WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 585 Saturday 26 April 2008 ------------------------------------------------------------------- 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: Wiseacre. 3. Recently noted. 4. Q&A: Moniker. 5. Book Review: The Secret Life of Words. 6. Sic! 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- STILLICIDE As numerous Latin scholars pointed out, I confused my Latin verbs last time. The "-cide" in words like "suicide" is from Latin "caedere", to kill, while that in "stillicide" derives from "cadere", to fall. Terry Walsh wrote to soften his correction, "The two Latin verbs acquire prefixes in Latin that reduce them to the same spelling. Hence endless confusion for Latin learners!" Alas, I never was a Latin learner. To misquote the late Peter Cook, I could never have become a judge, because I didn't have the Latin. Richard Losch suggested that "stillicide" is what revenuers do when they raid a moonshiner. Along the same lines, Laurence Horn at once "thought of the wonderful Gillian Welch song 'Tear My Stillhouse Down' as the prime instance of stillicide." In the piece, I listed some words that Vladimir Nabokov used in a poem in his novel Pale Fire. Bob Lee wrote, "I had a good idea of the meaning of the other words quoted from Nabokov, but wotinell is 'iridule'?" It was invented by Nabokov for what he describes as an opal cloudlet which "reflects the rainbow of a thunderstorm". It's from "iris", originally the name of the Greek goddess who appeared as the rainbow. BLACK HOLE Emery Fletcher, who was one of John Wheeler's graduate students in 1962, commented on last week's discussion of the origin of this term. "Wheeler was indeed its popularizer. Furthermore, he learned that the literal French translation was obscene, and as one who strongly objected to what he regarded as French arrogance in expunging any hint of Anglicizing, he used 'black hole' at every opportunity. The phrase he did actually coin, to describe the fact that no light or material issues from a black hole, was 'a black hole has no hair'. That one is even more formidably obscene to the French. Throughout his life he claimed that he'd coined the phrase innocently, but the claim was always made with the famous Wheeler twinkle in his eye." (I wonder if he was influenced in creating that phrase by "comet", whose name derives from the classical Greek "aster kometes", or long-haired star.) John Wheeler, as he would wish, has the last laugh, since everybody links his name to "black hole", on a principle that Walter Meyer pointed out was promulgated by Ogden Nash in his poem Columbus: He discovered America and they put him in jail for it, And the fetters gave him welts, And they named America after somebody else, So the sad fate of Columbus ought to be pointed out to every child and every voter, Because it has a very important moral, which is, Don't be a discoverer, be a promoter. 2. Weird Words: Wiseacre /'waiz,eik@/ {sm}wa{shti}z{smm}e{shti}k{schwa} ------------------------------------------------------------------- A pretender to wisdom. A subscriber queried this odd-looking word. A friend had suggested to him that the link with a measurement of land was that it alluded to a person having acres of wisdom. Ho, Ho. Although some experts do profess themselves baffled by the "acre" part of this word, we know where it comes from - the Middle Dutch "wijsseggher", a soothsayer, a wise sayer. The first part is from the same source as our "wit". The Oxford English Dictionary says that the Dutch pronunciation was /'wais,zeg@r/ (roughly WAIS- zegger). The word first appeared in English in a scurrilous ballad of 1595 that had the catchy title A Quest of Enquirie, by women to know, Whether the Tripe-Wife were trimmed by Doll. A tripe-wife was a tripe dresser, in this case a well-to-do London widow who sold her wares from a stall; the trimming referred to the cheating of her by one Doll Phillips, who pretended to be a fortune teller who could tell her which of her suitors she was to marry. The story was based on real events, though embroidered. We know the Dutch pronunciation had already changed, since in the ballad it's given as "wise-aker". The shift from Dutch to English is a good example of a common form of folk etymology, in which an odd or foreign word is changed until it looks familiar, even if its parts make no real sense. Curiously, the word seems never to have been used in English in the literal sense of a wise person that it had in Dutch. It has always meant only a person with an unjustified appearance of wisdom. At one time the home of the Royal Society in London, Gresham College, was called Wiseacres Hall by those sneering at its intellectuality. 3. Recently noted ------------------------------------------------------------------- HAIRCUT Steve Doerr pointed out a Reuters article on Monday that reported on plans to provide funds for cash-strapped British banks caught by the current shortage of credit. The Bank of England said it would swap at least 50 billion pounds in government securities with the banks' mortgage-based assets but would impose "variable haircuts". A haircut, the article helpfully explained, is the name of the percentage discount applied in each case to the value of the assets being swapped under the scheme. "The riskier the collateral, the larger the haircut." This comes from the older phrase "to take a haircut", to accept a pay cut or some other limit on earnings. This goes back to the 1970s in the US, if not further. The first example that I can find appeared in the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin in June 1973: "In sympathy with commissions in some other sports, Kolton is advising some of the players to take a haircut. By this he means institutions should consider trimming the stated value of their holdings." At least "haircut" is more homely than the sub- prime mortgages, structured investment vehicles, collateralised debt obligations, credit default swaps and all the other jargon that's become so depressingly familiar in today's credit crunch. This last term is so inextricably linked to the current financial crisis that one might guess it was created to describe it - but "credit crunch" is found in the USA at least as far back as 1967. BADGING While we're on jargon, Chris Pringle e-mailed to point out a term in a consultation document from the British Department for Innovation, Universities & Skills (DIUS). It suggested recipients should "cascade" the document to others and went on, "You'll be very welcome to joint-badge the learner version alongside DIUS." She was struck by "joint-badge", a verb that neither she nor I had previously come across. The idea behind it is that a document from an official organisation is identified - "badged" - by its logo. A document that goes out jointly from more than one body may contain the logos of all of them and so is jointly badged. I've found an example from the Scottish Parliament dated 2003: "Murray MacFarlane also advised that an issue had been raised on the joint badging of documents and whether a joint badge should be developed rather than the three separate logos." SPELLING FISH The famous story about English spelling being so idiosyncratic that it is possible to spell "fish" as "ghoti" (hint: use the spellings of "enough", "women", and "motion") is often said to have been created by George Bernard Shaw, though nobody has been able to find it in his writings despite assiduous searching. The best we have been able to say until now was that the story appeared quite suddenly in various publications around 1937, but only began to be attached to Shaw's name a decade later. But Matt Gordon of the University of Missouri-Columbia has found it in an 1874 issue of St James Magazine, which quotes a letter dated 11 December 1855 from the publisher Charles Ollier to Leigh Hunt. This disposes of any possible Shaw connection, since he was born in 1856. The letter reads: "My son William has hit upon a new method of spelling Fish. As thus: - G.h.o.t.i., Ghoti, fish. Nonsense! say you. By no means, say I. It is perfectly vindicable orthography. You give it up? Well then, here is the proof. Gh is f, as in tough, rough, enough; o is i as in women; and ti is sh, as in mention, attention, &c. So that ghoti is fish." 4. Q&A: Moniker ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. Your use of "moniker" in a recent newsletter in the delightful phrase "grandly Latinate moniker fumage" started me thinking. I've heard the word many times in the last fifty years, and even used it myself, but don't recall seeing it in print. All the Concise Oxford Dictionary (COD) can offer, spelling it with or without a "c" in the middle, is "19th century, origin unknown". I feel sure that you can do better than the COD in telling us the origin of the word! [Andrew Purkiss] A. I can write a lot more, and propose to do so, but I have to warn you that my conclusion is pretty much the same as the pithy note in the Concise. "Moniker" has had so many spellings that it's hard to keep track of them. Jonathon Green gives 14 in The Cassell Dictionary of Slang, for example. This variability is a sure sign the word was for long passed from person to person in speech rather than in writing. The first known written example is from 1851, in Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, in which Mayhew gives it as "monekeer". The word was recorded in the Sydney Slang Dictionary in Australia in 1881, spelled "monniker", and seems to have reached the USA not long afterwards. This may imply that it was a London term, exported by migrants. Most writers on slang , including Eric Partridge and Jonathon Green, suggest that it was originally tramps' slang. As a moniker was often, even usually, an assumed name or nickname, this is plausible. There are as many suggestions of its origin as there are variants on its name, though few of them sound even marginally convincing. A long list of them is given in Paul Beale's 1984 revision of Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. Some early forms suggest that it might be from "monarch", the idea being that it is one's name that partly rules one's life. One learned proposal was that it was "ekename" (an ancient term for a nickname, from "eke", additional - a relative of "eke out" - which changed to "nickname" through a shift of the "n" in "an ekename") that was converted into "moniker" by backslang. A further idea is that it derives from the saintly name "Monica". Others link it to one or other of a pair of Italian words, just possible if we assume that it's old enough to have entered slanguage via Lingua Franca. The association with tramps has led some writers to find a source in Shelta, an ancient secret language used by Irish and Welsh tinkers and gypsies, in which it would be derived from Irish "ainm", name (there's support for this in The Secret Languages of Ireland by R A Stewart Macalister, dated 1937, which gives "munika" as one form of the Shelta word.) Expert opinion, for which you may read "guesswork" if you like, is leaning towards a blend of "monogram" with "signature", largely because "moniker" can mean someone's John Hancock. 5. Book Review: The Secret Life of Words ------------------------------------------------------------------- Don't be confused by the title of this book, which feels like one dreamt up by publicity people and which may not have been the first choice of the author, Henry Hitchings. The subtitle says it better: How English Became English. Language is much more than simply a way to communicate and English retains within itself a record of invasion (of England and of other countries by English speakers), seafaring explorations, trade, and colonisation and empire. Every contact with other cultures has left its mark in the words that we use. Henry Hitchings chronicles them in a study that is as much a survey of the relevant bits of English history as it is of the archaeology of the language. It has become a cliché to say that English is a mongrel, having taken in words and influences from so many languages that its true origins have become submerged, along the way losing its grammatical baggage of verb endings, moods and cases. Some linguists even argue that modern English is a creole, a simplified tongue stripped of its grammatical intricacy by the collision of different linguistic groups through the urgent need to communicate. One view is that the language clash was that between post-Conquest medieval English and Norman French. In his survey of the forces that led to our modern language Henry Hitchings hints that he agrees, though for him the simplifying force is the impact between pre-Conquest English and the Scandinavian languages of the Vikings and Danes. Hitchings' exploration of the roots of English is presented in 16 chapters with enigmatic titles such as Powwow, Bonsai and Voodoo, illustrative words brought into the language as a result of the changes he writes about in each chapter. For example, "onslaught" is a word of Dutch origin (Middle Dutch "aenslag", from "aen", on, plus "slag" blow); he picks it to head the chapter on the influence of that language on English, which began well before the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in which William of Orange took over the English throne. "Cambric", "selvage" and "stripe" attest to the cloth trade with the low countries; "sketch", "masterpiece", "landscape" and "etch" remind us of Dutch and Flemish painters; "waffle", "boss" and "cookie" are tokens of early Dutch influence in North America; the large numbers of Dutch-originated maritime terms in English, such as "deck", "boom", "reef", "orlop", "bowsprit", "skipper", "hull" and "dock", show the maritime power of the Dutch in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the many denigratory terms on the model of "Dutch courage" that were once common highlight the antipathy between the English and Dutch through their competition for sea supremacy. It's a densely illustrated tale, essentially chronological but with many excursions up interesting byways. As he says at the beginning of his journey, "Words frequently come from unlikely places, and the unlikelihood is illuminating." Recommended. [Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English; John Murray, 3 Apr 2008 (UK); Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 16 Sep 2008 (US and Canada); hardback, pp440, including indexes; list price GBP16.99 in the UK; ISBN13: 978-0-7195-6454-3, ISBN10: 0-7195-6454-9.] AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK Amazon UK: GBP10.19 http://wwwords.org?SLW1 Amazon USA: http://wwwords.org?SLW5 Amazon Canada: CDN$34.52 http://wwwords.org?SLW6 Amazon Germany: EUR23,99 http://wwwords.org?SLW9 [Please use these links to buy. They get World Wide Words a small commission at no extra cost to you.] 6. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- Jonathan McColl reports from Dingwall that the Aberdeen Press and Journal had a short item on 17 April headed "RAF to respond to low- flying complaints." He comments, "It's the ones that come in under the radar that get you." When Nigel Neve got around to reading a sign in his local pub, The Railway Tavern in West Wickham, Kent, he did a double-take, then took a photo. It reads "SHIRTS/TOPS MUST BE WORN AT ALL TIMES BOTH INTERNALLY AND EXTERNALLY". Department of aphorism mangling: As practised by the BBC in a piece on 22 April about the launch of the Quilliam Foundation, a think tank to oppose the world-view of Al Qaeda: "It hopes to become a rolling ball gathering the moss of former Islamists - and the more moss it gathers, the greater its momentum in communities." Thanks to Andrew Ellam for passing it on. Judith Baron e-mailed on Tuesday, "The misplaced modifier is my favorite form of grammatical error. Here's the latest misdeed from today's New York Times (a plentiful source): 'His granddaughter, a bright-eyed 17-year-old in blue jeans named Katya.'" Does she also have a T-shirt named Charlie? ------------------------------------------------------------------- World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2008. 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 or blogs needs prior permission, for which you should contact the editor at wordseditor@worldwidewords.org . -------------------------------------------------------------------