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E-MAGAZINE 667: SATURDAY 28 NOVEMBER 2009 Contents 1. Feedback, notes and comments Slipshod? Many readers queried my invention of disopprobrium in this item last week. It was intended to mean harsh censure but, as correspondents pointed out, opprobrium had that sense without the prefix, which inverted the meaning. I might try to weasel my way out by suggesting dis- is an intensifier, but I fear that wouldn’t wash with this audience. Two weeks ago, you may remember, a Sic! item mentioned an unfortunate use of approbation when opprobrium would have been more appropriate. I seem to have suffered the same confusion but in reverse, since disapprobation (strong disapproval) is a perfectly good word and would have fitted the context. But “strong disapproval” might have been even better! Unfriend Several readers told me that unfriend was much older than Facebook. The noun certainly is, with evidence going back to medieval Scots, its sense ranging from a person with whom one is not on friendly terms to a full-blown enemy. After going out of favour around 1600 it was reintroduced by Sir Walter Scott in 1814 but then disappeared again. The verb has been recorded but is very rare, though the adjective unfriended has been moderately successful for some centuries: But I believed, niece, you had a greater sense of propriety than to have received the visits of any young man in your present unfriended situation. The Mysteries of Udolpho, by Ann Radcliffe, 1794.
2. Weird Words: Deliquescent/dɛlɪˈkwɛsənt/ Many people first encountered this word, as I did, during a school science lesson in which some crystals were put on the bench. Within a few minutes they absorbed enough water vapour from the air to dissolve into solution. Such crystals are said to deliquesce or to be deliquescent. That’s a specific technical application of a word whose meanings in English are intriguing. For example, how about dusty and deliquescent? In the nineteenth century, deliquescent was used jokingly of someone who has become so hot as a result of physical exertion that he’s swimming in sweat. Dusty and deliquescent became what we may politely call a set phrase or, impolitely, a cliché: The country pedestrians, “dusty and deliquescent” with their long rounds, are seen marching back towards the city. The Little World of London, by Charles Manby Smith, 1857. The Latin original is deliquescere. This could mean “dissolve”, but more negatively it implied melting away or exhausting. Romans might employ it figuratively for dissipating one’s energies. This produced another English meaning — of organic matter such as fungi that decomposes into a liquid mass after fruiting. Such ideas gave this author a way to create an image of fading fruitfulness: There was a middle-aged woman at the far side of the room with black dyed hair and a sort of deliquescent distinction. Room at the Top, by John Braine, 1957. The word can — surprisingly — describe a plant stem that repeatedly branches. The concept is of a single stem that ramifies by repeated branchings into ever smaller stems until it fades to nothing. This deeply figurative example is presumably borrowing the idea: This past fall, with the consecutive openings of six “Asian biennials,” the deliquescent 1990s and early-2000s trend toward establishing new large-scale exhibitions in increasingly far-flung locales bore fruit, such as it is. Artforum, 1 Jan. 2009
3. What I've learned this week Skywatchers What do you call a scientist who studies the heavens? Most of us would instantly say astronomer. But three times in the past week I’ve instead been presented with astronomist instead. A archive search finds a large number of examples, at least sixty in reputable newspapers since 2000. Some are much older — the earliest I’ve so far found appeared in the Weekly Georgia Telegraph in 1869 in a report on observations of a solar eclipse. There are so many words for specialists that end in -ist that astronomist might even have become the standard term, had not astronomer got there first (in the 1360s). The modern confusion may be rooted in a misformulation that’s recorded from the 1950s — astrologist for astrologer. So astronomist might be a result of the perennial confusion in some people’s minds between astrology and astronomy. However, astronomer is so common that for writers in periodicals to use it implies a surprising level of ignorance. More verbing The recent discussion about the verbing of nouns was still on my mind when I began to read a Michael Innes novel, Stop Press, dated 1939 (called The Spider Strikes in the US). The trick is frequently used for humorous purposes, of course, which is the way Innes employed it: “They edged through the crush and turning down a corridor found themselves in a deserted billiard-room amply decantered and cigared.” Since these are participles, it might be argued that Innes is actually adjectiving, not verbing, but that’s a distinction that makes little difference. Going Dutch Last year, the Onze Taal Dutch language association threw open the choice of its Word of the Year to internet voters. The association’s members were perhaps disconcerted by the choice of swaffelen, a slangy Dutch term that means to deliberately tap male genitalia against an object. At any rate, this year they have gone back to the old system and decided on the Word of the Year among themselves. They’ve gone for twitteren, which is the Dutch verb meaning to send short text messages via the Twitter site. The runners-up were kopvoddentax (“head rag tax”, in reference to the controversial tax on Muslim head scarves proposed by the far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders) and koninginnedagdrama, which is a reference to the attack on the Dutch royal family during this year’s Queen’s Day celebrations. Twining A minor lexicographical result of the devastating floods in Cumbria last week has been the appearance in at least two UK national newspapers of the dialect word twine, to complain or whine (“Cumbrians are a unique breed. They say what they see. They are hands-on people. They will twine and moan but then they will just get on with it.” — Metro, 23 November). It was at one time widely known throughout Scotland and the north of England. By way of another of its senses, to be fretful, ailing or sickly, it may be connected with dwine, another dialect word, to pine or waste away, which is from an ancient Scandinavian source.
4. Questions and Answers: Dot and carry one [Q] From C Sullivan: I was re-reading Treasure Island the other day, and there’s a line in it in which a character says his pulse went dot and carry one, seeming to mean in context, “skipped a beat”. Can you tell me more about the origin and usage of this phrase — the only other reference I could dig up online involved an old pulp fiction hero nicknamed Dot-and-Carry-One because he had an awkward gait due to having one leg shorter than the other. It seems the metaphor might have something to do with long division, but I’m not sure how that relates to the sense of hesitation or jerkiness. [A] Dot and carry one is a rather dated British figurative phrase for a person with a limp. Such people may indeed have had one leg shorter than the other, though the first people to be called that, around 1775, had wooden legs: Dot and carry one. Person with a wooden leg. The “dot” is the pegged impression made by all wooden legs before the invention of the modelled foot and calf. The “one” is the widowed leg. Passing English of the Victorian Era, by J Redding Ware, 1909. You’re right with your suggestion of long division, though it also relates to addition and subtraction. It refers to a way of doing arithmetic that was taught to children from the eighteenth century down into living memory. To dot and carry one means to set down the units in a column and to carry over the tens to the next column of figures. The method was to put one dot in the next column for every ten that you wanted to carry, as a reminder. An early reference was in a book that tried to make learning the techniques of arithmetic more palatable by setting them to music. One stanza refers to the way to add up columns of money in pounds, shillings and pence (the carries are twelves here, because 12 pence made a shilling in old British money): Still add to these the pence, sir, A Little Young Man’s Companion, or, Common Arithmetic Turned into a Song, by N Withey, 1796. His reference to D is to the old standard symbol for pence, from Latin denarius, as in LSD, pounds, shillings and pence (hence “money”), where L is from another Latin word, libra, a pound weight (the British pound originally referred to the value of a pound weight of silver). Another form at the time was dot and go one, which is explained by Captain Francis Grose in his Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue of 1785: “Generally applied to persons who have one leg shorter than the other, and who, as the sea phrase is, go upon an uneven keel.” He adds that the expression was also “a jeering appellation for an inferior dancing master, or teacher of arithmetic.” (Grose also mentions hopping-Giles as another slang term of the time for a person with a limp, St Giles being the patron saint of cripples. Another, later, term was limping Jesus.) Your dot and carry one version, which became the standard one, was popularised by that giant of early nineteenth-century novel writing, Sir Walter Scott, in this work: “That was his father — his father — his father! — you old dotard Dot-and-carry-one that you are,” answered the goldsmith. The Fortunes of Nigel, by Sir Walter Scott, 1822. It’s easy to see how dot and carry one could have later taken on the idea of a hop and a skip or a missing beat.
5. Sic! • Mícheál Ó Doibhilín’s report about reality crisps two weeks ago reminded Mark Allison of a belt he bought some years ago. Proudly stamped on its inner surface was the legend “Genuine Vinyl”. • Mr Ó Doibhilín himself returns with the following, which he spotted on Sky News teletext on 18 November: “A council has dismissed a fine which it issued to a woman for feeding the ducks with her 17-month old son.” The fine was actually for littering. But of course. • Travis Scholtens reports: “A truck at my local farmers’ market advertises its ‘non-profit commitment to harvesting produce and people.’” • “Safe at the hairdresser for eleven months!” was the subject of Richard Moody’s e-mail on Thursday. He had just seen the caption to a photo in the Herald-Sun of Melbourne: “Shane Warne at Advanced Hair Studios where they announced a new genetic test for people to predict whether they will go bald in September.” • “It’s not yet summer,” swooned Margaret Colls, “but large parts of southern Australia have already had maximum daily temperatures of more than 40 degrees Celsius. So I appreciated the suggestion on a packet of my favourite brand of sweets to ‘please keep away from heat to enjoy the flavour & avoid melting’.” • Nina Brevik encountered this thought-provoking sentence in an item in the Daily Telegraph online dated 19 November: “Katie Green, a former Ultimo model, who launched the Say No To Size Zero campaign with Lembit Öpik, the Liberal Democrat MP, told The Sun: ‘There are 1.1 million eating disorders in the UK alone.’”
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