WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 440 Saturday 14 May 2005 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Sent each Saturday to 23,000+ subscribers in at least 120 countries Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Contents ------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Feedback, notes and comments. 2. Weird Words: Fustigate. 3. Sic! 4. Book review: Word Map. 5. Q&A: Enquire versus inquire. 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- NIPPERKIN Several subscribers mentioned that "nip", the short form of "nipperkin" that I wrote about last week, is not only a casual term for a small amount of spirits but is actually a legal measure in Australia and New Zealand, of size 30ml. Others noted that barley wine, no doubt because of its strength, used to be sold in small bottles, usually one-third of a pint; these were also called nips. Some US breweries sell their strong brews in bottles of seven ounces, which is also about one-third of a pint, which likewise are called nips. Others mentioned that in New England, and possibly in other places, "nip" is a term for the smallest bottle of spirits or a miniature (though the old slang term "nip joint" recorded in the OED - an establishment illegally selling small amounts of spirits - would now seem to be defunct). Several correspondents pointed out that in some versions of the Barley Mow song the nipperkin is an even smaller size, one-quarter of a gill or 1/32 of a pint! But then it does seem to have varied a lot down the years: Captain Grose's slang dictionary of 1811 says it was half a pint. Warren Jamison commented: "When I first saw 'nipperkin', I thought it was a useful collective term for one's small fry descendants and relatives. I intend to so use it." As it happens, there is a mainly British colloquial term for a child, especially a boy: "nipper". Many people asked whether this is related. It looks as though it might be, but it comes from a different source. The word actually derives from the informal British verb "to nip", to move quickly ("I'll just nip down to the shops for some bread."). 2. Weird Words: Fustigate ------------------------------------------------------------------- To cudgel or beat. This word was described back in 1896, when its entry was published in the Oxford English Dictionary, as "humorously pedantic". These days "fustigate" is mainly fodder for lists of difficult or rare words. But then the word hasn't had a particularly extensive or distinguished history - it only came into the language around 1650 and even in its prime it was always rather an uncommon or literary word. Its creators took it from the Latin verb "fustigare", to cudgel to death (from "fustis", a staff or club). Sir Richard Burton used it in the 1880s in his translation of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (better known as the Arabian Nights Entertainment): "And she bade them bash me; so they beat me on my ribs and the marks ye saw are the scars of that fustigation." A writer in the Living Age in 1896 used it figuratively for severely criticising somebody or something. He wrote of Matthew Arnold's "fustigation of dummy opponents" as part of his style. This figurative sense survives to some extent. It appeared in the Rocky Mountain News in 2001: "Actually, most of today's complaints seem weak and whiny, almost apologetic. They lack the scorn and vitriol the writers evidently feel in their hearts. So - just this once, at the dawning of a new year - let me pass along a sample of real fustigation from real experts, a no-nonsense, in-your-face style for local critics to aim for." 3. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- Chris Brown poses an existential query that has occurred to many British drivers: "Have you ever noticed those road signs, found for example at a car park entrance or approaching a junction, that say 'Use both lanes'? Am I supposed to straddle the line down the middle or weave from side to side?" "One of the public gardens in our neighborhood," e-mailed Valerie Mann from British Columbia, "hosts a plant sale every year. My husband and I happened to trip across a sign for a particular plant that apparently has poisonous leaves. So the helpful people who ran the sale posted the warning: 'Be careful if you have pets who eat plants or small children.'" I know somebody with a dog like that. Alastair Scott found a couple of odd online headlines. On the New Scientist Web site a story is headed "Sea birds might pay for green electricity". Though the beak, presumably? (The story is taken from the print edition, which has the better headline "Sea birds might pay the price for green electricity" over a report on the dangers to wildlife of offshore wind farms.) The BBC Web site headlines a news story "Rubber whale helps train rescuers". (Nothing to do with rail accidents, as it turns out: a two-ton rubber whale is helping to train volunteers to rescue stranded mammals.) And from the Lebanon Daily Star of 6 May, noted by W Douglas Maurer: "As 20th Century Fox's new $130 million crusader epic 'Kingdom of Heaven' opens across theaters in Lebanon and the Middle East today, fears that it will create fiction between Muslims and Christians for its portrayal of Muslim fighters are being dispelled." Creating fiction - the curse of the movie business. 4. Book review: Word Map ------------------------------------------------------------------- The author, Kel Richards, is a journalist and author who broadcasts for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. His book is claimed to be the first national dictionary of Australian regionalisms. It derives from a section of the ABC's Web site of the same name - run in conjunction with the Macquarie Dictionary - to which listeners were invited to contribute regional words and phrases. The editors of the dictionary were surprised and pleased by the response, which showed that regional Australian English was not dying out, as they had feared, but was still very much alive. It also turned up terms that they hadn't heard about, confirming that the spoken language can still surprise lexicographers who are, by the nature of their work, so firmly tied to the written word. Much of the variation can be traced to communities of immigrants who brought with them their native vocabularies. If an inhabitant of Victoria speaks of a "piece" rather than a sandwich, that's a relic of a one-time Scottish presence; for a Tasmanian a "nointer" might be the name for a spoiled child, originally a term from English dialect that meant a scapegrace or young rascal; German immigrants in South Australia contributed "fritz" for a type of luncheon meat. Kel Richards says the book is intended to be "accurate but not too serious". That's fair comment. A quick flip through its pages finds "Canadian passport", a derisive and mysterious term for the hairstyle otherwise called a mullet; "dagwood dog", a deep-fried battered saveloy (feel your arteries hardening with all that cholesterol); "fish frighteners", one of a vast range of terms recorded here for tight-fitting swimming trunks or Speedos; "footpath", which in some areas is the name for a grassed strip between the front boundary of a house and the edge of the road (one recent correspondent tells me something similar is known in parts of the USA as the "devil's strip"); round Brisbane, a "joombie" is "a member of the burgeoning peasant underclass", presumably the equivalent of the British "chav"; a "mung bean" can refer to a totally useless person (which can include a tourist); someone in Tasmania described as "scadgy" looks untidy and grubby by choice. Lots of words to browse here. If you're Australian, there's also an invitation to help improve and enlarge on the entries. One minor annoyance: the key to the introductory map has gone awry, implying among other errors that Tasmania is actually called the Eyre and York Peninsulas. [Kel Richards and The Macquarie Dictionary, Word Map: What Words are used where in Australia, ABC Books; paperback, pp223; ISBN 0733315402; publisher's price AU$22.95.] [It's unfortunate that the book isn't readily available outside Australia. Big booksellers like Dymocks (http://quinion.com?DYMO) or Angus and Robertson (http://quinion.com?ANGU) may be able to post it to you. ABC's online shop (http://quinion.com?ABCS) will certainly mail it anywhere in the world.] 5. Q&A ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. In your issue of 23 April you wrote "Earnest enquirers wish to know." The Latin for "he said" is "inquit". Hence it always seems correct to me to use the English "inquired" rather than "enquired". How say you? [Barry Shandling, Toronto] A. As you might guess, I rather disagree. Arguments from etymology are always hard to justify, because there are many thousands of examples of words that have shifted sense or spelling since they arrived in English. Language is as language does: if native speakers choose to change words or the way they use them, that's something we just have to accept. Then there's the difficulty of defining what you mean by "correct", since usage can vary a lot between various communities of speakers, each of which will firmly assert that their own way of doing things is right. This one's particularly awkward, for both these reasons. The Latin origin is the verb "inquirere" (based on "quaerere", to ask or seek, which is also the source of "query"). However, the first examples of the English verb - in the thirteenth century - began with "en-", or even sometimes "an-". This is because the prefix became changed in its passage into English; it arrived via Old French, in which the word was "enquerre" (modern French has "enquérir"). Educated people in the fifteenth century began to be persuaded under the influence of Latin that it really ought to be spelled "inquire", not "enquire". But educated opinion didn't prevail, and the two forms have continued in use in parallel in British English, roughly in equal frequencies, down to the present day. However, in recent times British people have developed a difference of meaning between the two forms. "Enquire" tends to be used for general senses of "ask" (I might enquire after your health, or enquire about some fact or other), while "inquire" implies a formal investigation (as in the legal forum called a public inquiry). But this isn't absolute by any means, and British English is being influenced by American English, in which "inquire" and "inquiry" have long been the standard forms (though the "en-" forms are not entirely unknown even there, albeit in rather formal situations; also "enquiry" is relatively more common than "enquire"). Australian English stands in much the same position as British English and is subject to the same forces. Canadian English, as so often, is split between American and British styles, though favouring the American. ------------------------------------------------------------------- World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2005. All rights reserved. The Words Web site is at . -------------------------------------------------------------------