World Wide Words -- 30 Aug 14

[Michael Quinion]

World Wide Words
Issue 893: Saturday 30 August 2014

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


Feedback, Notes and Comments
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TWIG IT. Several readers pointed out, following my note last week, 
that some reference works, notably Collins Dictionary, give the Gaelic 
word "tuig", meaning "I understand", as a possible source of the 
idiomatic sense of "twig". Others noted that "twig" more often means 
to come to a sudden realisation rather than simply understand. So it's 
equivalent to "catch on", and to another British and Commonwealth 
idiom, "the penny dropped" (from a penny-in-the-slot machine). As 
James Forder pointed out, one doesn't twig the theory of relativity. 
But a person might twig that he was being made fun of. And Dorothy 
twigged that she and Toto weren't in Kansas anymore.

FOOTLOOSE AND FANCY-FREE. I wrote in the piece last time that "fancy" 
had lost its association with physical attraction. I was thinking of 
the noun. The verb still has this sense, of course, as in "I really 
fancy him", and the noun can have it in phrases like "He took a fancy 
to her".

MAILING PROBLEMS. A transmission error meant that more than 4600 
subscribers failed to receive the issue of 23 August. I would have 
posted a note about this on the website, but the problem also stopped 
me receiving error reports. Though the issue persists I hope a work-
round will ensure everybody gets it. If you missed last week's issue 
you can read it online here (http://wwwords.org/nbkw) .


Jentacular
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Slug-a-beds or slow-waking readers may not appreciate the virtues of 
this rare word, and will particularly dislike one of the compounds 
formed from it, "ante-jentacular". That's because it's an adjective 
that refers to breakfast, especially one taken early in the morning or 
immediately after getting up.

It was created near the beginning of the eighteenth century, 
presumably by a Latin scholar who knew "jentāculum", the Latin word 
for breakfast, and who felt a need for an adjective missing from the 
language. It had a fleeting period of rather ponderous popularity in 
the nineteenth century.

    To valetudinarians and others the following method of
    making coffee for breakfast is earnestly recommended,
    as a most wholesome and pleasant jentacular beverage.
    [The New Family Receipt-Book, by John Murray, 1820.]

Several of its appearances are linked to the philosopher and jurist 
Jeremy Bentham, best known for creating utilitarianism.

    Bentham composed after playing a prelude on the organ,
    or while taking his "ante-jentacular" and
    "post-prandial" walks in his garden.
    [Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Jul. 1852.]

The general view of the world at large seems to be that "breakfast" 
needs no adjective, though "breakfasty" has been recorded a few times. 
You may feel that's an ungainly construction, no substitute for the 
elegant Latinate word. But "jentacular" is now as near defunct as a 
word can be in an era when most of English literature is searchable at 
the press of a button.


Wordface
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ESTEEMED FELLOWS. Peter Chase asked about the derivation of "don", in 
the sense of an academic at one of our ancient universities. The 
source is the Spanish "Don", originally a term of high rank, which 
derives from Latin "dominus", master or lord, which has also 
bequeathed English words such as "dominate" and" dominium", as well as 
"domine", a one-time term of respect for a clergyman or a member of a 
learned profession and - as "dominie" - for a schoolmaster in 
Scotland. Around the middle of the seventeenth century, English began 
to use "don" for a leader or a man of importance or ability; to be a 
don was to be an adept at some activity, whether literature, cricket 
or a craft skill. Undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge began to 
humorously apply "don" to the tutors and fellows of their colleges, 
with perhaps an echo of "domine", and the term went into the language. 

IN THE SWIM. Kevin Armstrong asked me about "curglaff", which he had 
come across earlier this year as a term for a commemorative swim at a 
time when the water was still very cold. Many have sought the source 
of this odd term but the trail always ends at John Jamieson's 
Dictionary of the Scottish Language of 1808. He defined "curglaff "as 
"The shock felt in bathing, when one first plunges into cold water" 
and said it was a word from Banff in north-east Scotland. No other 
example of it is known to exist, though it turns up occasionally today 
in books of weird or obsolete words. It may be connected with the next 
entry in Jamieson's dictionary, "curgloft", which he defined as 
"panic-struck" and gave an example from a poem by William Meston of 
1767: "Curgloft, confounded, and bumbaz'd, / On east and west by turns 
he gazed."

ELSEWHERE. In the Financial Times magazine of 22 August Dan Jurafsky 
wrote about the language of American menus (http://wwwords.org/slfds), 
discovering, unsurprisingly perhaps, that he could predict the 
prices just from the words. The report of a pilot study into spoken 
British English (http://wwwords.org/mvase) by Lancaster University 
and Cambridge University Press shows that "marvellous" has been 
abandoned in favour of "awesome", that "cheerio" meaning goodbye is on 
the way out and that "marmalade" is used a lot less than it was. On 
the Oxford Blog (http://wwwords.org/xfdbg), David J Peterson 
discusses how he sets about inventing languages, especially Dothraki 
and Valyrian for Game of Thrones.


Furthest and farthest
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Q. From Randolph Knipp in Texas: When you wrote in the issue of 9 
August, "Kudos came to those who could pick up the ones furthest 
away", should the word not have been "farthest"?

A. That word isn't in my vocabulary. It's likely that a speaker of 
American English, such as yourself, would prefer "farthest", because 
that spelling has survived in the US longer than in British English, 
in which "furthest" is now almost universal in its various usages.

The same is true of the comparatives, "farther" and "further". 

"Farther" is historically a variant of "further" and it's possible to 
argue that there's no need for both. "Further" is the comparative of 
an ancestor of English "forth", meaning outwards or onwards. "Farther" 
came into being in Middle English under the influence of an old 
comparative of "far", which was replaced in time by "further" and 
"farther". 

This connection with "far" strongly influenced the view of scholars 
about the way that the words "ought" to be used: "farther" when a 
literal distance was meant and "further" for quantity or degree. The 
conventional view was summed up by Henry Bradley, who compiled the 
letter F in the "Oxford English Dictionary". In the etymological note 
for "farther" he wrote:

    In standard English the form "farther" is usually
    preferred where the word is intended to be the
    comparative of "far", while "further" is used where the
    notion of "far" is altogether absent; there is a large
    intermediate class of instances in which the choice
    between the two forms is arbitrary.
    [Oxford English Dictionary, First edition, 1897.]

The position was even less clear than he supposed. Both versions had 
coexisted in the language happily for centuries with little or no 
distinction of sense between them. In 1926, Fowler disagreed with 
Bradley:

    The fact is surely that hardly anyone uses the two
    words for different occasions; most people prefer one
    or the other for all purposes, & the preference of the
    majority is for "further"; the most that should be said
    is perhaps that "farther "is not common except where
    distance is in question.
    [A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, by H W Fowler,
    1926.]

The British position has polarised even more since. My search of a 
British newspaper database of the past twenty years finds that of the 
total uses of the two words, less than 2% are spelled "farther".

Caveats are required: in American English, as I say, "farther" has 
remained more common than in British English; in both countries, when 
it appears, "farther" almost always refers to physical distances.


Sic!
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"And no one could talk him out of it," Bob Rosenberg commented on a 
report of 21 August on the San Francisco Chronicle site: "When 
deputies arrived, they found a man down in the backyard and he was 
determined to be deceased."

John Gray, Alan Russell and Ian McIver sent the headline from a BBC 
News item of 27 August: "Eastbourne Pier contractors to resume work 
after death."

"I don't recall seeing a headline with so many ambiguities!", 
commented Mike Cowlishaw on this, from the CNN site on 28 August: 
"Official: Russian forces back rebels with tanks in eastern Ukraine".


Useful information
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