World Wide Words -- 16 Aug 14

[Michael Quinion]

World Wide Words
Issue 891: Saturday 16 August 2014

This mailing also contains a formatted version of the text. 
This issue is also available online (http://wwwords.org/evqi).


Feedback, Notes and Comments
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GOING SPARE. Barbara J Mann commented, "It occurred to me while I was 
reading your article about "go spare" that I've seen "spare" used to 
indicate the duty of a current title holder to his family to produce 
an "heir and a spare" before he goes into some potentially fatal 
activity (like war). Moving from that thought to the 'spares' having a 
traditional literary reputation for being disgruntled or caustic or 
downright rebellious because of their complete uselessness while a 
more direct heir lives, could probably get you to the meaning of being 
in a rage or in distress."

Though the concept is probably as old as primogeniture, the phrase 
"heir and a spare "is more recent than you might think. In Britain, it 
became popular only after the birth of Prince Harry in 1984, the 
"spare" to Prince William. So far as I can discover, the first example 
in print is in a US-published book in 1976 and then in 1988 in a piece 
in the New York Times about the princes' father, Prince Charles, that 
seems to be quoting from British sources.

CORYBANTIC. "That consummate wordsmith W S Gilbert," Bruce Graham 
wrote, "was not unfamiliar with the Corybantes, although he preferred 
the adjective 'Corybantian'. In his little-known and seldom-performed 
final collaboration with Sir Arthur Sullivan, The Grand Duke (1896), 
Ludwig, a theatrical manager, is encouraging his company to adopt 
Ancient Greek manners, including 'rather risky dances', namely: 

    'Corybantian maniac kick - Dionysiac or Bacchic -
    And the Dithyrambic revels of those undecorous days.' 

An erudite, if somewhat contrived, rhyme. As Gilbert himself said: 
'That kind of fun's the lowest.' Keep up the fascinating work!"


Animadvert   /,animad'v@:t/ 
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Only a writer with an extensive vocabulary and the confidence to make 
use of it without sounding a prat will venture this verb. One such is 
the British journalist and author Will Self, though he says he started 
using big words because he felt insecure.

    Ralph imagines a conversation between Marcel Duchamp
    and Luis Buñuel, in which the venerable - and now,
    quite dead - Surrealists animadvert on the relationship
    between chance encounters, narrative and destiny. 
    [Will Self in the Independent, 5 Jan. 2008.]

His boldness is the more striking because he's using "animadvert" in a 
way that's considered obsolete - to comment upon something. 
Dictionaries say the only current sense is to criticise or pass 
censure on someone or something. This shift in sense parallels that of 
"criticise", whose standard sense less than a century ago meant to 
judge the value of a work, a view that might be either positive or 
negative. Though that survives in literary and similar criticism, our 
carping age permits everyday criticism to be solely censorious. Those 
rare persons who - at the risk of sounding pompous - "animadvert" or 
create "animadversions" do so to disapprove.

The verb is from Latin "animadvertere", to notice something or remark 
on a subject. It was created from "animum", the mind, and "advertere", 
to pay attention, hence to turn one's mind to something. Even two 
thousand years ago, the Romans were using "animadvertere" to mean 
(adversely) criticise or even punish, so it's surprising that 
"animadvert" ever had a neutral sense in English. Its second element 
is the root of "advertise" and "advertisement", which at their most 
neutral contain the idea of making something known.

Ivor Brown, who wrote many books on the oddities of English, remarked 
of "animadvert" that "Surely the word animadvertisement should also 
exist" in the sense of a warning announcement or admonition. He surely 
hadn't checked his Oxford English Dictionary, for it includes the 
word, though it's firmly marked as obsolete and has its most recent 
example from 1661. I know of only one writer who has used it since, 
though his seems to be a neologistic blend of "animated 
advertisement":

    Flanked by an "animadvertisement" for deodorant pills
    and by a poster for Altars 0f the Heart, a newsscreen
    showed me its dormant glassy face.
    [The Continent of Lies, by James Morrow, 1984.]


Wordface
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SYNONYMISING FALLACY. An article (http://wwwords.org/rgtsm) dated 7 
August in the Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) introduced me 
to the new word "Rogetism". Its creator is Chris Sadler, a lecturer at 
Middlesex University.  

He had wondered about mysterious out-of-context phrases such as "tarry 
forth of the conquest", "modern store guides", "bequest mazes" and 
"Herculean personalised liturgies", which kept appearing in student 
essays. Eventually he twigged that they were plagiarising online 
material but trying to hide it by changing some of the words using a 
thesaurus. Unfortunately, they were using what they'd looked up 
without caring about its meaning. 

The phrases above resulted from applying this process to, 
respectively, "stay ahead of the competition", "new market leaders", 
"legacy networks" and "powerful personalised services". 

Sadler's favourite "Rogetism "(coined, of course, from the most famous 
of all thesauruses, that created by Peter Mark Roget) is "sinister 
buttocks", which he has entered for this year's THES exam howlers 
competition. The original was "left behind".

IT'S IN THE DICTIONARY. Oxford Dictionaries (http://wwwords.org/oxfdd) 
(not to be confused with the Oxford English Dictionary) added many new 
terms this week. 

The online world continues to be a significant generator of language, 
including "hate-watch" (watch a television programme for the enjoyment 
derived from mocking or criticizing it), "listicle" (an internet 
article in the form of a numbered or bullet-pointed list), "live-
tweet" (post comments about an event on Twitter while it's taking 
place), "second screen" (a mobile device used while watching 
television), "cord cutting" (cancelling a pay television subscription 
or landline phone connection in favour of an internet-based or 
wireless service), and "hyperconnected" (the widespread or habitual 
use of internet-connected devices). 

Abbreviations added to the dictionary include "adorbs" (arousing great 
delight; from "adorable"), "cray" and "cray cray" (crazy) and "dox" 
(search for and publish private data on the Internet, typically with 
malicious intent; from "doc", short for "document"). 

Slang and informal terms added include "hench" (strong, fit, and 
having well-developed muscles; probably from "henchman"), "hot mess" 
(something spectacularly unsuccessful or disordered), "mansplain" (a 
man explaining something, typically to a woman, in a manner regarded 
as condescending or patronizing), "side-eye" (a sidelong glance 
expressing disapproval or contempt), "spit-take" (as a comic 
technique, an act of suddenly spitting out liquid one is drinking in 
response to something funny or surprising; a play on "double-take"), 
and "side boob" (the side part of a woman's breast, as exposed by a 
revealing item of clothing.)

ELSEWHERE. Alex Baumans sent me a link to a piece on Language Log 
about the new word cladly (http://wwwords.org/cldly). And Alan Payne 
told me about a BBC article (http://wwwords.org/uptlk) on the growth 
and origins of uptalk. 


Vigorish
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Q. From Dawn Govender: I can't seem to find any information as to how 
the word "vigorish" came into use in English or when it took on its 
present meaning. I would also like to know if it is peculiar to 
American English or if other English-speaking cultures use the word as 
well.

A. "Vigorish" is a classic item of current American slang. It can mean 
either the rate of interest charged on money borrowed from a loan 
shark or the percentage taken by bookmakers or operators of gambling 
games from winning bets.

It appears in print quite suddenly early in the twentieth century 
because of a book, "The Apaches of New York". This was a collection of 
stories about the low life of the big city written by the Chicago-
based journalist Alfred Henry Lewis, who had researched and written 
about corruption in New York politics. He commented in his preface to 
the book:

    These stories are true in name and time and place. None
    of them in its incident happened as far away as three
    years ago. They were written to show you how the other
    half live in New York. I had them direct from the
    veracious lips of the police. The gangsters themselves
    contributed sundry details.
    [The Apaches of New York, by Alfred Henry Lewis,
    1912.]

Extracts from his book were widely syndicated and serialised during 
1911, including this, which contains the first appearance of the word:

    When the victim gets up from the table the "bank" under
    the descriptive of "viggresh" returns his one-tenth of
    his losings. No one ever leaves a stuss game broke and
    that final ray of sure sunshine forms indubitably the
    strong attraction. Stuss licks up with a tongue of fire
    a round full fifth of all the East side earns, and to
    "viggresh" should be given the black glory thereof.
    [Wanatah Mirror (Wanatah, Indiana), 30 Mar 1911.]

A couple of things stick out from this: the vigorish here isn't a 
charge on the punter, but a sum paid to a loser (contemporary writings 
say it was to give him car fare home and the price of breakfast); and 
the word hadn't yet taken on its modern spelling or pronunciation 
because it had up to then been transmitted orally. "Stuss", by the 
way, was a simplified version of the card game faro, popular in the 
cities of the east coast.

The experts think "vigorish" was borrowed from Yiddish, which may be 
supported by an alternative name for stuss, "Jewish faro". It's 
presumed that Yiddish had taken it from the Russian выигрыш 
(vyigrysh), which means gains or winnings.

The word first appears in its modern spelling in 1913. It was popular 
for a while but by about 1920 had vanished again, only to reappear in 
the 1930s in one of its modern senses, the interest on a loan:

    When negotiating a loan from a Broadway usurer, one
    asks how much "vigorish" or interest, will be charged.
    "How much off the top?" means the same thing, since
    interest is deducted in advance and thus comes off the
    top of the bills counted out by the money lender.
    [Lowell Sun (Lowell, Massachusetts) 15 Feb. 1935.]

It is now often abbreviated to "the vig" and is sometimes figurative:

    Two weeks after a hike across hills of heavy scrub long
    scratches still scab my legs - a kind of vigorish paid
    for abundant living. You pay as you go. 
    [The American Poetry Review, 1 Jan. 2011.]

So far as I can tell, the word hasn't migrated to other regional 
Englishes. However, it is known to a small extent from US film and 
theatre exports, for example in the plot of "The Jersey Boys".


Sic!
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Norman Berns found a headline of 10 August on the website of the 
Argyll Free Press (not the Scottish paper but the one of Mitchell, 
South Dakota): "Conference addressing issue of human trafficking by US 
attorneys: A major concern."

The San Francisco Chronicle website startled Jim Tang on 4 August with 
the headline: "Man killed after turning down ride from police."

Yet a third headline, from the website Engadget, struck Eugene Cassidy 
as entirely plausible: "IBM's new supercomputing chip mimics the human 
brain with very little power."

Padmavyuha Green read a BBC report about Rhosllanerchrugog, a village 
in North Wales: "Investigators found a number [of] cannabis plants 
following the fire, which forced neighbours to leave their homes."


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