WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 682 Saturday 20 March 2010 ------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 e-magazine is available online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/nzvj.htm My personal page on Facebook: http://wwwords.org?FBMQ A Facebook discussion group (http://wwwords.org?FBDG) Also now on Twitter: http://wwwords.org?TWTR. To leave the list or change your subscribed address, see Section A below or go to http://wwwords.org?SUBS. Please don't e-mail me with subscription matters unless you are having problems. This e-magazine 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: Hyetal. 3. What I've learned this week. 4. Q and A: Cabal. 5. Sic! A. Subscription information. B. E-mail contact addresses. C. Ways to support World Wide Words. 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- TECNONYMOUS In the piece about "mononymous" last week, I defined "tecnonymous" as "relating to the practice of naming a parent after their child". You might not believe how many sarcastic comments came in, suggesting either that a time machine or a senior moment on my part was involved. Think of the word "parent", you doubters. This shows that the naming (or renaming) occurs after the child is born. It's used in several cultures, I'm told, including Korean: Given the rather pervasive taboo in Korean culture against using personal names when speaking to or about adults, Koreans can resort to one of two interesting strategies: teknonymy or geononymy. Teknonymy is the practice of addressing or referring to an adult by way of that adult's relationship to a child. Thus Mrs Kim, the ajumoni next door, may also be Chinho omoni, or "Chinho's mother." [Korean Language in Culture and Society, by Ho-min Sohn, 2006. The spelling with a "k" is now more usual, matching the usual transliteration of the Greek word for child ("teknon"), from which it derives. "Geononymy", the author explains, "is the practice of qualifying kinship terms with place names."] But tecnonymy is also common in the English-speaking world. You may often hear a child, or an adult speaking to a child, refer to an adult by relational reference, for example, "Patrick's mum". You may feel that it would have been better to define the term as "the practice of *referring* to a parent by the name of their child". 2. Weird Words: Hyetal /'haI@t@l/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- You may wish to save this adjective for a rainy day, when you can enliven the inevitable discussion about the weather by dropping it into the conversation. Do not, however, expect it to be understood, even though you're merely referring to rain. The Oxford English Dictionary, my first stop in investigating our language, has no examples of it at all in its entry (written about 110 years ago), noting only that it is recorded in the 1864 edition of Webster's Dictionary. A further century of opportunities for the word to be used, coupled with the magic of searchable electronic databases, allows me to do better: The hydrologic cycle has undergone an atmospheric mutation here. They don't measure the rain in inches but in feet. A waterproofing contractor could definitely find happiness here, while rainmakers and dousers would quickly go out of business. This is the kind of place where words like pluviose, hyetal, and affusion actually belong in conversation. [The Washington Post, 4 March 1990. "Affusion" means the pouring of water on the body, as in one form of baptism; "pluviose" is another adjective meaning "rainy".] "Hyetal" comes from Greek "huetos", rain, and is related to Greek "hyei", it is raining. It means "relating to rain". A hyetal chart is a rain chart; an isohyetal is a line on a map connecting places of equal rainfall; a hyetograph is a self-registering rain gauge; and hyetology is the study of the geographical variation and annual distribution of rainfall. Meteorologists, the main users of the word and its compounds, have extended the meaning to include all forms of precipitation. 3. What I've learned this week ------------------------------------------------------------------- WHISTLING WORD My main task this week has been to systematically read a book about old crafts to extract vocabulary for the OED. I could fuel the Weird Words section for years on what turned up, though readers might quickly become bored by its resulting narrow compass. But one word in particular struck me: FIPPLE. It's still used, though it's somewhat specialist. The fipple is an essential part of a recorder, penny whistle or other instrument that belongs to a type musicologists call end-blown. A wedge in the mouthpiece directs air on to the lip in the blowhole, setting up the essential vibrations in the body. This wedge is the fipple. It's an old word with an obscure history, though lexicographers point to Icelandic "flipi", a horse's lip, which may suggest that it's from Old Norse. WOOF! I've previously had reason to mention a British form of social control, the ASBO (Anti-Social Behaviour Order). A proposal by the government to revise the Dangerous Dogs Act (a notoriously badly drafted law from 1991) suggested a variety of methods to control potentially savage dogs often kept as status symbols by young men. One idea put forward was a dog control order, which instantly led commentators to coin the name DOGBO for it. 4. Q and A: Cabal ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. Here in Nigeria, it is said that the true state of the health of the president has been shielded from Nigerians by a cabal, who are bent on holding on to power. How did the word come about? [Taiwo Obe]. A. This term for a semi-secret political clique is sometimes said to be an acronym, from the initials of five leading members of Charles II's government of 1667-73 that covered the period of the third Anglo-Dutch war. The five members were Sir Thomas Clifford, Henry Bennet (Lord Arlington), George Villiers (the Duke of Buckingham), Anthony Ashley Cooper (Earl of Shaftesbury) and John Maitland (Earl of Lauderdale). Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley and Lauderdale - CABAL. Even without detailed knowledge of word history this should cause your mental eyebrows to rise in scepticism. The earliest known acronyms date from around the time of the First World War (the military slang AWOL, "Absent Without Leave", is among the earliest, which newspaper reports around 1918 demonstrate was being said as a pronounceable word) and yet the source of cabal is dated on this theory to an acronymic origin some 250 years earlier. What scuppers the idea completely is that cabal is known from earlier in the seventeenth century through usages linked to Charles I and Oliver Cromwell. It came into English via French "cabale" from medieval Latin "cabbala" (these days more usually Kabbalah). This is an esoteric secret Jewish system of mystical practices based on a study of the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament. Kabbalistic teaching was based on oral transmission from a personal guide, so "cabal", at first referring directly to the Kabbalah, came to mean a private or semi-secret interpretation. By the middle of the seventeenth century it had developed further to mean some intrigue entered into by a small group, and also referred to the group of people so involved. The word was indeed applied to the five ministers (in a pamphlet issued in 1673), but it was no more than a scurrilous joke based on the accident of their initials. Unfortunately, it's a joke that has long since gone sour on etymologists, who have to keep explaining the facts, a problem compounded by historians, who continue to refer to the Cabal Ministry as a convenient shorthand. 5. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- The Record newspaper in Bergen County, New Jersey, e-mails Jean Beidl, had an article on 10 March headlined "Officials get tough with sea lions". It notes that wildlife officials in Portland, Oregon, are trying to "keep sea lions from eating endangered salmon, dropping bombs that explode under water and firing rubber bullets and bean bags from shotguns and boats." Heather Liston came across an online advertisement for the post of Director of Development of the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco. Under "minimum requirements" it listed "At least 57 years of fundraising/development experience." "How strong is this man?" asks Tanja Cilia, having read a report in the Canadian CNews: "When the 36-year-old man got out of his car - carrying his wife and two kids - to talk to the three men to try to calm them down, they got out of the truck and assaulted him, police said." "Apple Hires Wearable Computing Engineer" was the headline that Nick Adler came across in the New York Times online on 16 March. Suitable for dress-down Fridays, perhaps? Has the drive for diversity within the Aberdeen police led to its recruiting hermaphrodite officers? Susie Elins wondered this on reading a BBC News report on 16 March, headlined "Man assaulted female police officer with penis." It has since been changed to "Man used penis to assault female police officer", which, come to think of it, is still pretty weird. 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 e-magazine is also available as an RSS feed, whose source is at http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/newsletter.xml . Back issues are at http://www.worldwidewords.org/backissues/ . B. E-mail contact addresses ------------------------------------------------------------------- * Comments on e-magazine 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 and 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 asking for simple subscription changes you can do yourself. C. Ways to support World Wide Words ------------------------------------------------------------------- The World Wide Words e-magazine and Web site are free, but if you would like to help with their costs, there are several ways to do so. Visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/support.htm for details. ------------------------------------------------------------------- World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2010. All rights reserved. The Words Web site is at http://www.worldwidewords.org . ------------------------------------------------------------------- You may reproduce brief extracts from this e-magazine in mailing lists, newsletters or newsgroups online, provided that you include the copyright notice given above. Reproduction of substantial parts of items in printed publications or Web sites needs permission from the editor beforehand (wordseditor@worldwidewords.org). -------------------------------------------------------------------