World Wide Words -- 25 May 2013

Thu May 23 22:02:00 UTC 2013

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WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 833            Saturday 25 May 2013
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Hedonometer.
3. Adoxography.
4. The wrong end of the stick.
5. Sic!
6. Subscriptions and other information.

1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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SPILL THE BEANS  Several readers pointed out the slang usage of the 
word "bean" to refer to money. This was known in Britain from the 
early nineteenth century but was long preceded by phrases that took 
a bean to be something of very little value: "not worth a bean" is 
recorded from the end of the thirteenth century and "hill of beans" 
from the US around 1860. 

Since the earliest examples of "spill the beans" refers to a horse 
upsetting expectations by doing well, it's plausible to suggest that 
the expression referred to people losing their cash by betting on 
what seemed to be the more likely runners. But it would be good to 
find some examples before about 1900 of the US use of "bean" to 
specifically mean money. 

Readers who mentioned "bean-counter" can't use that as an example, 
as it dates only from the early 1940s, though literal bean counters 
are on record from a couple of decades previously for the person who 
had the job of counting the beans in one of those "guess the number 
of beans in the jar" competition.

Cevdet Suner wrote, "We have a saying in Turkish which translates as 
'beans don't get wet in his mouth', which is supposed to mean that 
he cannot keep his mouth shut and will spill the beans, unable to 
keep a secret as a result."

2. Hedonometer
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"Hedonistic", pleasure-seeking, and "hedonic", pleasurable (both 
from Greek "hedone", pleasure), suggest that a hedonometer must be a 
device to measure happiness. It sounds futuristic but the future has 
now arrived, to judge from recent news stories containing the word. 
There's now a website for that. 

Researchers have developed a global happiness sensor and launched 
www.hedonometer.org to display the results so we can all follow our 
communal progress towards paradise or the slough of despond. The 
latter is more likely, as the index has been sliding gently 
downwards since 2009.

The technique is linguistic and statistical. The researchers give 
numerical weights to significant words, assessing them according to 
their degree of pleasurableness - "disaster" has a low score, while 
"Christmas" has a much higher one. These weights are then applied to 
a large body of online texts, principally from Twitter posts, and 
the index is updated every day.

"Hedonometer" isn't new. It's usually said to have been coined - in 
a slightly different spelling - by the economist and statistician 
Francis Edgeworth. It appeared in his book, Mathematical Psychics: 
An Essay on the Application of Mathematics to the Moral Sciences, 
published in 1881. He developed the idea of a hedonical calculus:

    To precise* the ideas, let there be granted to the 
    science of pleasure what is granted to the science of 
    energy; to imagine an ideally perfect instrument, a 
    psychophysical machine, continually registering the height 
    of pleasure experienced by an individual, exactly 
    according to the verdict of consciousness, or rather 
    diverging therefrom according to a law of errors. From 
    moment to moment the hedonimeter varies; the delicate 
    index now flickering with the flutter of the passions, now 
    steadied by intellectual activity, now sunk whole hours in 
    the neighbourhood of zero, or momentarily springing up 
    towards infinity.
    [* This is the verb, to make definite, now rare.]

However, we must grant the honour of invention to Samuel Taylor 
Coleridge, who wrote to his friend Thomas Allsop sometime in 1821: 
"A pleasure which, believe me, stands a good many degrees above 
moderate in the cordi [heart] or hedonometer".

"Hedonometer" has several relatives, including "hedonology", the 
study of pleasure and happiness (created in the late 1800s but 
recently given new life), and "hedonomics", the study of the ways 
that consumers maximise their happiness in making economic choices. 
It was redefined in Ergonomics in Design in 2005 as the "branch of 
science and design devoted to the promotion of pleasurable human-
technology interaction." Everybody who has done battle with 
obstinate computers or obstreperous washing machines will want some 
of that.

3. Adoxography 
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Few dictionaries, not even the Oxford English Dictionary, give room 
to this word, so it is left mostly to non-lexicographers to define 
it, which they often do in terms such as "good writing on a trivial 
or base subject". Near, but not quite right.

It's a modern word to describe an ancient way to train young people 
in the art of rhetoric. They would be challenged to compose a speech 
praising an unpleasant idea such as poverty, ugliness, drunkenness 
or stupidity. A better definition is "rhetorical praise of things of 
doubtful value". Anthony Munday published a book on the method in 
1593, a translation of an Italian work, under the title The Defence 
of Contraries. It contained brief disquisitional examples on topics 
such as "ignorance is better than knowledge" and "it is better to be 
poor than rich". Its preface claimed that it would be particularly 
useful to lawyers.

The root is Latin "adoxus", paradoxical or absurd, but not from the 
classical language. It was first used by the Dutch scholar Erasmus 
around 1556, who took it from an identical ancient Greek word that 
meant inglorious. It was based on the root "doxa", glory, which is 
also the basis of "doxology", a formula of praise to God, and also 
of "paradox".

The noun was first used in 1909 in The Conflict of Religions in the 
Early Roman Empire by Terrot Glover, though it was preceded by the 
adjective, "adoxographical", which appeared in the American Journal 
of Philology in 1903. Dr Alex Leeper, the Warden of Trinity College, 
Melbourne, commented in Notes and Queries that year that it was an 
"ungainly word" and that it "will not, it is to be hoped, take root 
in the language." His hope wasn't fulfilled, though it remains rare. 

4. The wrong end of the stick
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Q. An article in the Irish Times recently gave examples of words and 
phrases associated with the printing trade that have found their way 
into everyday English language usage. I'm unsure about the writer's 
explanation of "getting the wrong end of the stick" as being linked 
to printing. Do you agree with it? [John Jefferies]

A. There are actually two idioms here. If somebody today gets the 
wrong end of the stick, he or she has misunderstood the facts in a 
case or misunderstood some story. An older version - not so much 
heard now, I think, and often with "have" instead of "get" - means 
to have the worst of a bargain or an argument. A related idiom with 
the second meaning is "get the short end of the stick". 

The writer based his suggestion for the origin of "getting the wrong 
end of the stick" on the ancient sense of "stick" - an abbreviation 
of "composing-stick" - for the hand-held device a typesetter used 
for composing text from individual letters. This story has often 
been retold, with the explanation that if a compositor set type in 
the stick incorrectly he got the "wrong end of the stick". It is 
certainly incorrect, not least because you had to be an extremely 
incompetent typesetter to hold the composing stick wrongly.

Other suggestions have been made. A common one is that it referred 
to a walking stick. The bottom end would often become coated with 
mud and other detritus so that to get hold of the stick by the wrong 
end would be a messy error. A ruder version, "getting the shit end 
of the stick", makes the point more forcefully, as does "Which of us 
had hold of the crappy ... end of the stick?", which appeared in The 
Swell's Night Guide in the 1840s. Some writers have sought a 
classical justification by pointing to the Roman lavatory practice 
of cleaning their backsides with a stridulum, a sponge on a stick; 
picking up the wrong end of a stick already used by somebody else 
would undoubtedly be unpleasant.

The pioneering philologist Walter Skeat suggested in 1895 that the 
source was a master beating his servant: 

    The right end of the stick was that held in the 
    master's hand, whilst the other was the wrong end, or (as 
    our American cousins would say) the "business end". The 
    servant would naturally "get hold of the wrong end of the 
    stick," but it would not much avail him, it would soon be 
    wrested from him, and the result would be more stick.

This suggestion is supported by the oldest example of the idiom that 
I've unearthed so far, though as the writer clearly expects readers 
to know the idiom, it must have been well established by then:

    This florid opinion, directly contrary to matter of 
    fact, is the wrong end of the stick - the argumentum 
    baculinum, which you unfortunately got hold of.
    [The Morning Post (London), 29 Jul. 1820. The Latin tag 
    "argumentum baculinum" literally means "the argument of 
    the cudgel", in other words an appeal to force.]

Further support comes from a widely recorded older version, "to have 
the worst end of the staff":

    God sent the spirit of division between them, so that 
    the Sichemites began to despise him, and rebell against 
    him, but they had the worst end of the staffe, and were 
    overcome by him: who pursuing the victory, tooke their 
    city by force, and put them all to the edge of the 
    sword.
    [The Theatre of Gods Judgements, by Thomas Beard and 
    Thomas Taylor, 1643.]

Neither of these examples is conclusive, but it certainly suggests 
that somebody getting the wrong end of the stick is figuratively on 
the losing end of an argument that has turned physical. They may 
also explain "short end of the stick" - the idea may be that the 
wielder of the stick is holding the long end and the victim the 
short one. 

The modern British idiom "to give somebody (some) stick", to 
threaten a person or criticise them severely, contains the same idea 
of physical assault but may be an independent invention.

5. Sic!
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My energy supplier sent me a booklet of advice this week from an 
official body called Consumer Focus. It included this tautological 
gem: "Annual statement - if you have been with your supplier for 
more than 12 months, it is required to send you an annual statement 
once a year."

Professor Stacy Clanton commented "I think the mission failed" about 
a report he submitted from Southern Arkansas University's website: 
"The group started a Campus Action Day, which included students in 
the class using the Reynolds plaza and SAU mall area to inform the 
campus community about ONE's mission of ending world poverty on 
April 15, 2013."

6. Useful information
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