World Wide Words -- 03 Mat 14

[Michael Quinion]

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WORLD WIDE WORDS            ISSUE 880            Saturday 3 May 2014
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Opusculum.
3. Wordface.
4. Marthambles.
5. Sic!
6. Useful information.


1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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INFLAMMABLE  Graham Thomas commented: "Surely it is necessary only 
to know the verb 'to inflame' in order to be in no doubt as to the 
meaning of 'inflammable'?" That might seem so, but as "inflame" is 
used figuratively, the connection isn't especially obvious. That's 
true of "inflammation", too. Therefore, to answer Pádraig McCarthy, 
there's no risk of us being urged to use "flammatory language" or 
"anti-flammatory medication".

Jennifer Atkinson wrote from Tasmania: "During my working life as a 
pharmacist, Australia's legally required labelling of inflammable 
goods changed from 'inflammable' to 'flammable'. How interesting 
that the change had such good reasons and was not the 'modern 
silliness' that I objected to." Ronald Davis noted, "In Canada, most 
labels have to be in both official languages. Thus, one often sees 
the seemingly contradictory label containing both 'flammable' (in 
English) and 'inflammable' (in French)."

Kathy Phillips remarked, "While reading your comments I started 
wondering about 'debone' versus 'bone' in relation to cooking. Which 
term is correct, to bone a chicken or debone it? Or are these words 
interchangeable also?" My impression is that, in Britain, "bone" is 
easily the more often encountered. "Debone" is a comparatively 
recent introduction in North America, dating from the 1880s, and is 
much more common there. It's an odd formation because it implies 
that the opposite is also possible.


2. Opusculum  /@'pVskjUl at m/  (for key see http://wwwords.org/pr)
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In 2009, J C McKeown of the University of Wisconsin described his 
book Cabinet of Roman Curiosities as an opusculum, an assessment 
both appropriate and modest. An opusculum is a little work, usually 
a book

For most of us, "opusculum" means nothing, which disgusted the late 
Anthony Burgess. In one of his diatribes in old age lamenting the 
decline of education he challenged guests at his dinner table with 
idiolect, palinlogue, desquamation, lesbic, autophagous, inesculent, 
monophthongal, autocephalous, allomorph, strabismus ... and 
opusculum.

I may return to some of these another time, but for the moment must 
restrict myself to explaining that "opusculum" is the diminutive of 
Latin "opus". For the Romans, opus was any sort of labour, but it 
has come to mean an artistic work, in particular one on a large 
scale. We meet it most frequently in music but it can be used of 
books, paintings and other media. It appears also in magnum opus, 
literally "great work", the most important creation of an artist. 
Burgess would undoubtedly have known that if one were in the 
unlikely situation of wanting to discuss the most significant output 
of several artists, one should describe them as their magna opera. 

Though "opera" is the plural of "opus" it's rarely used that way, 
since "opera" has taken on a life of its own as a singular noun for 
the musical genre. This came about in Italian, in which it meant a 
composition in which poetry, dance, and music were combined, thus 
including several types of opus.

The plural of "opusculum" is "opuscula", which widely appears in 
scholarly contexts but is otherwise rare. 

    It is many years since Sir Sacheverell Sitwell's 
    Collected Poems appeared: more than 40, indeed. Since 
    then, a few privately printed opuscula have been 
    distributed among friends.
    [Financial Times, 7 Aug. 1982.]


3. Wordface
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PASSING ON  The term "hand-me-up" appeared in several UK newspapers 
this past week as the result of some research by the online retailer 
Pixmania. It's an obvious play on "hand-me-down", which is known 
from the early nineteenth century, but I'd no previous memory of it 
and was surprised to find that it's been around for decades. In the 
current sense, an early example appeared in BusinessWeek of July 
1998: "And more and more older users are joining the throng as PC 
prices fall and adult children give 'hand-me-up' computers to mom 
and dad." The recent usages relate to mobile phones which young 
people consider outdated but which parents and older relatives, less 
concerned with fashion, find useful. The term can be traced back 
still further, to 1986, in the related sense of people passing on 
items of clothing to older relatives. 

RIVER LOW, MOUNTAIN HIGH  There are about 7000 languages in the 
world. It has long been realised that their diversity, area for 
area, is much greater in Africa and the Asia-Pacific region than in 
Europe and the Americas. Jacob Bock Axelsen and Susanna Manrubia 
wondered to what extent environmental factors influence the 
distribution of languages. They made a detailed statistical analysis 
covering a large number of possible factors, including vegetation, 
temperature, rainfall, altitude and population density. They 
reported last week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society that - as 
common sense might suggest - the most important factors are rivers 
and mountains, which act as barriers and lead to isolation and the 
fragmentation of languages in the same way that they cause 
biological populations to create new species. Rivers can 
paradoxically also make communication easier, bringing languages 
together and promoting the creation of new ones.


4. Marthambles
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Q. I remember discussions we once had on a Patrick O'Brian list 
about his use of the word "marthambles" for a disease. We spent much 
time looking for its origin and meaning but couldn't uncover it. Did 
he make it up? [Ed McDevitt] 

A. The author Patrick O'Brian rarely invented words, as he was a 
careful and accurate researcher of all matters maritime and medical, 
though he did have an impish sense of humour. He seems to have been 
rather fond of "marthambles", using it in six of his naval stories 
about Captain Jack Aubrey and Dr Stephen Maturin. 

    He asked 'How is our fourth man?' meaning Abse, a 
    member of the afterguard, whose complaint was known as the 
    marthambles at sea and griping of the guts by land, a 
    disease whose cause Stephen did not know and whose 
    symptoms he could only render more nearly bearable by 
    opiates: he could not cure it.
    [The Nutmeg of Consolation, by Patrick O'Brian, 
    1991.]

However, O'Brian is seriously inconsistent. In The Surgeon's Mate, 
he says Maturin "had cured Mrs Broad, the landlady and an excellent 
plain cook, of the marthambles" and in Desolation Island the crew 
says he similarly cured Prince Billy of it (this is presumably 
Prince William Frederick, great-nephew of George III, widely known 
as Silly Billy). Another surgeon claims in The Wine-Dark Sea that 
the disease is "as deadly as measles or the smallpox to islanders". 
We are left ignorant of the nature of the ailment and how serious it 
really is. There's a good reason for that - it's not a real disease.

Other examples of the word are on record. Dorothy Dunnett included 
it in her historical novel The Ringed Castle of 1971. It also turns 
up in an article on quackery in the issue of the American Medical 
Gazette for May 1859. It quotes a seventeenth-century medical faker 
named Tom Jones, whose words were reproduced in The Harangues or 
Speeches of Several Famous Mountebanks in Town and Country of 1690:

    These quacks may fitly be called soliniates, because 
    they prescribe only one kind of physic, for all 
    distempers: that is, a vomit. If a man has bruised his 
    elbow, take a vomit, says the doctor. If you have any 
    corns, take a vomit. If he has torn his coat, take a 
    vomit. For the jaundice, fever, flux, gripes, gout, - nay, 
    even the distempers that only my friend the famous Dr. 
    Tuff, whom you all know, knows as the hocognicles, 
    marthambles, the moonpauls, and the strongfives, - a 
    vomit; tantum.
    [I can find no other example of "soliniate"; "tantum" 
    is medical Latin from "tantus", meaning "so much".]

The famous Dr Tuff must be the same mountebank that O'Brian refers 
to in an interview printed in the Patrick O'Brian Newsletter in 
March 1994:

    Marthambles is a very fine word that I found in a 
    quack's pamphlet of the late 17th or early 18th century 
    advising a nostrum that would cure not only 'the strong 
    fires' and a whole variety of more obvious diseases but 
    the marthambles too. I have never seen it anywhere else 
    and it has escaped the OED.

It turns out, with the help of C J S Tompson's The Quacks of Old 
London of 1928, that Dr Tuff was really Dr Tufts. Tufts produced a 
pamphlet in 1675 that has several times been reproduced:

    There is newly arrived from his travels, a gentleman, 
    who, after above forty years' study, hath, by a wonderful 
    blessing on his endeavours, discovered, as well the nature 
    as the infallible cure of several strange diseases, which 
    (though as yet not known to the world) he will plainly 
    demonstrate to any ingenious artist, to be the greatest 
    causes of the most common distempers incident to the body 
    of man. The names of which take as follow: The strong 
    fives, The marthambles, The moon-pall, The hockogrocle. 
    Now, though the names, natures, symptoms, and several 
    cures of these diseases, are altogether unknown to our 
    greatest physicians, and the particular knowledge of them 
    would (if concealed) be a vast advantage to the aforesaid 
    person; yet, he well knowing that his country's good is to 
    be preferred to his private interest, doth hereby promise 
    all sorts of people, a faithful cure of all or any of the 
    diseases aforesaid, at as reasonable rates as our modern 
    doctors have for that of any common distemper.
    [As quoted in Ten Thousand Wonderful Things, by Edmund 
    Fillingham King, 1860. King slightly modified the spelling 
    and orthography of the original.]

Marthambles - later also spelled markambles - was an invention by Dr 
Tufts to frighten patients into paying for his useless nostrums. He 
wasn't alone in his trickery - others in the same period created the 
bonny scrubs, the glimmering of the gizzard, the quavering of the 
kidneys, and the wambling trot as ailments worthy of their well-paid 
attention.

Patrick O'Brian slyly bamboozled his readers with his various 
statements about its nature. Fair enough, it was mythical, after 
all. But I wonder at his failure to borrow "hockogrocle".


5. Sic!
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Lyn Mehl records that at the end of an article in the May-June issue 
of Dogs Naturally a brief biography of the author stated: "She lives 
in York, Maine with her husband, two dogs and two cats; they are all 
rescues."

The Daily Mail's website could keep this section in material by 
itself. Stewart Hartley found this sentence in a report of 24 April 
about the owner of the South Korean ferry that recently sank: "Last 
night, police were seen leaving Byung-eun's home with cardboard 
boxes and a church which Byung-eun is said to have an interest in."

Sometime last week there was a discussion on BFBS Forces Radio in 
Cyprus about a Commonwealth War Graves cemetery. Pattie Tancred 
heard the announcer inform his listeners that there is a "section 
reserved for personnel who died in both the First and Second World 
Wars."

Max Jackson sent a link to an article on Business Insider dated 24 
April about the Google co-founder Larry Page: "Google's human 
resources boss, a serious woman with bangs named Stacey Sullivan, 
thought Page's plan was nuts."

An unfortunately worded item on the Market Research Reports website 
startled Bernard Robertson-Dunn: "Healthcare is clearly becoming an 
area where key killer applications emerge." And Steve Colby noted 
this headline on the Daily Caller website: "Feds Might Slash Funding 
As Exploding Medicaid Applicants Struggle To Enroll."

A Sky News website item on 29 April surprised Stephen Brown: "Almost 
one in 10 heads and senior staff who responded said in the past year 
a child aged between five and seven had worn a nappy to school. The 
figure was 5% for classroom teachers."


6. Useful information
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