WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 608 Saturday 11 October 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/sjax.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: Nympholepsy. 3. Recently noted. 4. Q&A: Jay-walking. 5. Sic! A. Subscription information. B. E-mail contact addresses. C. Ways to support World Wide Words. 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- KIPPERS AND CURTAINS As many subscribers pointed out, there's no lack of disparaging terms for people who are thought to be trying to live above their station. John Davies mentioned one common in Coventry in his childhood: "Brown boots and no breakfast". Pat Mackay recalled, "Another variation is 'Curtains on the windows, no sheets on the beds.' It was common in Northern Ireland when I lived there 40 years ago." Sandra Parker mentioned, "My Dad used to say 'Queen Anne front and Mary Anne behind'". Jake Morgan wrote, "The town of West Bridgford, lying just south of the river Trent and proudly independent of the City of Nottingham, is locally referred to as 'bread and lard island'. This started in the late Victorian era to reflect the price of the then new houses in West Bridgford. It stemmed from a popular belief that once you had spent all your money on the house all you could afford to eat was bread and lard." Steve Flood commented: "Phrases for outward prosperity cloaking poverty are not confined to English. I have been working in Dalian in north-east China for 18 months and have discovered that Mandarin is a rich source of unique phrases including 'Silk trousers with corn in the belly' - corn being the cheap feed-all in Northern China." Anton Sherwood noted another version of "she's no better than she ought to be" - "she's no better than she should be"; this appears more frequently than the other one, though both are fairly common and neither is exactly a model of linguistic clarity. OF- WORDS My throwaway query on "Ofsted" last time, wondering what might be a term for words formed from the first syllables of other words, rather than first letters, led to some interesting further examples. Eryk Vershen noted "Nabisco"; Michael Delaney pointed out "Benelux" and "Amex"; Bernie Corbett gave "Gestapo". The view is that these are acronyms - most dictionaries (including the Shorter Oxford but not my other Oxford dictionaries), say this term covers pronounceable abbreviations formed from elements or syllables of a phrase or series of words, not just the initial letters. 2. Weird Words: Nympholepsy /'nimf@lepsi/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- A wild frenzy caused by desire for an unattainable ideal. That's one sense, which Edward Bulwer-Lytton described in Godolphin in 1833: "The most common disease to genius is nympholepsy - the saddening for a spirit that the world knows not." It can also refer to the passion or desire aroused in men by young girls, which is, unsurprisingly, in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. As a result, it's often equated with paedophilia or the Lolita complex, though it's strictly an unappeasable longing, not one that can be acted upon. Nympholepsy started life in English in the late eighteenth century with the idea behind it of a person in a frenzy from beholding those mythological spirits of nature that the ancients imagined as beautiful maidens living in rivers or woods. It's from the Greek "numpholeptos", caught by nymphs. George Moore wrote about it in his Memoirs of My Dead Life: I have always thought it must be a wonderful thing to believe in the dryad. Do you know that men wandering in the woods sometimes used to catch sight of a white breast between the leaves, and henceforth they could love no mortal woman? The beautiful name of their malady was nympholepsy. A disease that every one would like to catch. By the early nineteenth century it had added the meaning in my definition, the one Lord Byron called "The nympholepsy of some fond despair". 3. Recently noted ------------------------------------------------------------------- HAPPY, HAPPY FAT Jane Steinberg tells me she was researching the residual toxicity of a termiticide (itself an interesting word, for a substance that kills termites) when she found "lipofelicity" in an article. "I like to think of it as meaning happiness at being fat," she wrote. The writer of the article was undoubtedly looking for "lipophilicity", the property of being soluble in fats, oils and other non-polar solvents. It means "fat loving", not a million miles from the other sense, but both she and I rather prefer the mistake. For "lipo-", see http://www.affixes.org/l/lipo-.html. SUPERLATIVES AHOY! The Guardian covered the Monte Carlo boat show recently, mentioning that "Boats built to personal specifications have grown to such vast proportions that the labels superyacht and megayacht are no longer enough. Those on the dockside now talk of the gigayacht - multi-storey, 120-metre floating mansions that resemble cruise liners." I've fallen behind in my research on names for the nautical playthings of the mega-rich, as a search finds "gigayacht" from 2002; as a mark of its acceptance, compounds such as "gigayachting" and "gigayachtsman" are also used in the yachting business. As you would expect, "megayacht" is older still, recorded from 1986. I was going to write that we should be looking out for "terayacht" any year now, then thought to look for it and found examples from 2005. But we've not yet reached the giddy heights of "petayacht". (For more on the number prefixes, visit http://www.affixes.org/m/multiples.html.) CREDIT CRISIS NEOLOGISMS On Monday, The Times reported a new term for our times: "recessionista", describing it thus: "Apparently a recessionista is a fashionista (natch) who is decisively on trend in these straitened times and dresses exclusively in black (it's grim), vintage (it's all we can afford) and long skirts (going short during bad economic times is as frowned on in hemlines as it is in hedge funds)." It's not new - it has previously been sighted in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Washington Post and the Daily Mail. The word is obviously based on "fashionista", a term which borrows the "-ista" suffix for a committed supporter of a person or organisation: see http://www.affixes.org/i/-ista.html . Another credit-crunch neologism in the news this week is "square mile syndrome", where the square mile is the City of London. It was coined by an independent mental health hospital in Marylebone. It has experienced a 33% rise in the number of City workers in banks and hedge funds seeking treatment for depression, anxiety and stress as a result of the current financial turmoil. The hospital stresses that the term isn't a diagnostic definition. 4. Q&A: Jay-walking ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. When someone crosses the street in a city illegally, it's called jay-walking. This usually means crossing at a point other than the intersection. What does the "J" stand for, or who is Jay? What is the origin of this term? [Marty Ryerson; related questions came from Fred A Roth, Matthias Werner, Richard Hacker, Robert L Hamm and Dalia Wolfson] A. It has been said that people who take their lives in their hands in the big city by crossing the street anywhere dodge across in the pattern of a letter J - hence J-walking. Do not believe this. The experts are sure the jay is the bird, one of the American jays, presumably the common bluejay. From around the last quarter of the nineteenth century, "jay" had been a slang term in North America for a stupid, gullible, ignorant, or provincial person, a rustic, bumpkin, simpleton or greenhorn. I would guess it's a reference to the noisy squabbling of these slightly dim-witted birds. The jay I sometimes see on country walks, the European species, is placed in the genus Garrulus and garrulous is the right word for it - "jay" was an insulting term for a foolish chattering person back in the 1500s. It's not hard to see how country cousins, unversed to city ways, could have had this well-established sobriquet attached to them by supercilious metropolitans when they cluelessly wandered across a busy street or hopped about dodging the traffic. In the second decade of the twentieth century we start to see references in US newspapers to jaywalkers, usually because city councils are passing ordinances to stop pedestrians crossing the street anywhere they like. The earliest that I've so far found is from February 1912 in a periodical called The Survey, reporting on restrictions proposed in Kansas City. Numerous others turn up in newspapers the following year: in March in Washington DC, in June in Fort Wayne, Indiana (in a report which defines a jaywalker as "an alleged human being who crosses the street at other points than the regular crossings") and in October in Lincoln, Nebraska. These show that the term had quite suddenly become widely distributed and fairly common. I would guess that it had been around for some time in the spoken language and private usage but that something had made it break out into public discourse at this time. The Nebraska appearance was in an open letter in the Lincoln Daily Star to the city commissioners from a disgruntled citizen: "Dear Friends: Forget all about that 'jaywalking' ordinance, the very name of which insults every citizen. Give the people credit for having a grain of common sense, like yourselves, and of being able to take care of themselves, as they have heretofore managed to do without your grandmotherly help." It had no effect - the ordinance became law the following month. 5. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- On Wednesday of this week, the Guardian reported on the auction of a rare medieval Islamic ewer: "The bid was annulled by 'private agreement', prompting rumours that the vendor had agreed to sell the item along with the buyer." But who will buy the buyer? Gerry Zanzalari shook his head over a Fox News online headline on 26 September: "Jury Convicts New York Man of Killing Wife for the Second Time". He comments, "I thought you only got to die once. Silly me." Paul Birch recollects: "Some time ago a choir in which I sing was advertised here in Vancouver as having performed previously in several countries overseas. The conductor of the performance was to be the well-known Bernard Labadie. Unfortunately, the copy was passed through a spell checker without human review before it was sent out to subscribers. Our friends were somewhat surprised to read that the choir, 'conducted by the famous maestro, Mr. Libido, had recently sung in London at St. Martini's in the Field.'" 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. Ways to support World Wide Words ------------------------------------------------------------------- The World Wide Words newsletter 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 2008. All rights reserved. The Words Web site is at http://www.worldwidewords.org . ------------------------------------------------------------------- You may reproduce this newsletter in whole or part in free online newsletters, newsgroups or mailing lists provided that you include the copyright notice above. Reproduction in printed publications or on Web sites or blogs needs prior permission, for which you should contact the editor at wordseditor@worldwidewords.org . -------------------------------------------------------------------