World Wide Words -- 28 Sep 13
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Sep 27 14:59:51 UTC 2013
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WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 851 Saturday 28 September 2013
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Epizeuxis.
3. Snippets.
4. Grass.
5. Sic!
6. Subscriptions and other information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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UMBRAGE Following my remark in this piece last week that "Umbrage
has almost entirely severed its associations with shadows," Candida
Frith-Macdonald wrote: "One recent revival, of course, being Dolores
Umbridge in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, who manages
to be miserable, shade-casting, offended and offensive all together.
If there were a Dickens prize for naming characters, Rowling would
hold it. English may be tricky to spell, but it does allow for some
great puns."
LOOKSHURRY Last week I quoted a comment in The Times about a match
that had to be abandoned because the pitch was waterlogged: "Wimps.
Waterlogged pitch indeed. Lookshurry!" My mailbox was filled by
messages from dozens of readers hastening to point out that it's
intended to convey the word "luxury" uttered in an exaggerated
Yorkshire accent, a disgusted retort by hardened northerners on
pampered individuals put off by minor deprivations. (My error was
reading it as "looks" + "hurry", when it's said more like "looksh" +
"urry".) The connection is to a famous British television sketch by
four successful Yorkshiremen who sought to outdo each other in
increasingly bizarre descriptions of their deprived childhoods. Many
readers suggested that it's a Monty Python sketch; it has been
performed by the Python cast on stage but it's earlier. It appeared
in 1967 in At Last the 1948 Show (whose title disparaged the
commissioners of television shows for their dilatoriness) and was
performed by John Cleese, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graham Chapman and
Marty Feldman. You can watch it here: http://bit.ly/1f6jnBB (but
don't believe the accents). I hope that this detailed exegesis makes
up for my ignorance of the term's provenance. Rod Nicholas noted,
"The sketch is so well known, even here in Canberra, Australia,
nearly 50 years after it was first aired, that any cry of poverty
will be met with an enthusiastic cry of 'Lookshurry!'"
PRE-LOVED AND PRE-OWNED My gently deprecating comment about these
words provoked some American readers to point out that they didn't
use them either. Greg Holmes wrote, "As an American, I must tell you
that 'pre-owned' and 'pre-loved' are purely terms of advertising (or
possibly self-conscious humor), at least in any circles in which I
operate. Auto dealers may sell 'pre-owned' cars, but actual people
drive used ones. Those who solicit for charity do ask for 'gently
used' items but never 'pre-loved' or 'pre-owned' items, unless they
are being deliberately self-conscious and precious." Of a third word
that I mentioned, "upcycled", Loren Myer commented, "I have heard it
used on more than one occasion, but usually by the 'artsy-fartsy'
crowd. We have not taken it to our hearts. By far the more common
word for this process of creatively recycling items for new owners -
decorating and restyling beyond their original state of newness - is
'repurposed'."
SIC! The item about selecting a password provoked Paul Witheridge
to email, "I'm sure you've heard of the dumb individual who read
'Your password must be at least eight characters long and contain at
least one number' and selected 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarves'."
2. Epizeuxis /EpI'zju:ksIs/
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A writer in an American scholarly journal in 1914 felt that it was
hard on schoolchildren of his time to get a grip on the concepts of
rhetoric when they had to describe them in mouthfuls like epitheton,
catachresis, hendiadys, aposiopesis, hysteron proteron, hypallage,
anacolouthon, hyperbaton, parrhesia and epizeuxis.
Few of us of any age have to struggle these days with such words or
the concepts that they represent, though the tricks of effective
communication they stand for are still very much with us.
When in 2001 the Labour Party leader Tony Blair told the country
that a top priority of his administration was "education, education,
education", he was committing epizeuxis, the repetition of a word
for emphasis. Other famous examples are Alfred, Lord Tennyson's
"Break, Break, Break / On thy cold grey stones, O sea" and Rudyard
Kipling's "Boots, boots, boots, boots, movin' up and down again."
It's not necessary to follow the rule of repetition so strictly.
Richard the Third's "A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!" and
Captain Ahab's "Death and devils! men, it is Moby Dick ye have seen
- Moby Dick - Moby Dick!" are other examples of epizeuxis.
"Epizeuxis" is from Greek "epi-", in addition, plus "zeuxis" (from
"zeugnunai", to yoke), hence fastening together.
3. Snippets
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WHAT'S IN A NAME? I'm continually surprised by the names people
give to flora and fauna. An article in the Scientific American
introduced me to two insects called the glassy-winged sharpshooter
and the ultragreen sweat bee. A piece in the Observer described the
Amazonian bluntnose knifefish, which sounds as if it could do with
sharpening. But the biological sciences don't have a corner on odd
names. A report in New Scientist featured an astronomical phenomenon
called an asymptotic giant branch star.
HAIRBRAINED? Sarah Weidinger asked me about the phrase "on a wild
hair", which left me in a minor tizzy since I'd never come across
it. An online search found it in the lyrics to the Jake Owen song
Anywhere With You (Mexico on a Wild Hair) which obviously puzzles
other people, too. There are examples such as "I would do Mexico or
Hawaii for a beach vacation on a 'wild hair' but not Europe" and
"She is leaving on a wild-hair jaunt." This suggests a spontaneous
or unpremeditated excursion through the image of rushing off with
one's hair flying in the wind. An earlier line supports this: "If
you wanna just ride the breeze. I'll go anywhere". But I can find
nothing more, not even whether Jake Owen invented it.
GREEK AS IT AIN'T SPOKE Bernard Long tells me that he heard a BBC
news item in which someone was described as "hoi polloing with the
Putins of this world." He is aghast at the thought that this Greek
term for the masses, ordinary people, should have been turned into a
verb. I had to tell him that I'd found a couple of other examples,
though it's rare, thank goodness, not least because it doesn't make
any sense. I suspect it may be an error for "hobnobbing".
4. Grass
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Q. Today I came across the phrase "grass them up" which I gathered
from the context means to turn in to the authorities. Searching the
web confirms this, but I didn't come across any explanation of its
origins. I have faith you can explain this phrase. [Bill Brown]
A. It's good that you have such faith in my etymological detective
work, Mr Brown, but I doubt whether in this case I've tracked this
well-established slang term to its origin.
To grass in British slang is indeed to inform on a person to the
authorities; a grass is an informer. The noun starts to appear in
print in the 1920s and the verb a few years later. We've since had
"grasser" in the same sense; in the 1970s "supergrass" appeared for
a police informer who implicated a large number of people at one go.
It has been proposed that "grass" is from "snake in the grass", a
treacherous person or a secret enemy. This echoes the ancient idea
that snakes are perfidious creatures, a view that famously appears
in the Book of Genesis. I've also come across a curious argument
that it derives from "grass in the park", rhymingly a copper's nark.
("Nark" is known from the last third of the nineteenth century and
comes from Romany "nak", a nose, that is, somebody who sticks his
nose into others' affairs or sniffs out information; it's no
relation to the US "narc", short for "narcotics officer"). We're
quite sure that neither of these ideas is correct.
Instead, the experts point to "grass" as being a shortened form of
"grasshopper". We may pass over the latter's earliest slang sense of
a waiter in a tea-garden - which brings to mind an overworked server
bounding from customer to customer - and concentrate instead on the
meaning first recorded by John Farmer and W E Henley in volume three
of Slang and its Analogues in 1893: a policeman, by rhyming slang a
copper (see http://bit.ly/1bzcarf).
Earlier writers on slang assumed that "grasshopper" was extended to
refer to informers because of their police connections. More recent
writers are less sure.
The experts are instead favourably disposed towards another slang
term, "to shop". This dates from the sixteenth century, when it
meant to imprison (it comes from the noun "shop", which in low slang
then referred to a prison). By the early nineteenth century it had
taken on the sense of providing the evidence by which a person was
sent to prison, hence to inform. A grasshopper might therefore have
more obviously been a shopper, not a copper. "Shopper" begins to be
recorded in the sense of an informer around the time "grass" starts
to appear.
So far as I've been able to find out, there's no direct evidence for
either "copper" or "shopper". The current predisposition among slang
lexicographers to prefer the latter is basically that it has a more
direct semantic association with "grass" via "grasshopper".
5. Sic!
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Foreign Policy Magazine's summary of news headlines on 19 September
contained this sentence, Daniel Piotrowski notes: "Eduardo Campos's
Brazilian Socialist Party withdrew from President Dilma Rousseff's
coalition government on Wednesday, paving the popular state governor
to run for president."
Jim Getz found this in an item on the ARS Technica website dated 18
September: "The research was in part prompted by ... the foiling of
a plot to use explosives-packed, radio-controlled model airplanes to
attack the Capitol and the Pentagon by the FBI."
Paul Thompson received this realtor listing in the mail in Calgary,
Alberta: "This home will not disappoint and will not last long!".
An excerpt from the issue of Energy North for Summer 2013, sent in
by James Fleming: "The Scottish Conservative Party has ... also
called for subsidies for renewables to be reduced and for wind farms
to be built a minimum of 2,000km away from homes."
This appeared in an article about Johnny Vegas in the Guardian on 24
September (David Mackinder and Tim Riley both saw it): "He had gone
from a close and loving family in St Helens, Merseyside, to this
large institution with cold showers and mice that forbade any
questioning of one's faith."
6. Useful information
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