WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 442 Saturday 28 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. Turns of Phrase: Agroterrorism. 3. Sic! 4. Weird Words: Xenoglossy. 5. Recently noted. 6. Q&A: Top notch. 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- DEKKO Subscribers in Australia and New Zealand contributed more words of similar meaning to this slang term mentioned last week, whose meaning is "look". One from Australia was "squiz", which is often said to be a blend of "squint" and "quiz". For all we know, it might be, though the only certainty is that it comes from nineteenth century Devonshire dialect. Another, from New Zealand, is "gink". This is also from British English dialect ("geek" or "keek"). Bernard Scott remembers this being used together with "shufti" and "dekko" in the 1960s: "Each had its own shade of meaning. Taking a shufti was to check out a situation, possibly for danger. Having a dekko was to observe in an inquisitive manner, while taking a gink could be a bit furtive - 'Take a gink at this men's magazine!'" Yet another from New Zealand was "gecko", almost certainly humorously altered from "dekko" by blending it with "gink" or possibly even "gander" as an allusion to the lizard. NIPPER At the risk of boring you if you have had enough about the alleged nautical origins of this slang term for a young person, I must close off and tidy up the discussion by mentioning a message that has arrived from the author John Harland. He is sure that the supposed origin in weighing anchor is just a yarn. He believes the false leap of association was made in 1890 in a book by R C Leslie, Old Sea Wings, Ways and Words in the Days of Oak and Hemp. In the way of such stories, it has been perpetuated by many authors since, but he says it was debunked in an authoritative article in the journal Mariner's Mirror in 1951. PALOOKA I've updated the piece on the Web site, correcting a minor error and clarifying some points. See http://quinion.com?PALO . 2. Turns of Phrase: Agroterrorism ------------------------------------------------------------------- This term has been around for several years (the earliest examples I can find are from 1999), but has mostly been used by specialists up till now. It has gained a higher profile in the past year or so and has been in the news because the first International Symposium on Agroterrorism was held earlier this month. Agroterrorism is the deliberate introduction of a plant or animal disease that disrupts agriculture and so causes widespread economic loss along with fear and instability. The risk is potentially high in the USA, which is a major agricultural country with huge exports, so that the effect of a terrorist attack might be felt well beyond its own borders. As yet, no successful attack by agroterrorists anywhere in the world is known to have happened, though there have been reports of small- scale strikes by Palestinians and Israeli settlers on each other's crops. Threats in New Zealand to spread foot-and-mouth disease have been blackmail by individuals, not terrorism. Known cases of food contamination in various countries, or of threats to contaminate food, have also proved to be the work of would-be blackmailers or disgruntled employees. * From the Aberdeen News, South Dakota, 2 May 2005: Agroterrorism is a largely hypothetical problem ... The United States has never experienced an agroterror attack, but some of the hijackers involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were known to have been interested in agriculture and crop dusting. * From USA Today, 9 May 2005: Inspections of imported food at the nation's entry ports have declined since the Department of Homeland Security took over the job in 2003, a new government report says. The drop means the government is reducing its first chance to discover a foreign disease or an act of "agroterrorism" before the food is distributed nationwide. 3. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- Rik Kabel found "a wonderful amphiboly" in the New York Times of 19 May (an amphiboly is a grammatically ambiguous phrase or sentence; I would name it amphibology, but that's a distinction that makes no difference). That issue included the headline "Miramax Founders in Deal to Distribute Video Programs". 4. Weird Words: Xenoglossy /'zEn@(U)glQsi/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- The ability to speak a language without having learned it. This sounds like a really neat trick if you can manage it. However, a typical place to find this rare word is the Journal of Parapsychology. That's because the ability is regarded as a psychic phenomenon. It might come about because a person has been regressed to a previous incarnation through hypnosis. Or a medium might be in communication with a spirit person who speaks another language. The OED dates its first appearance to 1914; it's from Greek "xenos", stranger or foreigner, plus "glossa", language; another spelling is "xenoglossia". It sounds as if it's related to "speaking in tongues", which is regarded among Christian groups such as the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements as evidence of the presence of the Holy Spirit (though the phenomenon is found in many religions and has been recorded from the earliest historical times); the formal term for that is "glossolalia" (the second half from Greek "lalia", speech). But from a language point of view the difference is profound: in "xenoglossy" the implication is that a real language is being spoken that is intelligible to native speakers and in which the person can converse, while "glossolalia" is a succession of meaningless syllables interpretable only through faith. 5. Recently noted ------------------------------------------------------------------- PHEROBOT Words in "-bot" form an unending stream. This bot doesn't actually sniff the air, though its name might suggest otherwise, as the pheromones are virtual ones - pulses of infrared radiation sent by a member of a swarm of autonomous robots when it finds something of interest. The idea behind the research is that eventually such robotic swarms will be able to make collective decisions based on the information they acquire. SAVANNAH This isn't a grassy plain but a cross between a domestic short-haired cat and a serval, a long-legged wild African cat. The savannah is distinctive: it's twice the size of a normal cat, and has spots, stripes, a long neck and oversized ears. The breed dates back to the 1980s, but they're in the news because they've become a fashionable (and very expensive) accessory among trendy big-city dwellers in the USA. They're more like dogs than cats, love being taken for a walk on a lead, and find water irresistible to play in. They're also illegal in many states and cities (which ban animals that are wild or partly wild), which makes owning them all the more desirable. 6. Q&A ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. We all know "top notch" means the best or top quality. But was there a real notch in some situation where there could actually be a "top notch"? [John Schestag] A. The short answer is that we don't know but wish we did. The problem is that the term appears in print for the first time in the 1840s already fully formed in its modern sense with nothing to point to where it comes from. The earliest example I've come across is in an advertisement in the Huron Reflector of Norwalk, Ohio, dated 29 April 1845, which is worth quoting for its period flavour: J. WHYLER Has just arrived from the Great Emporium, with a Tremendous Cargo of Spring and Summer Goods, Which he is now unloading at his Old Stand in Norwalk - consisting of the choicest selections he ever made - the top notch of Fashions and Patterns - and an extensive variety of DRY GOODS, to suit his Old Customers and every other person who will give him a call. The term becomes widely recorded in the later 1840s and early 1850s, suggesting that it had suddenly come into fashion, perhaps because of some incident or happening, though there's nothing to show what that might have been. It seems clear enough that there was some sort of activity in which notches or notching played a part and in which reaching the top one was to be first-rate or the very best. But what that might have been is a mystery. A plausible idea is that it was a scoring system in some game. An ingenious explanation was recently put forward by a contributor to a British mailing list. He alleged that at one time a suitor visiting his beau was allowed by the girl's father to stay just as long as a courting candle continued to burn. The candle was set in a holder that permitted it to be raised or lowered by a system of notches, so changing its burning time. If the father really liked the young man, he set the candle on its highest notch, in the hope that by spending a lot of time together the couple would decide to marry. This has all the hallmarks of folk etymology, not least because I can't find any reference to a courting candle, so called, before very recent times, nor to the custom. Many illustrations of candle holders with this name exist online, but all I've seen are made from a metal spiral, with no notches in sight. Nice story, though. ------------------------------------------------------------------- World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2005. All rights reserved. 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