WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 460 Saturday 24 September 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. Weird Words: Vinolent. 3. Book review: Word Origins and How We Know Them. 4. Noted this week. 5. Turns of Phrase: Extraordinary rendition. 6. Sic! 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- ISSUE DATING The date and issue number of last week's edition were mistakenly a repeat of those of the week before. Sorry about that. KAKURO Alan Harrison commented on this import from Japanese which I featured in the last issue: "Kakuro demonstrates a Japanese way of coping with consonantal clusters, which cannot occur in the Japanese pronunciation system, where N is the only stand-alone consonant. It isn't untypical of Japanese inventiveness with loan words. While English is the most common source (especially in its American variant, such as the popular Japanese sport 'beisuboru'), two odd examples come from other languages. 'Arubaito' (a part-time job) is German 'Arbeit' (work) and 'abekku' (boy or girl friend, the person you are 'with') is French 'avec'. I am reminded of a rather difficult conversation with a Japanese lady who referred to the Arubato Whore, whom I assumed to be a minor character in the Tale of Genji. She was actually referring to that large public building in London, the Albert Hall." 2. Weird Words: Vinolent /'vaIn@l@nt/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- Addicted to wine; intemperate or drunken. In the Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote "In woman vinolent is no defence, This knowen lecchours by experience", meaning that lechers succeed by getting women drunk. This is easily the most famous appearance of the word in literature, because "vinolent" was never common and has become even rarer since his time (though a Web search did turn up a firm apparently willing to print the word on a T-shirt for you; if you wore one it might provoke spectators to ask whether you were boasting or complaining). I thought it had quite dropped out of daily use, but then instances emerged from the interstices of the Internet. The Business Law Journal of January 2005 has: "During this term, the United States Supreme Court will hear arguments on a matter that will have broad economic impact for winemakers and vinolent consumers." Hugh and Colleen Gantzer turned it into a noun in the Business Traveller in August 2002: "But then, not even the most dedicated Swiss vinolent can hope to taste all the great, and subtly evolving, wines of Switzerland!" These suggest that the word has lost its links with intemperance and drunkenness and has taken on a meaning of "lover of wine". This is a pity, etymologically speaking, since its source is the Latin word "vinolentus", meaning drunk on wine, from "vinum", wine. That also bequeaths us "vine" (the first part of "vinolent" is said the same way). 3. Book review: Word Origins and How We Know Them ------------------------------------------------------------------- When a man has spent the past 17 years working on a dictionary of etymology, with no end in sight, the one failing that you cannot tax him with is lack of patience. That he should find enough time to stand back from his labours - and his full-time academic duties - and write an overview of the whole subject for non-specialists is very welcome, particularly when he manages to inject gentle humour into what can be an excessively dry subject. Professor Anatoly Liberman has avoided this pitfall by dividing his subject into 18 themed chapters on various aspects of the study of the history of our language. The style of the book is deliberately old-fashioned in one respect (reflected in the cover design, which features a map of the original gerrymandered voting district), with each chapter headed by a contents list and an introduction like one in an eighteenth-century novel ("Chapter One, in which the author introduces himself, assumes a confidential tone, and suggests that etymology and entomology are different sciences"). If you find these affected or cutesy, they are easily passed over in favour of the meat below, which is straightforwardly written. The first part of his research was to compile a vast bibliography of pretty much everything that's been written over the past 500 years in some 25 languages about the origins, or supposed origins, of English words. As a result, he often has a different take on sources to those in the standard works. This makes his dictionary something to look forward to. The bibliography, in two volumes, plus a sample volume containing 50 entries, are to appear in 2006; the full work will come out in parts (let's call them fascicles, as the Oxford English Dictionary's editors did a century ago) every couple of years after that. As an example of his take on words, the OED considered the final part of "ragamuffin" to be fanciful, but he points out that in a Cumberland dialect "Auld Muffy" is a name for the Devil, related to French "maufé", ugly or ill-featured, and that "rag" also refers to the Devil (from the medieval "Ragman"). So "ragamuffin" may well have been the tautological "devil-devil", only later changed in sense under the influence of that initial "rag" to mean a tattered street urchin. He is also doubtful of the conventional view that the first element of the American "cater-cornered" (diagonally opposite) is from French "quatre", a square ("it has little to recommend it"), arguing that its true origin is in a word like Danish "kejte" (left hand) or "kejtet" (clumsy), left-handers often being considered such. The book has other such revisionist views, all argued in detail. Chapters cover such subjects as the way words are formed, such as those formed by reduplication ("shilly-shally", "hubbub"), words created by pasting a word or part of a word inside another word ("infixation"), those made by adding prefixes and suffixes, those that have been created from names, coinages by known individuals, and words that have been borrowed from other languages. The book ends with a brief note on the current state of English etymology. A sub-title of the book is "Etymology for Everyone", which is true for a special case of "everyone": those seriously interested in the origins of our language, who actively want to find out more about the way etymologists work, and who along the way don't mind taking in some sobering guidance on the pitfalls of ferreting out word histories. It will repay careful reading, but the casual browser may find it hard work. [Anatoly Liberman, Word Origins and How We Know Them, published by Oxford University Press USA in April 2005; hardback, pp312; ISBN 0195161475; publisher's US price $25.00.] ONLINE BOOKSTORE PRICES FOR THIS BOOK Amazon USA: US$16.50 (http://quinion.com?W23P) Amazon Canada: CDN$23.07 (http://quinion.com?W31P) Amazon UK: GBP12.27 (http://quinion.com?W94P) Amazon Germany: EUR23,50 (http://quinion.com?W87P) [Please use these links to buy. See C below for more details.] 4. Noted this week ------------------------------------------------------------------- ESQUIVALIENCE Nathan Bierma's "On Language" column in the Chicago Tribune this week reports that the New Yorker has found a fake word in the New Oxford American Dictionary. Its editors inserted it in the first edition of 2001 as a copyright trap. It's often said that compilers of reference works do this as a way to reveal competitors whose admiration for their work becomes - let us say - a little over-enthusiastic, but for obvious reasons it's usually difficult to confirm this. The word is now known - if you have a copy of the NOAD, please ignore the entry for "esquivalience", supposedly the wilful avoidance of one's official responsibilities or the shirking of duties (the duty being to check from your own research that the word exists). LINK: http://quinion.com?FAKE UNSCROLL This turned up in a report by Simon Hoggart in Thursday's Guardian about the Liberal Party conference: "Probably most of the delegates weren't aware that the whole speech was unscrolling on a giant screen hung from the balcony of the ballroom." But can any item unscroll, rather than just scroll? It's hard to imagine such a process. Deadline pressure presumably caused Hoggart to conflate "scroll" with "unroll". But it's not unique: there are dozens of cases in British and American newspapers over the past decade. One in the Evening Standard on 11 July referred to a bus journey: "We would rather sit in overheated proximity to the futures trader and the office cleaner, watching London unscroll in fits and starts and fare stages, than take the loathed Tube." I started out thinking this was an item for "Sic!", but it looks as though a new verb has formed under our noses, illogical though it may seem. 5. Turns of Phrase: Extraordinary rendition ------------------------------------------------------------------- This legal term has gained much attention in the press in the past couple of years because of reports that the CIA has been capturing terrorism suspects in one country and delivering them with no court hearing or extradition process to a second, in which torture is practised, in order to get confessions or useful intelligence. The term dates to the end of the 1980s at the latest, but is in the news at the moment because of accusations that the CIA is being actively aided by the British government, and because of a court case last month in New York in which a Canadian citizen challenged his removal to Syria in this way. The core of the term is "rendition", an old but little-known legal principle. It comes from an obsolete French term that derives from "rendre", to give back or render. Most people know "rendition" as a posh word for the performance of an actor or musician, but in the time of the first Queen Elizabeth - about 1600 - it referred to the surrender of a garrison (the occupants rendered, or gave themselves up, to the victors). In US law rendition refers to the transfer of individuals by what is called extra-judicial process (kidnapping, in plain speech) from a foreign country to the USA to answer criminal charges. The defendant is said to have been rendered up to justice. A problem for the security forces is that once brought to the USA the person is subject to US law and the rules of due process, which of course excludes torture. Hence "extraordinary rendition", a euphemism for taking them to a country where these rules do not apply. * From the Independent, 1 Jul. 2005: One week ago a judge in Milan signed warrants for the arrest of 13 of the agents, which has thrown covert CIA activities outside the US under the spotlight and drawn attention to the increasingly common practice of so-called 'extraordinary rendition', by which the US seizes terror suspects and removes them to countries known for their use of torture. * From the New York Times, 18 Feb. 2005: Extraordinary rendition is antithetical to everything Americans are supposed to believe in. It violates American law. It violates international law. And it is a profound violation of our own most fundamental moral imperative - that there are limits to the way we treat other human beings, even in a time of war and great fear. 6. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- A disconcerting image is evoked by an article seen by Roger Beale in the Welwyn Hatfield Times of 21 September. It's about the 70th anniversary of Welwyn Garden City's Catholic church: "The former coal cellar below the church has been converted into a drop-in centre." ------------------------------------------------------------------- World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2005. All rights reserved. The Words Web site is at http://www.worldwidewords.org . -------------------------------------------------------------------