Uncle Sam of the U.S.

I sometimes wonder as I post these things, whether everybody else knows this stuff already. But to continue with our theme of uncles, I never realised that Uncle Sam's initials are U.S., or United States; and though nobody is utterly sure of the origin, the OED says

The suggestion that it arose as a facetious interpretation of the letters U.S. is as old as the first recorded instances, and later statements connecting it with different government officials of the name of Samuel appear to be unfounded.

So there. I set off to do a bit of research and started reading an 1816 book called The Adventures of Uncle Sam in Search of his Lost Honour, but aside from the phrase "Thus ejaculated the chief steward" it's terribly tedious. It does, though, have a nice bit at the beginning about how important it is for a book to be printed, otherwise:

Deeds of fame hard earned in iron fields of argument flutter on to future times, like the treaties of savages, on the tongues of women, mutilated, distorted, exaggerated and defrauded of half their beauty...

Which seems a terribly ungentlemanly attitude towards the tongues of women. Speaking of books being in print, did I mention that my book - The Etymologicon - is being published in three and a bit week's time? Did I mention that it's filled with all sorts of fascinating and entrancing etymological tales? Did I mention that you can pre-order it from this site with free shipping to anywhere in the world?

I did? Oh well.

This says "Friends-Democrats, Uncle Sam and Ivan". It's from a Tsarist pro-American propaganda campaign that started in 1917, and was then cut short.

Gamut

About two thousand years ago a perfectly respectable lady called Elizabeth became pregnant and her husband lost his voice. He stayed silent as a silo until the child was born. The child was called John and when John grew up he began telling people that they were naughty and chucking them in a river. Now, if you or I tried a stunt like that we'd be brought up by the police pretty sharpish. But John got away with it and, if you can believe it, was considered rather holy for all his attempted drownings. Chaps at the time called him John the Baptist.

Seven hundred years later somebody else lost his voice, or at least had a terribly sore throat. He was an Italian chap who went by the cumbersome moniker of Paul the Deacon so he wrote a verse prayer to John the Baptist that went thuslyly:

Ut queant laxis
   resonare fibris
Mira gestorum
  famuli tuorum,
Solve polluti
   labii reatum,
Sancte Iohannes.


[O let your sevants sing your wonders on,
With loosened voice and sinless lips, St John.]

Four hundred years later, somebody set this little poem to music. He wrote a pretty, climbing melody, in which each line started a note higher than the last, until with the words Sancte Iohannes it dropped again to the bottom.

So the first note was on the syllable Ut, the one above was on the Re in Resonare, then Mi in Mira, Fa, So, La...

The problem with Ut, though, is that it's a rather short syllable and difficult for a singer to hold. Try it. So it got changed to Do (perhaps for Dominus, but nobody's sure), and that gave do, re, mi, fa, so, la and, by extension, Si for Sancte Iohannes. Then somebody pointed out that there was already a So beginning with S and you couldn't rightly have two of them beginning with the same letter. So Si was changed it to Ti.

Do re mi fa so la ti do


Which is just a shortening of a hymn to John the Baptist. The shortening technique was invented by a fellow called Guido of Arezzo.

So poor Ut was consigned to history, or nearly. It sort of survives. You see the lowest note was also known as gamma, after the Greek letter. So the lowest note of the scale was once known as gamma or ut. Then a whole scale came to be known as gamma-ut. And that is why when you go through the whole scale, you still run through the gamut.

Which means that this explanatory video is a damned lie.



Julie Andrews singing the praise of John the Baptist

Pluto, Plutocracy and Plutonium

Pluto was the god of the underworld. He was also the god of wealth. That is why we have plutocracy (government by the wealthy), plutocrats and plutomania. This last word either means a frenzied pursuit of money, or the delusional belief that you are already rich. I veer between the two.

Plutonium is not rich, it is so named merely because it is Neptunium's neighbour in the periodic table just as Pluto is Neptune's neighbour in space. Pluto the dog of Disney is named after the planet, or at least he got the name only a few months after the planet, so there must have been some connection.

Finally, Operation Pluto was part of the D-Day landings and stood for Pipelines Under The Ocean.

And with that, this series on planets drifts off into the Kuiper Belt like some lachrymose extra from 2001: A Nine-Year-Old Space Odyssey.

The Inky Fool begs for a loan

P.S. A philoplutary is a lover of money


P.P.S. Anyone considering leaving a comment about how Pluto isn't a planet no more, can take that thought, cover it in brambles, and stick it where the sun only shines very, very faintly.

The Acronyms and Initialisms Database System

What the world needs is a new quango (quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisation) to deal with acronyms and initialisms. The other day the front page of the BBC news website looked like this (note the bottom left and top right):

The other one, in case you were wondering, is Northern Ireland. The problem of ambiguous initialisms has been the central scandal of the news over the last few weeks. Proportional Representation has fought with Public Relations on the front page. The International Panel on Climate Change has been in as much trouble as the Independent Police Complaints Committee ever since PC Delroy Smellie hit a member of the PC brigade at a demo (something that I saw on youtube on my PC).

The web has the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which stops two people both registering the same domain name and a similar leap forward in initialisms is long over due. I suggest, indeed I demand, that it should be called the Acronyms and Initialisms Database System.

I shall write to my Military Police about it.

Incidentally, in a preposterously technical sense an acronym is something that's pronounced as as single word like Scuba (Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus) while an initialism is one where the individual letters are pronounced as in DVD (Digital Versatile Disc). Or maybe not. It depends which dictionary you read.

Figjam

The Inky Fool overheard this little exchange between two British journalists coming out of Gordon Brown's press conference in Copenhagen yesterday:

Journo 1: That was so figjam.
Journo 2: Figjam?
Journo 1: Fuck I'm Great, Just Ask Me.

Figjam is similar to the obscene acronym Snafu (Situation Normal: All Fucked Up), but utterly different to Sweet F.A. which is Sweet Fanny Adams, an unfortunate girl who was murdered in 1867. Sailors in the Royal Navy thought that their meat rations resembled her corpse so she became synonymous with "tinned mutton". By 1919 the term, though still military, had drifted to mean little or nothing.

You can of course make jam out of figs if you particularly want to. There's a recipe here.

Figjam

Update: After writing that last post I went to a bookshop to do some Christmas shopping and came across a whole book about military slang titled FUBAR (Fucked Up Beyond All Recongnition).

Take Out The TCB

R, E, S, P, E, C, T:
Find out what it means to me.
R, E, S, P, E, C, T.
Take out the TCB.
Sock it to me. Sock it to me. Sock it to me. Sock it to me. Sock it to me.

So sang Miss Aretha Franklin in a section that she added to Otis Redding's song Respect. For years I misheard the words and believed that she was singing:

R, E, S, P, E, C, T.
Take out the T, C, P.

So I would remove the letters T, C and P from RESPECT and be left with rese, which means tremble as anybody familiar with Chaucer's description of the temple of Mars in The Knight's Tale knows:

And therout came a rage and suche a veze,
That it made al the gate for to rese.

This seemed appropriate as Miss Franklin's supposed paramour, who has previously been enjoined merely to "respect" her, is now at the song's climax being asked to go further and to "rese" or tremble before her: a megalomaniac yearning to which the maenads respond with the incantation, "sock it to me sock it to me sock it to me" etc..

The only other explanation was that Miss Franklin was asking for TCP the well known brand of antiseptic, whose name is a shortening of trichlorophenylmethyliodosalicyl. Perhaps, I thought, she yearns to heal the metaphorical (or even literal) wounds inflicted upon her by her respectless beau by cleaning them with this literal and emotional disinfectant.

There was even the intriguing interpretation that Miss Franklin was demonstrating that respect could be cabalistically deconstructed into its two orthographical components of trembling and antiseptic.

Then in one damascene moment I heard that it was not P but B. Take out the TCB. TCB is an initialism for Taking Care of Business. This phrase, nearly unknown on our shores, was used as a catch-all excuse by the tardy American male of the mid twentieth century. As in:

Female: Why were you out until three in the morning?
Male: TCB, baby, TCB.

Miss Franklin is asking, therefore, that her lover cease to use this nebulous excuse; and therefore, by implication, she is entreating him to give up all those sins and divagations that would make such an excuse necessary.

Just thought you ought to know.

More discussion of such topics can be found in this video.

Minding your p's and q's

Almost everybody knows that it is wrong to use apostrophes before an ‘s’ which denotes a plural rather than a possessive. So it is “breakfasts” and “tomatoes”, not “breakfast’s” (which I saw on a sign yesterday) or “tomato’s”.

But what about plurals of words made up of initial letters, like “GCSE” or “CEO”? (Incidentally, these should – strictly speaking – be referred to as initialisms, rather than acronyms – see explanation below)*. Does the same rule still apply?

I think it does, but perhaps not so strongly. A reference to “CD’s” or “MP’s” may not stand out so clearly as being wrong as “tomato’s”, but the apostrophe is still unnecessary – the lower case “s” is on its own enough to denote the plural. The Economist’s online style guide, in its section on acronyms, recommends using a regular lower-case “s”, with no apostrophe in sight. The same – and here The Economist is explicit – holds true for decades, so it is “the 1990s”, not “the 1990’s”.

Things get a little more complicated when it comes to plurals of single letters. Here the authorities do not agree. The Times style guide advises that “an apostrophe should be used to indicate the plural of single letters - p's and q's”**. This is presumably to avoid confusion with two-letter words (or initialisms) ending in "s", like "ps", "as" or "is",

But, although a recent Sunday Times feature followed this format, a Times column earlier this month referred to “Ps and Qs”. A similar discrepancy can be found between a recent article from the Daily Mail (“Ps and Qs”) and one from its sister paper, the Mail on Sunday (“p’s and q’s”). This suggests that with plurals of single letters, either format will do – upper case letters with no apostrophe, or lower case letters with an apostrophe.

* An acronym is made up of initials, or first syllables, of other words, and is pronounced as if it were a word – like NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) or Unicef (United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund). With an initialism like CD, MP, GCSE or CEO, each of the initials is pronounced separately.

** The etymology of this phrase, which means “to be careful or particular in one's words or behaviour; to mind one's manners”, is mysterious; The Phrase Finder discusses it at some length. Some people think it stems from advice to apprentice typesetters or children learning to write (not muddling up two similar-looking letters), but it has also been suggested that it comes from “pints and quarts” or “pleases and thank-yous”.

(Picture from a Walk in the WoRds)