WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 543 Saturday 9 June 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: Chuck-farthing. 3. Recently noted. 4. Q&A: The abbreviation pp. 5. Book review: By Hook or By Crook. 6. Sic 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- ADVANCE WARNING As my wife and I shall be departing shortly on our summer holidays, next week's issue will be the last for four weeks. After the issue of 16 June the next will be that of 21 July. APOLOGIES Sorry about the late arrival of last week's newsletter, which was due to circumstances beyond anybody's control. A power failure caused the Web site of the University of Eastern Michigan (where the World Wide Words list server is based) to go offline just as the issue was about to be distributed. HOT CELLING Lots of people pointed out, quite correctly, that this expression derives from the much older practice of "hot bunking" (also known as "hot racking" and "hot cotting"), in which sailors coming off watch would swap bunks with men going on watch. Both "hot celling" and "hot desking", which I cited as a precursor, derive from this source. VENOMOUS SPIDERS I wrote in the piece about "attercop" that the Old English word "attor", poison, was applied to spiders in the "mistaken belief that they were all venomous". Many entomologists pointed out that virtually all spiders are venomous, as that's how they immobilise and kill their prey. But only a small proportion are dangerous to humans, which is what I meant and what the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary had in mind when they refer in their definition to "the supposed venomous properties of spiders". 2. Weird Words: Chuck-farthing ------------------------------------------------------------------- A game of skill and chance. You can't fault the name for accuracy. The game really did consist of chucking farthings, that is, throwing small coins. The farthing was a British coin, one quarter of a penny (it comes from an Old English word for a fourth part), which went out of use in 1960, even before the decimalisation of the currency in 1971. The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England by Joseph Strutt, dated 1838, has a detailed description, albeit with a different coin: I have seen a game thus denominated played with halfpence, every one of the competitors having a like number, either two or four, and a hole being made in the ground with a mark at a given distance for the players to stand, they pitch their halfpence singly in succession towards the hole, and he whose halfpenny lies the nearest to it has the privilege of coming first to a second mark much nearer than the former, and all the halfpence are given to him; these he pitches in a mass towards the hole, and as many of them as remain therein are his due; if any fall short or jump out of it, the second player, that is, he whose halfpenny in pitching lay nearest to the first goer's, takes them and performs in like manner; he is followed by the others so long as any of the halfpence remain. It seems, though, that coins weren't always used, sometimes being replaced by rough-cast leaden counters, called dumps because they were dumpy in shape. Like so many games, this one was disliked by serious-minded folks, in part no doubt because of the implied warning in John Arbuthnot's History of John Bull (1755): "He lost his money at chuck-farthing, shuffle-cap, and all-fours." The last of these was a card game, while in shuffle-cap money was shaken up in a hat, at least according to the Oxford English Dictionary, to what effect I've been unable to discover. 3. Recently noted ------------------------------------------------------------------- DOWN THESE MEAN STREETS Anthony Massey reports that he saw a van belonging to Hammersmith and Fulham Borough Council with "Street Scene Enforcement" emblazoned on the side. He looked around to see if someone was making a scene in the street, either of the filmic or argumentative sort, which might possibly require enforcement. But all was quiet. On closer investigation, the van proved to be the council's litter patrol. A Google search showed the term to be relatively common among British local authorities, with the phrase going beyond the control of litter to the general improvement of the look of local communities by removing abandoned motor vehicles, reducing dog fouling and graffiti, and enforcing remedial work by private property owners, all of these being misdemeanours lumped under the heading of envirocrime. BLEEDING EDGE Elias Friedman found this in Science Daily: "HPC systems are on the bleeding edge of technology". He wonders if this is a mistake, a confusion of similar words, or an eggcorn. It turns out to be none of these, but a deliberate humorous coinage to refer to a development ahead of the leading edge (and the cutting edge), which is unperfected or unaccepted technology whose use entails a risk of some kind. It's common in the computer business. At the moment, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are bleeding-edge technologies - it's uncertain which is to become market leader and so there's a risk of backing the wrong horse, as there was a generation ago when buyers and developers had to decide between Betamax and VHS. The Science Daily article commented that parallel computing, becoming common on desktop systems, might be a hardware technology too far on the bleeding edge for software programmers to be able to cope with it. 4. Q&A: The abbreviation pp ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. I would like you to tell me about the origin of the abbreviation "pp" when someone signs on behalf of someone else. I've heard that comes from the Latin "per procurationem", but is it true? [Anthony Vamvakidis] A. This may be an unfamiliar business abbreviation to Americans, as I believe it is not much used there. It's commonly placed alongside a signature to show that it is being signed by somebody other than the ostensible author, say by a secretary in the absence of the writer. Back when the abbreviation first began to be used in business, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, it was indeed taken to be a shortened form of the Latin phrase "per procurationem". But reference books today often say that it's actually short for the Latin "per pro", and that's how I learned it when I first came across it. This is a more important difference than one might think. "Per procurationem" means "through the agency of" or "by proxy", while "per pro" means "for and on behalf of". Which meaning you take changes where you put the abbreviation. If the former, it should be alongside the name of the person who actually signs the letter; if the latter, it should precede the name of the true writer. Most people these days would assume the latter. Even in Britain, an alternative form such as "dictated by Y but signed in his (or her) absence" is now common. For completeness, it's worth noting that there's a third Latin phrase with some similarities, "in pro per", in full "in propria persona", meaning "in their own person". This is required in some legal jurisdictions to show that a person is handling their own case, without a lawyer. And "pp" may be more familiar in the sense of "pages", a nineteenth-century abbreviation from the English word "page" in which the doubling of the letter represents the plural. 5. Book review: By Hook or By Crook ------------------------------------------------------------------- It's impossible to give you a brief description of this book. Its subtitle is A Journey In Search of English and David Crystal spends the book driving more or less purposefully around bits of the UK, with mental excursions to California, India and Europe. You might describe it as a travelogue coupled with literary and linguistic reflections. There are many references to local history and the origins of place names as well as substantial sections on the language of Shakespeare, the linguistic melting-pot of India, and the evolution of Euro-English. If it resembles anything at all, it is a comfortable and unhurried car journey to interesting places in the company of an entertaining guide. Did you know, for example, that Shaw named the character Henry Higgins in Pygmalion after the co-owner of a department store in Peckham? Or that the letter "o" in words such as "come", "love", "one", and "son" ought to be "u" but that medieval scribes changed it to avoid a chain of identical downward strokes that were difficult to read? Or that the patron saint of booksellers, St John of God, is also - shades of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 - the patron saint of firemen? Or that a parrot was the last surviving speaker of one South American language? Or that the towns of Welshpool and Llanfair PG - the one on Anglesey with the 58-letter name - were both renamed by railway companies? (The former was originally just Pool, renamed to avoid confusion with Poole in Dorset, the latter was formerly Llanfair Pwllgwyngyll and was gifted its overweighted name as a tourist attraction.) You do have to accept that your guide will become discursive, even meandering at times. In places it's not so much a narrative as a stream of consciousness. On one page, he moves within three brief paragraphs from Roget's Thesaurus to J M Barrie's Peter Pan to the origin of a Herefordshire place name to its namesake railway locomotive and to the system for classifying engines by their wheel arrangements. In short, don't expect a textbook. But if you would like to curl up for a few hours in the company of an erudite if free-associative literary and linguistic companion, you could do worse. [David Crystal, By Hook or By Crook: A Journey In Search of English; published by HarperPress on 1 May 2007; hardback, pp314; ISBN-13 978-0-00-723558-2; ISBN-10 0-00-723558-5; publisher's price GBP16.99.] AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK Amazon UK: GBP11.04 http://quinion.com?H0C9 Amazon USA: Not listed Amazon Canada: CDN$20.76 http://quinion.com?H7C8 Amazon Germany: EUR27,40 http://quinion.com?H2C4 [Please use these links to buy. They get World Wide Words a small commission at no extra cost to you.] 6. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- Last Friday evening, an item on the BBC Radio 4 six o'clock news concerned the 15th attempt by the jockey Frankie Dettori to win the Epsom Derby. The reporter noted: "He always talks up his chances but this time he's partnered with a horse that speaks for itself." As he won, perhaps talking horses is the way to go. Gardin Carroll reports that the Federal Citizen Information Center in Pueblo, Colorado, sent out a press release, Get The Facts About Reproductive Health, promoting a free Reproductive Health Kit. One sentence read "It features valuable information on sexually transmitted diseases that every woman can use and share with her loved ones." Am I perhaps getting over-pedantic? In Kim Stanley Robinson's new book, Sixty Days and Counting, occurs this sentence: "She walked on to the grocery store to see if there were any vegetables left from the day's farmer's market thinking furiously." Although it's SF, the book has otherwise no sentient vegetables in it. Much has been made in the public prints of the sign behind Hillary Clinton during her speech on 31 May in Santa Clara, California: "New Jobs for Tommorrow". That wasn't as embarrassing as the error perpetrated by the organisers of the US National Spelling Bee, in which during preliminary heats the placards around the necks of two competitors spelled their states as "Maryalnd" and "Virgina". Susan Abraham reports that public servants were on strike in South Africa last week, so that schools, hospitals, police services and the like were being run by very few employees. The National Radio service claimed that emergency services in the major hospitals were being kept going by skeleton staff. ------------------------------------------------------------------- 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. 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