WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 537 Saturday 28 April 2007 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Sent each Saturday to at least 48,000 subscribers by e-mail and RSS Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448 http://www.worldwidewords.org US advisory editor: Julane Marx ------------------------------------------------------------------- Contents ------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Feedback, notes and comments. 2. Weird Words: Nincompoop. 3. Turns of Phrase: Two-factor authentication. 4. Recently noted. 5. Book Review: Balderdash & Piffle. 6. Sic! 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- EGGCORNS Michael Boddy e-mailed from Australia to point out that "chaise lounge" is not solely an American eggcorn, but one that is also extremely common in his country. Julia Cresswell remarked that "The damp squid is well established in the UK as well. I heard it in a BBC Radio 4 interview about six weeks ago for the first time, but asking round, found a number of people who were familiar with it, to the extent that it was even an office standing joke." 2. Weird Words: Nincompoop ------------------------------------------------------------------- A foolish or stupid person. It's a silly-sounding word for a silly sort of person. Many writers have tried hard to find an origin for it, though most dictionaries play safe and list it as "origin unknown". The good Dr Johnson, in his famous Dictionary of 1755, thought it might be from Latin "non compos", as in the legal and medical phrase "non compos mentis", not mentally competent. As the Oxford English Dictionary commented 150 years later, this supposed origin doesn't explain the early versions of the word that were around in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, such as "nicompoop" and "nickumpoop". The late John Ciardi, in A Browser's Dictionary, dismissively calls Johnson's idea "a clerk's guess" and asserts that it comes instead from the Dutch words "nicht om poep", meaning "the female relative of a fool" ("poep", a fool, said like the English "poop"). He said, "And if that does not work out ... I will be a monkey's uncle". Conceivably not, but such a stretched derivation from a foreign language is typical of a type of folk etymology that turns up a lot. A more intriguing idea, one with a fair level of acceptance, links it with the given name Nicodemus, especially the Pharisee of that name who questioned Christ so naively in the Gospel of St John. This word still exists in French as "nicodème", a simpleton, and it may have been modified by the Dutch "poep" that Ciardi referred to. 3. Turns of Phrase: Two-factor authentication ------------------------------------------------------------------- Why, you may reasonably ask, is this arcane bit of computer jargon popping up here? Agreed, it's never going to trip lightly off the lips of your neighbourhood bank teller, but it refers to a trend in banking that's likely to affect all of us, even if we never come to know it by that name. The problem is that of security, or rather the insecurity of the usual form of security, passwords. Everybody knows they're bad at their job: people forget them or create ones too easy to guess, mislay them, write them down where somebody unauthorised can read them, or can be all too easily persuaded to give them over the phone to a conman with a plausible line of patter. Online, matters are even worse. Banks spend huge amounts of effort trying to stem the flood of phishing sites that pretend to be the real thing so that they can grab your log-in details and plunder your accounts. So the quest has been on to find an alternative that is acceptable to the public, which works, and which won't be too much trouble to use. The basic idea is to add a second level of protection to the password - so two factors of authentication. Practicality rules out methods like retinal or fingerprint scans so the current focus is on little electronic devices that do the job for you. You plug in your card and enter your PIN. The device issues you with a time- sensitive code (in the jargon, a one-time password) that you must type in to gain access. The term "two-factor authentication" has been around since the early 1990s and appears extremely widely in technical documents, though it is still rare in newspapers. The devices are common in businesses, especially to give employees access to secure office systems while on the road. They are now beginning to be made available to bank customers. Security experts warn, however, they won't stop every kind of attack and may indeed be most useful by building awareness among customers of the need for security. * Guardian, 11 Apr. 2007: Scams such as identity theft, "phishing" attempts to trick customers into revealing account details and advanced spyware that can capture a computer user's passwords have led several banks, including HSBC and Lloyds TSB, to experiment with a technique known as two-factor digital authentication. * Computer Weekly, 24 Apr. 2007: Barclays said last year that it would offer two-factor authentication via card readers to all of its two million banking customers. 4. Recently noted ------------------------------------------------------------------- A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME ... The stroke of genius by New Zealand producers in the 1960s of renaming the Chinese gooseberry as the kiwi fruit has been an inspiration to marketers everywhere. In the 1990s, a little herb called borage began to be widely cultivated (if you come across a field in England in summer covered in blue flowers, they're likely to be borage, if not lavender or lupins). Its advocates claim that it is diuretic, emollient, demulcent, anti-rheumatic, anti-depressive, diaphoretic, refrigerant, and expectorant, and that its seeds have a high proportion of gamma linolenic acid (GLA), an essential fatty acid. Its name, however, was thought to be an impediment to sales. A traditional name for plants with similar star-like petals is starflower - it has been given to tormentil, lesser celandine, the star of Bethlehem, and others. The fact that borage has never been known by this name didn't hold marketers back and starflower oil is now widely available. To add to the list of renamed plants, it was announced last week that a firm of British chemists, Boots, is to produce and market what is claimed to be the first essential oil to be developed in the UK for commercial use for more than 40 years. It is said to be four times more effective at killing acne bacteria than tea tree oil. The problem for the marketers was that the herb is best known by its Scottish name of bog myrtle, not one that was likely to excite the buying public. What luck, then, when it was found to have several alternative names, including sweet gale in parts of England. 5. Book Review: Balderdash & Piffle ------------------------------------------------------------------- The success of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary rested very substantially on the shoulders of a small army of what were essentially amateurs: readers who scoured books for examples of words for the OED's editors to use as evidence in creating the entries. It might be thought that such days are over, since there are now so many electronic resources for lexicographers to call on that non-professionals without access are at a fatal disadvantage. But a BBC television series in 2006, which shares its name with this linked book, proved otherwise. It was arranged in conjunction with a word hunt, looking for prior evidence of a number of terms that had puzzled the OED. Viewers with access to material that hasn't been digitised and may never be - obscure journals, long- forgotten minor novels, advertisements, letters, even autograph albums - were able to produce some gems of antedating. The British term "bog-standard" (basic, standard, unexceptional) was taken back to an issue of Hot Car magazine for 1968, proving that memories of its having first been used in the custom-vehicle field were right. A search in the archives of the English Country Cheese Council turned up references to showcards that advertised the ploughman's lunch, not only taking the word back a decade to 1960 but proving the assertion of food experts that the term (if not the meal) was the creation of cheese marketers. You'll find the results of the Wordhunt written up in the final chapter of this book. We can only hope that the new series, due to begin on BBC2 in May, will produce more of this valuable data (see http://www.oed.com/bbcwordhunt/ for details). The main part of this book consists of eight chapters whose themes are those of the programmes in the forthcoming TV series: madness, fashion, obscure eponyms, idioms that refer to dogs, underhand dealings, put-downs and insults, words for bodily functions, and X- rated words. It is entertaining and popularly written, though you may feel the dark side of life and language is overly represented, with no shortage of rude words and words for rude things. Do not expect great depths of research - it's not that sort of book - since the author has relied on the OED, Partridge, and a small number of other works for his information. In several cases, this means that his dating is a bit out-of-date (those digital sources again). But the only actual error I've so far caught him in is his assertion that in "three sheets to the wind", a sheet is a sail. No, Mr Games, it's a rope. [Alex Games, Balderdash & Piffle, published by BBC Books on 5 April 2007; ISBN-13 978-1-84607-235-2, ISBN-10 1846072352; hardback, pp239; publisher's price GBP9.99.] AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK Amazon UK: GBP6.59 http://quinion.com?B91P Amazon USA: [Not yet available] http://quinion.com?B36P Amazon Canada: CDN$16.35 http://quinion.com?B45P Amazon Germany: EUR16,50 http://quinion.com?B28P [Please use these links to buy. They get World Wide Words a small commission at no extra cost to you.] 6. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- Mícheál Ó Doibhilín (and there's a good Irish name) came across a startling item in the Dublin Evening Herald last week, reporting police concern at the increased use in criminal feuds in Ireland of pipe-bombs and similar weapons manufactured by ex-paramilitary bomb makers. The police, the report said, were particularly worried by the "increased use of Pope-bombs". Paul in Pennsylvania noted an item on the Web site of WSAZ3 in West Virginia, which contained a good example of a malapropism: "Family members of the missing men reported to Kanawha County Sheriff's Deputies during the afternoon yesterday that they believed the men were lost in the mine. The proper mine authorities were notified and immediately began immobilizing resources including specialized search and rescue teams." ------------------------------------------------------------------- World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2007. All rights reserved. The Words Web site is at http://www.worldwidewords.org . ------------------------------------------------------------------- You may reproduce this newsletter in whole or part in free online newsletters, newsgroups or mailing lists provided that you include the copyright notice above. Reproduction in printed publications or on Web sites needs prior permission, for which you should contact the editor at wordseditor@worldwidewords.org . -------------------------------------------------------------------