World Wide Words -- 02 Aug 14

[Michael Quinion]

World Wide Words
Issue 889: Saturday 2 August 2014

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


Feedback, Notes and Comments
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PLEASANT GALES.  Following up the comment last week by Pat Spaeth 
about a poem with the line "A pleasant gale is on our lee", arguing 
that there can be no such thing as a pleasant gale at sea, readers 
pointed out that the meaning of "gale" hasn't always been the same as 
our modern one. The Oxford English Dictionary notes Dr Johnson's 
definition, "a wind not tempestuous, but stronger than a breeze", and 
records that in poetical language it could mean a gentle breeze. 
Several readers mentioned a well-known example in Alexander Pope's 
poem "Summer": "Where-e'er you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade". 
The OED also has several early examples in seafaring contexts of 
"pleasant gale". In An Accidence, a book for young seamen of 1626, 
John Smith gave a set of names for winds of increasing strength: "A 
calme, a brese, a fresh gayle, a pleasant gayle, a stiffe gayle".  
John Robertson's The Elements of Navigation of 1772 asserted that "A 
common brisk gale is about 15 miles an hour." On the Beaufort scale, a 
moderate gale (force 7) is at least twice that speed and a whole gale 
(force 10) averages about 60 mph, which seems to confirm that a "gale" 
now blows more fiercely than it used to.

BLOOPER.  As expected, readers corrected my knowledge of baseball. 
Professor Laurence Horn emailed from Yale: "Not to rub it in, but your 
modesty about your baseball expertise is, I fear, as well-deserved as 
it is becoming. A blooper (aka "Texas leaguer") is not an embarrassing 
error for the fielders, or at least not necessarily." Richard 
Hershberger explained, "It is a poorly hit weak fly ball that 
ordinarily would be easily caught, but through luck lands where no 
fielder can reach it. The embarrassment is to the batter, as nobody 
makes such a hit on purpose.  The embarrassment is, however, 
considerably lessened by getting on base safely."

Jeremy Shaw and Roger Johnson asked about the closely similar but 
independently created "bloomer", known in Britain and Australia, 
though now rather dated. The evidence suggests that it appeared in 
Australia in the late nineteenth century as a contraction of "blooming 
error", where "blooming" is a much older euphemism for "bloody". Its 
earliest record is in the Dictionary of Slang, Jargon and Cant by 
Albert Barrère and Charles Godfrey Leland, published in Edinburgh in 
1889. They say that it began as Australian prison slang.

VÉRAISON.  I made a minor blooper or bloomer myself last week by 
suggesting that the creation of "véraison" was influenced by "raisin", 
grape. Readers told me that it is indeed derived from the obsolete 
French verb "vérir", as I explained, but by adding the agent suffix "-
aison". Any similarity to "raisin" is accidental.


Epilimnion
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Have you ever swum in the warm water of a lake in summer and found 
when treading water that your feet suddenly became uncomfortably cold? 
If so, you experienced something that "limnologists", experts on 
lakes, describe by the rather splendid and poetic-sounding pair 
"epilimnion" and "hypolimnion".

When the sun heats a smallish body of water, the topmost layer of 
water warms up, but because warm water is less dense than cold, it 
stays on top. That top area is the epilimnion. The cold water below 
it, which may not warm up much during the summer if the lake is at all 
deep, is the hypolimnion.

The root of both "epilimnion" and "hypolimnion" is the classical Greek 
"limnion", the diminutive of "limnē", a lake. "Limnologist" and the 
subject of study, "limnology", are very closely related — they derive 
from "limnē". "Epi-" is Greek for upon or above, while "hypo-" is from 
Greek "hupo", under.

The epilimnion and hypolimnion are separated by a thinnish layer where 
the temperature drops quickly. You might guess this is sometimes 
called the "metalimnion" (Greek "meta-", with or across), though it's 
commonly referred to as the "thermocline".

Most examples of "epilimnion" are in scientific contexts, though it 
also crops up very occasionally in SF:

    The brown sphere was spotted after some days by a
    prowling ameba, quiescent in the eternal winter of the
    bottom. Down there the temperature was always an even
    4°, no matter what the season, but it was unheard of
    that a spore should be found there while the high
    epilimnion was still warm and rich in oxygen. 
    [Surface Tension, by James Blish, 1952.]

If you should ever need the adjective, it's "epilimnetic".


Wordface
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SUCH ODD. MUCH CUTE. SO PASSING FAD.  The internet phenomenon of 
"doge" has been fashionable for some months now and has attracted the 
interest of linguists. It originally tagged pictures of the Japanese 
dog breed shiba inu (in multicoloured Comic Sans font), so the name is 
a deliberate misspelling of "dog" (no link with the one-time ruler of 
Venice; don't ask how it's said as wars have been started over less 
and the consensus seems to be "any way you want"). Doge pairs a 
modifier and a noun to create a dissonant phrase. The main doge 
modifiers are "much", "many", "so", "very", "such", plus three words 
that can be used by themselves: "wow", "amaze" and "excite". Typical 
phrases are "very eat", "much grumpy", "so trick", which usually have 
meaning only when written on a photo. But I found a retelling of 
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet in doge, which begins:

    What light. So breaks. Such east. Very sun. Wow, Juliet.
    What Romeo. Such why. Very rose. Still rose.
    Very balcony. Such climb.
    Much love. So propose. Wow, marriage.

What interests linguists is that it's much more than just bad English. 
It has a strict grammar that deliberately subverts the standard one. 
You have to have a sophisticated intuitive understanding of English to 
write good doge. A newbie user wrote "Much respect. So noble" and was 
immediately corrected because it was too conventional — it should be 
"Much noble. So respect." An article in the Daily Telegraph in 
February was headlined, "Doge: such grammar. Very rules. Most 
linguistics. Wow", which pretty much sums it up.

BARRED ENTRY. Angry items have appeared in British newspapers about 
the phenomenon of "poor doors" in London. The developers of blocks of 
luxury flats in the capital are required to set aside part for lower-
income families, under the title of "affordable housing". The press 
was commenting on the practice of providing separate entrances to such 
flats, without the reception and concierge facilities provided to 
richer tenants and even separating rubbish disposal and postal 
deliveries. The term "poor doors", a neat rhyming construction, is 
said to have been coined in 2013 for the same phenomenon in New York.


Nail
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Q. "From Peter Heimler:" One word that has always puzzled me is 
"nail". Why is the thing on the end of our fingers called the same as 
the thing that fixes wood together? It would end years of wondering if 
you would be so kind as to get to the bottom of this.

A. The connection is ancient. It appears in one of the first  
documents in English, dating from the early eighth century. 

The text, in the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College in 
Cambridge, has become known as the Corpus Glossary. It's a list of 
Latin words with their Old English equivalents. "Nail" is included 
twice in its Old English form "naegl", once to translate a variant of 
the classical Latin "unguis" for a finger or toe nail, the other the 
words "paxillum" and "palum" for a wooden pin or peg.

The experts say that "naegl" derives from a prehistoric Indo-European 
root that became not only "unguis" but also Greek "onux" and other 
words of the same meaning in most of the languages of Europe.

The original senses of the Latin and Greek words could be a finger or 
toe nail, but both were also used for the horny endings of the toes of 
cattle, horses, birds and other beasts, for which we now have the 
separate words "hoof", "claw" and "talon". 

A link in shape between claws and pointed fasteners of wood or metal 
seems to have been established in prehistory, centuries before it was 
written down in the Corpus Glossary.


Sic!
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Catherine Pantsios and Keith Underwood mentioned a New York Times 
article on 27 July about marketing toys to diverse demographics: 
"'Right now there are more multicultural children being born under the 
age of 5,' said Lisa Williams, chief executive of World of EPI."

The Northbrook Tower, which covers a suburb of Chicago, intrigued 
Douglas Downey on 24 July: "Smeltzer said the fire was distinguished 
'within the first 10 minutes' of arrival by utilizing two hose lines."

David Coe told us about a brief story in the Sarasota Herald Tribune 
of 30 July about Crayola Inc that mentioned: "Mike Perry, the 111 year 
old company's chief executive officer."

A front-page story in the Comox Valley Echo of 29 July caused Peter 
Blackmore to wonder how the aircraft ever got off the ground: "The 
fights follows ["sic"]  the success during the Shellfish Festival in 
June when more than 100 people took to the sky in one of the company's 
14-seat DHC-3 Single Otter planes."

Joel Berson reported on another list that Trader Joe recently issued a 
recall notice for its California stone fruits, listing the products 
concerned with the helpful heading "Sold Individually (by the each)".

Thanks to Nick Willmott we know that the BBC online news for South 
West Wales of 25 July had this quote: "We have some really rampant 
gulls in Tenby, viciously attacking people with ice cream or chips."  

Lynn Whinery found this caption on the CNN website on 31 July: "A 
truck carrying an unsecured ax flew through the windshield of the 
vehicle driving behind it down the highway. Luckily, no injuries."


6. Useful information
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published by Michael Quinion in the UK. ISSN 1470-1448. Copyediting 
and advice are provided by Julane Marx, Robert Waterhouse, John 
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