WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 556 Saturday 6 October 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. Topical Words: Sputnik. 3. Weird Words: Cheapskate. 4. Recently noted. 5. Book review: The Language Report. 6. Sic. 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- FLETCHERISE The item on this word last week brought back a memory for F Jack Shasha in Israel: "I still remember that when I was in boarding school in New Barnet, England, in 1938, we were ordered to chew porridge 15 times. The principal, Mrs Wreford, insisted, and had teachers sitting with us at the breakfast table; they watched and counted." I can't imagine chewing porridge even once - it must have been incredibly lumpy! On a mildly contentious point, William Marshall, wrote: "A passing thought - should it not be 'Fletcherize'?" I had a friendly dispute about this with my American copyeditor, Julane Marx, since she felt the same, pointing out that Mr Fletcher was American and that, in the draft she saw, every example was from a US source and so was spelled with "-ize". My counter argument, which prevailed because it's my finger on the despatch button, was that this is a British publication and so the word should be spelled with "-ise", at least in the title. I softened the issue by adding a British example. HYPHENS From Jon Voskuil: "I suspect you'll get a lot of questions about this after today's piece on hyphens. Why no hyphen in 'World Wide [Words]'"? Good point, though it's common to spell "worldwide" as one word (as do the new Shorter Oxford and the current Concise Oxford dictionaries). But the title of this newsletter is a play on the name of the World Wide Web. When I started it ten years ago, the full name of what's now just called the Web (often lower-cased) was more widely known than now, and the punning nature of the title was obvious. It's getting to the stage when it may need explaining if it is not to appear illiterate. The times they are a-changing. The person really at fault is Tim Berners-Lee (with a hyphen), who invented and named the World Wide Web. He's British, but that's no excuse. Cathy Rowlands pointed out that "Misplaced or missing hyphens have produced that mysterious object, the fine toothcomb!" INTERWEB ET AL Following up my squib last time, Louise Dore noted, "I wanted to add my perspective, that 'interweb' is used widely by me and my peers (call us late-twenties professional types) as a 'cute', or even affectionate, alternative to 'internet'. I suspect this is simply because it gets boring saying 'internet' all the time, and you do end up saying it rather a lot these days! Another alternative used unironically here in Sheffield, and I suspect elsewhere in Yorkshire, is 't'internet'. I'm not surprised that one hasn't made it to the London media though." Seth Elgart told me about "intertube", a more recent term that's used sarcastically to suggest ignorance about the Net and the Web, sometimes in the form "tubular interwebs". This came from the phrase "series of tubes", which was used in Congress by US Senator Ted Stevens in June 2006 when he spoke about Internet matters. He was ridiculed for failing to understand the nature of the online system, though as he was arguing that the Net wasn't a truck (lorry) but a series of tubes, he wasn't creating a totally ridiculous analogy. Margaret Louise Ruwoldt e-mailed from Australia, to mention that "intertube" was well known there, and to say, "Once you add 'teh' as the definite article, as in 'teh intertubes' or 'teh interweb', you're speaking pure nerd ;-)". WHATCHAMACALLIT My running title to the "interweb" item provoked a complaint from an anonymous AOL user: "I wish people would use the term 'thingie' only during foreplay, intercourse, or afterglow." I feel I've been told more than I want to know. SITE UPDATES As well as the usual pieces from last week's issue, I've added "interweb" and its relatives and "unconference", another recent reference. I've also updated the "Kilroy was here!" page with new material, though unfortunately no new conclusions about where it comes from. You can reach all of these via the Home Page at http://www.worldwidewords.org/ . THANKS! An analysis of the logs of the Web site this week revealed that visitors came from 160 countries and territories, making the site truly World Wide Words. Google says that there are now 79,026 links from other sites to various of its 2,000+ pages. Page views by visitors total around 400,000 a week. This is a solid success story, for which I thank readers. 2. Topical Words: Sputnik ------------------------------------------------------------------- Thursday saw the 50th anniversary of the successful launch by the USSR of Earth's first artificial satellite on 4 October 1957. It was a sensation - many people who were around at the time will remember the astonishment with which it was greeted. It also immediately introduced a new term into the language. Within two days, newspapers everywhere were referring to "Sputnik", which first reports said was Russian for satellite or moon (looking back, it's interesting to see how many contemporary reports referred to Sputnik as a moon, a term that we reserve these days for a natural satellite). The Russian term actually meant a travelling companion, though other early reports translated it as "fellow-traveller", probably with pejorative intent, since that phrase had the specific meaning of somebody who sympathised with the Communist movement without actually being a party member. What Sputnik also did was introduce a lot of people to the "-nik" ending, which was reinforced later by a common Russian and English term "lunik" for the rockets the USSR sent to the moon, which came from the Latin and Russian "luna" for our moon. One early result, though, was a lot of short-lived and humorous formations. When the USSR sent up a second satellite on 3 November with the dog Laika on board, some American writers referred to it as "Muttnik". The very public failure of the US Navy to launch a satellite on 6 December resulted in sarcastic terms like "Kaputnik" and "Flopnik". It also led to many figurative creations, mostly intended jokingly but a few of which have permanently entered the language. In 1958, the rise of the beat generation led to "beatnik" (folk enthusiasts briefly becoming "folkniks") and to "neatnik", a person excessively neat in his personal habits, the opposite of a scruffy beatnik. A "robotnik" was a person who blindly obeyed authority, the opposite of a "refusenik", one sense of which in the 1980s was a person who refused to obey orders as a form of protest, though its main sense, from the 1970s, was of a Jew in the Soviet Union who was refused permission to emigrate to Israel. A member of a pacifist movement was from the 1960s called a "peacenik". In the late 1980s in the UK, "noisenik" came on the scene for a loud musician, especially one who played a form of rock music. The "-nik" ending became so widely used that it is assumed by many people that Sputnik started it. But it's a long-standing Slavic ending that implies an agent or a member of a class or group. In fact, as early as the end of the nineteenth century, a few Russian words ending in "-nik" became rather rare unnaturalised immigrants into English, such as "chinovnik", a minor government functionary or civil servant, and "Narodnik", literally a member of the common people (Russian "narod", people) but which in the late nineteenth century meant a member of a socialist political group among the Russian intelligentsia. The ending is shared in particular with Yiddish and also appears in modern Hebrew, hence "kibbutznik", a member of a kibbutz, a term that wasn't much known in English at the time of Sputnik, though it had been recorded 10 years earlier. In American English, "-nik" has been an active word-forming agent from the early twentieth century as a result of Yiddish influence. One result was "alrightnik", an immigrant Jew who has raised himself from poverty to prosperity (though the main sense of the Yiddish "olraytnik", borrowed from US English, was of an upstart, offensive boaster or parvenu who is smug or philistine). His opposite was the "nogoodnik", recorded from 1936. Another still with us is "nudnik", a nagging, pestering or irritating person, from Yiddish "nudyen", to bore. The ending was kept in the public consciousness in the US through Al Capp's frequent use of "-nik" words in his L'il Abner cartoons. So the entry of Sputnik into the language only reinforced a trend in American English, but one whose linguistic echoes are still with us and which we may celebrate along with the achievements of Soviet rocketry. 3. Weird Words: Cheapskate ------------------------------------------------------------------- A miserly or stingy person. It's never nice to be called a cheapskate, especially if it's true. The second part has nothing whatever to do with any of the more common senses of "skate". A writer in the San Francisco Chronicle in September 2007 was way wide of the mark when he wondered if a cheapskate was avoiding paying his share by adroitly sliding past the transaction, as though on skates or a skateboard. And there's nothing in the least fishy about the word. Well, up to a point. The origin, as often with slangy words, isn't easy to fathom. "Skate" began to appear in print in the US at the end of the nineteenth century, almost simultaneously meaning a worn-out horse, a mean or contemptible person, and a second-rate sportsman (later, in the Royal Navy, according to Eric Partridge, it became a slang term for a troublesome rating). "Cheap" was added early on to refer to a person's tight-fisted nature rather than any of his other perceived inadequacies. An early example appeared in the Newark Daily Advocate of Ohio in September 1896; the motorman of a streetcar is remonstrating with the driver of a coal wagon: "You're a gol dinged, insignificant, pusillanimous, ragged, cheap skate of a tenth assistant barnyard corporal." The best suggestion we have is that "skate" was originally a Scots contemptuous word, still known in Australia and New Zealand, where it's usually written as "skite". We retain it in "blatherskite" for a person who talks at great length without making much sense. (For more, see http://wwwords.org?BLAT.) It appeared first in a slightly different form in a Scots song, Maggie Lauder, written by Francis Semphill about 1643 ("Jog on your gait, ye bletherskate / My name is Maggie Lauder!"). This was a favourite camp song among American soldiers during the War of Independence and remained popular in the decades that followed. We guess that this may have helped "skate" or "skite" to be preserved among emigrant Scots and others in the US during the nineteenth century. By the way, the fish sense of "skate" is from Old Norse "skata"; the word for ice skates and similar devices come to us from Dutch "schaats", although its origin is the Old French "escache", meaning a stilt; there's also the South African sense of a disreputable or irresponsible young white man, which may be from Afrikaans "skuit", excreta. 4. Recently noted ------------------------------------------------------------------- IGNOBLE? The annual razzmatazz of the IgNobel Prices, sponsored by the Annals of Improbable Research and timed for the week before the real Nobel Prizes are announced, is always good for some knockabout fun. On Thursday, awards went to two British researchers who found that sword-swallowing causes sore throats and a US Air Force team who proposed creating a chemical weapon that would make soldiers sexually irresistible to each other. Glenda Brown won the award for literature for her study of the indexing problems of "the". Three researchers at Barcelona University collected the linguistics prize for proving that rats cannot tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and a person speaking Dutch backwards. 5. Book review: The Language Report 2007 ------------------------------------------------------------------- This is the fifth annual report published by the Oxford University Press and edited by Susie Dent, best known in Britain through her contributions to the television programme Countdown. The subtitle of this year's edition is English on the Move 2000-2007. As Susie Dent notes, 2007 has not been a vintage year for language change, but one in which the turbulence of the first years of the century has subsided into "a feeling more of limbo than of change". This gives her a chance to recapitulate what has been happening to the English language in the past seven years. Language, of course, is driven by events, exemplified by the shift of "tsunami" from a technical term of seismologists and geographers into mainstream public use as a result of the disastrous events of the last days of 2004. So it's no surprise that some vocabularies have been augmented this century, including those of war (enemy combatant, extraordinary rendition, axis of evil), the online world (podcasting, folksonomy, Web 2.0, wiki, mashup, phishing) and of politics (big conversation, progressive consensus). Climate change has been a potent force popularising terms and creating new ones (eco-savvy, carbon credit, offsetting, global dimming, green urbanism). "Footprint" has been reinterpreted in this context to refer to the extent of one's ecological imprint on the planet and has been used so widely that Susie Dent nominates it as her Word of the Year. A more subtle marker for the way our language is changing comes not so much from the words we use but from those we use them with. The Oxford English Corpus, a vast searchable repository of 1.5 billion words from every conceivable source, has been in preparation since 2000 but only became available to researchers in 2006. Among other functions, it allows searches for collocations, words that often occur together. Susie Dent points out that in the Corpus, seven out of 10 instances of "feed" in this century's writing are in phrases like "RSS feed", so linked to information, not food; "attachment" in 2000 was most likely to be preceded by "emotional", but by 2005 this had been overtaken by "e-mail"; in the past five years, the word "surveillance" has not only become much more common, but is most often linked to "warrantless", "covert" and "constant". Indeed, we have become the most surveilled generation in history. One pointer is that verb - "surveil" was coined at the end of the nineteenth century as a back-formation from "surveillance". In the hundred years that followed, it remained a jargon term of the law- enforcement agencies, but this century it has already appeared three times more often than it did in the 1990s. Through language you shall know your culture. [Susie Dent, The Language Report 2007, published on 4 October 2007 by Oxford University Press; hardback, pp166; publisher's price in the UK, £10.99; ISBN13: 978-0-19-923388-5, ISBN10: 0-19-923388-8.] AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK Amazon UK: GBP7.14 http://wwwords.org?S45D Amazon USA: Not yet listed (ask to be told when it is) Amazon Canada: CDN$15.72 http://wwwords.org?S92D Amazon Germany: EUR17,50 http://wwwords.org?S74D [Please use these links to buy. They get World Wide Words a small commission at no extra cost to you.] 6. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- Faith Jones's new employer recently sent her a set of forms to fill in, of which her favourite was the one headed "Voluntary Accidental Death and Dismemberment Application." Norman Simons found that the Web site of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Philadelphia provided helpful general information for visitors. It explained, "The national language of the United States of America is English. English is widely spoken in Philadelphia." Mr Simons commented, "Many of us who live in the area are unsure of the accuracy of either statement." An Associated Press news item dated 3 October surprised Norman C Berns: "Sampson said fossils of duck-billed dinosaurs once lived throughout the northwestern part of North America." Mr Berns now feels there's more to evolution than he ever imagined. "The mention in last week's issue of the canary in the coal mine singing loudly," wrote Elaine Blackman, "reminded me of a report in the Hereford Times for 27 September. It quoted Cllr Olwyn Barnett, Herefordshire council cabinet member for social care and health, on the subject of the county's proposed Public Service Trust. She said, 'With the demands on both bodies and their budgets getting greater, we risk a headless chicken coming home to roost.'" ------------------------------------------------------------------- World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2007. All rights reserved. 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