World Wide Words -- 05 Oct 13
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Oct 4 16:28:38 UTC 2013
--------------------------------------------------------------------
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 852 Saturday 5 October 2013
--------------------------------------------------------------------
This mailing also contains an HTML-formatted version.
A formatted version is also available online at
http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/elzy.htm
Contents
--------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Agnotology.
3. Snippets.
4. Old-fashioned look.
5. Sic!
5. Subscriptions and other information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
--------------------------------------------------------------------
ON A WILD HAIR I queried this expression last week and many readers
from the US readers explained it to me. Let Ryan Kelley stand in for
them all: "The young country singer Jake Owen most definitely did
not invent the term 'wild hair'. I am from the midwestern United
States - Ohio specifically - and the term has been in use for all of
my 32 years. It is a country term, no doubt. The most common use
I've found is in the phrase 'getting a wild hair up your ass'. It
does imply an urge to move because of discomfort - even to travel.
Sometimes, though, it also implies general annoyance or discomfort,
as in 'he got a wild hair up his ass and trashed the whole bar!' Not
the most proper of American sayings. It's definitely a common one
where I'm from, though, and one that most people would easily
understand."
Others surmised that it should be spelled "hare" rather than "hair",
on the model of mad March hares or the British "hare off" for going
away at speed. Several readers noted that they have encountered it
in that spelling and others suggested that there are actually two
versions, the "hare" one being much the more polite. The evidence
that I've now turned up, having been clued in by these comments, is
that the original is undoubtedly "hair". The confusion seems to be
similar to the one between "hairbrained" and "harebrained" - see my
piece at http://bit.ly/5Yk9Dff.
SMALL PERSON PROBLEM Paul Witheridge accidentally started a hare
running (sorry) when he retold a story about passwords last week,
whose punchline was "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves". "No, no!"
cried some thoughtful students of the vagaries of English spelling,
"It's 'dwarfs'". That's the traditional spelling, which Walt Disney
used in the title of his film in 1937, though correspondents
objected to "dwarves" on more general grounds. However, "dwarves"
has become quite widely used. My feeling is that if it was good
enough for J R R Tolkien, who are the rest of us to argue? ("Hobbits
are a little people, about half our height, and smaller than the
bearded Dwarves." - The Hobbit, 1937.)
NOT OF THE PEOPLE? Carolanne Reynolds followed up my snippet last
week about the use of "hoi polloi" by noting that many people don't
think it means the common people. She quoted Paul Brians, Emeritus
Professor of English at Washington State University: "it is often
misused to mean 'the upper class' (does 'hoi' make speakers think of
'high' or 'hoity-toity'?)."
WEIRD SPECIES NAMES Jim Delaney wrote, "An unusually-named species
of tree got a mention in the Daily Telegraph on the same day as your
latest newsletter arrived." It has the formal name Sorbus admonitor
(the second word is from the same source as "admonish") but it has
the common name No Parking Whitebeam. It's a new species, officially
identified in 2009. First found in the 1930s near Lynton in North
Devon, the original had a No Parking sign nailed to it.
2. Agnotology
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Agnotology is the study of culturally induced ignorance.
Agnotology refocuses questions about "how we know" to
include questions about what we do not know, and why
not.
[Londa Schiebinger, in the Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society, 1 Sep. 2005.]
Historians of science have tended to focus on the processes by which
scientific knowledge gets accepted. In recent decades, some scholars
have come to see that processes that impede or prevent acceptance
of scientific findings are also important. Such processes include
the very human desire to ignore unpleasant facts, media neglect of
topics, corporate or government secrecy, and misrepresentation for a
commercial or political end. They often generate controversy, much
of it ill-informed. Examples include the health implications of
tobacco and of genetically modified plants, the safety of nuclear
power, the environmental consequences of hydraulic fracturing
(fracking), and the existence or extent of man-made climate
change.
The word's earliest appearance seems to have been in a book of 1995,
The Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes What We Know and Don't Know
About Cancer. This was by Robert Proctor, a historian of science at
Stanford University in California. He coined it from the classical
Greek "agnosis", not knowing, plus the suffix "-(o)logy", a subject
of study, from Greek "logos", word or speech.
3. Snippets
--------------------------------------------------------------------
ATTACK OF THE VAPERS The growth of e-cigarettes, in which users
breathe in a vapour of water and nicotine, has popularised the slang
terms "vaper" for the person using the device and "vaping" for the
process, as well as the verb "vape". These have been known for
several years among the users of various drugs and seem to have been
created from "vaporiser". One reason for their becoming more popular
is that e-cigarette smokers are banding together, using "vaper" as a
self-identifying term, to campaign against proposed EU rules that
would ban most e-cigarettes currently on the market because their
nicotine levels are too high.
HALOODIE DOODY! Last week saw the inaugural Halal Food Festival in
London, which showcased varieties of cuisine from around the world,
from hot dogs to curries to fish and chips, that had been prepared
as prescribed by Muslim law. The festival's founder, Imran Kausar,
has coined "haloodie" as a descriptive term for foodies who follow a
halal diet.
YUCKY STUFF I've a job for somebody with the right qualifications:
become a disgustologist. Valerie Curtis, director of the Hygiene
Centre at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine,
describes herself by this word because she researches the scientific
background to aversion and repugnance. "Disgustologist" and
"disgustology" have appeared quite widely in the past couple of
weeks because her book Don't Look, Don't Touch: The Science Behind
Revulsion has just been published. This isn't the first appearance
of "disgustology" - the earliest example I've turned up is from The
Economics of Hate by Samuel Cameron (2009) in which he lists it
alongside other social science topics such as humiliation studies.
4. Old-fashioned look
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. Can you tell me any more about the origin and usage of the phrase
"an old-fashioned look"? From what little I can find online, people
seem to define it as merely disapproving. But I first encountered it
in Terry Pratchett's work; he seems to mean something more subtle
than that, less "I don't like what you're doing" but more scepticism
of someone else's naiveté or foolishness. Is Pratchett using the
phrase in a weird way? [Colleen Sullivan]
A. I don't think so. I agree there's more to this originally British
expression than just disapproval. This is one of several examples by
Terry Pratchett, in which it is certainly being used in the way you
describe:
He looked Carrot up and down. "Joining the watch, are
you?"
"I hope to prove worthy, yes," said Carrot.
The guard gave him what could loosely be called an
old-fashioned look. It was practically neolithic. "What
was it you done?" he said.
"I'm sorry?" said Carrot.
"You must of done something," said the guard.
"My father wrote a letter," said Carrot proudly. "I've
been volunteered."
"Bloody hellfire," said the guard.
[Guards! Guards!, by Terry Pratchett, 1989.]
The problem with subtle idioms is that their meaning is often hard
to tease out. I can remember being puzzled by it long ago, since so
few appearances are in contexts that make the sense obvious. My
sympathies are with a character in Celia Brayfield's recent novel
Mister Fabulous and Friends who complained, "I wasn't giving you an
old-fashioned look. I wouldn't know how to give an old-fashioned
look."
The idiom appears early in the twentieth century. This is the first
I've so far found:
"Would you have me give pain to our good Queen Osburga
by breaking the King's commands?"
"No," said Alfred, with a quick, old-fashioned look.
"We cannot do that, boys."
[The King's Sons, by George Manville Fenn, 1901.]
"Old-fashioned", as a way to describe a style from an earlier era,
hence antiquated, begins to appear in the written record in the late
sixteenth century. Almost immediately, it also begins to refer to
values, attitudes or tastes that belong to an earlier time.
Somehow, our current idiom grew out of this. It may derive from the
stereotypical attitudes of older people disapproving of modern ways:
"They didn't do that in my day." Early users, in a time of changing
attitudes at the end of the Victorian period, may have been looking
back at the supposedly prissy and moralistic views of the previous
century, so an old-fashioned look may have communicated similarly
old-fashioned views.
The giver of the look may indeed be gently exasperated about
foolishness or naiveté, as in this exchange about prison:
"It's not unusual, you know, stabbings and that.
Happens all the time. There's some pretty bad people in
there."
"Dealing drugs?"
She gave him an old-fashioned look. "No, dancing round
their handbags."
[Disturbia, by Christopher Fowler, 1997.]
But other emotions may lie behind it. In her story The Tiger's
Bride, Angela Carter wrote, "He offered me what my old nurse would
have called an 'old-fashioned look', ironic, sly, a smidgen of
disdain in it." In Where Did It All Go Right? of 2002, Al Alvarez
comments: "She gave me what she used to call an 'old-fashioned look'
- amused, sceptical, out of the corners of her eyes."
My impression is that "old-fashioned look" is itself becoming rather
old fashioned. Many recent examples are prefixed by "as my granny
used to say" or similar comments that put its popularity back a
generation or two.
5. Sic!
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Dead serious? "My local daily newspaper, the Borneo Post," Bernard
Long emailed, "is a never-ending source of unintended amusement. But
a headline on 27 September had me sputtering my breakfast tea across
the dining room table: "Decomposed Corpse Found in Cemetery".
Kevin Horne noted the opening sentence to an article on the New
Orleans Menu site dated 1 October: "Wolf Kohler's Crescent City
Brewhouse is not a German restaurant, but Wolf himself is."
A couple of malapropisms arrived at almost the same moment. One was
submitted by Leo Boivin from an obituary in the Washington Post on
27 September: "After retirement he researched, wrote and published a
family history which included interesting antidotes about various
ancestors." The other came via Neil Hesketh from the website of his
local TV station WAVY in Virginia: "That's the problem with rampant
use of heresy in these proceedings - there is no way to test the
evidence."
The Barbican in London sent Andrew Haynes an email on 30 September
which announced the Bicycle Film Festival 2013: "Highlights include
the ever-popular Urban Bike Shorts, featuring stories about amputee
brothers chasing their BMX dreams, three female couriers in London
and a postman in Afghanistan."
6. Useful information
--------------------------------------------------------------------
ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER: World Wide Words is written and published by
Michael Quinion in the UK. ISSN 1470-1448. Copyediting and advice
are provided by Julane Marx in the US and by Robert Waterhouse in
Europe. Any residual errors are the fault of the author. The linked
website is http://www.worldwidewords.org.
SUBSCRIPTIONS: The website provides all the tools you need to manage
your own subscription. Please don't contact me asking for changes
you can make yourself, though if problems occur you can e-mail me at
wordssubs at worldwidewords.org. To change your subscribed address,
leave the list or re-subscribe, go to http://wwwords.org?SUBS. This
newsletter is also available on RSS (http://wwwords.org?RSSFD) and
on Twitter (http://wwwords.org?TWTTR). Back issues are available via
http://wwwords.org?BKISS.
E-MAIL CONTACT ADDRESSES: Comments on newsletter mailings are always
welcome. They should be sent to wordseditor at worldwidewords.org. I do
try to respond, but pressures of time often prevent me from doing
so. Items for the Sic! section should go to sic at worldwidewords.org.
Questions intended to be answered in the Q and A section should be
sent to wordsquestions at worldwidewords.org, not to me directly.
SUPPORT WORLD WIDE WORDS: If you have enjoyed this newsletter and
would like to help defray its costs and those of the linked Web
site, please visit the support page via http://wwwords.org?SPPRT .
COPYRIGHT: World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2013. All
rights reserved. You may reproduce this newsletter in whole or part
in free newsletters, newsgroups or mailing lists or as educational
resources provided that you include the copyright notice above and
give the web address of http://www.worldwidewords.org. Reproduction
of items in printed publications or commercial websites requires
permission from the author beforehand.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/worldwidewords/attachments/20131004/ebd35363/attachment.htm>
More information about the WorldWideWords
mailing list