World Wide Words -- 25 Jan 14
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Thu Jan 23 23:01:00 UTC 2014
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WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 866 Saturday 25 January 2014
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A formatted version is also available online at
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Prolegomenon.
3. Wordface.
4. Snake oil.
5. Sic!
6. Useful information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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RHINE David Gow wrote about related words that I listed in the
piece: "A connected word used in Scotland (and perhaps elsewhere?)
is 'rone', meaning the horizontal metal guttering along the eaves of
a house which carries rainwater from the roof to the downpipe. The
Concise Scots Dictionary invites us to compare this with Norwegian
'run' or 'ron', a watercourse. The Dictionary also gives 'rin'
meaning a stream, or course of a river, frequently with the lands
bordering it. This ties in nicely with your examples. Isn't it
marvellous where words take you?" Stan Firth suggested that the
word, at least in the Glasgow area, was applied to "the rainwater
downpipes from the roof-gutter. Frequently, the name can be applied
to the gutter, but usually only by laymen." I'll let Scots argue
about its exact meaning.
And William Woodruff pointed out, "In some parts of the States, a
creek or small (sometimes not so small) stream is called a 'run' -
most commonly in Virginia but also in Pennsylvania and Maryland and,
less commonly, states further south; perhaps best known as the
eponyms for Civil War battles, e.g. Bull Run." The Oxford English
Dictionary confirms that this usage, from English dialect, is
related to "rune" in the sense of a watercourse or stream.
GANDERFLANKING Lee Rickard, clearly a movie buff, wrote, "There's
just something about that trochaic dimeter. I bet you could up its
popularity by plugging it into inappropriate places. For example,
'I'm ganderflanking tired of all these ganderflanking snakes on this
ganderflanking plane!'" Moray Guise emailed, "Here in New Zealand, a
number of my colleagues (Maori or pakeha) use a term of similar
sense that I enjoy, 'tutuing', for fluffing around achieving little
- almost like yak shaving. 'While you're tutuing about, I'll just
finish the job.'" I might instead speak of "faffing about", though
"tutuing" sounds like a distant relative of the Northern English
expression "big girl's blouse" (http://wwwords.org/bgbl).
ERROR Several readers noted that the surname of the famous Texan
wheeler-dealer Clinton Williams Murchison was misspelled. This was a
typo in the newspaper in which the quotation appeared and which I
forgot to correct.
2. Prolegomenon /,pr at Ule'gQmin(@)n/
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This is a posh word for an introduction, preface or foreword or, to
counter ponderous Greek with obscure Latin, an exordium.
It's the neuter of the present participle passive of the Greek verb
"prolegein", to say beforehand, and is much rarer than its relative
"prologue", which derives from Greek "prôlogos", literally "fore-
speech". Both have travelled via Latin to reach us, but "prologue"
has shuffled off its high-flown classical links while "prolegomenon"
is condemned by its length and shape to be reserved for high-flown
intellectual occasions and formal scholarship.
As prolegomenon to the systematic account of what I
regard as the truth about the history of psychiatry
presented in this book, I offer Roy Porter's restatement
of the premises that underlie my writings on this
subject.
[Coercion as Cure, by Thomas Szasz, 2007.]
It may be a prologue to a book but it may also describe a work that
introduces the study of a subject. A perusal of the dustier aisles
of a large library may find article titles such as "A Prolegomenon
to the Reconceptualisation of Dialectic", "A Prolegomenon to the
Material Culture of Garments in the Formative Islamic Period" and
"Prolegomenon for an Excuse-Centered Approach to Transitional
Justice".
Should you ever need to discuss more than one prolegomenon, the
plural is "prolegomena", though this has also at times been used
irregularly for the singular.
3. Wordface
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SNAPSHOTS A word that's been around for some time online but which
I only recently spotted in print is "gifable". This looks like a
misspelling of "giftable" but it actually derives from the image
format "GIF" (Graphics Interchange Format). Unlike other formats,
GIFs can be animated and have long been used to create, for example,
repetitive icons that illustrate an emotion. A film or television
programme is said to be gifable if it's possible to snatch a clip a
few seconds long that encapsulates a memorable moment and turn it
into a GIF. It still appears as "GIF-able", though the hyphenless
lower-case version is becoming common. People disagree about the
pronunciation of "GIF", but "gifable" is always said with a hard
initial letter. It's the source of "giffing out", a term invented by
Kmart for an annoying advertising campaign in the run-up to last
year's holiday season that included brief looped snatches of people
going crazy over their purchases.
FRESH MINT I've reported previously on abbreviations created by
economists for groups of countries thought to have something in
common. We've had "PIGS" for the four EU countries with the most
severe economic problems (Portugal, Greece, Spain and either Ireland
or Italy) and "BRIC" for what are now called newly advanced economic
countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China), coined by the economist
Jim O'Neill in 2001. A try in 2009 by Robert Ward of the Economist
Intelligence Unit to popularise "CIVETS" (Colombia, Indonesia,
Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa, countries with diverse
economies and a young, growing population) never caught on. Nor did
"EAGLES", "Emerging And Growth-Leading Economies" (Brazil, China,
Egypt, India, Indonesia, South Korea, Mexico, Russia, Taiwan, and
Turkey). This year, Jim O'Neill is arguing for "MINT", a name
created by the fund managers Fidelity, for what he thinks will be
the second generation of emerging market pace-setters: Mexico,
Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey. He views them as geographically well
situated with a youthful population so that over the next 20 years
they will all see rises in the number of people eligible to work
relative to those not working. Some of the MINT countries, he says,
could match China's recent double-digit growth rates.
4. Snake oil
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Q. I think just about everyone knows that a "snake oil salesman" is
a huckster trying to sell some product of dubious quality. I wonder
where "snake oil" came from, given that it seems there could be many
other descriptive metaphors applied, and if this witty term has an
identifiable creator. I also wonder and whether it preceded the age
of films or might have been a result of depictions in it. [Sam
Foreman, Pittsburgh]
A. It's worth recounting the history of the term "snake oil" in some
detail since accounts available online and in many books don't match
the evidence in historical sources.
We may dismiss out of hand the assertion in several places that the
name "snake oil" is a corruption of "seneca oil". This was the name
given to crude petroleum that seeped from the ground in Pennsylvania
and New York State; it was sold for medicinal purposes under that
name and as Indian spring oil.
"Snake oil" actually derives from the folk belief in North America,
recorded from the start of the nineteenth century but presumably
older, that rattlesnake oil was a remedy for problems such as
rheumatism and croup. This is an early mention:
There is one article more, which, as some people deem
it a specific in the croup, it may not be improper to
mention, which is ... rattle-snake's oil, as it is
called.
[A Dissertation on Cynanche Trachealis, or Croup, by
Abraham Haskell, read before the annual meeting of the
Massachusetts Medical Society, 1812. Dr Haskell goes on to
mention its extremely fishy and nauseous taste.]
Similar beliefs have been widespread, but especially in traditional
Chinese medicine, in which oil from the Chinese sea snake (Laticauda
semifasciata) is used to treat arthritis and other joint pains. Some
writers say that snake oil and beliefs about its value were brought
to the US from the late 1840s by the Chinese immigrants who helped
build its railways, though the evidence is clear that Americans had
much earlier been using rattlesnake oil for similar purposes. Others
hold that the beliefs derive from the practices of native Americans
that were borrowed by immigrant settlers. They may be also be linked
to an earlier belief in Britain that preparations based on our only
venomous snake, such as viper oil, viper wine and viper jelly, would
cure various ills.
Chinese sea snake oil has recently been found to contain high levels
of omega-3 fatty acids, which can reduce inflammation, among other
benefits. However, rattlesnake oil doesn't contain them and its
value would never have been much better than a placebo.
Advertisements in US newspapers from the 1840s offer rattlesnake oil
for sale but editorial references are rare before the 1880s. Some
from that decade lament the decline in production of snake oil as a
rural craft, a small-scale seasonal occupation among countrymen, in
the north Pennsylvania mountains and the Ozarks in particular.
Hunters would go out in the early autumn to catch snakes and "try"
them - boil them to extract the oil, as whalers did with blubber -
or behead them and hang them in the sun to drain. Later reports
imply the craft was being industrialised, at least to some small
extent, with snake farms being set up to breed them and sell them on
to businesses that extracted and sold the oil. Though the snake oil
remedy was useless, these reports suggest that it was a legitimate
trade that provided the genuine article to customers who retained
their belief in it.
Some people still hold to curious old superstitions
concerning the curative properties of the oils of certain
animals; and to hear the druggists tell of the strange
articles called for by some of their customers is to be
reminded of the vagaries indulged in by the aboriginal
medicine man in his native wigwam. For instance, there are
persons who pin great faith still to the virtues of
rattlesnake oil, and who believe it is a specific for
rheumatic afflictions.
[Daily Globe (St Paul, Minnesota), 7 Jun. 1882.]
This belief provided an opening to hucksters selling products that
had never been near a snake. Some replaced rattlesnake oil with oil
from creatures such as raccoon, woodchuck, skunk or bear. Others
concocted a product from whatever was serviceable and cheap with no
concern for any medical effects, good or bad.
This is an early description of an itinerant mountebank of this
type, one who later became a cliché in westerns:
The scoff and jeer of the multitude turn from him as
water from the shining back of a duck. He always comes up
on top, beaming his perpetual smile, and asks who will
have the next bottle of ready-relief, pain-killer or
rattle-snake oil. The facility and rapidity of his speech
is phenomenal, and his fund of Billingsgate inexhaustible.
... [T]he traveling quack ... may be of some use in the
world, but like that of the fly and mosquito it is not
easy to say just in what it consists. Apparently his
success is based upon his enormous development of cheek,
in connection with that fixed element in human nature,
gullibility.
[Hagerstown Herald and Torch Light (Maryland), 14 Jul.
1880. "Billingsgate" refers to the London fish market,
whose porters were renowned for their invective and bad
language.]
A development was the travelling medicine show, in which a variety
of entertainments sugared the hard sell of the proprietor's nostrums
for curing every kind of ailment. They became common enough to be
unremarkable by the late nineteenth century and continued well into
the twentieth despite attempts to outlaw them. From the 1890s, their
rise was matched by the growth of print advertisements for what were
mistakenly called patent medicines: none were ever really patented,
because their makers would have had to list their ingredients. There
was a huge variety, those touted as snake oil being a significant
minority, but ones with seemingly miraculous powers.
An advertisement of 1891 urged readers to "Try one of Dr. Miles
Rattle's Snake Oil Pain Cure Plasters, the most powerful remedy for
external application". Another in Portland in 1903 stated that the
Great Yaquis Snake Oil Liniment "relieves instantaneously and cures
headaches, neuralgia, toothache, earache, backache, swellings,
sprains, sore chest, swelling of the throat, contracted cords and
muscles, stiff joints, wrenches, dislocations, cuts and bruises."
The proprietor of Dr Reese's Snake Oil Liniment in later years was
much more succinct, claiming simply that it would "cure any pain,
external or internal". Another for Miller's Antiseptic Oil in 1918,
also known as Snake Oil, argued that "Snake Oil is a mighty fine
thing to have sitting around the house. For colds and pains in the
chest, neuralgia, sore throat, cuts, burns, bruises, corns and
bunions and pains of all kinds, Snake Oil is a Godsend."
We can't say now whether any these products actually contained any
rattlesnake oil. Most surely didn't. One denunciator wrote of
the damnable curse of street fakirs, charlatans, and
patent-medicine venders [who] reap dollars from the sale
of snake oil, made of rot-gut whisky, a little ammonia and
tincture of iron.
[The Western Druggist, Jul. 1895. "Vender" is an old
spelling of "vendor". It may be relevant that "snake oil"
at about this time came to have a slang sense of low-grade
whisky.]
One notable example - Clark Stanley's Snake Oil - was analysed in
1915 and in the analyst's words was found to consist "principally of
a light mineral oil (petroleum product) mixed with about 1 per cent
of fatty oil (probably beef fat), capsicum, and possibly a trace of
camphor and turpentine."
It was findings like this following the Pure Food and Drug Act of
1906 that led to the term "snake oil" appearing in print in the
1920s as a symbol of fraud, although it had been understood for
decades by informed people that any hawker of something so called
was almost certainly a quack and his product a swindle.
The now-common term "snake oil salesman" was a little slower to
appear: the first recorded use I can find is dated 1933.
5. Sic!
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Rob Crompton found a sentence on the BBC website on 18 January about
Bristolian Lewis Clarke's attempt to become the youngest person to
reach the South Pole: "The challenge began on 2 December, two weeks
after his 16th birthday, and he is expected to reach the finish line
later." He commented that extreme cold slows a lot of things but
time just carries on.
An AP report of 17 January about Vatican actions against paedophile
priests was seen by Judith Reich and Stephen Brown. It read "Bishops
routinely moved problem priests from parish to parish rather than
subject them to canonical trials or turn them into police." Stephen
Brown commented, "I imagine the police were relieved."
Patrick Martin reports from Winchester: "The locals have been making
much sport with the sign in the window of a restaurant and take-away
that is shortly to open: 'kebabs, burgers, vegetarians, barbeque'.
Notices have been added that include 'only uses ethically sourced
vegetarians'."
6. Useful information
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