WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 613 Saturday 15 November 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/tqzp.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. Turns of Phrase: Black swan. 3. Weird Words: Chatoyant. 4. Vote for World Wide Words. 5. Recently noted. 6. Q&A: Widow's peak. 7. Sic! A. Subscription information. B. E-mail contact addresses. C. Ways to support World Wide Words. 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- BOOK REVIEW Apologies to early readers of last week's newsletter. I made two mistakes in coding the links that enable readers to buy the book from Amazon (codes should be four alphanumeric characters, but I made them five, then forgot to test them). My thanks to alert subscribers who told me about the problem. It needed 15 minutes of hurried reworking of the online translation routine, but the codes have since worked. 2. Turns of Phrase: Black swan ------------------------------------------------------------------- A black swan event is related to the "butterfly effect". The latter term was coined by the American mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz in 1973 as a way to illustrate the chaotic nature of weather and the difficulties of modelling it on computers. A tiny change in the initial conditions can often lead to dramatically different outcomes. His example was of a butterfly that fluttered its wings in Brazil, setting off a tornado in Texas. (SF fans will know Ray Bradbury anticipated the idea in his 1952 story A Sound of Thunder; a time traveller to the age of the dinosaurs accidentally kills a butterfly and finds when he returns to the present day that history has changed in a small but vital way. But Bradbury didn't use the term.) "Black swan" came into the language in 2008 through the book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a former market trader. He argued that the stock market is as unpredictable as any chaotic system and that people who thought they could forecast it on the basis of past trends were fooling themselves. At the time he wrote, in 2007, this was considered a contrarian view, but recent events have convinced many doubters of its truth. For Taleb, a black swan is an unpredicted and unpredictable event, like the finding of black swans in Australia by the seventeenth- century Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh. It was taken for granted by Europeans at the time that all swans were white, so his finding could not have been expected and was outside previous experience. The term has been taken up in financial circles and now appears more widely. Though it mainly refers to the recent global financial turmoil, it is also used for unexpected happenings - the closure of the London Stock Exchange for most of 10 September 2008 due to a computer failure was called a black-swan event at the time. * Chicago Sun-Times, 10 Oct. 2008: Either the financial world as we know it is coming to an end - or it's not! We'll only know in hindsight. But unless this is the proverbial "black swan" - the unimaginable and unique event that annihilates capitalism - this panic will subside. * The Press, New Zealand, 8 Oct. 2008: The credit crunch and banking crisis definitely qualifies as a black swan. No one saw it coming and no one knows how it is going to end. All we know is that it is messy. 3. Weird Words: Chatoyant /S@'tOI@nt/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- Having a changeable, varying lustre or colour. No two dictionaries seem to entirely agree on the current meaning of the word. Some mention only the bright lustre of a gem caused by reflections from within the stone, because the word now most often appears in discussions by gemologists; other dictionaries include the sheen of a bird's plumage or the changing colours and texture of a material such as silk. All agree, however, that the source of the expression is the gleam of a cat's eyes in the dark. The direct source is the eighteenth- century French verb "chatoyer", to shine like a cat's eyes. Its French connections remain strong enough that it is still sometimes said as though it were French (roughly "cha-twai-yan"). Many examples in English literature refer to shining eyes, as in The Insidious Dr Fu-Manchu, by Sax Rohmer, of 1913: "I managed to move sufficiently to see at the top, as I fired up the stairs, the yellow face of Dr. Fu-Manchu, to see the gleaming, chatoyant eyes, greenly terrible, as they sought to pierce the gloom." 4. Vote for World Wide Words ------------------------------------------------------------------- Some of you may be jaded following recent electoral excitements in the USA, New Zealand and elsewhere. But your further and continuing help is required. Despite everyone's endeavours, World Wide Words is dropping back in the contest for the 2008-09 Choice Awards. This is the competition organised by L-Soft, creators of the LISTSERV mailing list software on which the World Wide Words newsletter is distributed. Do please vote via http://wwwords.org?LCAS and keep on voting! 5. Recently noted ------------------------------------------------------------------- EPHEBICIDE George Monbiot created this word in an article, "Lest we forget", in the Guardian on 11 November: "There are plenty of words to describe the horrors of the 1939-45 war. But there were none, as far as I could discover, that captured the character of the first world war. So I constructed one from the Greek word 'ephebos', a young man of fighting age. Ephebicide is the wanton mass slaughter of the young by the old." The root appears in a few English words, including "ephebe", the Greek word filtered through Latin, meaning a young man aged between 18 and 20 who undertook military service. "Ephebiatrics" is a rare medical term for the branch of medicine that deals with the study of adolescence and the diseases of young adults; an "ephebophile" is a homosexual adult sexually attracted to adolescents. Though George Monbiot created it afresh, there is one previous example of "ephebicide" on record, in a work of 1979, Saul's Fall: A Critical Fiction. This purported to be a collection of critical essays about a play by a forgotten Spanish author, but the whole book, including the play, was an invention by Herbert Lindenberger, now Emeritus Professor of Humanities at Stanford University. 6. Q&A: Widow's peak ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. I read a sentence in a book and can't figure the last part out: "Her dark hair was drawn back in a simple chignon that accentuated the elegance of her widow's peak." I cannot find an explanation of what "widow's peak" means or where it comes from. I hope you can explain. [Ton Hayward, The Netherlands] A. "Widow's peak" is a well-known English term for a small V-shaped protrusion of hair at the forehead. There has been a widespread superstition - I've found it recorded in Britain, Ireland and North America, and it was probably at one time a common belief throughout the English-speaking world - that a woman with this shape of forehead hair is destined to outlive her husband. Some writers argue the superstition actually refers to another hair feature, the "widow's lock". G F Northall noted in his Warwickshire Word-book in 1895 that this was "a small lock or fringe growing apart from the hair above the forehead"; he commented, "Credulous persons believe that a girl so distinguished will become a widow soon after marriage." Another version of the superstition appeared in Notes and Queries on 7 May 1853, which reproduced the report of a jury, dated 4 July 1692, on the physical examination of several women accused of witchcraft in Ipswich, Suffolk: "Upon searching the body of Widow Hoer, nothing appeared on her unnaturall, only her body verry much scratched, and on her head a strange lock of haire, verry long, and differing in color from the rest on her head, and matted or tangled together, which she said was a widow's lock, and said, if it were cutt off she should die." A book with the title Current Superstitions, published in 1896, recorded that in Labrador it was believed that if a girl's lock were cut before marriage, she would be a widow. Many writers have traced the widow's peak superstition to old-time conventions about the clothing appropriate to a mourning widow, the traditional widow's weeds. ("Weed" was a millennium ago a standard word for an item of clothing; it was only in the sixteenth century that it became restricted to mourning clothes, and in particular to those of a widow.) It is said that part of the widow's costume at the time was a hood (perhaps a version of the bycoket, worn by both men and women) with a pointed crest at the front that resembled the widow's peak. Through a kind of sympathetic magic, a woman who had that shape at the front of her hair was believed to be destined to wear widow's weeds. The term "widow's lock" is recorded from about 1540 but "widow's peak" doesn't arrive until the eighteenth century, in an entry in Nathan Bailey's Universal Etymological English Dictionary of 1721. He equates it with the bandore, a form of head-dress that was even then quite out of fashion; a book of 1712 said that it was part of the costume of "our grandmothers". This suggests people may indeed have imagined a link between hair shape and headwear. Though it's explicitly female, these days men are at least as often described as having widow's peaks ("widower's peak" is known but is rare), because the receding hairline of a balding man often leaves a central protruding peak. The term frequently turns up in books about genetics, because the hair shape is a classic example of a dominant inherited trait. 7. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- "I submit this example to the Department of Funny Mistranslations," Claude Baudoin wrote. "'Salad with believed ham'. It was an English subtitle on the menu at a brasserie in Paris I dined at last month. It comes from the fact that 'cru' is the adjective meaning raw (in this case, it refers to air-cured ham) and also the past participle of 'croire', to believe. I would like my ham to really be there but I'll believe it when I see it." John Leonard continues the theme of unfortunate translations: "My friend's son is in northern China on business. The other morning his breakfast buffet offered 'fungus burning rape'. We guess that it was wood-ear mushrooms sautéed in canola (rapeseed) oil. Jay said he was afraid to even lift the lid." 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 . -------------------------------------------------------------------