WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 631 Saturday 21 March 2009 ------------------------------------------------------------------- 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/vhki.htm Don't forget to vote every day! http://wwwords.org?LCAS To leave the list or change your subscribed email address, see Section A below. Please don't e-mail me with subscription matters unless you are having problems. This 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: Anadiplosis. 3. Recently noted. 4. Q&A: Jeep. 5. Sic! A. Subscription information. B. E-mail contact addresses. C. Ways to support World Wide Words. 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- TIMEOUTS Apologies to any subscriber who tried to visit the Web site last Saturday morning, UK time. The server went down and it took some hours to get it working again. My learning of this came hard upon my discovery that the e-mail edition had gone out an hour early. The server that despatches it is in the US; I forgot that US daylight saving time starts three weeks earlier than ours here in the UK. It's hardly an epoch-making error but I hope to have got it right this week. TILL IT HURTS Mark Worden made the point, in reference to my piece in the last issue, that there is a welter of idiomatic expressions indicating the vastness of a person's desire for a particular thing or outcome. People have in rhetorical outpourings offered their hair, their last penny, their shirts, their firstborn, their right arms, their last drop of heart's blood, even their lives and immortal souls. Mr Worden says he grew up in Idaho with the form "I'd give my left nut ...". 2. Weird Words: Anadiplosis /,an@dI'pl@UsIs/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- The beginning of a sentence, line, or clause with the concluding word of the one preceding. This is yet another term from that repository of extraordinary expressions, the field of rhetoric. An example will make the idea clearer and to give it I call upon that fortune-cookie philosopher, Yoda from Star Wars: "Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering." Understanding you are? A more sanctified appearance of the form is at the very beginning of Genesis, in the King James Bible: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void." "Anadiplosis" derives from Greek "diplous", double, from which also come "diploid", "diploma" and "diplomat" (the last two from the idea of a doubled or folded paper, hence an official document). The prefix "ana-" is also Greek, meaning back or anew. Do not confuse this figure of speech with epanadiplosis, in which a sentence begins and ends with the same word. A famous example is in a speech by Malcolm X: "You bleed when the white man says bleed. You bite when the white man says bite, and you bark when the white man says bark." The extra prefix in "epanadiplosis" derives from the Greek preposition "epi" that means "upon, in addition". Likewise, don't muddle anadiplosis with the better-known anaphora, in which successive clauses or sentences begin with the same word or words: Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls deified among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. [Bleak House, by Charles Dickens. "Ait" is another way to spell "eyot", island (see http://wwwords.org?EYOT).] Another rhetorical term for a similar trick is "antistrophe" (also known as "epiphora" and "epistrophe" - there's disagreement over terms), which refers to repeating a word at the end of successive clauses or sentences ("government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth"). Both "antistrophe" and "epistrophe" derive from Greek "strephein", to turn. 3. Recently noted ------------------------------------------------------------------- PROCYCLICALITY Laurie Malone encountered this word in a recent issue of the Weekend Australian. It's another current buzzword in the financial community and refers to forces that tend to magnify fluctuations in an economic cycle. As a particularly pertinent example, credit is easier to obtain during an upswing, which tends to overheat the economy, but harder to get in the downturning part of a cycle, dampening the economy when it needs to be stimulated. Physicists and mathematicians will recognise this as a classic positive feedback loop, which makes systems unstable. The adjective "pro-cyclical" is recorded from the early 1950s but the abstract noun appears only in the late 1980s. It's currently more popular than it has ever been in its short life. COPPER-FASTENED Val Bellamy asked about this term, which appeared in an article in the online publication Spiked: "In many ways, the Diana phenomenon merely copper-fastened political and social trends that had been apparent for a decade before she died." I hadn't come across it in a figurative sense before. For me, a thing that is copper-fastened is literally attached with copper, in particular the copper sheathing on the hull of a wooden-hulled sailing ship that prevented attacks by teredos (nasty molluscs, once incorrectly called shipworms, that bored into ships' timbers, causing great damage); copper nails or bolts had to be used to secure it to hulls to prevent corrosion. The figurative expression, which arose out of this concept, is poorly recorded. However, it's in the Dictionary of Newfoundland English, which says it means "to reach a clear and firm understanding or agreement without loop-holes or ambiguity". Around the middle 1990s, the term starts to appear in newspapers in Ireland in this figurative sense, though I'd guess it was far from new. The first example I can find was in the Irish Voice of Dublin in December 1995 about Bill Clinton: "His visit had copper-fastened the twin-track initiative launched on the eve of his arrival by John Bruton and John Major." It appears most often these days in a political or sporting context and is still to be found mainly in Irish sources, north and south. Though it does from time to time turn up in newspapers in the rest of the British Isles, it's almost always in connection with items about Irish affairs that we may presume are by Irish writers. 4. Q&A: Jeep ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. I was just about to chide someone for believing 'Jeep' to be an acronym of 'Just Enough Essential Parts' and was about to point out, with just a trace of smug superiority, that 'Jeep' is, of course, a corruption of the initials GP, short for General Purpose (Vehicle). Then I thought, 'Hang on, how do I know that?' It seems there's a lot of dispute, with some very credible arguments against 'General Purpose'. You don't seem to have tackled this one. Might I suggest an investigation? [Patrick Neylan] A. You're right to be cautious. An etymologist who has recently investigated the matter concludes: The word was coined in the full light of history, we have eyewitness reports (conflicting as such reports always are) of the car's production, and we still have doubts about the origin of its name. [An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology, by Anatoly Liberman, 2008. Puzzled enquiries about the origin of the name, for example, appeared in various publications as early as May 1944.] Professor Liberman devotes several thousand words to his discussion of the various theories but comes to no clear conclusion. With that facing me, perhaps the best thing to do would be to walk away. But it's worth giving at least the bare bones of the controversy. The jeep was a quarter-ton all-terrain reconnaissance vehicle (a half-ton equivalent also existed) that was manufactured by several firms. It officially came into service in the US Army in early 1941. "Jeep" is first recorded for it in August the previous year and seems almost from the start to have been its universal name among servicemen. As a demonstration of its powers, one was driven up the steps of the Capitol building on 20 February 1941; the Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune remarked, under a photograph of the event, that the new light trucks were known as "jeeps" or "quads". Dictionaries do commonly say that it's from the initials "GP", for "general purpose". This origin is disputed because only one maker, Ford, used those initials and they only meant something within its factory (G for government contract and P as a code for a vehicle with an eighty-inch wheelbase). "GP" never meant "general purpose", which would have been a misnomer because the vehicle was designed for a specific role. A more fanciful origin is that it's a reduced form of "jeepers creepers" (a euphemism for "Jesus Christ") which was supposedly uttered by Major General George Lynch when he took his first ride in a prototype vehicle in 1939. Others point to the army slang sense of "jeep" for a recruit or something insignificant or unproven; however, the jeep was anything but that, with everyone marvelling at its abilities. This leads me to an origin that's now widely accepted as a major influence, if not the sole origin - Elzie Segar's comic strip "Thimble Theater". It's best known for Popeye the Sailor and Olive Oyl. In March 1936 a new character arrived to great ballyhoo (adverts were placed in newspapers that took the strip to announce his impending arrival: "You'll laugh! You'll howl! Everyday! Watch for Popeye and the Jeep".) This was Eugene the Jeep, a rodent-like character the size of a small dog whose only word was "jeep!" (most likely a variation on "cheep"), who lived on orchids and had supernatural powers that let it tell the future (and disappear into the fourth dimension at need). Eugene the Jeep soon became widely known, with references to him appearing in newspapers throughout the US. It may be that the letters "GP" on the Ford models suggested "Jeep" to servicemen. It was much more likely that the term was applied as an affectionate name because, like the wondrous animal from Thimble Theater, the vehicle could "go anywhere". [The online HTML version of this issue has illustrations. You can view it at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/vhki.htm .] 5. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- We've all heard of minis, but this is ridiculous. Nick Hewish found an item in the Saffron Walden Reporter for 12 March: "A sports car worth nearly £13,000 was stolen from a changing-room locker at Lord Butler Leisure Centre." It transpired later in the item that only the keys to the car were in the locker. A local restaurant in Fort Wayne, Indiana, reports Sharon Girard, advertises "3 coarse meals for $16.00". Notices on the stalls in the busy Saturday market in Chester-le- Street, County Durham, often amuse Rita Day. Last week she came across the delightfully Harry Potterish "insulting tape". Vicki Vaughn was unimpressed by the descriptions of the Timeless Treasures for sale on the My Garden Gifts site, including this one: "For those who love the aura of the tropics and the lush greenland, here's a impressionable wall planter for the home or garden." Wall planter: $235.00. Bad English: priceless. 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 asking for simple subscription changes you can do yourself. 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 2009. All rights reserved. The Words Web site is at http://www.worldwidewords.org . ------------------------------------------------------------------- You may reproduce brief extracts from this newsletter in mailing lists, newsletters or newsgroups online, provided that you include the copyright notice given above. Reproduction of items in printed publications or Web sites, including blogs, needs prior permission from the editor (wordseditor@worldwidewords.org). -------------------------------------------------------------------