WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 393 Saturday 22 May 2004 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Sent each Saturday to 19,000+ subscribers in at least 120 countries Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448 ------------------------------------------------------------------- To reply to this mailing, select "reply" in your mail program or create a new message to TheEditor@worldwidewords.org . Please include "XYZZY" somewhere in your subject line. Contents ------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Feedback, notes and comments. 2. Turns of Phrase: Interesterification. 3. Sic! 4. Weird Words: Megilp. 5. Noted this week. 6. Q&A: Over a barrel; Nineteen to the dozen. A. Subscription commands. B. Useful URLs. 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- JUMP THE SHARK In response to my query whether this American slang phrase had an existence outside television, a number of subscribers said they had encountered it in the political arena in reference to a politician whose policies (to borrow another allusion) were past their sell-by date, or to an event in a candidate's campaign that marked the effective end of their hopes of election. Ethan de Seife e-mailed thus: "Here in the midwestern US, at least, the phrase 'jump the shark' surely does refer to the point at which anything - not just a TV show - goes irrevocably downhill. Moreover, there seems to be a consensus that 'jump the shark' itself has jumped the shark." And many subscribers pointed out that Fonzie didn't jump a shark tank on a motorcycle but water-skied over a shark in a bay. SEASON VERSUS SERIES A minor difference of terminology caused many subscribers to e-mail me. I mentioned the fourth series and fifth series of West Wing. This is the usual British way of describing a set or group of programmes run consecutively, for which the usual American term is "season". ME AND I Lots of classically trained grammarians among subscribers jumped on me for writing "Many subscribers better versed than me in Shakespeare ..." last week, pointing out that it ought to be "than I". It's worth taking a moment over this, not just so I can justify myself, but because it illustrates a subtle grammatical point. In a sentence such as "Diana has better manners than I", the word "than" is a conjunction, implying there's a hidden "have" after "I". On the other hand, in "Diana has better manners than me", "than" is a preposition, which requires the object case. So you can argue from grammar that either is correct. However, style guides agree that the latter construction appears mainly in relaxed and informal situations. This newsletter surely is one of those. A closely similar problem occurs with pronouns after "but", when that word means "except". Only two subscribers queried what I wrote in the piece on gadzooks in the same issue: "Nobody but he these days utters this word ...". Is "but" a conjunction, which would require "he" (as I had it), or is it a preposition, which would require "him"? Fowler says the situation is ambiguous and that the best way out is to use the subject case when the "but" is before the verb (as it is in this instance) and the object case when it lies after it (so if I had written, "Nobody utters the word these days but him", that too would have fitted Fowler's rule). Other style guides generally agree. LYKE WAKE WALK In referring to this walk in my little squib on the word dirger last week, I might have mentioned that the name of the walk was almost certainly taken from the poem, A Lyke-Wake Dirge, an anonymous seventeenth-century work. 2. Turns of Phrase: Interesterification ------------------------------------------------------------------- This jargon term of the food-processing industry is not yet, as far as I know, in any dictionary. But it is one that has been turning up more frequently in the past few years as a result of increasing concern over side-effects of the technologies that produce some of the processed foods we eat. Manufacturers of products such as cakes and biscuits need fats in solid form, but unsaturated fats usually occur as liquids, so makers have commonly converted them to solids by hydrogenation. The problem is that some of the fat is converted to a type called trans fat, which humans can't easily digest. As a result, firms are instead starting to turn to interesterification, in which acids or enzymes modify the fats to make them solid. (The name comes about because the component fatty acids in the oils are combined with organic groups and are so technically esters; these are shifted about within the oil molecules during the reaction.) The process has been known for at least the last two decades, but is slowly becoming commercially viable. Some critics claim it is open to similar objections to the older hydrogenation method. A variant spelling, interestification, sounds as though it might be something that enhances your interest in a subject. It's certainly a process being carefully watched by nutritionists. 3. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- Peter Carnell is a freelance copywriter who naturally takes a keen interest in the way that rivals promote themselves online. He was delighted to find this finely honed text on one British Web site: "If you've not used a professional copywriting service before, you need to talk to [name deleted to protect the guilty]. We'll show the devastating impact that lively and totally memorable copy can have on your staff, customers, prospects and profits!" "There is a Latin American restaurant not far from where I live," Margie Nathanson e-mailed from Pennsylvania. "A local paper wrote a review that, overall, was good. However, this line caught my eye: 'A good first impression is made by the basket of hot pressed Cuban sandwich rolls or a bowel of nachos and salsa.' Maybe I won't eat there after all." Carl Bridge, who lives in Staffordshire, spotted a temporary road sign on the main road into his village which warned that traffic was just about to encounter "Slow workforce in road". A warning to be careful of your suffixes, from an editorial in the Guardian on Thursday: "Fortunately it soon became clear that the substance thrown at Tony Blair from the guest balcony of the Commons chamber by campaigners on behalf of Fathers 4 Justice was nothing more harmless than purple flour." 4. Weird Words: Megilp ------------------------------------------------------------------- An outmoded painting medium. How to make an art conservator shudder: mention megilp. It was a medium popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. You made it by mixing a mastic resin (which comes from a Mediterranean tree that's related to the pistachio) with linseed oil that had been boiled with a lead compound. This produced a jelly-like substance. Painters of the time loved it because it made paint easier to work and quicker to dry and gave a rich, "buttery" quality to colours it was mixed with. An eighteenth-century writer said that it "produces that warmth and serenity which characterizes the peculiar merit of Claude Lorraine". The problem is that in time it turns the paint yellow or brown and makes it so brittle that it cracks. If you've wondered why paintings by J M W Turner no longer have the luminous quality they reportedly had when first painted, blame megilp. For these very good reasons, nobody uses it any more. Where the name comes from is not known; the term appears about 1760 with no clue to its origins. It's also a rather rare surname, and some say that it may have been named after its inventor. This seems unlikely, because it has been written in many ways, including majellup and McGilp. 5. Noted this week ------------------------------------------------------------------- EDIACARAN It was pleasant to hear this week that a word geologists have been using for four decades now has an official meaning. The International Stratigraphic Commission, part of the International Union of Geological Sciences, has just decided that the geological period from 600 to 542 million years ago is officially to be called the Ediacaran, and not the Vendian, the name that some scientists, in particular those in Russia, have preferred. The decision ends 8 years of deliberation. The official name commemorates the Ediacara Hills in South Australia, north of Adelaide, whose rocks contain beautifully preserved fossils of animals from that time. 6. Q&A ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. Last week, you mentioned the expression to have somebody over a barrel, meaning to have that person at your mercy. However obvious it may seem, I would like to know the precise source of this metaphor. [Norm Brust] A. It might not be that obvious. My first reference point, as so often, was the Oxford English Dictionary, which finds the first occurrence of the expression in Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep of 1939: "Some day you might use that gun again. Then you'd be over a barrel." This makes it sound as though the barrel in question is that of a gun, but - as we shall see - Chandler is making a joke on a saying that, notwithstanding the OED, was at that time already well known. The OED suggests that the allusion is to placing a person rescued from drowning over a barrel to clear their lungs of water. This might sound rather unlikely, but there are many references in the literature to show this was once a common practice, as for example in The Flying U's Last Stand by B M Bower (1915): "Then they began to work over him exactly as if he had been a drowned man, except that they did not, of course, roll him over a barrel." An article in the Trenton Times of New Jersey in August 1885 that explained how to resuscitate a person warned against the technique, clearly a traditional one: "In the first place they should be brought in face downwards, and then laid upon their faces, so that their heads are lower than the nether parts of their bodies, and the water they have swallowed can go out. There need be no rough action to secure this result. In fact, the rolling of a person over a barrel or other rough exercise might be the means of killing them." The figurative expression is much older than the OED was able to discover - the earliest I've been able to turn up is this from the Woodland Daily Democrat of California, dated January 1896: "To use a vulgar expression, a Republican congress gleefully assembled in Washington for the express purpose of getting President Cleveland 'over a barrel.' The humiliating predicament in which the aforesaid congress now finds itself is ample evidence that Mr. Cleveland has beaten it at its own game." I'm also unsure about the claimed source. There are instances recorded from this period and earlier of a person being placed on or rolled over a barrel as a humiliating punishment. One case was that of a student hazing at a college in Ohio, reported in the Frederick Daily News in Maryland in 1886: "Once inside he was at the mercy of his captors, and the treatment he received was cruel. Bound hand and foot, he was rolled over a barrel." This is by far the more likely origin, since a person held over a barrel is helpless, whether face down or face up. It fits the meaning of the phrase much better than the resuscitation one does. ----------------- Q. A dog came to visit my work today. He was very excited at being in a new place with lots of people to greet. This was evident in his bobbed tail wagging so fast it became a blur! One of our clients, a polite Brit of 80-odd years, commented, "Oh look at its tail! It's going forty to the dozen!" She was unable to give an explanation of the meaning of that phrase. And it's certainly one that isn't used in Northern Arkansas, USA. Any ideas? [Karen J Mora] A. Inflation is everywhere, it seems, even in language. The usual form is nineteen to the dozen; on occasion I've come across twenty to the dozen, but never forty. It's now perhaps a little old- fashioned as a British expression, though you can still find examples in newspapers and daily speech. The usual meaning, as you will have gathered, is to do something at a great rate. It most often refers to speed of speaking, as in this instance from the Daily Mail of 23 October 2003: "Talking nineteen to the dozen, her conversation is still peppered with outrageous references and bawdy asides." The idea is that the rate of talking is so great that when other people say merely a dozen words, the speaker gets in 19. It's also sometimes used to describe rapid heartbeat in times of danger, and to refer to other fast-moving or fast-changing things (like dogs' tails). Nobody seems to have the slightest idea why 19 is the traditional number to use here, but it has been in that form ever since it was first recorded in the eighteenth century. A. Subscription commands ------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the list, change your subscription address, or subscribe, please visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/index.htm . 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