World Wide Words -- 23 Nov 13
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Nov 22 17:24:48 UTC 2013
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WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 859 Saturday 23 November 2013
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This mailing also contains an HTML-formatted version.
A formatted version is also available online at
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Feghoot.
3. Wordface.
4. Honour and honorary.
5. Comprise redux.
6. Sic!
7. Useful information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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RILE AND NEEB Wendy Magnall wrote, "I concur with the likelihood of
'rile' and 'neeb' being fictitious postcard terms. Out of curiosity,
I searched a trio of postcard collecting glossaries and found no
listings for the terms. I did come across the quite practical term
'stamp box' for the latter, suggesting that 'neeb', at least, is
quite unnecessary." Rick Burdsall, a contributor to the Encyclopedia
of United States Stamps and Stamp Collecting, also made enquiries
and concluded, "as you suspected, the writer who suggested 'neeb'
may be pulling his readers' legs. Through supplying an outrageous
derivation for the word, it made it more likely that they would
accept that the word itself was valid."
MIGHT COULD BE WRONG Numerous readers leapt upon my last-minute
editing error: "That must be apocryphal, though it's certainly
possible that an early user might could described it that way." (If
you didn't see it, that's because it was only in the HTML and RSS
versions, not the plain-text one that had been carefully checked by
my copyeditors.) Several readers even submitted it as a possible
Sic! item. The biter bit, indeed.
2. Feghoot
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A feghoot is a brief story, usually in a science-fictional setting,
whose punchline is an elaborate pun.
The canonical feghoots feature the eponymous Ferdinand Feghoot, a
member of the Society for the Aesthetic Re-Arrangement of History.
Beginning in 1956, a Russian-born American author, Reginald Bretnor,
created more than eighty of them under the anagrammatic pseudonym of
Grendel Briarton.
They are collectively known as Through Time and Space with Ferdinand
Feghoot and always end with Feghoot solving some tricky problem by
way of some of the most atrocious puns ever committed to paper. The
late Anthony Boucher remarked:
A true Feghoot not only culminates in a pun of singular
beauty and terror; it is, even before that point, an
entertainingly absurd episode of a possible history.
[Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Apr.
1973.]
One concerned poaching of cock pheasants at Balmoral. Gillie John
Brown discovered they were being shot by the Lord Chief Justice of
Scotland, who would hide them in a hole in the wall before coming up
to the house to pay his respects to Queen Victoria. Clearly, it was
impossible to treat him as a common criminal and drag him to court
for poaching, so Feghoot suggested that he be charged instead with
male pheasants in orifice.
The stories appeared in several science-fiction magazines and are
famous in SF circles. They have been affectionately imitated by
other writers, including Spider Robinson. Many feghoot-like tall
tales were created by Frank Muir and Denis Norden in the BBC radio
programme My Word; my favourite punchline of theirs (I think it's
theirs) is "The squaw on the hippopotamus equals the sons of the
squaws on the other two hides."
3. Wordface
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WORDS OF THE YEAR First away from the starting gate this year is
Oxford Dictionaries, whose word of the year is "selfie". It defines
this as "a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one
taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media
website". Its editors noted that "selfie" can be traced back to an
appearance in an Australian online forum in 2002 (its sender was
identified by ABC News as Nathan Hope: http://ab.co/1bEAbYZ , who
remarked that it may have been the first example ever found but it
certainly wasn't the first one ever used, as it was common slang at
the time). It has become much more popular in 2013 because it has
evolved from a purely social media buzzword to a mainstream term.
The editors say that its popularity can be measured by the large
number of spin-off terms that have already been created. Some refer
to parts of the body, such as "helfie" (a picture of one's hair) and
"belfie" (of one's posterior). Others describe an activity, such as
"welfie" (a workout selfie) or "drelfie" (one taken while drunk).
"Shelfie" and "bookshelfie" indicate that your picture includes
furniture in the background, the latter being a neat way to showcase
your cultural pretensions.
DOCTOR WHO'S WORDS In British television, only one character is now
always referred to just as "The Doctor". BBC Television is pulling
out every stop to hymn the 50th anniversary of the first broadcast
of Dr Who in 1963. Lexicographically speaking, the series is not
especially productive, with only four words in the Oxford English
Dictionary: Tardis, Dalek and Cyberman, plus the first use of The
Matrix in the sense of cyberspace, from a Dr Who novelisation of
1976. We also have "Whovian" for a fan and "Whoniverse", a blend of
"Who" and "universe", for the broad fictional setting of the series,
including its offshoots. "Tardis" (an acronym, as any aficionado
will at once be able to tell you, of "Time And Relative Dimension In
Space") is the only one which has taken on meanings beyond Dr Who
itself, such as a structure which seems bigger on the inside than
the outside.
ORIGINS A study published this month of the origins of the folktale
Little Red Riding Hood introduced me to "phylomemetics". It's based
on "phylogenetics", a range of techniques that have been developed
to study evolutionary relationships among species. Folklorists are
starting to apply these techniques to their own work. In both words,
"phylo-" derives from Greek "phulon", a kind, race, or tribe, as in
"phylum", a principal category of living things. "Phylomemetics" is
first recorded in an academic paper of 2011, though the adjective
"phylomemetic" is about ten years older in a different context. Both
terms derive from "memetics", the study of memes - cultural ideas
passed from one person to another by imitation. "Phylomemetics"
encapsulates the idea that cultural constructs such as folktales and
languages are living entities classifiable in an evolutionary tree
just like plants and animals. The authors of the study suggest that
the Little Red Riding Hood tale is most likely a European creation
of two millennia ago that began as The Wolf and the Kids (in one
form of which a wolf tries to gobble up little pigs by persuading
them to open the door for him), with the Red Riding Hood version
splitting off from it about a thousand years later.
4. Honour and honorary
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Q. Why in British English is there no "u" in "honorary"? [Sir Peter
Bottomley]
A. American readers, accustomed to "honor", might instead ask why a
"u" appears in British "honour". And that's an equally interesting
question.
It might seem simply that "honour" and "honorary" are following a
spelling rule, on the pattern of "glamorous", "humorous", "rigorous"
and "vigorous", whose nouns all include a "u" in British English. At
various times, all these adjectives have been spelled with a "u" -
except "glamorous", which is much more recent than the others and
fell into step from its inception - but none has had a history as
complex as the "honour"/"honorary" pair.
Their story is a muddle. English imported them via the Anglo-Norman
"onour", itself a respelling of the older French forms "onor" and
"onur". The earliest Middle English spelling was "anour". The "h"
has never been sounded but was inserted early in its English history
by scholars who knew its Latin source was "honor", repute or esteem,
and felt that its English descendent ought to be spelled to match.
"Honour", "honourable" and "honorary" have been lumbered with that
unnecessary initial letter ever since.
Common forms in the 1500s, before standardisation of spelling, were
"honur", "honor" and "honour". Shakespeare used both "honor" and
"honour" but preferred "honor". "Honour" became usual in the
seventeenth century but the pendulum swung back in the eighteenth.
John Ash had it as "honor" in his New and Complete Dictionary of the
English Language in 1775, and commented that it was "a modern but
correct spelling, from the Latin." Less than two decades later, John
Wesley, the founder of Methodism, recommended instead that preachers
should "Avoid the fashionable impropriety of leaving out the u in
many words, as honor, vigor, &c. This is mere childish affectation."
His advice seems to have been prescient, since "honour" has been so
spelled in Britain pretty much ever since.
The story of "honorary" is of similar confusion. At its inception in
the seventeenth century it was spelled without a "u". There was a
period in the eighteenth century when the u-form became fashionable,
weirdly around the time that people were leaving it out of "honour".
In his Universal Etymological English Dictionary of 1733, Nathan
Bailey thought the u-less form the better spelling but recommended
"honourary" because it was then more usual. By the century's end,
the fashion had abated again and we've spelled "honorary" without
the "u" ever since.
The spelling reforms of Noah Webster in the US that led to the loss
of the "u" in "honour" in that country in effect returned that word
to a spelling that had been common in England for several centuries.
If only he had gone the whole hog and removed the "h" as well.
5. Comprise redux
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Following my piece about the usage of "comprise" two weeks ago ( see
http://bit.ly/1d57bQP ), several readers raised a subtle grammatical
issue. You may feel this is too arcane a topic for this newsletter,
but it explains why "comprised of" appeared and why it is gaining in
popularity.
The issue centres on my description of the "comprised of" version as
a passive construction. A couple of readers bluntly told me that to
call it that meant that I didn't understand the passive. I said it
was passive because almost all of the grammar and style guides that
I consulted, going back to H W Fowler's Modern English Usage nearly
a century ago, describe it as one.
Help came from an acknowledged expert. Geoffrey Pullum is professor
of general linguistics at the University of Edinburgh and co-author
of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. His first comment
was "It's an extraordinarily tricky topic!"
He said that "comprise" is a member of a class of verbs that take a
noun phrase as their object. With "comprise", this noun phrase is
the list of the parts that make up the whole, as in "The executive
committee comprises the heads of the three main divisions." A key
point is that "comprise" can't be followed by a prepositional phrase
beginning with "of". Many verbs can, including one with a related
sense, "consist". "The executive committee consists of the heads of
the three main divisions" is good English but you can't replace
"consists of" with "comprises of" in the standard language.
If you try to turn "comprise" into a passive, you run into trouble.
With the sentence I quoted earlier, you end up with "The heads of
the three main divisions are comprised by the committee", which
nobody says. The form "is comprised of" can't be a passive, because
there's nowhere for the "of" to come from. Though genuine passives
can contain "of", as in "Her dress was strongly disapproved of by
her parents", in those cases the "of" is also present in the active
form: "Her parents strongly disapproved of her dress."
Professor Pullum pointed out that a similar situation occurs with
"compose". You can write, "The heads of the three main divisions
compose the executive committee" but if you tried to make a passive
out of that you would get "The executive committee is composed by
the heads of the three main divisions." Nobody says that either.
But you can say "The executive committee is composed of the heads of
the three main divisions." What has happened, he concludes, is that
"composed" in sentences such as "Water is composed of hydrogen and
oxygen" has evolved into an adjective of a type that may be followed
by "of", in the way that "afraid" is used in sentences such as "Jack
is afraid of spiders."
In the version, "Water is comprised of hydrogen and oxygen", people
have unconsciously substituted the "comprise" root for the "compose"
one to make a new adjective, "comprised", which can also be followed
by "of". But while the usage with "compose" is standard English, the
one with "comprise" is still widely regarded as an error.
What we're seeing is English quietly evolving through analogy. Of
course, few people pay close attention to what they're saying, or
even notice, and as Professor Pullum says, it's not the easiest
construction to analyse anyway.
When you look at it in this way, it's hard to justify continuing to
object to "comprised of" other than through convention.
6. Sic!
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Another misplaced initial modifying clause: "After about two hours
of marching and attacking the Russian embassy, the Polish police
asked that the permit for the march be cancelled." This came from a
report of 14 November on the Al Jazeera site via Reg Brehaut.
And another of the same day, spotted by Maggie Westera in a caption
to a photograph in the Independent: "The Mausoleum at Castle Howard,
Malton, North Yorkshire which was ranked the second best place to
live in the UK."
All quiet on the prairie ... Duncan Morrow found this headline on
the website of the Hillsboro Star-Journal of Kansas, again on 14
November: "Buffalo heard growing at Tallgrass Prairie National
Preserve."
Words to live by ... Brian Redman submitted another headline, again
of the same date, from Science Daily: "Where someone drowns
determines their chance of survival."
In the December issue of Waterways World, Bruce Napier found this in
a review of a new style of wide-beam boat: "A good sized wardrobe
would provide space for guests to stay for a week or more."
7. Useful information
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