WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 550 Saturday 25 August 2007 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Sent each Saturday to at least 50,000 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: Omnium-gatherum. 3. Recently noted. 4. Q&A: Crib. 5. Book Review: Faux Pas? 6. Sic. 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- TAX, GLORIOUS TAX Several subscribers noted that I over-simplified the British sales tax (value-added tax or VAT) system when I said in the item on fat tax last week that food was untaxed. Inessential foods like chocolate, sweets, ice cream and savoury snacks do incur VAT, but you will appreciate that I preferred to oversimplify the situation rather than undertake a disquisition on the British tax system. (VAT experts will, I hope, also forgive my use of the terms "untaxed" and "taxed" rather than the official "taxed at zero rate" and "taxed at the standard rate".) The cases I quoted on which it was suggested that a fat tax might be applied - cakes, biscuits and puddings - are currently untaxed, although chocolate biscuits do have VAT on them. The makers of Jaffa cakes went to court in the 1990s to successfully challenge HM Customs and Excise, who classed them as chocolate biscuits and imposed VAT. The court ruled that they were cakes and so were tax-free. 2. Weird Words: Omnium-gatherum ------------------------------------------------------------------- A miscellaneous collection. One of my reference books disparagingly calls this Dog Latin and it's a fair description. The first part is genuine enough, being the genitive plural of "omnis", all ("omnibus", for what we prefer nowadays to call a bus, is the dative plural of the same word). The second part, though, is just the English word "gather" with a fake Latin ending. The 1788 second edition of Francis Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue says that it's a "jocular imitation of law Latin" and this seems plausible. There's an older form, "omnigatherum", mainly Scots, which the OED says was used from the seventeenth century for a group of craftsmen in Stirling, such as coopers, glassworkers, dyers, and gardeners, whose skills weren't recognised in a formal trade guild but who were lumped together for some purposes, mostly taxation. "Omnium-gatherum" has been known since the sixteenth century. In view of its bastard form, it's odd that the first recorded user should have been the highly educated Greek scholar Richard Croke, in a letter to Thomas Cranmer in 1530. 3. Recently noted ------------------------------------------------------------------- GO FORTH When somebody says some job is like painting the Forth Bridge they mean it's never-ending. Although the famous railway bridge across the Firth of Forth north of Edinburgh was opened in 1890, recent research by the Oxford English Dictionary shows that the metaphor first appears in print only in 1955. But the symbolism of the endless task was around long before then. As early as 1894, it was reported in the Glasgow Herald: "The Forth bridge receives a new coat of paint every three years, and one-third is done each year, so that the painters are continually at work." In 1901, US papers commented "The Forth bridge is constantly being repainted" and the factette was repeated down the years until it was embedded in the public mind on both sides of the Atlantic. Now an expensive refit is using epoxy resin and polyurethane coverings in place of traditional paint (though still in the same rust-red colour). Last week, a BBC television programme reported that the finish is so much more resistant to the rain, gales, salt spray and ice that batter the bridge that when the refit ends in 2009, nobody will need to paint the bridge for 30 years. But how long will it take for the cliché to die? BOSH The same programme mentioned that Sir Thomas Bouch was the first architect of the Forth Bridge but that he had been dismissed following the catastrophic collapse of his Tay Bridge in 1879. The programme pointed out that his family name was pronounced "boosh" and claimed that it was the origin of "bosh", nonsense or rubbish. It was too good a story not to use in the context, though a casual glance at a nearby dictionary would have shown that the word was actually more interesting than that. In reality it's from Turkish, in which language it means worthless or empty. It came into English largely through its appearance in James Morier's novel Ayesha, the Maid of Kars in 1834, which was highly popular at the time but which is now almost forgotten. BARIATRICS As an aside on last week's piece about the fat tax, the Guardian printed an article by Raj Patel on 17 August, one sentence of which caught my eye: "Bariatrics, the medical branch concerned with obesity, is so new that it has yet to find its way into the OED." (It is due to appear online in September, I'm told.) Out of curiosity, I went word-hunting. It turns up in a 1964 news report about the annual conference of the American Society of Bariatrics, and so is presumably rather older still (incidentally, the report warned that "Some 65 million Americans are overweight and thus subject to quicker death than the lean and hungry", so concern about the risks of obesity go back quite some way). The word was coined from Greek "baros", weight; this is also in "barometer", a device to measure the weight of the air (physicists will wince at the sloppy thinking behind the etymology, since barometers actually measure pressure, not weight). A practitioner is a bariatrician. BACN To quote the actor and writer Stephen Fry, "the e-mail of the species is more deadly than the mail" - but there are levels of deadliness. Several net bloggers have reported on this word this week, all saying that it was coined at the Pittsburgh Podcamp last weekend. At this meeting developments in online communications were discussed. (As an aside about another term that was new to me, the Podcamp was called an "unconference", an unorganised conference; haven't we all been to some that felt like that?) Bacn (pronounced "bacon" and a creative misspelling along the lines of site names like Flickr) lies between e-mail and spam; it's all that stuff you do want but which is low-priority and which you often don't have time to read. A Web site discussing it has already appeared, which says that bacn might for example be "notifications of a new post to your Facebook wall or a new follower on Twitter. It's the Google alert for your name and the newsletter from your favorite company". Don't bother learning it; it doesn't have the feel of a stayer. 4. Q&A: Crib ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. A simple question, but it's bothering me. Where does "crib" come from in the sense of a cheat's answer sheet or illicitly copying somebody else's work? It's listed as the same word as the baby's bed, but the connection is beyond me. [Martin Turner, Hong Kong] A. It is the same word, though you may not be surprised to hear that a lot more lies behind it. The use of the term for a baby's cot is more common in US English than in Britain, where it's mainly reserved for the bed of the infant Jesus in Nativity plays. The verb "to crib" in the sense of plagiarism or stealing another's schoolwork is mainly British English, though both US and British English know "crib notes". Both varieties of English share the sense of a barred container or rack for animal fodder, a manger. This is the original, which turns up in English around the year 1000 and which is from an Old German word whose descendants are to be found in modern Dutch and German. There are other senses of "crib", especially that of a small house, cabin or hovel (from an extension of the sense of an animal stall), which eventually led to the New Zealand meaning of a small house at the seaside or at a holiday resort, to thieves' slang of the early nineteenth century for a house, shop or public-house and to the slightly later US slang usage for a saloon, a low dive, or brothel (and also the current US Black English sense of one's room, house or apartment). The sense of the baby's bed doesn't arrive until the seventeenth century as an application of the barred container idea, others being a repository for hops during harvest and a wickerwork basket or pannier. A shift from container to contents may explain why in Australia and New Zealand the word can mean a light meal or snack, though it's also suggested that an eighteenth-century slang sense of the stomach may be the direct link. The basket sense was used in particular for one in which a poacher might conceal his catch. The experts guess this may have led to the thievery sense around the middle of the eighteenth century. Much rests on an appearance in Samuel Foote's play The Nabob of 1778: "A brace of birds and a hare, that I cribbed this morning out of a basket of game." The plagiarism sense arrived at around the same time, though it seems to have become applied to stealing another's school work only in the following century. 5. Book Review: Faux Pas? ------------------------------------------------------------------- On being criticised by Kermit in a long-ago edition of The Muppet Show, Miss Piggy flounced, tossed her head, rolled her eyes, placed one trotter on her ample bosom and cried, "Pretentious? Moi?" In the flagging system of this book, "moi" is given the highest possible pretentiousness rating of three exclamation marks. The idea behind this helpful little guide, reissued in paperback last month, is firstly to explain puzzling expressions from other languages that have made their way into English, and then in many cases to warn prospective users of the risk of sounding like a pompous prat. Many of the book's entries are straightforward explanations of words and phrases that may puzzle or confuse: "arcanum", "coup de foudre", "de jure", "encomium", "femme fatale", "idiot savant", "kowtow", "memento mori", "nota bene", "picayune", "reductio ad absurdum", "shtum", "ukase". But a high proportion are attached to warnings about potential misuse: don't use words like "perestroika", "glasnost", or "gulag" outside their historical Russian contexts; "karma" is too often used sloppily to mean just fate, whereas in Buddhist and Hindu belief it refers to actions in this life that will affect your status in the next; only use "Götterdämmerung" if you really mean the world is to end in smoke and flame; never describe a lady as being "d'un certain age" when you mean she's middle-aged; do avoid "canaille", the rabble or the mob, Mr Gooden points out, since it comes "with an in-built aristocratic sneer" that you will almost certainly wish to avoid. Miss Piggy's usage is in a select group of only four expressions that get the top pretentiousness rating. Even "moi", he noted, is most often used in a mocking, self-deprecatory way to defuse a preceding statement that might be thought to be pretentious. The others are "dégringolade", a rapid decline or fall into decadence, rarely found in English and which Mr Gooden points out is more or less the preserve of a single (unnamed) newspaper columnist; "au contraire", on the contrary, disparaged because of "the slightly camp context in which it's usually found"; and "quartier" for a district in a (French) town or city, which he argues deserves the full raspberry because it sounds ridiculous or precious if used about a district of a British city ("We have suburbs.") Well worth the small investment involved. [Philip Gooden, Faux Pas? A No-nonsense Guide to Words and Phrases From Other Languages; published in paperback by A & C Black in July 2007 at £7.99 in the UK; pp231; ISBN-13: 9780713685237, ISBN-10: 0713685239.] AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK Amazon UK: GBP6.39 http://wwwords.org?FP9T Amazon USA: $13.22 http://wwwords.org?PG9Z (hardcover) Amazon Canada: CDN$16.79 http://wwwords.org?FS4P Amazon Germany: EUR13,50 http://wwwords.org?S1PF [Please use these links to buy. They get World Wide Words a small commission at no extra cost to you.] 6. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- The Channel 4 Web site recently promoted a program about John Wayne Bobbitt: "Twelve years on, after [a] brief porn career, a job as a Las Vegas minister, a stint as a limo driver for a brothel and a spell in jail, film-maker Vicky Hamburger went to find out what happened to the man with the world's most famous penis." Phil Wolff sent that in, wondering which of Ms Hamburger's adventures landed her in jail. Reuters posted a story on 16 August with the headline "Earthquakes can move faster than thought". Jim Grusendorf commented, "I can't begin to imagine what sort of experiment could compare the speed of earthquakes to the speed of thought." Adding "previously" before "thought" would have helped ... "I was intrigued," wrote Eli Jacobs, "to find on the menu at the Fook Yuen Chinese restaurant in Millbrae, California, a listing for 'Wanton Soup'. I was going to ask the waitress whether they were referring to its sensual properties or its merciless character, but restrained myself, and opted for the egg drop soup instead." The Boston Globe site reported on the progress of an injury to the Red Sox backup catcher: "Doug Mirabelli's sore ankle is still in a boot and is not with the team. He's expected to join the Sox on this trip - perhaps in New York when he can begin working out." Josh Weiland suggests that Mirabelli's ankle should continue its rehab in the Sox's training centre in Fort Myers until it's ready to play again. ------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 . -------------------------------------------------------------------