WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 453 Saturday 6 August 2005 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Sent each Saturday to at least 25,000 subscribers by e-mail and RSS Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Contents ------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Feedback, notes and comments. 2. Topical Words: Spinster. 3. Weird Words: Poppysmic. 4. Recently noted. 5. Q&A: Aga saga. 6. Sic! 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- UNFOLDING OF LANGUAGE My review last week attributed a comment to the author that was actually the result of a spelling mistake on my part. When I wrote "He quotes examples in English of what seem to be abrupt changes in sense - 'repent' three hundred years ago mean to appreciate or feel grateful for, practically the opposite of its modern sense", what I should have written was "resent". There's an example in the Oxford English Dictionary from 1648: "God resents an infinite satisfaction in the Accomplishment of his own Will." 2. Topical Words: Spinster ------------------------------------------------------------------- It's official. From 21 December this year, the word "spinster" will no longer be part of the British government's vocabulary. It's because of the Civil Partnership Act, which comes into force then and will permit a form of civil ceremony (which is carefully not being called "marriage" but a "civil partnership") for gays and lesbians. The Registrar General's office felt it desirable to come up with fresh descriptions to fit the new situation, since to call the contracting parties spinsters and bachelors is inappropriate. The replacement will be the boringly accurate "single", to describe the status of both men and women who haven't before been through either ceremony. Somehow, I can't feel the word is much of a loss. It must have been a very long time since an unmarried woman referred to herself by this title in seriousness. In our modern language it has too many adverse connotations: a woman left on the shelf, an old maid, with nothing left but to become a benign busybody, keen on gardening and cats, bustling round the parish doing good works and cycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist (image courtesy of George Orwell via John Major) or, like Miss Marple, solving the problems of the world with hard-headed sympathy and acute observation. But there's nothing new about these implications - they've been linked with the word since the seventeenth century through the suspicion and hostility with which unmarried women above a certain age were regarded, at risk of being arrested as prostitutes or condemned as witches. What we have lost is any clear connection with the word's roots. That ending "-ster" is what grammarians call an agentive suffix, one that turns a verb for some activity into the name of a person who does it. Originally, it was always applied to a woman (though that changed later), as in "brewster" (a woman who brews ale, a female job in a medieval household), "maltster" (a woman who makes the malt from which ale was brewed), and "spinster" (a woman who spins). The word appeared in the written language in 1362, in William Langland's poem Piers Plowman. So many women were described in marriage records as having the occupation of spinster that by the sixteenth century it began automatically to be used for all unmarried women and became the legal description, as Thomas Blount wrote in his Dictionary in 1656, "for all unmarried women, from the Viscounts Daughter downward". 3. Weird Words: Poppysmic ------------------------------------------------------------------- Produced with smacking of the lips. You won't see this in your local newspaper any day soon. It comes from the Latin "poppysma", via the defunct French "popisme". Romans used the original for a kind of lip-smacking, clucking noise that signified satisfaction and approval, especially during lovemaking. In French, it referred to the tongue-clicking "tsk-tsk" sound that riders use to encourage their mounts. The only writer in English known to have used our word was James Joyce, in a stage direction in Ulysses: "FLORRY WHISPERS TO HER. WHISPERING LOVEWORDS MURMUR, LIPLAPPING LOUDLY, POPPYSMIC PLOPSLOP." 4. Recently noted ------------------------------------------------------------------- MONKEY HURLAGE This expression appeared in the Dilbert comic strip on 25 July: "Wally, your calf muscles and ankles are performing well, but the rest of you is monkey hurlage." (That day's strip is online via http://quinion.com?DILB.) This was obviously enough a euphemism for "crap", based on the unfortunate habit of apes in zoos of throwing the stuff at visitors, but what I hadn't known until Markus Laker e-mailed me about it last weekend was that Scott Adams had invented it. In itself, that's nothing remarkable, but as he points out, the term has already taken root online, with at least a dozen examples used for real without reference to the strip. "It's not often that you can pinpoint the coining of a new phrase right down to a single day," he writes. XENA When four asteroids were named John, Paul, George and Ringo many years ago, it was confirmation that the star system had really hit astronomy. Two weeks ago I mentioned that Star Wars had gone literally astronomical with an extraordinary celestial object being named after Luke Skywalker's home world Tatooine. Now the minor planet just discovered way out beyond Pluto in the Kuiper Belt has been styled Xena after the heroine of that hokum-filled television series Xena: Warrior Princess. At this moment this is a nickname, since discoveries have to go through a formal procedure before a name is accepted; currently, Xena is officially 2003UB313. YEPPIES Another survey, another invented tag for a group of young people. This survey was for eBay, carried out by Kate Fox, a social anthropologist at the Social Issues Research Centre. It argues that young people are now shopping around and experimenting to find, as she puts it, "the perfect job, the ideal relationship and the most fulfilling lifestyle". It's part of the supposed trend towards what has been called delayed adulthood that has spawned terms such as "adultescent". This one actually stands for "Young Experimenting Perfection Seekers". Unfortunately, the word has been created at least twice already, for "Young Environmental Professionals" and those who are "Young, European and Proud of it" as well as those who are graduates of the Youth Environmental Program in the USA. 5. Q&A ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. A clue in The Times crossword, published recently down under, was "doubly funny middle-class stories". The answer was "agasagas" ("a gas, a gas" and "Aga sagas"). Many of us down here know that an Aga is a battleship stove favoured by posh country folk in the UK. But what about Aga saga? Does that expression have currency with you? [Alex Hopkins, Melbourne, Australia.] A. Indeed it does. It's quite common, though its heyday has perhaps now passed. Let's start by filling out the story of the Aga for those who have never heard of it. Like many good things in Britain, the Aga is actually Swedish. It was invented by Gustav Dorén in 1922 as what turned out to be the culmination of the long history of the kitchen range. It's named after the firm that manufactured it, the Svenska Aktiebolaget Gas Accumulator. Literally weighing a ton, fuelled by coke, superbly insulated and extremely efficient, they were ideal for the larger kitchen, especially in farmhouses, in which lots of cooking jobs had to be carried out throughout the day. It's the kitchen equivalent of the Rolls-Royce, solid, dependable, and reassuringly expensive, and it became a token of a prosperous, conservative, countrified, middle-class lifestyle. The term "Aga saga" was invented in 1992 by Terence Blacker in an article in Publishing News to describe a class of novels based in middle-class country or village families. The classic exponent of the genre, for whom the name was coined, is Joanna Trollope, though she hates it. She was quoted in an article in the Independent in March 2005, as saying, "I am fairly tired of such an inaccurate and patronising tag", pointing out that the Aga featured in only two of her twelve novels. 6. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- Tim Johnstone read this in The Chronicle of Canberra, Australia, on 26 July: "RSPCA ACT has called on all pet owners to de-sex their pets. It has introduced a low cost de-sexing service for health care card holders and low income earners." "Instructions given by Express Scripts for ordering prescription drugs by mail," e-mailed J. Holan, "include the following: 'Note: We cannot accept Schedule II controlled substances by fax.' Do you suppose it was attempted, with messy results?" In the Corrections and Clarifications section of the Guardian, Ian Mayes is often required to correct the homophonic errors that turn up in the newspaper. On Tuesday, he noted that the issue of 30 July had included a reference to a person "peddling off into the night". He commented, "One of the Guardian's more familiar sights, a pedlar on a bicycle." ------------------------------------------------------------------- World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2005. All rights reserved. The Words Web site is at http://www.worldwidewords.org . -------------------------------------------------------------------