WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 685 Saturday 10 April 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 with illustrations is available online at http://wwwords.org?IJNB 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. Weird Words: Nye. 2. This week. 3. Q and A: Tacky. 4. Sic! A. Subscription information. B. E-mail contact addresses. C. Ways to support World Wide Words. 1. Weird Words: Nye /nVI/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- We've all come across a pride of lions, a flock of sheep, a swarm of bees, and a gaggle of geese. Such collectives are part of our common language. Other fairly well-known cases are a parliament of rooks, a murmuration of starlings, and an exaltation of larks. There are so many, and so popular a subject, that they've generated a sub-genre of humour: a catalogue of librarians, an enumeration of accountants, a descent of relatives, even a wunch of bankers, as well as that hoary old joke about the essay of Trollopes/jam of tarts/anthology of pros. Nye is a rarer example. It's usually said to be any collection or group of pheasants, though older lexicographical authorities insist that it really means a brood of the birds. That's because the word derives from Anglo-Norman "ny", from Latin "nidus", a nest. But as fowlers were using the group sense as long ago as 1701, it's hard to insist on etymological exactitude. This is a rare example of the word appearing outside a list: Hark ye! only last week that jack-fool, the young Lord of Brocas, was here talking of having seen a covey of pheasants in the wood. One such speech would have been the ruin of a young Squire at the court. How would you have said it, Nigel?" "Surely, fair sir, it should be a nye of pheasants." [Sir Nigel, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1901. A covey, as any countryman of the time would have known, is a group term for partridge, ultimately from Latin "cubare", to lie down.] Another term from the same source for a brood or nest of pheasants is "nide". This, too, has long since become a general collective: The farmer informed us that the game was very plentiful; and when we entered the first stubble field, we saw a nide of fourteen pheasants run into the hedge row. [Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq, by Henry Hunt, 1820.] 2. This week ------------------------------------------------------------------- CHEXTING A humorous piece mentioning this word came from Reuters on 1 April, so I was suspicious of it. But it had been recorded in the Urban Dictionary back in November 2006 and it had appeared in various publications the previous week in response to a "report" by a PR company, so the Reuters article was more probably a tongue-in- cheek follow-up than an April Fool joke. CHEXTING is said to be a blend of "cheating" and "texting", a close relative of "sexting", and refers to text messages sent between lovers who are cheating on their spouses. The Reuters article noted, "But don't be fooled into thinking you're safe. If you've sexted and chexted, you might soon be 'exted' by your spouse." Ouch. There's also BREXTING, I'm told, from the same source, which is breaking up a relationship by means of a text message. I suspect that both terms are already past their sell-by date. TWITTERPIDITY Dozens of slangy terms have recently been invented in connection with Twitter, such as twittersphere, twitterrhoea, twitterer and twitterati - all examples of twitterspeak. Two UK inventors - an advertising consultant and a retail designer - have come up with the TWETTLE, a wireless-enabled kettle that sends you a tweet when it boils. As a result, you could spend an extra minute or two doing something really useful, instead of impatiently waiting for the water to boil for that nice cup of tea. I'd guess the old-fashioned whistling kettle is too low-tech for them? TRANSCREATION This word appeared in a blog in MediaPost on Monday and I flagged it because it was unfamiliar. A quick search showed that it's common in international marketing, whose practitioners must not only translate material into another language but also get across the spirit of the original. The MediaPost piece described TRANSCREATION as "the process of rendering creative ideas so they resonate in other idioms and cultures". It's clearly enough a blend of "translation" and "creation". It's most often used in the US, in discussions about converting English advertising into Spanish. 3. Q and A: Tacky ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. I was looking for the origin of "tacky" when I came across your site. I was hoping to find validation of my conclusion (based on nothing but my experience of living in the US for 63 years) that it may have come from quilting. By comparison to a handmade quilt, the workmanship of a cheap quilt made by the process called tacking may be considerably below standard. It is tacked together; therefore it is "tacky" by comparison. Could this be the origin? [Tom Crain] A. It's an interesting suggestion, Mr Crain. In the sense that you mean - something exhibiting poor taste and quality - we don't know its ultimate origin for certain, though the chance of its being related to the embroidery sense of "tacking" seems remote. We might instead guess that it's related to the other sense of the adjective - for something, such as paint or varnish, that isn't quite dry and so is still slightly sticky. There's no evidence for that, either. In your sense, "tacky" is firmly located in your own country. It appeared first around 1800 as a noun, variously spelled as "tackie" or "tackey". The earliest example is this: At some places, you are thus asked, in local phrase, to _truck_ or _trade_ for a horse, a cow, or a little _tackie_, a term which signifies a poney, or little horse, of low price. [Communications Concerning the Agriculture and Commerce of America, by William Tathan, 1800.] The horse sense continues in the name of the Carolina Marsh Tacky, a survivor of a breed of horse brought to the Americas by Spanish explorers. Such horses have existed for centuries as semi-wild herds in the marshes of coastal South Carolina and Georgia. The link with horses might lead to the idea that it has something to do with "tack" for horse harness, but the one can't have led to the other, not least because "tack" in this sense dates only from the 1920s (it's an abbreviation of "tackle"). Web sites about the breed sometimes suggest that "tacky" is from an English word meaning "cheap" or "common", but it's the other way round - the adjective "tacky" in this sense certainly derives from the name for the horse. The link seems to have been the idea of a lack of breeding, since the horses weren't considered to be of high quality (one writer called them "scrubby"). Later in the century, "tacky" became a term for a "poor white" inhabitant of the southern states. The adjective, enlarging on this sense of "ill-bred", began to be written down in the 1860s and has been in use ever since, though the full flowering of its popularity came only in the 1970s and 1980s. It has since spread throughout the English-speaking world: In the glitzy, and often tacky, world of casinos, Sydney's Star City is the ultimate ugly duckling. [Daily Telegraph (Sydney, Australia), 3 Apr. 2010.] In large part, its renewed popularity came from "ticky-tacky", a term derived from it in the 1960s for cheap or inferior materials. It was invented by Malvina Reynolds in her song Little Boxes, about poor-quality suburban housing in California, which is best known in a version by Pete Seeger: "And they're all made out of ticky tacky, And they all look just the same." 4. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- "On 12 March," belatedly communicates Graham Mackie, "our local newspaper, the Peeblesshire News, carried a job advert for a part- time position in the admin department of the local health centre. It stated that "a knowledge of medical termination would be of benefit but not essential". Jerry Fox was left uncertain how to proceed when he looked up the maintenance contract for the lawn sprinklers at his place of work. One sentence read, "The property owner shall call and schedule an appointment between the months of April and May." "Leonardo da Vinci accused in car accident". Though this headline appeared on BBC News on 1 April, Bill Wanlund is sure it wasn't a prank. It referred to a man on trial for extortion related to The Madonna of the Yarnwinder. Norman Berns reports that the weight-loss site fatsecret.com has word of a curious beverage: "Zwiebelkuchen is an onion pie from Germany, usually served with new wine that's very similar to a quiche." 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. 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