WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 538 Saturday 5 May 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: Lollapaloosa. 3. Recently noted. 4. Book Review: Brave New Words. 5. Sic! 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- KNOWING THE ROPES Having gently reproved Alex Games in my review last week of his book Balderdash & Piffle by pointing out that a sheet on a sailing ship was not a sail but a rope, I was in turn firmly told that they're not ropes but lines. Brian Lentle noted, "Boat-speak almost qualifies as a separate language quite apart from its gifts to English." Chet Shaddeau explained: "According to my long-ago instructors in marlinespike seamanship, there are only about seven 'ropes' on a ship; they are all specialised dinguses like the bellrope, footrope, ridgerope, etc. Practically everything you pull or heave on is a line." Peter Underwood went beyond the nautical: "If we are going to be pedantic, you might like to know that at the Royal School of Military Engineering in Chatham that comment would have resulted in some arcane form of punishment. Rope is made of metal. Any other form of lashings, including those made of nylon, would be referred to as cordage." EGGCORNS Too many people responded to the piece on eggcorns for me to be able to give a rounded summary. But you may like the report of the man said to be wearing a cygnet ring. And "deafly quiet" has a certain logic to it. A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME Many people pointed out that the most famous example of a name change for marketing purposes was that of rapeseed to canola in North America. It didn't come to mind when I wrote the item, as that name isn't well known in the UK, where we call a spade a spade and a rape plant a rape plant, though its oil is usually sold labelled euphemistically as "vegetable oil"). As an aside, unlike the ones I quoted, the word is an invention, from "Canada" + "-ola", based on Latin "oleum", oil. Susan McLeary mentioned that in New Zealand honey is made from a close relative of borage, another echium called viper's bugloss. We know the plant by this name in Britain, too. The "viper" part is from its former use as a treatment for snake bite, the viper being the only venomous snake in the country. The second part is shared by some other British plants and derives, via Latin, from ancient Greek words meaning "ox tongue", because of the shape and rough texture of the leaves. (It's said as "byu-gloss", by the way, not "bug-loss".) HIRCOCERVUS The Winchester College archivist has kindly sent a copy of the picture of the Hircocervus or Trusty Servant, mentioned in my piece about this exotic word two weeks ago. It is now online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-hir1.htm 2. Weird Words: Lollapaloosa ------------------------------------------------------------------- Something outstandingly good of its kind. You can't easily misunderstand the meaning of this American word once you've heard somebody say it, it's so obviously an over-the- top cry of excitement or delight, highly suitable as the name for the annual Lollapalooza pop festival. It has been spelt just about every possible way down the years (the Oxford English Dictionary has it under "lallapaloosa"). Its extravagant enthusiasm may be judged from an early appearance, in Miss Minerva and William Green Hill by Frances Boyd Calhoun, dated 1909: "Lordee, Lordee," he gazed at them admiringly, "you sho' is genoowine corn-fed, sterlin' silver, all-wool-an'-a- yard-wide, pure-leaf, Green-River Lollapaloosas." Another early example is in a baseball match report in the Fort Wayne Sentinel of May 1903, one we may be glad to have missed (the reporter said disgustedly that one pitcher was all too accurate, since he hit the bat almost every time): There wasn't enough ginger in the players nor audience, either, to keep a colicky baby awake, the only excitement being furnished by a loquacious individual in the grand stand who was rooting for Evansville, and he rooted right, too. He proclaimed himself the High-past-potent-grand-mufti- lallapaloosa of the Amalgamated Knockers' Brotherhood and had a bigger assortment of mallets on hand than a croquet factory. That was one of its earliest appearances in print, since it seems to have been around in the language for only a few years by then. Other early usages suggest an origin among card players, as in an 1899 report in the Daily Herald of Delphos, Ohio, about card sharps fleecing a hick: "Another got a lallapaloosa, consisting of three clubs and a pair of spades, and took $85 of the farmer's money." In 1897 the Idaho Daily Statesman had another: "'A lalla-pa-loosa,' answered big John, and threw his hand to Scovel. There was a jack of hearts and a deuce, tray, four and five of diamonds." Where it comes from is uncertain. "Lulu" and "lolla", both also meaning something good, are recorded earlier, and "lollapaloosa" may be a super-extravagant enlargement of the latter. 3. Recently noted ------------------------------------------------------------------- WELL BROUGHT UP In the Observer last Sunday, the author Sebastian Faulks commented on what he calls the astonishing recent rate of change in English. "For several hundred years, the past tense, or preterite, of 'bring' was 'brought'. In roughly three years, it has changed to 'bought'. Everyone I know, except my wife, now says: 'I was bought up in X' or: 'I bought it with me.' The rapidity of the switch is remarkable. In 2010, will the preterite of 'think' no longer be 'thought', but 'taught' - as in 'I taught as much'? Such a change would be no quicker than that of 'brought' to 'bought' and no less odd." This hasn't come my way - it may be a metropolitan shift that hasn't yet reached the semi-rural fastness from which I communicate with the world. A shift from "taught" to "thought" is hardly a parallel to one from "brought" to "bought", and of course it's already well known in those dialects that pronounce "th" as "t", notably in Ireland. 4. Book Review: Brave New Words ------------------------------------------------------------------- Only a couple of weeks ago, British scientists were reported to be working on a force field to protect astronauts from radiation on the space station and space shuttle, on interplanetary journeys or while working in the projected NASA moonbase. We take such language in our stride these days, when science-fictional concepts seem to become reality almost month by month. But if you go back more than a couple of generations, words like these were mainly the preserve of people who wrote and read science fiction. This book is a pure dictionary, albeit with a few mini-essays on aspects of SF vocabulary; each entry is supported by a number of example citations, just as in the Oxford English Dictionary. Here you will find hyperspace, organlegger, phaser, ramscoop, spacesuit, Dyson sphere, generation ship, terraforming, holodeck and hundreds of other terms familiar to SF readers and viewers, plus a lot that are less so, even to those well-read in the field. Also included are abbreviations like BDO (Big Dumb Object), a mysterious object of alien origin found somewhere out there (think of the monolith in Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey) and BEM (Bug-Eyed Monster), any stereotypical alien creature of hideous form created through authorial imagination to terrify and fascinate. The genres of SF are here, too, such as cyberpunk, new wave, slipstream and steampunk. It also includes the vocabulary of people who engage in SF fandom (fan activities), who attend cons (conventions), who compose and sing filk songs (folk songs with SF leanings, a name borrowed from a misprint), take FIAWOL as their motto (Fandom Is A Way Of Life) and are gutted when they have to fafiate (from FAFIA, Forced Away From It All), leave the world of cons and fans and return to mundania, the mundane everyday world. Cross-fertilisation between SF and the real world of technology and science has been so great that it is often difficult to know where the stimulus for a term has come from. Was it created within the SF field and subsequently widened its appeal, or did SF writers take over and build upon an existing term? It would be good to have this made clearer in the text at times, at least where we know for sure. "Hyperspace", for example, is correctly glossed to point out that it was a term in mathematics long before SF writers got their hands on it. On the other hand, "completist" is dated to an SF source of 1944, eleven years before the OED's first example, so seems to be a term of SF origin; likewise "gas giant" (a very large planet made largely from gaseous material) appears in an SF context 13 years before the first citation in the OED's entry, which was drafted as recently as 2006 (respect to editor Jeff Prucher and his team for that one). "Insectoid" looks like a word that has been around for centuries, but turns out to have been first used in an SF work by Olaf Stapledon as recently as 1937. Casual readers, however, might be confused by the inclusion of an entry on "gadget" and assume it's a term of SF origin, first noted from 1942, whereas it was popularised by Rudyard Kipling in 1904 and is actually a sailors' term going back at least as far as 1886. The choice of entries seems somewhat eclectic. Some words that you might think are SF-oriented enough to be here are absent, such as "astronaut", no doubt because it was created in the mainstream astronautics field rather than SF (also omitted are related terms such as "astroengineering", though others like "astrogation" are in). But "space station" isn't here either, although it was first recorded, in the genre, in the 1930s; nor is "space habitat" (often just "habitat"), an artificial world; this might be a spinning hollowed-out asteroid or an artefact of similar type constructed from scratch, like Babylon Five (they're called O'Neill cylinders after their inventor, Gerard K O'Neill, another unglossed term). "Kryptonite" is absent, alas, as is H G Wells's gravity-blocking material "cavorite". And why does "COA" (change of address) merit an entry? Clarke's laws are included, each separately glossed and listed under the name of their creator, the British SF and science writer Sir Arthur C Clarke, the most famous being his Third Law ("any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"). But where are Isaac Asimov's more famous three laws of robotics? They appear in no entry, neither under his name nor under "robot" or its derivatives (ah, there they are, briefly mentioned in passing on page 125). It's easy to nitpick. This is a pioneering attempt to record the vocabulary of the field; it's one which is notoriously difficult to cover because of the number of neologisms for imaginative concepts that writers are forced to invent, or take joy in inventing. Jeff Prucher and his readers have scoured the literature for the early history of the genre's language. If you're interested in the back- story of SF, this is a reference work you will want to own. [Jeff Prucher, Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction; ISBN-13 978-0-19530567-8, ISBN-10 0195305671; hardback, pp342; published by Oxford University Press, USA on 1 May 2007; publisher's price US$29.95.] AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK Amazon UK: GBP13.53 http://quinion.com?S84F Amazon USA: US$19.77 http://quinion.com?S15F Amazon Canada: CDN$22.02 http://quinion.com?S67F Amazon Germany: EUR28,75 http://quinion.com?S32F [Please use these links to buy. They get World Wide Words a small commission at no extra cost to you.] 5. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- Derek Stevens came across a headline in the Guardian of 27 April: "Passengers face worse overcrowding as rail operators run out of carriages". He suggests their rapid departure might be disquieting but it would make more room for the passengers. Daphne Sams came across an egregious example of bad translation on a tag that came attached to a pair of jeans: "This Card Department Guarantees The Over Merchandise Quality Without Blemish Toward You Whole Responsibility, And From Purchase The Day Since In Seven Days If Discover The Quantity Problem. Please Go To With This Card To Purchase At First The Store Is Gratis To Replace The New Article, If Because Of Artificial Damage, Then Not At Guarantee The Row Of The Scope." She promises that she hasn't artificially damaged this message, and she hopes that someone may understand the row of its scope. Her best guess at the meaning is, "We would like very much to offer you a guarantee, and we hope you think we have, but we haven't and we won't." ------------------------------------------------------------------- World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2007. All rights reserved. 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