World Wide Words -- 04 May 13
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Thu May 2 22:02:00 UTC 2013
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WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 830 Saturday 4 May 2013
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Hoyden.
3. Theranostics.
4. Piggy bank.
5. Sic!
6. Subscriptions and other information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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CAREER VERSUS CAREEN David Coe asked if there might be a lexical
link between these words and "carom". This is connected with games
such as billiards (British readers will know the shot as a cannon).
It is from "carambole", which derives from the Spanish "carambola".
"Carambole" was assumed by English speakers to be "carom ball" and
shortened. So the words have independent ancestry.
Malcolm Kronby noted that in the song I'm Still Here, from Follies
by Stephen Sondheim, the line appears, "Then you career from career
to career." Martin Turner remembers a story told by the British
comedian Tommy Cooper: "I was driving along, and my boss rang up,
and he said 'You've been promoted.' And I swerved. And then he rang
up a second time and said 'You've been promoted again.' And I
swerved again. He rang up a third time and said 'You're managing
director.' And I went into a tree. And a policeman came up and said
'What happened to you?' And I said 'I careered off the road.'"
UMPTY-FLUMPH This appeared in a piece last week. I was sure it was
a slang term from my youth for an indefinite large number, a term
that my wife remembers as "umpity-flumph". Readers queried it, so I
looked it up. It wasn't in any of the reference works I consulted
but "umpty-flump" does appear online a number of times in the sense
I used, so my memory wasn't at fault. Both forms must surely be
variations on the fairly common US "umpty-umph" or "umpty-ump",
which date back rather more than a century and which developed
around the time of the First World War into "umpteen". "Umpty" has
also for many years appeared in words such as "umpty-eleven" or
"umpty-thousand".
The OED says that "umpty" is a "fanciful representation of the dash
in Morse code", basing this on "iddy-umpty", a military term of the
early twentieth century for a dot followed by a dash. However, I've
found examples from much earlier in which it was a nonsense syllable
in poetry, for example as "umpty-tumpty-tiddle-dee". The phrase "the
class of umpty-five" appeared in an American magazine in July 1882
and "three hundred and umpty-five Fifth Avenue" in Life magazine in
October 1884. These suggest that we should be very cautious about
uncritically accepting the Morse code origin, since the second part
of "iddy-umpty" may have been based on one or other of these older
usages. There might be a link with Humpty-Dumpty, sometimes written
'Umpty-Dumpty at the time to represent uneducated speech.
One reader mentioned the British children's TV series of the 1970s
called The Flumps. My term isn't obviously linked with it. However,
one episode featured an Umpty Flump (a knowing pun, I'm sure) who
was umpty in a different sense, that of feeling unwell. This began
as British Second World War slang; my wife and I still use "umpty"
to mean having a mild malaise such as an upset stomach.
2. Hoyden
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This year is the 200th anniversary of the publication of Pride and
Prejudice by Jane Austen. Commenting on it, P D James wrote of Lydia
Bennet that "Seen through the eyes of her sister, Elizabeth, she
appears to be a vulgar, lusty hoyden."
Though it's still to be found, "hoyden" is a word that feels better
suited to Austen's time than the modern world. These days, we do not
regard boisterous or tomboyish girls as a disgrace to their sex,
though if we are forced into close association we may wish for a
quieter life. Jane Austen would have been much less kind, because
for her "hoyden" had a stronger sense of being ill-bred and rude.
She doesn't call the frivolous and headstrong Lydia a hoyden - she
never uses the word in any of her writings - but she does say that
Lydia has "high animal spirits", which closely matches the modern
sense.
"Hoyden" is a curiosity because it once referred to men. We may now
look indulgently on hoydenish young women but male hoydens were
considered to be rude, ignorant, awkward or boorish. In 1593, Thomas
Nashe (on record as its first user) wrote of the hoydens of Trinity
Hall at the University of Cambridge. Its members were exclusively
male at the time, as they continued to be until 1977, when the
college admitted its first female undergraduates. Why "hoyden"
should have shifted to describe women instead of men is unclear,
though boorishness and awkwardness are hardly male preserves.
The other oddity is that "hoyden" is a close relative of "heathen".
This is a much older term, whose roots lie in very early Germanic
dialects and is related to "heath". Heathens were literally heath-
dwellers, inhabitants of open country, uncivilised and in particular
unacquainted with Christianity. "Hoyden" is thought to have come
into English from Dutch "heiden", the Dutch equivalent of "heathen"
from the same ancient Germanic source.
3. Theranostics
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"Theranostics" is widely known within the pharmaceutical field but
is almost unknown outside it. A report in 2000 said that the drugs
firm PharmaNetics had invented it as a blend of "therapeutics" and
"diagnostics".
Its original sense was of a two-stage drugs package - a diagnostic
test that identified patients who were most likely to be helped by a
new medication, and a targeted drug therapy based on the test
results. The aim was to create treatments, using genetic and other
methods, which were tailored to individual patients, an area of
research called personalised medicine.
With the development in the past decade of specialist techniques at
the molecular level, "theranostics" has also come to refer to a
medication that would simultaneously diagnose and treat a disease
and even provide feedback about how effective it has been in each
individual patient. This is still in its early stages - a researcher
predicted in New Scientist in April that "theranostics will enter
clinical trials within the decade."
Other terms within the research world for it are "tailored therapy",
"companion diagnostics" and "translational medicine".
Scientists had been excited about "theranostics," where
implanted devices would both diagnose and treat illnesses
in people automatically, giving insulin for diabetes, for
example.
[New York Times, 30 Nov. 2012.]
Theranostics is referred to as a treatment strategy
that combines therapeutics with diagnostics, aiming to
monitor the response to treatment and increase drug
efficacy and safety, which would be a key part of
personalized medicine and require considerable advances in
predictive medicine.
[Biotech Week, 26 Sep, 2012.]
4. Piggy Bank
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Q. Many web pages claim that "piggy bank" derives from "pygg", said
to be a kind of clay. They say that in the 18th century "pygg bank"
became "pig bank" and later "piggy bank". The Merriam-Webster
Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary, on the other hand,
suggest that "piggy bank" comes from "piggy", and the earliest cites
are 20th century. None of them give a really clear and definitive
answer. So I figured I'd ask you. Any thoughts? [Jed Hartman]
A. There's a great deal of nonsense written about the origin of
"piggy bank". As a typical example, this is from a book that came
out just as I was looking into the matter:
The name originated from the word "pygg", which
referred to an orange clay used to form all sorts of
pottery items, including jars to hold loose change, which
were named after the material itself. In the eighteenth
century a clever potter decided to make a pig-shaped "pygg
bank" as a novelty item and that soon became the piggy
bank of today.
[No 1 Mum, by Alison Maloney, 2013.]
As you say, other websites and publications have stories very like
this. Particularly marked are the repeated references to that orange
clay. They all appear traceable back to one of those "Life in 1500"
spoof e-mails that circulated so widely in the 1990s and which new
online generations periodically rediscover. These seem in turn to
have been based on Charles Panati's book of 1989, The Extraordinary
Origins of Everyday Things, which has no reference for the story. In
turn he may have got it from How Did It Begin? by Dr Rudolph Brasch,
published in 1965, who likewise gives no source. Too many people who
have encountered the story have taken it at face value.
The story is false in every particular. There is no record of a clay
called "pygg", whether orange or any other colour. The term "pygg
bank" is not on record and "piggy bank" is only a century old.
Devices similar in function to modern piggy banks are ancient - the
Greeks and Romans had them. The Victoria & Albert Museum in London
has examples dating from the sixteenth century. Historically, they
were called money boxes, though modern collectors and curators often
prefer to identify them as the more generic "coin banks". Most were
quickly thrown on a potter's wheel, sealed at the top and with a
slot cut in the side to insert coins. As an encouragement to save,
the only way to get the money out was to break them, a good reason
not to make them of expensive materials. That's also why so few have
survived. Many of the V&A's examples are beautifully made and look
too good to smash; these were presumably intended as decorative
presents rather than practical savings boxes (modern ones get around
the problem by providing a stopper or plug that avoids having to
smash the container). However, there seems to be no significant
British tradition of making them in the shape of pigs.
The story may be based on a misunderstanding. In Scotland and the
north of England, "pig" - occasionally "pygg", though that's just a
variant or dialectal spelling of "pig" - was used from about 1450 as
a general term for earthenware products, including pots, pitchers,
jars and crockery. The references to the colour orange in the story
presumably derive from a common colour of unglazed earthenware.
The experts are unsure where this sense of "pig" came from. It might
have been from "piggin", a wooden pail (though that could sometimes
mean an earthenware pitcher), or be related to "prig", a dialect
term for a small pitcher; it might conceivably at some point in its
history have been influenced by the animal sense of "pig", because a
few items, such as ceramic hot-water bottles, are smoothly rounded
like a pig's body and have indeed been called pigs.
Scots named their coin banks "pirly pigs", probably from the older
Scots "pyrl", to thrust or poke, suggesting the action of inserting
a coin. The "pig" refers not to their shape but to the class of
earthenware items to which they belonged.
We see the modern name evolving in American publications at the very
end of the nineteenth century. The first form was "pig bank":
The latest novelty - The Pig Bank. You have to kill the
pig to get the money - 25c each.
[The Oregonian (Portland, Oregon), 10 Nov. 1900. Thanks
to Barry Popik for finding this.]
May we presume from this that there was little or no earlier history
of pig-shaped money boxes in the US? It seems so, from what little
information on nineteenth-century ceramics I've been able to gather.
Might the name have been suggested by the old Scots term? Probably
not. More likely it came about through German immigrant influence,
since money boxes in the shape of pigs are known much earlier from
that country and from elsewhere in continental Europe. It's claimed
that the shape was suggested through an old idea that the pig was a
symbol of fertility and frugality. (Ancient Javanese ones exist,
too, but knowledge of these is less likely to have travelled to the
US.)
Within a decade or so, the term had matured into the modern form:
She could see everything quite plainly now; her little
room with the pink roses climbing up the wall, her box of
toys, - "Teddy was up-side-down, poor Teddy," - her desk
with the piggy bank on top of it.
[Dietetic and Hygienic Gazette, Feb. 1913.]
These days piggy banks come in a bewildering range of shapes and
styles and a direct connection with pigs is much less clear.
5. Sic!
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Rob Crompton told us that a link on the National Secular Society's
site on 27 April read: "Don't expect change under Pope Frances."
That would be change enough by itself.
Rhéal Nadeau commented that journalists really ought to watch their
metaphors when reporting on hospitals. This followed a headline on
the Canadian Metronews site on 26 April: "Ottawa hospital nursing
layoffs open old wounds, dispute over whether cuts are new."
Where else? The Daily Mail site, Roy Lomas discovered, captioned a
photo on 25 April: "Sun shades: Robert Downey Jr. and Susan Downey
wore dark glasses on their eyes."
6. Useful information
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