World Wide Words -- 26 Jul 14

[Michael Quinion]


World Wide Words
Issue 888: Saturday 26 July 2014

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


Feedback, Notes and Comments
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PRECRASTINATION.  "This is a wonderful word that we have long needed 
without knowing it," wrote Frederica Postman. "Doesn't everybody have 
a device to postpone the required tasks? Before I learned this word, I 
was just wasting time. Now I know I was precrastinating. Thank you for 
your informative and amusing newsletter."

"As an inveterate procrastinator of this particular sub-type," Cynthia 
Harvey emailed from Virginia, "I have discovered, and come to love, 
the term 'laterally productive' instead. I get all sorts of things 
done — just not the important stuff I "should" be doing. It is very 
difficult to break this habit."

John Mills wrote, "When I was studying music composition, the word 
'quill-sharpening' was used in a deprecatory way to describe getting 
ready to compose, rather than composing. I've been unable to find a 
reference to this usage on the Web. It does seem to be common in the 
context of writers, satirists and critics 'sharpening their pens' in 
anticipation of penning a trenchant attack on something."

Ron Witton recalled, "While travelling in India, I have heard fairly 
often the term 'prepone' as in 'Your flight has been preponed', 
meaning brought forward in time. It has happened sufficiently often 
for me to assume it is not an individual construct but a socially 
accepted word form." The verb is widely known in India and dates from 
the 1970s.

"Summer of 1969, aged 17," Henry Larsen recollects, "I was taken on at 
a factory as a seasonal helper. I was assigned to an old steamfitter 
by the name of Vern. Every Monday morning the foreman gave us all of 
our tasks for the week. My third or fourth week on the job, having 
settled in a bit and built up a little confidence, I looked at the new 
list and saw one particularly onerous job. In my youthful enthusiasm, 
I opined that we should do that one first and get it out of the way. 
'No', said Vern. 'Always do the easy jobs first. You never know, you 
might die before you get to the shit work'." Precrastination meets 
procrastination.

Alan Weyman says that he lives his life by the rule he calls 
"Mañanismo, ""Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day 
after tomorrow". He believes, as many people do, that Mark Twain 
invented it. I query such attributions on principle (this one has also 
been ascribed to Oscar Wilde and others) but it's half right. Garson 
O'Toole wrote about it on the Quote Investigator website; he 
discovered that Twain really is the source, in an article of 1870 
criticising the way Benjamin Franklin popularised folksy aphorisms. 
Twain created the saying as a comical instance of something that 
Franklin might have said. He would surely have hated its being 
credited to him as a humorous proverb worth repeating.

BOUNDING MAIN.  Pat Spaeth commented on one of the snippets of poetry 
I cited in the piece last week: "If you look a little earlier in the 
text, you'll see that your author knew little about the bounding main 
or sailing in general. The original verse starts: 'Heave ho, me lads, 
the wind blows free / A pleasant gale is on our lee.' First, I doubt a 
gale would ever be called 'pleasant'. And 'lee' means the side "away 
"from the wind (as in the Leeward Islands or in another song, 'bring 
your ship under our lee')." Beware landlubberish poetasters!


Lucubration
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Today a "lucubration" (or "lucubrations" — the word more often appears 
in the plural) is a derisive reference to a pedantic, over-elaborate 
or muddled attempt to make a point.

    But Coleridge was an unselfdisciplined monologist
    addict who left a few brilliant poems and poetic
    fragments behind him, along with a blather of sometimes
    suggestive but mainly inane lucubration.
    [A C Grayling, in the Financial Times, 14 Oct. 2006.]

"Lucubration" literally means thought, study or writing that has been 
undertaken by artificial light. Its origin is Latin "lux", light, via 
the stem of the verb "lūcubrāre", to work by lamplight. Imagine a 
scholar hunched beside a guttering flame, striving late into the night 
to get his ideas on paper. 

The word appeared first in English around the time of Shakespeare at 
the end of the sixteenth century. People soon started to use it for 
the result of the activity as well as the activity itself.

Unfortunately, as every student struggling against a deadline to write 
an essay will know, such burning of the midnight oil is likely to 
produce work that won't stand the light of day. Hence its current 
meaning.


Wordface
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CHANGING COLOURS.  Being a keen wine drinker, though an ill-informed 
one, I was delighted recently to have my knowledge expanded by coming 
across a French word that every English-speaking viticulturist seems 
to knows: "véraison". It refers to the point when grapes stop growing 
and start to ripen, in the process changing colour. It's from the 
obsolete French verb "vérir", to ripen, presumably influenced by 
"raisin", grape.

LOCAL EXPRESSIONS.  Susan Walker poses a query: "My father, who came 
from Warwickshire, often said 'If you come in late you'll get the 
slick side of the door.' I thought this was a common expression until 
people did not know what I was talking about. I believe it may be from 
old style doors having the crosshatch wood bars inside but the 
exterior smooth — thus if you come home late the door will be closed 
against you. My grandmother, also from Warwickshire, told me, when she 
thought I was not getting married young enough, 'You'll go round the 
orchard and come up with a crab apple.' I wonder if these are local 
Warwickshire sayings or known more widely?"


Blooper
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Q. From Dave McCombs, New Zealand:  Has the word "blooper" ever been 
traced to a source?

A. Yes, it has, and it's rather a surprising one.

We have to go back to the pioneering days of radio broadcasting in the 
US in the early 1920s. The primitive valve radios of those times 
suffered from a serious problem. To make them more sensitive, they fed 
back part of the amplified signal to the input. But if the user 
increased that feedback too far to try to pick up a weak station, the 
radio became a transmitter and blotted out reception for up to a mile 
around it.

If you've heard a public-address system screeching because somebody 
has put the microphone too near the loudspeaker, you'll have a very 
good idea of the experience for suffering nearby listeners. Two 
technical names for it are "positive feedback" and "oscillation"; it 
has many others (during my time at the BBC, the jargon term for it was 
"howl-round").

The same problem bedevilled the early days of the BBC. Its chief 
engineer, Peter Eckersley, used to go on air and entreat listeners not 
to be so anti-social as to allow their sets to transmit: "Is this 
fair? Is this British? Don't oscillate. Please don't oscillate. Don't 
do it." He did this so often that he was nicknamed "Don't Do It 
Eckersley".

Americans didn't call it oscillation, perhaps because it sounded a 
touch highfalutin. They named it "blooping". The perpetrator was a 
"blooper" and the noise was a "bloop". 

    Then some evening he wants to listen to a program clear
    through and the occassional [sic] "bloop" of his
    neighbors calls for his most blood-curdling curses.
    [Nevada State Journal, 16 Dec. 1923. ]

Nobody tried to explain where it came from at the time and nobody has 
managed to put forward an entirely satisfactory suggestion since. My 
guess, having heard lots of variations on the sound that feedback 
makes, is that the term imitated the noise in affected receivers, 
which probably wasn't a shriek or whistle but a rapidly pulsing howl 
that sounded vaguely like "bloooop ... bloooop ... bloooop".

The problem quickly grew worse as the number of sets mushroomed during 
the radio craze. The first example of "blooper" in print I've found is 
this, though for the sets rather than the perpetrators:

    On account, perhaps, of the word of warning that was
    published in yesterdays paper in connection with the
    announcement of the presidents speech against improper
    handling of the radio sets of the radiating type, or
    "blooper" sets as they are coming to be called there
    was less interference than has been noted heretofore.
    [Lubbock Morning Avalanche (Texas), 23 Apr. 1924. To
    cap the typos in the item, the headline to the story
    misspelled the word as "blopper". An early
    self-referential blooper.]

Everybody knew what bloopers were and everybody hated them. To 
accidentally bloop was an embarrassing error; to do it deliberately 
was a crime against your neighbours.

In the middle 1920s "blooper" was taken up by baseball. I am, as you 
know, no expert here, and so I rely on descriptions by experts to say 
that it's a sloppily hit ball that lofts into the gap between the 
infield and outfield for a base hit, an embarrassing error on the part 
of the fielding team.

    The Gambles tied it up in their half of the fourth when
    five hits and an error brought in four runs. Four of
    these hits were tantalizing "bloopers" which fell
    between the infielders and the outfielders about a yard
    inside of the left field foul line.
    [Freeport Journal Standard (Illinois), 27 Jun 1933.]

The sense of a verbal or written error or indiscretion began to appear 
in print around 1940 (a writer to the Racine Journal Times of 
Wisconsin in January 1940 used "bloopers" for the typographical 
mistakes that he had found in the paper). The following year "pull a 
blooper "appeared, to make an embarrassing mistake:

    We pulled a blooper, and we're sorry. Here we were told
    that Dave Henry lost to Axel Johnson when the two
    softball greats teamed up in the Southern California
    playoffs three seasons ago. Actually the reverse was
    the case.
    [Oxnard Press-Courier (Oxnard, California), 12 Jun.
    1941. ]

The specific sense of making a mistake before a microphone or camera 
is from movie jargon. The word started to appear in films in the early 
1930s with the coming of the talkies. The short-lived "blooping patch" 
was a black strip stuck on a film's optical soundtrack to cover the 
noise resulting from a splice. Compilations of errors in film, called 
"bloops", are known from the 1930s, initially for private enjoyment:

    But some of the nabobs of the films began collecting
    celluloid records of the "bloops" of which the screen
    players were guilty in reciting their lines, and so
    most of them now play safe with antics and verbal
    outbreaks that have become both unique and amusing.
    [Los Angeles Times, 15 Dec. 1935. ]

"Blooper" for such compilations became popular in the US in the 1950s 
through a series of records by a television producer named Kermit 
Schaefer under the general title Pardon My Blooper. "Blooper reel" was 
first used publicly of outtakes from Star Trek episodes in the early 
1970s.

The evidence suggests that all these usages can be traced back to 
those anti-social individuals who let their radios oscillate in the 
early 1920s.


Sic!
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Len Morrison found this headline on Google News, which was taken from 
the Birmingham Mail on 19 July: "Grandad hit by three bus lane tickets 
in Birmingham city centre." The story explained the man had received 
three fixed-penalty fines for driving in bus lanes.

An email offer Vance R Koven received from Groupon was headed "Apple 
iPad mini 32GB with WiFi, 14K Gold Swarovski Earrings, Men's Spiked 
Golf Shoes & More." His comment: "Talk about bells and whistles!"

Dana Cook Grossman contributed a sentence from an obituary in the 
Valley News of Vermont and New Hampshire with the comment, "He must 
have been quite a headstrong guy": "First thing in the morning Donal 
enjoyed using his skull to travel the perimeter of Pleasant Lake."

On 18 July the Atlantic online had a photo of Argentinean youths, who 
rioted after the World Cup final, trying to escape tear gas and a 
water cannon. Amy Briggs spotted that the caption ended, "Police said 
more than a dozen officers were injured and many more were arrested."

F J Bergmann reports that the Publishing Perspectives e-newsletter of 
23 July includes this: "Spanish author Javier Marias argues that while 
there are plenty of reasons not to write novels, there's one that is 
very important — a shot at immorality."


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