Tidal Waves, Groundswells and Etymology Man

The majority of the population of the world have sent me a link to this cartoon about a superhero called Etymology Man. It is instructive in my uselessness, and I thoroughly recommend having a look.

However, it's not quite right. A tidal wave had always been a wave caused by the tide, until T.H. Huxley misused it in 1878. But there was a perfectly good English word for a huge rise in sea level caused by seismic activity: groundswell.

For some reason groundswell is now pretty much the prisoner of political journalists, as in a groundswell of support/disapproval/lust etc.

So, in cases of emergency you should shout Groundswell, and everybody on the beach with a copy of the OED in their swimming-trunks pocket will know to run for the hills. This is called Natural Selection.

This is not a groundswell

Stationary Stationery

Those who have never liked the fine distinctions of English spelling will rejoice to learn that the first recorded use of the word stationery, in Nathan Bailey's Universal Etymological English Dictionary of 1727, goes thus:

Stationary, Stationers Wares

The -ary -ery distinction was only introduced in the nineteenth century to annoy schoolchildren.

But what is it that makes stationery so stationary? Why so still?

Well, once upon a medieval time, most books were sold by itinerant tinkers and traders who would set up shop in a different place everyday, or often only on market day. An exception to this rule was the stationarius. This was an official position within a university. A stationarius was given a shop from which to sell books and parchment and the like. This meant that unlike most of his competitors he was a stationary booktrader and thus became known as a stationer. In return for the shop he was required to swear fealty and obedience to the institution.

The stationer only slowly became differentiated from the bookseller. It wasn't until 1656 that Blount wrote in his Glossographia

Stationer is often confounded with Book-seller, and sometimes with Book-binder; whereas they are three several Trades; the Stationer sells Paper and Paper-Books, Ink, Wax, etc. The Book-seller deals onely in printed Books, ready bound; and the Book-binder binds them, but sells not. Yet all three are of the Company of Stationers.

Which hardly clears things up. The distinction didn't really catch on until a hundred years later, and the -ery until a hundred years after that.

Hmm

Vocal C[h]ords

According to The Guardian, an actress has...

...previously expressed her eagerness to flex her vocal chords on a guest spot on Glee, and for a spell was attached to a Judy Garland biopic.

Aha! I thought. There's a topic for a post. Because, you see, there are cords in your throat that vibrate to produce sound. Several people's vocal cords vibrating at the same time will produce a chord.

So I go to the OED. I look up cord. I get down to section 2.b and there it is.

Now applied generally to a nerve trunk, and spec. to certain structures, esp. the spermatic cord, spinal cord, and umbilical cord, the vocal cords; see these words.

Ok. I'll see those words. I turn to the entry for vocal and to my shock and flabbergasterment, I see this in section 6.a:

Operative or concerned in the production of voice. Freq. in vocal chord, vocal fold, vocal organs, vocal tract, etc.

So I can't really criticise The Guardian at all. Or if I did, I'd have to sneer at the OED too, which is blasphemous. I would have no lexicographical backing or supply chain. I would just be alone, muttering maledictions, straining my vocal kords, and shouting myself horse.

The Inky Fool was feeling a little horse that day.

Antanaclasic Verse

There's a Chinese poem called Shi Shi Shi Shi Shi. The reason for the title should be obvious if you read the poem in Westernised script:

Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.
Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.
Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.
Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shìshì.
Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì.
Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shíshì.
Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī.
Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī, shí shí shí shī shī.
Shì shì shì shì.

Which translates as:

In a stone den was a poet named Shi, who loved to eat lions, and had resolved to eat ten.
He often went to the market to hunt for lions.
At exactly ten o’clock, ten lions had just arrived at the market.
At that moment, Shi had just arrived at the market too.
Seeing those lions, he shot them with his arrows.
He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den.
The stone den was damp, so he had his servant clean it.
After the stone den was cleaned, he tried to eat those ten lions.
When he ate, he realized the corpses were in fact ten stone lions.
Try to explain this matter.

It was written by a linguist called Chao Yuen Ren to demonstrate how inflection and the use of tone could alter the sense of Chinese words. In Chinese the same word can have different meanings when pronounced at a different pitch.

It's an exercise in what the ancient and rhetorical Greeks called antanaclasis, the repetition of a word in different senses. As Benjamin Franklin said: 'Your argument is sound. All sound.' Or Shakespeare's:

Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy will,
And will to boot, and will in over-plus...
Make but my name thy love, and love that still,
And then thou lovest me, for my name is will.

(These verse are often ignored by the Shakespeare-was-all-written-by-Walter-Raleigh-dressed-as-Queen-Elizabeth brigade.)

Shī Shì shí shī shǐ, put me to pondering whether it was a possible to write something slightly similar in English. I started with: She's chi-chi, sews so-so tutus too. And then turned to: Right, write which witch ate eight bare bears, but got bored. So instead I shall give you the much looser poem below as a Sunday punishment. You are invited, dear inventive reader, to write your own antanaclasic rhyme over Christmas and to post it in the comments.

House Rules


Don’t meddle with medals
And don’t peddle pedals
And don’t throw your beer on the bier.
Don’t ever stalk storks
And don’t hawk those hawks,
Don’t peer at that peer on the pier.


Don’t fiddle with fiddles
Or riddle me riddles
Or wail about whales in Wales.
Well, well, you’re not well
Since you fell down that fell;
And - Alas! - that’s the tail of my tale.


So reader so dear to my heart, be as a deer to my hart, and write your own. I am not averse to a verse that is short, nor long for one that is long. Come to the waters of creativity, lower your can into the well and do as well as you can.

Very chi-chi

P.S. For the translation, and indeed the name of the author, of Shi Shi Shi Shi Shi I am indebted to this article.

Will, Shall and Mornington Crescent

Volumes, tomes and libraries have been written on the correct use of will and shall. So I shall keep this short (as the film archivist once said). I was in Mornington Crescent tube station yesterday, waiting for the lift (elevator, if you're American) to raise me to superterranean liberty.

A voice, one of those rather too clear female voices that machines always have, said:

Lift number two shall be the next lift.


And it didn't sound right at all. It's not that I was concentrating. I wasn't. I was guilelessly clutching my suitcase, my mind its habitual blank. But my first thought was that it was a spell. It sounded as though the voice were trying to make lift number two the next lift, as though it were an imperative, as though Harry Potter were pointing his wand and willing that lift to come and get me.

Lift number two shall be the next lift.

In grammar, as in buttoning, nothing reveals more than a mistake. I think that my misunderstanding reveals something of the distinction between will and shall. Shall suggests what should happen, it expresses a human hope or order. Thou shalt not kill. If a weatherman were to say 'It shall rain tomorrow', it would sound wrong, because will or going to are used for such predictions. Similarly 'You will not kill' does not sound like a command, merely a statement of fact or murderous inadequacy.

Anyway, Fortune smiles on the confused, because in speech we usually contract both words to 'll.


The confused should follow this link.

Farther and Further

There's a scene towards the end of Ubik by Philip K. Dick*, in which the hero, Joe, is dying on a staircase.

'Feel any better?' Pat asked.
'No,' he said. And, getting halfway up, lunged onto the next step.
'You look different. Not so upset.'
Joe said, 'Because I can make it. I know that.'
'It's not much further,' Pat agreed.
'Farther,' he corrected.
'You're incredible. So trivial, so small. Even in your own death spasms you-' She corrected herself, catlike and clever. 'Or what probably seem subjectively to you as death spasms. I shouldn't have used the term "death spasms." It might depress you.'

Just so you know, dear and careful reader, farther is generally used for physical distance and further for metaphorical distance. If you are curious about the city beyond the mountains you must travel farther to investigate further.

Onward and upward

*Just read it. Terribly good fun. And, weirdly, this post isn't really a spoiler.

Batman, Batman, Batmania!

Batman is, of course, the name for a military officer's servant. The term derives from the old word bat meaning a packsaddle. In America, where they're far more logical about such things, the equivalent position is referred to as a dog-robber.

Batman is, of course, a unit of measurement found in Asia. Batman has varied wildly in value over the centuries and was finally redefined as 10kg when Turkey basted itself with the metric system.

Batmania is, of course, the original name of the Australian city of Melbourne. John Batman, a syphilitic farmer from Sydney, persuaded some of the natives to lease some land to him for an annual rent of two hundred handkerchiefs, a hundred knives, a hundred pounds of flour, fifty scissors,  forty blankets, thirty mirrors, thirty axes and six shirts. He then named the new settlement after himself: Batmania.

The rent was clearly exorbitant and the governor cancelled it a few years later, shot anyone who disagreed, and renamed the town Melbourne after the Viscount Melbourne who was prime minister at the time.

Batmania isn't as mad as it sounds to our surprised ears. After all, Tasmania is named after Abel Tasman.

There are no other known meanings of the word batman.

John Batman

Became a hat-man.

He said, "It's rainier

In Batmania."

Love

In 1984 Western civilisation reached its apogee with the release of I Want To Know What Love Is by Foreigner. Glancing through the OED I found the answer:


love, noun, Any one of a set of transverse beams supporting the spits in a smokehouse for curing herring.


There are two nouns called love. There are also two verbs. To love can simply be a dialect synonym for to offer something for sale.


I fear that all the love I've ever received may have been based on a misunderstanding.


Well, look in the bloody dictionary, then.

Shoo-In

Floella Benjamin may stand to be Mayor of London. The Daily Mirror reports that:


London party activists get to pick who will take on Boris and the peer should be a shoe-in for selection if she can be persuaded to stand.



The usual phrase is shoo-in. It means that one horse is so much superior to the rest of the field that he can simply be shooed over the winning line.


But I suppose that Cinderella was a shoe-in for marrying Prince Charming.

I just spazzed a monkey on the gee-gees

Baited Breath

THE private equity industry will watch with baited breath as European Union finance ministers discuss the regulation of alternative investment funds tomorrow.

   - Today's City A.M.

I often wait with baited breath. I put a fly in my mouth and stand gaping next to a river waiting for salmon to leap in. Then I go to singles bars and hyperventilate. It works surprisingly well.

To be fair (which I never am), the phrase bated breath is the only survival of the verb bate, although its sister abated is still putting it about. Bate is a fossil word, a sole and strange survivor from years of yore that still creeps amok in some necks of the linguistic forest. So confusing it with the still common bait is understandable, even if it sticks in a pedant's craw.

I've already posted on some other examples in Gormless, Feckless, Ruthless and Reckless.

You see that bag at the bottom of the neck? That's a craw. It's where birds store food before digesting it.

P.S. The origin of amok (a Malay habit of suddenly and inexplicably dashing about trying to kill people) is fascinating and there's more here.

Anti-sceptic

                                                                                                   

Reading CityAM on the train this morning, I was intrigued to learn about the Salt Cave, a London clinic where visitors can treat their colds or asthma by breathing in sodium chloride.

According to the owner of the clinic, salt has "anti-sceptic" properties - I can only think she meant antiseptic, unless she really was referring to the ability to overcome sceptical clients' doubts about the efficacy of the treatment.

The article also had a long sidebar on complimentary therapies.

Distress signals

I have just been invited to pay £125 for a spa treatment which includes a "distressing scalp massage". Being a sensitive soul, I find the mispelling distressing enough on its own without paying £125 to be upset further.

Another two words which look similar but have opposite, or near-opposite meanings, are energise and enervate (which originally had something to do with cutting a horse's tendons, but now means to weaken, to destroy someone or something's capacity for vigorous effort). I was very distressed when I found Oliver James (or his editors) had used "enervate" throughout Affluenza to mean "energise" - I found it impossible to take any of his advice seriously after that.

A distressing scalp treatment

Just deserts

An email in which my friend described the delicious praline he had enjoyed for desert reminded me of how commonly these two words - desert and dessert - are confused, most frequently in the phrase "just deserts" (and it is "deserts", not "desserts", despite what Dogberry thinks).

It is remarkable how often people get this wrong. Over the last year, there have been 90 references in British newspapers to "just deserts" but 53 to "just desserts". Stripping out the inevitable puns in restaurant reviews, recipe pages, and an intriguing report about a local council which insisted that Spotted Dick be renamed Spotted Richard, we are still left with more than 20 instances of incorrect usage.

This does not seem to be a simple case of misspelling, rather a widespread assumption that the phrase is some sort of food metaphor, like "revenge is a dish best served cold", or "taste of one's own medicine" (I know, medicine isn't food, precisely, but you get the picture). This is compounded by the confusing fact that "desert" is in this case pronounced like "dessert" and not like the sandy sort of desert.

In fact, the "desert" in "just deserts" has nothing to do with sand or pudding, but comes from the Old French deservir and means something which is deserved, "a due reward or recompense".

In England, at least, the word "dessert" also raises questions of class. There is a lingering sense that "pudding" is somehow socially preferable, which I think may be something to do with Nancy Mitford.

Compliments of the chef

“It all started when I served a smoked salmon pâté starter with Aquavit, a Scandinavian alcoholic drink made from caraway seeds. You drink it in one go, like a shot, and I thought it would compliment the starter and make my dinner a real social event”.

(Countryfile star Julia Bradbury explaining how she fell out with Edwina Currie, Daily Mail Weekend supplement, 7 November 2009)

Other than the decision to serve Aquavit to Edwina Currie, can anyone spot the mistake here? It is, of course, the use of the word “compliment” to mean “complement”.

Complement has the sense of perfecting, completing or enhancing something, of going well with something or “setting it off”. Complementary colours (and flavours) enhance each other; complementary therapies are so called because they are used alongside, and complement, mainstream medical treatments.

Compliment, as everyone knows, means “to pay a compliment to; to flatter with polite and delicate praise”. A guest could compliment the starter (or more correctly, perhaps, compliment the cook on the starter), but it would be very odd for an aperitif to do so. Complimentary can also have the sense of something which is given away for free, as a courtesy. If a restaurant were to offer a free shot of Aquavit to every customer, it could quite correctly be described as “complimentary”.