WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 605 Saturday 20 September 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 ------------------------------------------------------------------- A formatted version of this newsletter is available online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/tyer.htm The newsletter is best viewed in a fixed-pitch font. For a key to phonetic symbols, see http://wwwords.org?PRON Contents ------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Feedback, notes and comments. 2. Weird Words: Gnathonic. 3. Personal publishing news. 4. Recently noted. 5. Elsewhere. 6. Q&A: Piggyback. 7. Sic! A. Subscription information. B. E-mail contact addresses. C. Ways to support World Wide Words. 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- MOOREEFFOC Several readers objected that, as the only letters in the word that are truly reversible are M and O, "coffee room" can't be properly read backwards on a glass door. Such critics fail to take into account Dickens's intelligence and literary acumen, even at the tender age at which he first observed the sign. He was quite capable of reading reversed letters. One that does work backwards for us ordinary folks was recalled by Stephen Howlett: "I remember the shock the first time I saw an IXAT in my rear-view mirror." Others pointed out that my reference to Dickens's autobiography had to be wrong, since he never published one, something I should have known. A reference in John Forster's The Life of Charles Dickens of 1872 confused me. He quoted from material that Dickens wrote for an autobiography he began but abandoned. Instead Dickens incorporated much of the material on his early life (not the word "mooreeffoc") into the chapters of David Copperfield in which David is sent to work at Murdstone and Grinby's warehouse. Its manager, by the way, was a Mr Quinion, a name that on one of his night-time rambles about London Dickens must have plucked from the sign over the saddlery shop in Southall owned by a long-dead relative of mine, Samuel Quinion. BLESS YOUR LITTLE COTTON SOCKS There are, it transpires, several folk variations on this phrase in the US. Robert Sharp mentioned "bless yore li'l pea-pickin' heart"; Greg Landheim recalled his mother saying "Bless your heart and little mittens." Richard Strout informed us that "'Bless your cotton socks' is an old southern US saying used to show indulgence of someone who is 'playing poker with a pinochle deck' but is trying as hard as they can." Joyce Schnobrich remembered another version from her childhood in Florida and Washington DC, as did Charlie Jensen Lecanto, who e-mailed from Florida: "This has to be related to or at least the source of the American Southern expression 'Bless your cotton pickin' heart', often used in lieu of some expletive when a person does something inconsiderate or says something out of place." 2. Weird Words: Gnathonic /neI'TQnIk/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- Sycophantic, toadying. The Oxford English Dictionary defines this as "resembling Gnatho or his proceedings". Next question, please. Gnatho was a character in the play Eunuchus, the Eunuch, by the Roman writer Terence. He was the worst kind of flatterer, who would say that black was white or yes meant no if it would please Thraso, the man to whom he has succeeded in attaching himself. The Latin word for him was "parasitus", a parasite, a person who lives at the expense of somebody else and repays him with flattery (this is the original sense of "parasite" in English - the non-human sort came along rather later). The parasite in Greek and Roman literature was particularly fond of his food. The word, and its older variation "gnathonical" are long dead in English, though very occasionally resurrected to confuse the unwary at spelling bees with that silent initial "g" or by some writer who wishes to parade his erudition. The most recent example I can find of a genuine use is from Charles Kingsley's Westward Ho!, as far back as 1855: "That Jack's is somewhat of a gnathonic and parasitic soul, or stomach, all Bideford apple-women know." 3. Personal publishing news ------------------------------------------------------------------- BOOK NEWS The paperback of my book Gallimaufry: A Hodgepodge of Our Vanishing Vocabulary has just come out and is available from all good bookshops and online, though Americans will have to wait until March 2009 for it to appear in their country. (If you're in a hurry, you could sneak over the border and get it from Canada, or buy the hardback). Go to my page via http://wwwords.org?GALI for more about the book, a sample entry and Amazon links. Less good news is that Oxford University Press have remaindered my dictionary of affixes, Ologies and Isms, after six years. I was sorry about this, though it wasn't making me much money, because I felt the book served a need. As the copyright has reverted, I've put it on a Web site of its own. It's at http://www.affixes.org, where anybody can consult it for nothing. Do please visit and send me your comments and reports of any errors you find - converting the code for 1,300 Web pages was a big job, even with most of it done programmatically, and there are bound to be mistakes. Please use the e-mail address at the bottom of each page on that site. To redress the bad news, Shire Publications have just brought out a revised version of my little book about cidermaking, published back in 1982 and out of print for some years. If you're interested, you will find information at http://www.quinion.com/cidermaking . Oh, and before I forget, the digital manuscript for my next book was submitted to Penguin this week. Don't expect to see the book anytime soon, as the wheels grind slowly at publishing houses, especially in this case. You won't be able to buy a copy for the better part of a year. 4. Recently noted ------------------------------------------------------------------- CLBUTTIC MISTAKE This one has been circulating online for some time, but surfaced in an article in the Daily Telegraph earlier this month under the running head "President Abraham Lincoln was buttbuttinated by an armed buttailant after a life devoted to the reform of the US consbreastution." Yes, it's our old friends the incompetent programmers of obscenity filters. They've decided that certain nasty words in e-mail and on Web sites shouldn't just be deleted, but converted to something more tasteful: "butt" replaces "ass", "tit" is turned into "breast", and so on. The problem is that they do it to such strings of letters within words as well as whole words. Such slack programming once caused e-mail references to the English town of Scunthorpe to be rejected by filters. We must hope that the torrents of ridicule heaped upon their heads will cause them to rewrite their code more carefully. CALL ME SQUIDGY The advertisement in New Scientist on 6 September for a "soft condensed matter scientist" might have ended up a Sic! item, had I not discovered that the study of soft condensed matter is a sub-discipline of physics that's concerned with the properties of colloidal suspensions, polymers, and surfactants. DANCE OF THE MINUSCULE The same issue reported that one fear some people had about turning on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva was that it would create bosenovas. I read that first as bossanovas, which brought quite the wrong image to mind. I learn that bosenovas can be produced in a Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC), matter cooled to a tiny fraction of a degree above absolute zero, in which all the atoms behave like one superatom. If the BEC is squeezed with a magnetic field, it can explode like a microscopic supernova. "Bosenova" is clearly a blend of "bose" with "nova" and was invented by the team that created one in 2001; the same team had been the first to create a BEC, in 1995. The Bose-Einstein Condensate is named for Albert Einstein and the Indian physicist Satyendra Bose, who in 1924 predicted its existence. 5. Elsewhere ------------------------------------------------------------------- WEIRD WORDS Aydin Örstan wrote, "Thank you for the wonderful list of weird words. I was so intrigued by them that I challenged myself (and my niece) to construct a sentence using as many of them as I can." His version is at http://wwwords.org?WWAO. Don't miss the link at the end to his niece's one! OED UPDATES The Oxford English Dictionary, which is incidentally about to celebrate its eightieth birthday, posted its quarterly update of new and revised entries to its online site last week. OED editor Graeme Diamond picks some out in his notes on the latest new words at http://wwwords.org?OEDG; John Simpson, the Chief Editor, comments on some of the most interesting features of this batch at http://wwwords.org?OEDS. 6. Q&A: Piggyback ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. "Piggyback" is used so commonly that I've never really wondered about it until an advertisement on television here in New Zealand showed cartoon pigs standing on each other's backs. Did the word ever actually have anything to do with pigs? [Donna Gush] A. Not originally. The pigs have sneaked in through human error. It started out in the sixteenth century as "pick pack", carrying something on the back or shoulders. "Pick" is a medieval version of "pitch", so it meant a load that was pitched on to a person's back for carrying. A little later, "pickpack" meant a ride on somebody's shoulders. After that, matters started to get muddled. "Pack" was changed into "back" through the obvious associations. Then it became "pick-a- back". Finally, the pigs arrived, in the nineteenth century, by a confusion between "pick" and "pig", an obvious-enough change, not least because then "pick" made no more sense than it does today. "Piggy-back" came along later in the century, with "piggyback" a modern loss of the hyphen. We're not sure where the pigs were introduced - some writers say it was in north America, others in Britain. There's lots of evidence from English regional dialects of "pig" being part of the phrase by the early to middle nineteenth century, which suggests that it may originally have been British. "Pig-a-back" is known from the US no later than the 1860s but from Britain rather earlier - it appears in The Life of Beau Brummell, published in London in 1844, and in A Dialogue in the Devonshire Dialect of 1838 whose glossary says, "Pig-a-back, said of schoolboys that ride on one another's backs, straddling, as an Irishman would carry a pig." The earliest cases of "piggy-back" are from the US in the 1880s, though cases came along soon afterwards in Britain (the OED has a US citation dated 1843, but as this is in a comic description of a riot interrupting a wedding and refers to men actually carrying pigs, it looks like wordplay on "pick-a-back"). I'd guess the same processes of change were going on in both countries more or less at the same time and pace. 7. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- A friend of Esther Cup Choy on Oahu sent her this extract from the Honolulu Star Bulletin of 7 September: "By 6:15 p.m., no one had been reported missing, and officials called off the search, Seelig said. 'There was no body at Bellows,' he said. 'We did see a shark in the helicopter.'" Kay in Denver reports, "As Hurricane Ike barreled towards Texas last Friday, CNN's Wolf Blitzer stated that the residents of Galveston should 'leave or possibly face certain death.'" A reader who works for Royal Mail says that in a recent discussion between workers and management a postman was complaining about the standard of the footwear issued. "Basically", he said, "these shoes are pants!" Christine Shuttleworth was reading Charlotte Metcalf's food column in the Spectator for 13 September: "If anything, luxury food sales are rocketing and appear to be recession-proof. Mary Adams, buyer at Fortnum & Mason, says: 'Grouse are literally flying off the counter.'" Peter Ronai read an article by the physicist Brian Greene in the online version of the New York Times for 12 September: "After more than a decade of development and construction, involving thousands of scientists from dozens of countries at a cost of some $8 billion, the 'on' switch for the collider was thrown this week." He reckons that was an expensive switch and wonders how much the whole machine cost. A. Subscription information ------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the list, change your subscription address or resubscribe, please visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/index.htm . You can also maintain your subscription by e-mail. For a list of commands, send this message to listserv@listserv.linguistlist.org: INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS This newsletter is also available as an RSS feed. For the details, visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/newsletter.xml . Back issues are at http://www.worldwidewords.org/backissues/ . B. E-mail contact addresses ------------------------------------------------------------------- * Comments on newsletter mailings are always welcome. They should be sent to me at wordseditor@worldwidewords.org . I do try to respond, but pressures of time often prevent me from doing so. * Items for "Sic!" should go to wordsclangers@worldwidewords.org . Submissions will not usually be acknowledged. * Questions intended to be answered in the Q&A section should be addressed to wordsquestions@worldwidewords.org (please don't use this address to respond to published answers to questions - e-mail the comment address instead). * Problems with subscriptions that cannot be handled by the list server should be addressed to wordssubs@worldwidewords.org . To allow me more time for researching material, please don't e-mail me with simple subscription changes. C. 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