World Wide Words -- 09 Nov 13
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Nov 8 16:26:01 UTC 2013
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WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 857 Saturday 9 November 2013
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Anti-fogmatic.
3. Snippets.
4. Comprise.
5. Sic!
6. Subscriptions and other information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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RECUMBENTIBUS I feared there might be something amiss when I wrote
in this piece last week, "It's the ablative plural of recumbere, to
recline or rest." I was right. Giles Watson was first to respond:
"You've missed a bit. Verbs don't have ablatives, although verbal
nouns and adjectives can. 'Recumbentibus' is in fact the ablative
plural of the present participle of the verb."
Rita Beyers commented, "I never heard of 'a recumbentibus', but like
it very much, especially because of the impossible combination of an
article and the ablative plural of the present participle of a verb.
That's the kind of wordplay one might expect from people who are
familiar with the word, so that they come to use it in a completely
different context." Other examples in English of the same ending are
the everyday "omnibus" (http://bit.ly/1bOYvIS) and the fake Latin
"circumbendibus" (http://bit.ly/1iElkBz). Rita Beyers doubts whether
the word was ever used in Latin for a blow: "I cannot think of any
comparable use in medieval Latin of such a form of a present
participle as a noun. It simply would not work in Latin."
There's often more to "recumbentibus" than merely reclining. It
appears in St Mark's gospel in the Vulgate, the Latin bible that was
compiled in the fourth century: "novissime recumbentibus illis
undecim apparuit". This is rendered in the King James Bible as
"Afterward he appeared unto the eleven as they sat at meat". More
recent versions translate "recumbentibus" in the words "as they sat
at table" or "as they were eating". Its sense here is explained by
Romans liking to recline on couches to eat their meals.
PROUSTIAN Tony Augarde wrote, "Some young people may not understand
the clever double entendre in your heading 'Marcel wave' for the
piece about Marcel Proust. It has an interesting but debatable
history: http://bit.ly/17z5Rna and http://bit.ly/1bMimZg." Notably,
all the messages about this were from readers who, rather than
querying it for themselves, similarly wondered whether other readers
would understand the reference.
HEY, RUBE! Ron Davis wrote, "In the quotation from the Cincinnati
Enquirer, the cited phrase is punctuated as 'Hey! Rube!', which
makes the two words into separate ejaculations. This may just show a
change of convention between then and now, but it could also mean
that 'Rube!' is not an invocation of the intended recipient(s) of
the message, but is rather a reference to the source of imminent
trouble, reflecting circus people's opinion of their customers."
Ryan Kelley commented, "Your discussion of 'rube' to mean a fight
led me to the term 'rhubarb', a somewhat antiquated Americanism
related to a fight during a baseball game." This seems to have begun
in New York in the early 1940s, originally as an loud argument, or
what Baseball Magazine in 1943 called "Brooklynese for a heated
verbal run-in, especially between players and umpires". I suspect
that it comes from the same source as the older muttering of the
word by extras or supporting actors to simulate the sound of a mob.
Paul Dickson also cites this origin in his baseball dictionary.
2. Anti-fogmatic
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Two centuries ago, some Americans believed that an anti-fogmatic, a
dose of spirituous liquor, would relieve the unhealthy effects of
damp and rain. A dram before breakfast was said to counteract the
figurative or literal fog of the early day, hence its name. It was
even supposedly recommended by physicians:
Its great utility in preserving the planters from the
effects of the damp and unwholsome air of the morning, has
given it the medical name of an Antifogmatick.
[The Massachusetts Spy, or the Worcester Gazette, 12
Nov. 1789.]
The writer of a letter in 1812 to the delightfully named New York
magazine, the Halcyon Luminary and Theological Repository, was
critical of any possible medical advantages:
Some of my neighbors were in the practice of taking a
morning dram, well known in the lower counties of
Virginia, by the term anti-fogmatic, but I perceived that
this did not charm away disease from their houses, though
its effect on their rationality was evidently
injurious.
Much similarly sarcastic writing was directed at its ingestion,
though a book of 1825 that claimed Bostonians habitually guarded
against the New England fogs by taking an anti-fogmatic of half a
pint of whisky before breakfast was spinning a tall tale. However, a
travelogue of 1810, which recorded some splendid contemporary names
for tipples, implied that an anti-fogmatic was a prescribed
aperitif:
Speaking of the Virginians, he gave us the following
specimen of their dram-drinking. A gum-tickler is a gill
of spirits, generally rum, taken fasting. A phlegm-cutter
is a double dose, just before breakfast. An antifogmatic
is a similar dram before dinner. A gall-breaker is about
half a pint of ardent spirits.
[Travels Through Lower Canada, and the United States of
North America, by John Lambert, 1810.]
Lambert noted that anybody who had progressed to gall-breakers was
regarded by his neighbours as a lost soul not expected to live
another six months. No surprise in that.
In the first edition of The American Language in 1919, H L Mencken
wrote that "anti-fogmatic" was by then extinct. Not utterly, though
I can count its written usages in the period since on the fingers of
one hand. Any appearance today is merely a mildly humorous hint of
an earlier age, though opaque to most people. This is a recent case,
the one that started me on this linguistic exploration:
Whatever time of day or night you arrive at Hawksmoor,
there's always a drink to sort you out. In the morning, it
might be an "anti-fogmatic" such as their Marmalade
Cocktail: gin, Campari, lemon juice, orange bitters and
marmalade.
[Observer, 20 Oct. 2013.]
3. Snippets
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APIAN INTRUDER Last week's issue of New Scientist featured a photo
of a cuckoo bee. The caption introduced me to "inquilinism", a word
that sent me, fruitlessly, to the Oxford English Dictionary, though
it does have "inquiline". More recently revised dictionaries such as
Collins say that "inquilinism" is living in close association with
another animal without harming it; it's from Latin "inquilinus", a
sojourner (http://bit.ly/sjrner) or lodger. Unfortunately for New
Scientist caption writers, the cuckoo bee, as its name suggests, is
actually a parasite. It lays its eggs in the brood cells of a host
bee; after its larvae have eaten the pollen provided by the host for
its own larvae they then eat the larvae. That would make it the
lodger from hell.
DUN DREARY Richard Dawkins, the famous evolutionary biologist and
professional atheist, tweeted on 3 November: "Bin Laden has won, in
airports of the world every day. I had a little jar of honey, now
thrown away by rule-bound dundridges." He tweeted in February that
"dundridge" was "a coining I am trying to introduce into English. It
means a petty, bossy, bureaucratic little rule-hound." We may feel
that we have in that sentence almost all the words that we need to
describe such types without Prof Dawkins adding to the language. He
wrote in his memoir An Appetite for Wonder this year that he based
the word on a character in Blott on the Landscape by Tom Sharpe. He
pleaded with readers to use it as he is trying to get it into the
OED, as he did with "meme", which he coined in The Selfish Gene in
1976. It may not catch on because it's in the name of a number of
places, including a hamlet in Hampshire, as well as being an English
surname. So far as I know, neither place nor person has ever been
named "jobsworth", so perhaps he could use that instead?
THE END IS NIGH? The ending "-pocalypse" from "apocalypse" has
become popular as a way to create neologisms that exaggeratedly
imply a situation is of terminal seriousness: "oilpocalypse" (the BP
oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico), "snowpocalypse" (severe winter
storms in the US), "beepocalypse" (destruction of bee colonies by
pesticides or disease), "Marmapocalypse" (a transient New Zealand
term for the absence of Marmite after its factory was damaged in the
Canterbury earthquake in 2011), "debt-pocalypse" (a consequence of
the financial crisis), and even "non-pocalypse". The most recent is
"airpocalypse" for the extensive damage to health being caused by
air pollution in Chinese cities. The word appeared first in January
this year as shorthand for a dense, yellow smog that cloaked Beijing
for several days and reappeared last month for a similar episode in
Harbin.
4. Comprise
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Q. I teach a grammar course at Bennington College, and one of my
hobby-horses is "comprise", which is misused more often than used
correctly. Would you weigh in on this issue? [John Gould]
A. I shall, with some trepidation, because its correct application
has become a shibboleth of good writing. Recently, arbiters have
become more tolerant of it, which may sadden some readers.
The first issue is word order. The standard view is that "comprise"
is used correctly if the writer precedes the verb with a group noun
(one that refers to a set or collection), and follows the verb with
a complete listing of the components of the set. Put simply, the
whole comprises its parts. That sounds terribly abstract and some
examples may help:
* A pack comprises 52 cards.
* The evaluation will comprise a process study, an
impact study and an economic study.
* Our fun-filled shows comprise comedy and music.
The experts say it's wrong to use it the other way round, to list
the parts first and then the whole, as in
* Governors, mayors and tribal leaders comprise the
task force.
* Fourteen categories comprise the field of
competition.
* Scissors, thread and sewing cards comprise the
kit.
These rules seem to have arisen only during the twentieth century.
Before then, grammarians made no mention of this second version as
wrong. It is ancient: as long ago as 1579, Thomas North translated a
sentence in Plutarch's Lives as "There were but one and thirty
cities comprised in the league." The rise in condemnation parallels
its rise in use; until the twentieth century it was more frequent in
technical prose. In the second edition of Fowler's Modern English
Usage in 1965, Sir Ernest Gowers objected strongly to it:
This lamentably common use of comprise as a synonym of
compose or constitute is a wanton and indefensible
weakening of our vocabulary.
However, disquiet over it has been dying back. Thirty years later,
in 1996, R W Burchfield commented in the third edition of Fowler:
"It cannot be denied that the sheer frequency of this construction
seems likely to take it out of the disputed area before long."
Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage goes so far as to say
"This active construction ... is flourishing and can be found in
quite a wide range of writing." Popular usage is returning this item
of English to the acceptable state it was in before writers such as
H W Fowler began to decry it a century ago.
By the way, if you use "comprise" in its accepted active role, what
follows must be a complete list of the parts that make up the whole.
If it doesn't, you should use a word such as "include", since that
signals that the list is of examples, not of the whole set.
The other disputed form is the passive construction "is comprised
of". Style writers take an even dimmer view of this than of the
other one. Bill Bryson wrote in his Dictionary of Troublesome Words
of 1984, "If you remember nothing else from this book, remember at
least that 'comprised of' is always wrong." Bryan Garner concurred
in his Modern American Usage of 2003, "This phrase is always wrong
and should be replaced by some other, more accurate phrase." I have
to confess to disliking it with an almost visceral emotion, in part
because I don't like the passive (I also object, though less
violently, to "is composed of"), but mainly because I was taught
decades ago that it was utterly wrong.
However, opposition is weakening here, too: the American Heritage
Guide to Contemporary Usage and Style notes that in 1996 63% of its
advisory panel approved of "is comprised of" against only 47% in
1965. It's easy to find examples in print; these are all from
newspapers of October 2013:
The new exhibition at the Wallace Collection is
comprised of nothing but drawings of naked men (Daily
Telegraph);
The Kenya Lake System is comprised of three inter-
linked shallow lakes (The Australian);
Home prices changes for the national index, which is
comprised of 20 cities, peaked in April (Chicago Tribune);
This passive construction has been in use for nearly two centuries.
(The earliest I've so far found is in The Jamaica Planter's Guide of
1823 by Thomas Roughley: "The great gang is comprised of the most
powerful field-negroes.") The complaints against it may be thought
illogical, because the passive construction puts the whole before
its parts in the way that's approved for the active form.
However, having noted that the times they are a-changing, I have to
say that it would be wise for a serious writer who values their
reputation to be careful of the "is comprised of" form. It will
still attract criticism.
5. Sic!
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We really ought not to mock poor English in foreign signs, but they
are often too good not to. Gordon Caruana-Dingli photographed this
one at Seville airport: "Drinking water only in lavatory".
Hazel Flynn wrote, "Lou Reed's life was well chronicled, but after
he died the Sydney Morning Herald had a scoop on his little-known
Australian years: 'As a young Canberra punk, Lou Reed had an
enormous impact on Rhys Muldoon.'"
A headline on the website of the Boston Globe over a story dated 1
November was spotted by Dave Kearns: "Royal Bank of Scotland to sell
off Citizens".
"If only it were that easy" was the subject line of Ellen Sheffer's
email about a notice on Facebook: "Find out how Women for Women
International helps women rebuild their lives after war and conflict
by signing up for email alerts."
Paul K Davis found this caption to a video clip dated 31 October on
townhall.com about Cory Booker becoming a US senator and resigning
as mayor of Newark: "The Newark City Council is scheduled to hold an
emergency meeting to decide his predecessor."
Heidi Brubaker found an item listed for sale on Amazon, a plastic
flavour injector. That explains a lot.
6. Subscriptions and other information
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