World Wide Words -- 11 Jan 14

[Michael Quinion]

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WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 864         Saturday 11 January 2014
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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. Dulcarnon.
3. Wordface.
4. Sizzle and steak.
5. Sic!
6. Useful information.


1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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SQUARED AWAY  "During basic training in the Royal Fusiliers," Peter 
Taylor recalls, "we had to open our lockers for regular inspection. 
Shirts, underwear and socks had to be not only immaculately folded, 
but reinforced with cardboard so everything appeared rectangular. As 
this was nearly 60 years ago, during National Service, I can't be 
certain whether the phrase was 'squared away' or 'squared up'. The 
whole experience was so mind-numbing that I would rather not think 
about it too much!"

Sir Peter Bottomley wrote that "squared away" reminded him of "all 
Sir Garnet", the one-time army equivalent of "Bristol fashion". The 
latter is a short form of "all shipshape and Bristol fashion", known 
from the 1820s in reference to the excellent condition maintained by 
ships based in Bristol, then one of the richest and most important 
ports of England. The former derives from Sir Garnet Wolseley, a 
famous soldier who led many successful military campaigns in the 
1870s in Canada, the Gold Coast, southern Africa and the Sudan. He 
was hailed as the master of the small war, did much to reform the 
army and was caricatured by W S Gilbert in The Pirates of Penzance 
as the very model of a modern major-general. His soldiers used the 
expression so much that it became transformed into "all Sigarneo" or 
"all Sigarno", all is in order or everything's OK.

CONFORMATOR  Colin Houlden commented on one of the other technical 
terms in last week's piece. "My father used to be a hatter and I 
seem to recall - this is over 70 years ago! - that there were two 
types of tolliker. The foot tolliker formed the brim at right angles 
to the foot of the crown or upright part of the hat, while the 
tolliker produced the indentation on the top of the crown. The foot 
tollikers were of wood and made to fit either the right or left hand 
and looked rather like an iron (for clothes) on the end of a curved 
handle. The tollikers to produce the 'crease' in the crown were also 
of wood and looked like an iron with no handle with a pear-shaped 
indentation in its top."


2. Dulcarnon
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Geoffrey Chaucer included this in his poem Troilus and Criseyde of 
about 1374. Criseyde says that she's in a dulcarnon over something 
and is at her wits' end. This led to "I am at dulcarnon" meaning 
that the speaker is utterly perplexed or at a complete loss.

In the middle of the nineteenth century increased interest in the 
works of Chaucer and the history of language led to scholars being 
deeply puzzled about "dulcarnon". No other word like it existed in 
English and its own origins were unknown. 

The matter was eventually cleared up by the famous philologist and 
Chaucer scholar Professor Walter Skeat. He worked out that it's from 
Arabic "dhu'lqarnayn", two-horned, an epithet applied to Alexander 
the Great because he claimed descent from Amun, a god of ancient 
Egypt who was often depicted with ram's horns. 

When Euclid wrote his famous Elements of Geometry, he illustrated 
Pythagoras's theorem by a diagram showing squares built on the three 
sides of a right-angled triangle. The way the picture was oriented 
made the upper two look fancifully like horns and in medieval times 
they were known to irreverent or exasperated students as dulcarnons. 
Many found Pythagoras's theorem impossible to understand and 
"dulcarnon" came to mean an irresolvable puzzle. 

Chaucer had Criseyde's uncle Pandarus tell her that a dulcarnon was 
also called the "flight of wretches". Unfortunately, he had got his 
Euclid confused. This actually referred to a different proposition, 
known in Latin as the "fuga miserorum" or the "pons asinorum", the 
bridge of asses. It proved that the angles opposite the equal sides 
of an isosceles triangle are themselves equal. This was the first 
real test of intelligence for someone studying geometry and anyone 
who couldn't understand it was unlikely to be able to master the 
rest of Euclid.

Dulcarnon has been confused with "horns of a dilemma", though that 
refers to being forced to choose between two equally unsatisfactory 
alternatives, not being at a loss how to proceed at all.


3. Wordface
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QUAKING COLD  The extreme cold in Canada earlier this week led to 
the appearance of the term "frost quake". In Toronto, for example, 
there were reports of hundreds of people being startled by loud 
booms that resembled gun shots. The cause was water deep in the 
ground becoming frozen and expanding, causing explosive cracking of 
the soil. The scientific term for it is "cryoseism", described in a 
work of 1980 as "a non-tectonic earthquake caused by freezing action 
in ice, ice-soil and ice-rock materials". Though rare outside the 
polar regions, they're known in Canada and the northern states of 
the US and the term "frost quake" is older than some reports have 
suggested. In January 1918, for example, two newspapers in the 
Boston area reported, in small news items on an inside page, that 
people were woken and houses shaken as the result of a frost quake, 
so named. The Boston Globe noted in a subheading "Frost quakes not 
uncommon in Maine, but rare in Bay State."

GUFF GETS PRIZES  Lucy Kellaway announced her 2013 Golden Flannel 
awards for corporate linguistic foolishness in the Irish Times last 
Monday (http://wwwords.org/guff). The prize for the best euphemism 
for firing people went to HSBC for "demising"; she commented that 
"it has done the impossible and invented a euphemism that is harsher 
than the real thing." (There's a word for that: "dysphemism".) Last 
month, Michael Bellas of Nestlé described a bottle of water as an 
"affordable, portable lifestyle beverage" and so got the award for 
the best rebranded common object. There's more in the article.

BECAUSE BECAUSE  The choice of "because X" as the Word of the Year 
by the American Dialect Society last week to much confused comment. 
As an example of the grammatical difficulties accompanying this 
word, as much in its conventional usages as the new one, see 
Professor Geoffrey Pullum's mind-stretching discussion on Language 
Log: http://wwwords.org/bcse. He says dictionaries wrongly call 
"because" a conjunction "because they are all lazy followers of a 
stupid tradition that has needed rethinking for 200 years." He 
argues that the word is a preposition. You may find it hard work 
following him, but the destination is worth the journey. If you 
would like a different view, pop over to Gretchen McCulloch's blog 
All Things Linguistic, in which she argues the opposite view, that 
"because" in the new construction isn't a preposition: 
http://wwwords.org/bcgm.


4. Sizzle and steak
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Q. I heard someone say in the BBC World Dateline London programme, 
"He is all steak and sizzle". Does this mean "in totality"? Somewhat 
like "lock, stock and barrel" and so many other figurative sayings? 
[Pierre Leteurtre, France]

A. You're right to be puzzled by this. Assuming you didn't mishear, 
it's likely the speaker (who would have been a foreign correspondent 
based in London) misspoke the idiom. The idiom is properly "he's all 
sizzle and no steak", meaning that the person being spoken about had 
an appearance of ability but was actually ineffective.

He might have borrowed another idiom with the same sense and said 
the person was "all talk and no action" or - in the Texan version - 
"all hat and no cattle". The idea behind "all sizzle and no steak" 
is that you figuratively get the anticipatory sound of the frying, 
perhaps even a delicious smell, but that in the end nothing appears 
except disappointment. A modern example:

    House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) responded 
    Thursday by describing Obama's initial speech as having 
    "all sizzle and no steak." He added: "That's assuming that 
    there is any sizzle left after you've reheated this thing 
    so many times."
    [Washington Post, 26 Jul. 2013.]
    
The idiom is American but the first example that I've found in the 
historical record in the current form is actually from a debate in 
the Irish parliament, the Dáil, in 1962:

    I think the Minister will concede that this Bill is all 
    sizzle and no steak.

For its origin we have to go back at several decades further, to the 
man who has been called the greatest salesman in the world. He was 
Elmer Wheeler, who codified years of selling during the Depression 
in a 1937 book on salesmanship called Tested Sentences that Sell. 
Among them was a line that's been called the most famous piece of 
sales advice ever given and which gave him the nickname "Sizzle": 
"Sell the sizzle not the steak" (he also wrote it as "Don't sell the 
steak - sell the sizzle"). His argument was that a good salesman 
tells a potential customer what the product will do for him, not 
what it is. He wrote:

    Sell the bubbles, not the champagne. Sell the pucker, 
    not the pickles. Sell the whiff, not the coffee. Sell the 
    extra freshness, not the eggs. Sell the flavor, not the 
    butter.

Of course, after all the salesmanship is done and the sizzle has 
successfully sold the steak, something tasty and filling has to be 
presented to the buyer; sell the sizzle without the steak and you're 
a fraud. Somebody who's trying hard to impress with his abilities 
had better come up with some steak to match his sizzling sell. Hence 
the disparaging quip, "all sizzle and no steak". 


5. Sic!
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"Dangling modifier of the day," Martyn Cornell emailed on Tuesday, 
having seen this in the Derby Telegraph: "Despite being diagnosed 
with breast cancer in 2008 and undergoing months of chemotherapy and 
radiotherapy, the pub grew in popularity under Mrs Muldoon."

Bruce Greyson encountered this in the Charlottesville Daily Progress 
on 4 January: "One proposed rule change aims to clarify terminology 
used by federal laws to prohibit people from purchasing a firearm 
for mental health reasons." He commented, "As a psychiatrist, I am 
hard-pressed to think of a good mental health reason to purchase a 
firearm."

Alan Clayton found that an edition of the translation by Constance 
Garnett of a classic Russian novel was being advertised on Amazon as 
The Brother's Karamazov. A hiss and a boo to publishers E-artnow. 
Its cover not only has the apostrophe but it's the wrong way round.

Don Donovan wrote: "Sky TV News in New Zealand reported on 6 January 
that to aid victims of the polar vortex, US authorities had set up a 
'Hypothermia Hotline'."

On this side of the Atlantic, an electricity pylon is a transmission 
tower. Eoin C Bairéad's message had the subject "Irish engineering 
wonders" and referred to a report on the website of Clare Community 
Radio of 7 January: "The Government says it is not realistic or 
financially feasible to run new electricity pylons underground."


6. Useful information
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