World Wide Words -- 19 Oct 13

[Michael Quinion]

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WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 854         Saturday 19 October 2013
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       This mailing also contains an HTML-formatted version.
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Eximious.
3. Snippets.
4. Brown as a berry.
5. Sic!
6. Subscriptions and other information.


1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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PREANTEPENULTIMATE  Last week, I mentioned "suprapreantepenultimate" 
as a very rare word that meant "fifth from last". Gary Mason found 
an alternative in Wikidictionary: "propreantepenultimate". This is 
just as rare: its only appearance that my investigations have turned 
up is in a book of 1825, A General Critical Grammar of the Inglish 
Language on a System Novel and Extensive, by Samuel Oliver (that's 
not an error but the way he spelled "English"):

    In its minute divisions, accent is ultimate, 
    penultimate, antepenultimate, preantepenultimate, 
    propreantepenultimate.

SOFTLY, SOFTLY, CATCHEE MONKEY  Mike Cahill more closely identified 
the African source of this idiom: "In the Koma people of northern 
Ghana, with whom we worked for some years, there's a proverb that 
translates literally as 'small-small catches the monkey's tail'. 
Other languages in northern Ghana have it as well. It was explained 
to me as follows: if there's a monkey in a tree, and his tail is 
hanging down, you have to move very slowly ('small-small' here has 
that meaning) to catch him. In other words, patience and bit by bit 
will accomplish your goal."

TURKEY TALK  The most frequent comment following the last issue came 
from readers who live north of the 49th parallel. May I reassure 
them that I did know there are two Thanksgivings in North America 
and that the Canadian one is earlier than the American? That was why 
I specified the date, to remove any possibility of ambiguity. It 
didn't work.


2. Eximious   /eg'zimI at s/
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One of the first pieces that I wrote for World Wide Words, nearly 20 
years ago, was on inkhorn terms (see http://bit.ly/19NxH9D). They 
are bookish words of the sixteenth century, generated from classical 
Latin or Greek precursors for the most part, invented to fill what 
seemed to their creators to be gaps in the language. 

Some achieved a permanent place in our vocabularies, but most 
disappeared again through being thought unnecessary or pretentious, 
such as "adnichilate" (destitute), "exolete" (obsolete), "oblatrant" 
(reviling), "pervicacy" (obstinacy) and "trutinate" (estimate). A 
small number survived but never quite fitted in, remaining on the 
margins as the province of wordsmiths with a taste for the exotic or 
obscure. "Eximious" is one such. It refers to something excellent 
and derives from the Latin adjective "eximius", choice or select, a 
relative of the verb "eximere", to take out or remove. Relatives in 
English include "example" and "exempt". 

"Eximious" appeared first in The Breviary of Health, a book of 1547 
by Andrew Borde, who was variously a monk, writer of an excellent 
travel book about Europe, spy for Thomas Cromwell, popular physician 
and reputed compiler of several books of jokes (he wrote in the 
Breviary that nothing comforted the heart so much as honest mirth 
and good company). He died in prison, having - it's said - been 
found guilty of keeping three whores in his chamber in Winchester, 
though a contemporary explained that he was merely pimping them for 
members of the clergy.

He wrote in the Breviary about "The eximious and arcane science of 
physic", that is, the excellent and mysterious science of medicine. 
That comment notably contains two neologisms, since he is also the 
first known user of "arcane". He created other medical terms in the 
book which are still familiar, such as "constipated", "hydrophobia", 
"head louse" and "ulcerated", but many of his terms didn't catch on: 
a writer two centuries after him observed that he was as fond of 
hard and uncouth words as any quack could be.

"Eximious" had some small popularity during the second half of the 
nineteenth century in grandiloquent references such as "the eximious 
character of the right honourable gentleman" and "my eximious and 
illustrious contemporary"; is now exceedingly rare, though it has 
managed to survive to the present day:

    While his eximious Presbyterian church here is built of 
    bricks from Flintshire, they are as stridently, violently 
    coloured as their Lancashire counterparts. 
    [Jonathan Meades, writing in The Times, 9 Oct. 
    2004.]


3. Snippets
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NAMING THE NAMELESS  Professor June Flanders wrote to tell me of a 
neologism she had just encountered, "deanonymise". As it happens, 
I'd come across it in a report a few days earlier about attempts by 
the US National Security Agency to find the identities of users of 
Tor, The Onion Router, a system that enables people to communicate 
anonymously online. ("Onion" because its security is achieved in 
part by routing messages through a series of servers, so that 
tracing their origin would be like peeling back the layers of an 
onion.) Since users are anonymous, to reveal them would logically 
enough be to deanonymise them. In technical jargon, this has a quite 
specific sense, more precise than "reveal" or "uncover". "Anonymise" 
as a verb dates from the 1970s, at first in medical statistics for 
the need to protect the identities of individuals. The earliest 
example of "deanonymise" I've found is from an educational journal 
in 1996. The noun, "deanonymisation", appeared the following year.

LEANING TOWERS  Peter Bottomley forwarded, with raised eyebrows, a 
jargon-laden notice that he had been sent at the House of Commons 
about a forthcoming event: "Increasing deverticalisation of public 
sector delivery, collaborative online platforms and hyperlocal 
participation is creating a need for new structures that can service 
digital communities." Deverticalisation, you will appreciate, is the 
opposite of verticalisation, which describes the situation in which 
a business controls all the stages of production, from raw materials 
to marketing. To deverticalise is to arrange for some of the steps 
to be undertaken by outsiders. We may more pithily describe it as 
farming out, subcontracting or outsourcing. "Deverticalisation" is 
from the 1970s but it became more common, alas, in the 1990s.

THAT'S ALL RIGHT, JACK  I've been firmly told more than once that 
the British national flag should correctly be called the Union Jack 
only when it is being flown at sea, while on land it is the Union 
Flag. A forthcoming report from the Flag Institute, the UK national 
organisation which advises the British government and other bodies 
on matters vexillological (see http://bit.ly/vexill), is intended to 
settle the matter once and for all. Its conclusion is robust: you 
can call it what you like. There is no official name for the flag 
and the distinction between "jack" and "flag" is an artificial one 
invented by some vexillologist in the nineteenth century. This came 
about on the grounds that a jack was a small flag flown from a 
ship's bowsprit and that traditionally the national flag has been 
flown by Royal Navy ships in harbour on a small mast called the 
jackstaff rigged in the bows. The two names were actually being used 
interchangeably as far back as the late 1600s and the matter has, 
strictly speaking, been beyond dispute for more than a century, 
since in 1902 the Lords of the Admiralty had decided that either 
name could be used officially.


4. Brown as a berry
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Q. Why do we talk about somebody with a good suntan being "brown as 
a berry"? Berries are usually red, occasionally blue or black but I 
can't think of a brown one. [Sheila Napier]

A. This has long puzzled people and readers have asked me about it 
in the past. The simple truth is that nobody really knows, though 
there are theories.

The first thing to say about the expression is that it's ancient. It 
appears twice in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, dating from 
the 1380s, firstly in the Prologue ("His palfrey was as broun as is 
a berye", referring to a horse ridden by a monk) and then in the 
unfinished Cook's Tale as a description of the cook ("Broun as a 
berye, a propre short felawe", which in modern English is "brown as 
a berry, a good-looking small fellow".) We may reasonably presume 
that as a conventional simile it is even older in speech.

A suggestion often made is that it refers to coffee beans. It can't, 
because coffee hadn't been introduced into England in Chaucer's day. 
Another idea is that in the English of the time "berry" could refer 
to a nut, but there's no suggestion in the Oxford English Dictionary 
or the Middle English Dictionary that people used it that way. The 
OED does remark that in Old English, four centuries before Chaucer, 
"berry" was most commonly used of grapes, which then grew quite well 
in southern Britain in the warm climate of the time. But it would be 
a stretch for us to describe any variety of grape as brown.

Curiously, "brown" was also used of armour or glass to mean shining 
bright - a text of about 1330 described a "sword of brown steel". 
Some berries are shiny, but we can hardly imagine "brown" in this 
sense being used of a person's face, unless it was slick with sweat, 
of which there's no hint in any early example I've looked at.

Another possibility comes to mind. Some ancient writers seemed to be 
insensitive to colour and emphasised light and dark in preference to 
hues. There is some support for this in the OED, which gives the 
earliest sense of "brown" as dusky or dark. One medieval writer, for 
example, describes lead as brown. This link to gloom apparently led 
to "brown study" (see http://bit.ly/brnstdy). Most native English 
berries are relatively dark-coloured, so a link may exist. 


5. Sic!
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A neat example of a hanging modifier came from Tim Conway, who found 
it on the BBC website: "Vibrant, surreal and deliciously silly, an 
astonishing 21 million viewers tuned in to watch it in 1983, a 
record for a children's programme which has yet to be beaten."

"A mail order gift catalogue called Bits and Pieces arrived in the 
post," Anne O'Brien tells us. "My husband just noticed that they 
offer teleidoscopes as "A unique gift for any collector measuring 5¼ 
inches long." [A teleidoscope, I learn, is a type of kaleidoscope 
with an open end and a lens so you can make patterns from objects 
outside the instrument.]

There's either some chronological confusion in the photo caption 
from Life magazine that Angie Jabine sent in or Eric Clapton was an 
infant financial wizard: "In 1970 Rose Clapp shows off her tea 
service and Eric Clapton, the rock-god guitarist grandson she raised 
in the home he bought for her and her late husband in Surrey, 
England."

Stephen Follows spotted that the Telegraph's coverage on 11 October 
of Peter Higgs's Nobel Prize included this: "Professor Brout died in 
2011 and could not share the prize post humorously." It has since 
been corrected.

On 17 October, the Guardian revealed the identity of a whistleblower 
from forty years ago: "He was Reg Dawson, a senior civil servant and 
lifelong railways buff, who died last year alongside his wife, 
Betty, pictured above on their wedding day at the Dignitas clinic in 
Switzerland."


6. Useful information
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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 
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