World Wide Words -- 05 Apr 14
Michael Quinion
michael.quinion at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Thu Apr 3 22:02:00 UTC 2014
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WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 876 Saturday 5 April 2014
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Decussate.
3. Wordface.
4. On the lam.
5. Sic!
6. Useful information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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PARALLELQUEL Several readers noted earlier works that could have
been given this name if it had existed at the time. Roland Huebsch
suggested Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet: "The first three
books are parallelquels, telling of the same incidents from totally
different perspectives, and the last is a sequel to tie all the
various versions up." An excellent example, as Jon Blanding pointed
out, would be Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,
featuring two minor characters from Shakespeare's Hamlet. Francis
Abercrombie suggested "Peter Matthiessen's utterly sublime trilogy
of the Watson murder: Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man's River and
Bone by Bone, three accounts of one event, each from a different
viewpoint and able to stand on its own." "A very good example from
2006, Cliff Larsen wrote, "although 'parallelquel' wasn't used to
describe it, is the pair of films about the Second World War Battle
for Iwo Jima as told from the USA side in Flags of Our Fathers and
the Japanese side in Letters from Iwo Jima both directed by Clint
Eastwood."
BOX OF BIRDS Local knowledge is invaluable. Rodney Grindey wrote
from New Zealand: "My experience is that 'box of fluffy ducks' is
infinitely more common here these days than 'box of birds' - with
the identical meaning." And Kel Richards of Word of the Day on radio
in Australia added: "The version I've encountered here in Australia
is 'as bright as a box of budgies'. I've put its popularity down to
the alliteration, which English language users seem to like."
CACOETHES When giving the classical Greek etymology of the word,
the first letter of "ethos" somehow vanished from my text. Several
readers pointed out that it would have been better to say that in
"cacoethes loquendi" the second element is from "loqui", to speak.
2. Decussate /dI'kVseIt/ (for key see http://wwwords.org/pr)
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You may be reminded of Dr Samuel Johnson's famously unhelpful try at
defining "network" in his Dictionary of 1755: "Any thing reticulated
or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the
intersections." The moral for lexicographers is not to define a term
using words that are less familiar than the one you're defining.
The verb "decussate" means to intersect or cross two things to form
the shape of an X. Its source is the Latin verb "decussāre" with the
same sense. This can be traced back to the ancient Roman copper coin
called an "as" (whose name, by the way, is the origin of our "ace").
A coin worth 10 of them had the name "decussis", a combination of
"as" with the word for 10, "decem". As the Roman symbol for 10 was
"X", "decussis" came to mean cross-shaped and the verb followed.
In everyday life we've never had much need for "decussate", as it's
much simpler to use "crosswise". Mostly, it turns up in specialist
fields of study. As an adjective, neurologists use it to describe
nerve fibres that cross the midline of the spinal cord or brain. For
botanists, it refers to the leaves in some plants that are arranged
on the stem in alternate pairs at right angles.
"Decussate" also describes one form of the Christian cross, the one
that looks like a figure X. Another name for it is the St Andrew's
Cross, after the saint who is said to have been crucified on one
that shape. A white on blue St Andrew's Cross, popularly called the
Saltire, forms the national flag of Scotland and is incorporated in
the Union flag of the UK.
3. Wordface
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BY A NECK Sonya Brite, an American, heard "pipped at the post", to
be narrowly defeated at the last moment, from a Canadian friend. It
is known in several countries, but it's originally British. The verb
"pip" in this sense, to narrowly beat, dates from the 1830s, perhaps
from an older sense of a small ball or a pip on a card. The allusion
in "pipped at the post" is to horse racing, the post marking the
finishing line. In the Oxford English Dictionary, P G Wodehouse is
the first recorded user ("Bad luck his getting pipped on the post
like that"; Ukridge, 1924) but I've found it much earlier in both
Australia (1888) and the UK (1881). In its early days, it was always
"on the post"; the "at" form began to appear only in the twentieth
century and hasn't entirely superseded the other.
HELLO, I'm a little article and I hope you'll find me interesting.
If that opening made you cringe then you are not alone. The current
tendency for advertising to address the reader childishly in the
first person is becoming nauseating. "Keep me in the fridge," says
the bag of salad; bananas encourage us with "eat me"; a coffee cup
warns "I'm hot"; a snack tells you that it's "your private stash of
almonds, cashews, raisins ...". It has become known as "wackaging",
a blend from "wacky packaging" that was invented by the Guardian
journalist Rebecca Nicholson in 2011. Everyone blames the smoothies
maker Innocent, which adopted a chatty and informal style on its
labels from its beginnings in 1999. These days I see the verbal tic
on all sides - robot servers email me "I'm afraid I wasn't able to
deliver your message"; my local buses display the sign "Sorry, I'm
not in service." Can we go back to grown-up advertising?
4. On the lam
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Q. I didn't see "on the lam" in your index, and it came up today in
a conversation about my neighbors. Don't ask! [Paul Lawrence]
A. But you're asking, right?
"On the lam" has had a good life. It appeared near the end of the
nineteenth century and is still common. To be on the lam is to be on
the run from the police or to have escaped from prison.
In its quest to find a suspected domestic terrorist on
the lam for a decade, the FBI on Friday began placing his
image on billboards across the country.
[Daily Herald (Arlington Heights, Illinois), 1 Mar.
2014.]
Another form has been "take it on the lam", as in this example from
the period of mobsters and hard-boiled detectives:
He heard the shots, saw the kid tear down the steps,
jump into a big sedan and take it on the lam.
[Trouble is my Business, by Raymond Chandler, 1934.]
"Lam" goes back a lot further than these modern senses. It may be
from a Scandinavian source - dictionaries mention the Old Norse
"lemja", literally to lame but usually meaning to give a beating,
and the Danish and Norwegian "lamme", to paralyse. When "lam" came
into English in the late 1500s it retained the Old Norse sense of
beating soundly or thrashing.
Shortly afterwards it was extended to "lambaste", a doublet that
added emphasis by including the older "baste" of similar meaning
that's also from Old Norse (there's no connection so far as we know
with the cookery or sewing senses). Nowadays, "lambaste" means to
criticise harshly with no implication of physical force, but that's
a nineteenth-century shift.
Unlike "lambaste", "lam" and its close relatives have kept the same
sense down to modern times:
Three of the guards will come in with belts. They'll
lam into me until they can't lam into me any more. Every
day for a week, they'll do that.
[Come Easy - Go Easy, by James Hadley Chase, 1960.]
These are odd origins for a word that has also come to mean moving
rapidly away from trouble. "Lam" in this sense is American, from the
1880s. It's most probably a joke, a play on "beat it" from the same
period for leaving in haste. That can be traced to seventeenth-
century phrases such as "beating a path" or "beating the hoof", the
image being of one's feet or horse's hooves trampling the ground.
5. Sic!
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Seen by Kate Bunting above one of the stalls in the food court of
Derby's Westfield Shopping Centre: "Kids eat for £1 when bought with
a main meal."
The banning of celebrity chef Nigella Lawson from flying to the US
featured in the Independent, Chris Gray tells us: "The 54-year-old,
who is a judge on cookery show The Taste in the US, admitted she had
taken cocaine seven times and also to smoking cannabis during a
court hearing."
6. Useful information
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ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER: World Wide Words is researched, written and
published by Michael Quinion in the UK. ISSN 1470-1448. Copyediting
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