an analysis of the
buying habits of customers who have bought similar items.
If computerised predictive policing catches on,
Ferguson expects a test case eventually to work its way up
to the US Supreme Court. In the meantime, he expects noisy
kickback from civil rights groups. "That a computer can
effectively curtail the Fourth Amendment rights of
individuals in certain areas would be particularly
troubling to the civil liberties lobby," he says.
[The Independent, 11 Jan. 2012.]
Predictive policing, on the other hand, might replace
such intuitive knowledge with a naive belief in the
comprehensive power of statistics. If only data about
reported crimes are used to predict future crimes and
guide police work, some types of crime might be left
unstudied - and thus unpursued.
[The Observer, 10 Mar. 2013.]
4. Fender
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Q. I've just read Josephine Tey's book The Expensive Halo, published
in 1931. She referred to a character being able to wear her diamond
fender to an evening affair. I can't find this term anywhere else -
a tiara? A necklace? What would it be? [Laurelyn Collins]
A. The word is poorly recorded in print and there are too many other
sorts of fender to make searching for examples easy, even though few
incorporate diamonds, apart from the occasional "blinged-out" Fender
Stratocaster. However, I've found my way to the origin.
The full quotation you mention is this:
Mother goes because the opera is the only place in
London nowadays where you can wear a diamond fender
without looking a fool.
We may deduce from this that a fender is jewellery of a rather old-
fashioned sort, albeit elegant or upper class. This next appearance
shows that you are right to suppose it is a kind of tiara, one of a
particularly grand and expansive nature:
"Eleanor always says that when she puts on the Mershire
diamonds she feels the respected shades of her ancestors-
in-law closing around her," said Esther, still smiling;
"and that with a diamond fender on her head and a diamond
poultice on her chest a woman can face anything."
[Her Ladyship's Conscience, by Ellen Thorneycroft
Fowler, 1913.]
The Oxford English Dictionary's entry for "fender", which fails us
utterly by not mentioning the jewellery sort, does include a
citation from the Temple Bar magazine of 1893. Some delving shows
that this came from the serialisation of a novel:
Presently she moved away with Lord Frederick in the
direction of Madeleine, who had installed herself at the
further end of the room among the fenders, as our latter-
day youth gracefully designates the tiaras of the
chaperones.
[Diana Tempest, by Mary Cholmondeley, 1893.]
We may presume that the youth of late Victorian times referred to
the tiaras as fenders because their wearers' function was to defend
their charges from unwanted male attention. We may guess that the
tiaras were substantial enough to be figurative battlements.
Since we are in an urban environment in the days before motor cars,
the most likely fender for the allusion would be the sort placed
around open fires to protect the room from cinders and to prevent
children from getting too close. This next extract confirms both the
allusion and the monumental nature of the tiaras:
"I will wear what Jack calls the family fender," said
Dodo. "Tiara, you know, so tall that you couldn't fall
into the fire if you put it on the hearthrug."
[Dodo Wonders, by E. F. Benson, 1921.]
What is odd about it is that no editor of any dictionary of slang of
the period has thought to include this sense of "fender", though it
was well enough known that authors expected readers of the period to
understand it.
5. Sic!
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Paul Boothroyd writes, "I'm not sure if this belongs here or not, as
there's nothing really wrong with it, but ... The Penguin biscuits
website has a note at the top saying: 'United Biscuits (UK) Limited
uses cookies on this website.' I wonder how many bites each cookie
has?"
Pete Sinclair found this on the BBC Scotland website on 25 March: "A
poisonous spider from India has been found inside a couple's fridge
in Fife. The exotic species, which is from the wolf spider family,
is not deadly but, if bitten, it would leave a bad sting."
The Wikipedia article about James Naismith, who invented basketball,
currently reads, "Naismith died in 1939 after he suffered a fatal
brain hemorrhage and was buried in Lawrence, Kansas." The Reverend
Carl Bowers wondered whether the cause of death was being buried
alive, or being buried in Lawrence?
A Daily Mail online article dated 25 March reported the sale of an
engagement ring that had been given by Napoleon to Josephine. Peter
Watts found this sentence in it: "Her first husband, Alexandre, had
been beheaded following the French Revolution and within a few years
had become Napoleon's mistress."
6. Useful information
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