WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 688 Saturday 1 May 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?IQFQM 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: Urtication. 3. This week. 4. Q and A: Pluck the gowans fine. 5. Q and A: Just des(s)erts. 6. Sic! A. Subscription information. B. E-mail contact addresses. C. Ways to support World Wide Words. 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- HUNG PARLIAMENT In retrospect, perhaps I should have provided some footnotes. Many readers commented on or queried three words in the piece: psephological, discombobulation and commentariat. The first of these is the adjective from "psephology", the statistical study of elections and trends in voting (Greek "psephos", a pebble, but also a vote, because Greeks used small stones as voting counters); "commentariat" has been around since 1993, having been coined in the US as a blend of "commentator" and "proletariat"; it is now fairly common worldwide and has been given an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary. For "discombobulation" see my piece at http://wwwords.org?DSCBL. COMEUPPANCE I was surprised by the number of readers who told me that I'd spelled a word wrong in this piece. They felt it should be "just desserts", not "just deserts". This has come up before (once when I got it wrong myself) but it seems worth giving a definitive answer. See below! 2. Weird Words: Urtication /3:tI'keIS@n/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- Your favourite word magazine may be accused of nearing the knuckle (a British idiom meaning verging on the indecent), since urtication - flogging with nettles - has been advocated for erotic stimulation in various cultures. But it's known best as a method of provoking inflammation, a folk remedy for several ailments. Have you urticated yourself today? People have been doing it for a couple of thousand years to relieve arthritis pain, hives, rashes and even sciatica. To perform urtication, all you need is a nettle plant and a glove. Put on the glove, pick up the plant, and smack yourself repeatedly. ... Urtication is not recommended. [The Green Pharmacy Herbal Handbook, by James A Duke, 2000.] The word can be traced back to Roman times. Latin "urtica" is the stinging-nettle, a name in turn taken from the verb "urere", to burn. The medical term "urticaria" refers to a condition of the skin that's also called nettle rash and hives. Romans are said to have performed the nettle-flogging technique with other aims in mind than easing arthritis: Dreading the English climate, [Romans] brought nettles to plant around their first camp in Kent, intending to use them as food, animal fodder and, more bizarrely, as a quick heating system. A flogging with nettle stems was, they had discovered, just the thing for warming chilly limbs. Enthusiasts might like to know that it's called urtication. [Independent, 22 Sep. 2001.] 3. This week ------------------------------------------------------------------- YAKA-WOW! In what seems to have been a mixture of rueful admission of error and pleasure in accidental accomplishment, the Times noted on 23 April that a transcription error in an interview on 15 April with the neuroscientist Baroness Greenfield has gone viral. She was concerned that excessive playing of computer games or using social networks such as Twitter would stop the malleable brains of young people developing as they should: "It's not going to destroy the planet but is it going to be a planet worth living in if you have a load of breezy people who go around saying yaka-wow. Is that the society we want?" Within 24 hours, it is said, Google had 75,000 results for "yaka-wow". It has inspired a Twitter stream, a page on Facebook, mugs and T-shirts; it has become a personal philosophy: "I think, therefore I yaka-wow"; and it has led to the creation of the virtual First Church of the Yaka-Wow. What Baroness Greenfield really said was "yuck and wow", a derogatory comment about the limited emotional range and vocabulary of Twitter users. Considered linguistically and culturally, it's a fascinating example of the way electronic communications can today create and transmit a new word. WEB SCIENCE This term has been in the news because the second web science conference has been held this week in Raleigh, North Carolina. WEB SCIENCE was first publicly used in late 2006 when the Web Science Research Initiative (now the Web Science Trust, headed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web) was launched as a collaboration between MIT and the University of Southampton. Web science is an interdisciplinary study, which brings together Web technologists with economists, lawyers, philosophers and social scientists. It covers such fields as security, trust and privacy and investigates the social and economic impact of the Web. A particular concern is the way in which data sets are increasingly being interconnected to make huge "data webs", which combine information in new ways, ways which are likely to have unforeseen social and privacy implications. The first undergraduate degree in web science has been announced this month by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. COLLAPSONOMICS This one popped up recently in a couple of sources I regularly read. It's vanishingly rare in printed texts - and even Wikipedia hasn't noticed it yet - but has a presence in blogs and especially on Twitter. COLLAPSONOMICS is clearly enough a blend of "collapse" and "economics". The term is the economics mirror of DISASTER STUDIES, which has been around since the 1950s and looks into the financial and social consequences of natural calamities such as earthquakes, asteroid strikes and volcanic eruptions and how to cope with them. COLLAPSONOMICS began to appear about a year ago to refer to the study of national economies on the brink of collapse. 4. Q and A: Pluck the gowans fine ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. I have searched the Web to the best of my ability to find some explanation of the derivation of the phrase "plucking the gowans fine", which P G Wodehouse employed many times in his writings. It seems to express the nostalgic recollection of "a good time being had by all," and the possibility of renewing those good times among long-parted friends. Its etymology seems - online, at least - to be a closed book. Can you shed any light on this curious phrase? [Barton Brown] A. Wodehouse seems to have used the complete expression only in his later works - the earliest example I've found is in the Code of the Woosters of 1938. This is a more recent one: It was many years since this Cheesewright and I had started what I believe is known as plucking the gowans fine, and there had been a time when we had plucked them rather assiduously. [Joy in the Morning, by P G Wodehouse, 1947.] The problem in your finding the origin most probably lies in your searching for the whole phrase. It seems to have been invented by Wodehouse and to have been used only by him, since I can't find it anywhere else. On the other hand, lots of examples of "gowans fine" turn up in online references, which at once send one to the source. It's in a song by Robert Burns that later became famous in a rather different form. His version includes this stanza: We twa hae run about the braes And pu'd the gowans fine But we've wander'd mony a weary foot Sin' auld lang syne. [Auld Lang Syne, by Robert Burns, 1788. The title roughly translates as "times long past". "Twa" means two; "hae" means have; a "brae" is a hillside; "mony" means many; "sin'" is short for since.] The line needs some translation. "Pu'd" is the past tense of the Scots verb "pou" (sometimes written as "pu" in Burns's time). This may be translated as "pull", but it has a rather wider compass. It covers the actions of plucking flowers (or chickens), gathering fruit, or harvesting or collecting produce of any kind. A "gowan" with a supporting adjective may be a wild flower of several sorts, but standing alone it's the common daisy. "Pu'd the gowans fine" may therefore be rendered in modern English less obscurely but also less romantically as "picked the fine daisies". As you suggest, the line does evoke carefree former times, as Wodehouse meant by it. There's no mystery why he chose "plucked", which is a perfectly good equivalent of the Scots verb and is both more powerful and evocative than "picked". Perhaps the greater mystery is why nobody else seems to have done so. 5. Q and A: Just des(s)erts ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. In last week's issue, in your item on "comeuppance", you wrote "Why should it mean the punishment or fate that someone deserves, a just retribution or just deserts?" Surely that should be "just desserts"? [Megan Zurawicz; related questions came from others.] A. I didn't make a mistake, but the confusion between the two forms is now so widespread that it's hard to be sure which one is right. The evidence of the Oxford corpus of recent English is that "just desserts" is now more common than "just deserts" (60% against 40%), suggesting it may one day become the standard form. Even my Sunday newspaper, the Observer, had it in a headline on 11 April: "Perhaps the parties will get their just desserts". It wasn't suggesting they might be served with apple pie or Black Forest gateau. The muddle isn't helped by the bakery chains and authors of cookery books who think "just desserts" is a deliciously punning title. The problem is that there are three nouns involved (and a verb as well, though that's less of an issue), two of them spelled with just one "s" in the middle and the third with two. It's fatally easy to get them mixed up. We have no problem with "desert" when we mean the dry, barren area or with "dessert" when we refer to the sweet course of a meal. The former is from Latin "desertus", abandoned, deserted or left waste; in turn it's from the verb "deserere", to abandon, which is the source also of the verb. The latter is from French "desservir", to remove what has been served or to clear the table - the dessert course was usually laid out in another room to give the servants free rein to clear the table after the main course. It's the third word - the "desert" in "just deserts" - that causes the trouble, as it's spelled like the barren desert but said like the sweet course. This "desert" is from another Old French verb that means "deserve". The confusion between "just deserts" and "just desserts" is mainly one of pronunciation. We don't confuse the barren desert with the other two words because it's stressed on the first syllable, while the others are stressed on the second It's because the "deserts" in "just deserts" is said the same way as the foodstuff "desserts" that leaves us puzzled how to spell the former. If you need a memory aid, remember the sentence "Deserts are what one deserves". "Deserve" and "desert" both have one "s" and are both stressed on the second syllable. So it's "just deserts". 6. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- Bob Lee read about a malevolent natural event in the issue of the Calgary Herald for 23 April. A report noted that Princess Alexandra was unable to attend an event in the city: "After more than a year of meticulous preparations, the volcano in Iceland disrupted air travel for hundreds of thousands of passengers, including the princess." He spotted another in a story in the same issue about an update of what was once called the badger game: "A man hired a female escort online. After she arrived, she received a phone call from a friend, police said. Within minutes, two men burst inside the home." That must have been really messy. Norman C Berns found a link in the Huffington Post to a story from the Daily Telegraph last Tuesday: "A touch of Mission: Impossible has come to text messaging, with the launch of a new service called Safe Text. The system sends messages to mobile phones that self- destruct as soon as they have been read." Mr Berns would prefer to keep his phone intact. 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. 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