World Wide Words -- 31 May 14
Michael Quinion
michael.quinion at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Thu May 29 22:02:00 UTC 2014
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WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 884 Saturday 31 May 2014
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Gyre.
3. Skeleton in the closet.
4. Sic!
5. Useful information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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HOLIDAY BREAK I'm away for a while and so there will be no issues
during June. The next will be on 5 July.
NUCIFORM Several readers pointed out that there was nothing odd in
Nehemiah Grew's creation of "nuciprune" for the walnut, implying a
fruit halfway between a nut and a plum. Fresh from the tree, walnuts
are enclosed in nubbly green outer flesh and resemble unripe plums.
Candida Frith-Macdonald commented, "Almonds are similarly wrapped in
flesh, and fuzz, being the nutty cousin of the peach and apricot.
But for the oddest of all, look at the Brazil nut fruit, a real
master of disguise."
ARSE VERSUS ELBOW Ray Heindl commented on my item about errors
being introduced when scanning printed documents: "An OCR [optical
character recognition] error is sometimes called a 'scanno', by
analogy with 'typo'. There are also 'spellcheckos', caused by
blindly accepting a spellchecker's suggestions."
Robert Nathan wrote, "Converting printed contracts and other
documents into editable text frequently results in what a former
secretary aptly dubbed 'devilspeak'. I encountered the cited mis-
transcription of 'arms' [into anus] in scanning an early bound copy
of Lewis Carroll's Through The Looking Glass, when, in Jabberwocky,
the invitation extended to 'my beamish boy' took on an unforeseen
and particularly salacious meaning."
2. Gyre
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Many people seeing this word would at once recall Lewis Carroll's
poem Jabberwocky from Through the Looking-Glass: "'Twas brillig, and
the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe."
You might enjoy the version created some years ago by the British
satirical columnist Miles Kington in the style of Raymond Chandler:
Outside in the street, the first lights had come on and
the slithy toves were doing whatever they do in the wabe.
Some days they gyre, some days they gimble. It's no skin
off my nose, but I wish they'd make their minds up, then
we could all rest easy.
When the toves gyre they spin around, revolve or whirl, an animal
impersonation of a whirling dervish. You might link it to "gyrate"
or "gyroscope", which would be appropriate, since all three words
are from the same source, the Greek "guros", a ring or circle. As a
noun "gyre" means a spiral or vortex. Geographers use it for a
circular pattern of currents in an ocean basin, such as the North
Pacific gyre, which has become infamous as a perennially rotating
mass of unrottable plastic rubbish. Like "gyrate" and "gyroscope",
"gyre" is said with a soft "g".
No one, by the way, is sure what slithy toves do when they gimble.
It was one of Carroll's lesser linguistic inventions and hasn't
caught on. Humpty Dumpty, Carroll's alter ego, suggested they were
making holes like a gimlet with their corkscrew noses. Carroll might
also have had "gambol" in mind, or perhaps gimbal, a contrivance for
keeping an instrument such as a compass horizontal in a moving
vessel. If so, pace Miles Kington, toves must simultaneously gyre
and gimble, spinning to stay balanced.
3. Skeleton in the closet
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Q. I can understand why a skeleton in the closet should mean an
embarrassing fact that's best kept secret, but how did it come into
existence? [Martin Sturmer]
A. Being British, my figurative skeletons are in a cupboard rather
than a closet. I learned the idiom that way in childhood, a form
that's still the more common one, though the version with "closet"
is also found.
Such hidden embarrassments aren't limited to family disgrace or
private misdemeanour:
RBS chief Stephen Hester has gone as far as he can to
prepare expectations that the bailed-out bank will be
slapped with a big fine when watchdogs around the globe
finally finish their investigations into the manipulation
of interest rates. But Libor is not the only skeleton in
the cupboard for this industry.
[Observer, 28 Oct. 2012.]
A tale often repeated links the phrase to the difficulties surgeons
faced, before the passing of the Anatomy Act of 1832, in obtaining
cadavers for teaching students. They sometimes did so illegally, as
the famous case of Burke and Hare made very public. After bodies had
been thoroughly dissected, so the story goes, the surgeons had to
hide the skeletons, as they were evidence of a crime. It's sometimes
suggested instead that it arose from a murder in a family in which
the body had been hidden away, only later to be found in a mummified
state, close enough to a skeleton for folkloric purposes. We may
disregard these tales.
The idea that a skeleton was a figurative representation of a secret
shame was once thought to be the inspiration of William Makepeace
Thackeray, who wrote in an article in Punch in 1845 that "There is a
skeleton in every house." In a novel ten years later, The Newcomes;
Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family, he wrote, "It is from these
that we shall arrive at some particulars regarding the Newcome
family, which will show us that they have a skeleton or two in their
closets, as well as their neighbours."
However, we now know that it appeared much earlier in the century:
In these, as in many other highly important questions,
men seem afraid of enquiring after truth; cautions on
cautions are multiplied, to conceal the skeleton in the
closet or to prevent its escape.
[A Philosophical Treatise on the Hereditary
Peculiarities of the Human Race, by Joseph Adams, 1815,
quoted in a review by an anonymous physician in the
Eclectic Review of November 1816. This is the first work
that set out modern principles of genetic inheritance;
Adams is discussing the shame associated with congenital
disease.]
So the original form is actually "closet". The earliest example of
the "cupboard" version I can find is in the Morning Post in October
1858 and then as the title of a book by Lady Harriet Anne Scott in
1860.
Why the shift? At the time the phrase first appeared, "closet" in
British English could mean either a cupboard or a private room for
retirement or study. My impression is that though the verb survived,
the noun "closet" slowly fell out of use in both senses in Britain
during the nineteenth century, perhaps because the rise of "water
closet" (WC), using "closet" in the sense of a small private room,
made it a less suitable word for polite conversation in Victorian
times.
For whatever reason, the shift didn't take place in the US, where
"closet" has always been dominant, with "cupboard" a lesser used
variant. The partial shift back towards "closet" in the UK seems to
be the result of American influence.
4. Sic!
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Tom DeLorey advises us that on 22 May the Denver Post reported on
the bad weather in Colorado, "Both storms were driven by the way
warm air flows into the metro area from the south and east because
of typography of the surrounding region."
A report that Mark Anderson read on the BBC website on 28 May about
genericide, the loss of a trademark by a company because it had
become a general term, had this to say: "German pharmaceutical firm
Bayer was forced to give up its rights to the Aspirin trademark in
the Treaty of Versailles, in 1919, which followed its defeat in
World War One."
A piece on the Telegraph site dated 19 May about Spain's new traffic
laws surprised George R Francisco with this sentence: "It is quite
common to witness car occupants swerving between lanes at speed
without indicating."
"As long as they can count," was Bernard Robertson-Dunn's comment on
a job advertisement for a numerical analyst he saw on the Fish4Jobs
site: "We are looking for individuals who understands the importance
of customer relationships and who is solution focused with excellent
communication skills."
Margaret Vowles tells us that in the Sunday Times magazine article,
A Life in the Day, of 18 May, Jane Percy, Duchess of Northumberland,
said of her daughter "Our eldest, Catherine, is a country girl and
an expert on birds who can mend guns."
5. Useful information
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