Hunting and pecking

There are things about smartphones that bother me when I see them in use. (I'm not a user myself, you understand: Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for islands of self-absorption who avoid eye-contact and court Repetitive Strain Injuries. The temptation would be too great.

Chief among these, apart from the standing invitation to be anti-social, is what happens to users' thumbs. Cradling the phone in the fingers of both hands and typing with two thumbs can lead to stenosing tenosynovitis, or ‘Trigger Thumb‘ (or even – less cryptically...

<aside subject="Trigger Thumb">
Trigger Thumb gets its name from the typical physical jerk and popping sound as the joint moves into/out of place.

<philological_observation>
When only specialists (in this case, specialists in orthopædics) have need of a term, they use what suits their needs – often leaving lay people wondering what they're on about. 

When an idea gets a wider use, as the needs of the users have changed, the term changes to reflect a new focus. "Trigger" Thumb referred to a characteristic sign of the pathology – what a diagnostician should look for; in medical terms, a sign (what an observer sees) rather than a symptom (what a patient feels). So when the same thing started being felt by a wider range of users, a more specific term was needed.

<autobiographical_note>

When my mother (whom saints preserve, [and they better had]) was working at Metal Box in the late '60s, when ring-pull cans were in development, they were called –  in the language of Metal Box technicians 'easy-open ends'. What mattered to those technicians was only the end of the can: specifically, that it was easy to open. 

Obviously that clunky name had to change, and the marketing people came up (in the UK) with 'ring-pull can'. 

<shared_language>
In the US the cans had 'pull-tabs' I gather from Wikipedia.
</shared_language> 

The new expression reflected what was important for the users

</autobiographical_note>

</philological_observation>

</aside>

...– "Texting Thumb").

Winged Words

I've been asked about the derivation of lurgy. A Google search for etymology lurgy leads to confusing results:

1950s (originally spelled lurgi ): used in the British radio series The Goon Show and probably invented by its writers, though possibly from an English dialect term.

So...? What's confusing about that? Well, click on the arrow for further information and you get this:

A 1950s coining with recorded usage going back to the beginning of the 19th century.

The word strikes me as owing something to India (look at the menu of an Indian restaurant; 'urg' is the sort of word-bit (that's morpheme, if you want the $10 word) you'd expect; murgh is Hindi for chicken, so it is not uncommon in that context. But my questioner said that the word cropped up in the context of an Indian asking what the word lurgy meant.

Lurgy/i was a dialect word that referred to laziness. Oxford's Lexico says this:

This was the word that Spike Milligan adopted for the Goon Show.

Spike Milligan was born in India, and in any case may have been exposed to *urg* words during his army service (and in a lifetime of Indian restaurants).  It doesn't seem to me impossible that these Indian influences led him to adopt an existing word that sounded somehow Indian (and looked it, in its lurgi guise).

That's what I think anyway; it's time to go though.

b

Update: 2020.02.01.12.30 – Added PS

PS Apropos of nothing, I've just heard on the radio yet another mis-stressing of Così fan tutte and I've thought that rather than just wincing (after all, the accent is there, and you don't need to be a professor of Italian to realize that it must do something) I should publicize this mnemonic: così means "like that" and it is stressed like that ("like that" – così). OK, as you were, it's now safe to go back to Classic FM.

Update: 2020.05.18.12.30 – Added missing bit of sentence in blue. Sorry.

That's one way of looking at it

I've been thinking about – among other things (hence my failure to add to the Harmless Drudgery mountain (slag heap?) for the best part of  two weeks) – obsession. In particular I've been thinking about what obsession, gunwale, and titanic have in  common.

People with an etymological bent (sic – I‘m reminded of Joni  Mitchell‘s ‘That  girl is twisted‘) – will be familiar with the random arising of questions such as "What‘s obsession got to do with sitting?‘

<grandmothers_egg_sucking>
(And I know it should be grandmothers', but the compiler wouldn't be able to handle apostrophes; I know the compiler is a figment of my imagination, but if a conceit‘s worth pursuing it‘s worth pursuing to the last syllabub of recorded time.) 

Words built from some variant of "session" (not -cession, which is a whole 'nother kettle of worms) include somewhere along the line the idea of sitting. At its simplest, for example, a court that  is  ‘in session‘  is sitting.  Session musicians "sit in". And the Holy See involves sitting on a particular sort of chair (whence the building that houses it, a cathedral, gets its name). 

<RC_note>
Ex cathedra pronouncements are reserved for when the Pope Really Really Means It.
<RC_note> 

Etymonline‘s entry for "obsess" explains further:
</grandmothers_egg_sucking>

So besieging – the now obsolete meaning of obsession – involves an army encircling a town and just sitting it out. (I discussed words to do with sitting a while ago, here.) If you think of the poor besieged  townsfolk,  who can‘t get anywhere, by any path, without coming up against the besieging force, you can see where the modern sense comes from: any thought leads to the same place  – the obsession (the besieging enemy).

So ob and sedere got together to concoct the military  meaning, and psychotherapy took the ball and ran with it – so successfully that the ‘besieging‘ idea withered on the vine: obsession isn't just a metaphor; it‘s a metaphor that turned into another metaphor with a totally different meaning.

Which brings me to  gunwale, commonly reduced to gunnel. Most  native speakers of English have met the expression "laden to the gunnels" (OK make that ‘about a third of us, with the other two thirds saying "packed to the gunnels"). The gunnel is a wide plank at the edge of the deck, and if a ship is laden to the gunnels its load is so heavy that the ship  is low in the water.

But if you peel back the superficial metaphor (and when I said "plank" I was giving the game away, as today wood need not  be involved and often isn't) you find out what the gun is doing. On a sailing ship intended for battle the edge of the deck was reinforced with an especially sturdy plank, which supported the cannon – the gun wale.

<further_reading>
Pick the bones out of this if you're interested in the wale bit.
</further_reading>

Like obsession, gunnel (in expressions such as "laden/full to the gunnels") started life as a metaphor, and was pressed into use as another totally different metaphor.

You can probably see where I‘m going with this; the story with titanic is similar. I‘ll just sketch out the bare bones:

Titans (powerful gods) 👉 titanic (=big and powerful) 👉 Titanic: big/powerful ship

Along comes an iceberg and one metaphor gets flipped on its head to make another: something that‘s titanic can either be big/strong/influential ("a titanic struggle") or it can have a capital T and be over-confident and doomed to failure.

There must be more such metaphors  that have been given a new lease of life as newly formed metaphors, but this has gone on long enough...

<autobiographical_note>
(as has this accursed backup)
</autobiographical_note>

.. and I  must return to the land  of the living.

b

Once bittern, twice shrike.

Boom boom. That is all.

Nearly 7 years ago, with the chutzpah of a fairly sprightly (at the time) recent-notcher-up of the big 60, I wrote this:

I had a difference of opinion with MrsK the other day. We were in the seventh circle of la città dolente, or PC World as it is more commonly known, looking for a new laptop. In defence of one I pointed out that it did not have Windows 8 (which to me made it preferable). She wanted to know why this was an advantage, and I said that with any new operating system there's more to go wrong; tried and trusted software is no longer supported. 

This was further evidence of my defeatism, she said. Why expect things to go wrong? She asked a passing school-leaver if there were any known support issues with application software (I'm paraphrasing here, you understand) and the answer was, surprisingly enough, that everything was hotsy-totsy with Windows 8. 

Well, twenty years of working with software engineers (actually, 19¾ - HP took the penny-pinching precaution of shafting me 3 months before they would have had to fork out for a 20-year award) has taught me that if anything can go wrong with new software it will. This was true of Windows 95, and with everything since. Working in 'Support', which I did for many years, involved me almost daily in fixes and workarounds and you-just-can't-do-that-any-more when people tried to get existing application software to play nice with a new operating system. 

So everything, I feared, was not hotsy-totsy. To quote Ogden  Nash it was coldsy-toldsy (and Google, incidentally, has just asked me whether I mean 'cold toddy'). New operating systems are great when all the dependencies work, but with each new operating system there are more dependencies; there's more to go wrong. I hold no candle for Windows 7; give me Windows NT 4.1 any day. But for me it's preferable to Windows 8 (just as Windows 8 will be preferable to - saints preserve us - Windows 9).

My fear in the last line was ill-founded. For reasons best known to the Microsoft marketing department, 'Windows 9' is The Operating System that Never Was. I wonder why... It's not as if it were Windows 13, or Windows 666 (due in some future century, perhaps)..

But earlier in 2019, Microsoft decided to pull the plug on Windows 7 (the home, at the moment, of Knowles family computing – although there are outposts of more recent operating systems on various less benighted devices). On some date in mid-January 2020 support will be withdrawn. This could be relatively painless, if things just stop being fixed. I suppose Anti-Virus software could be a problem. But, realistically, what are the odds against  hackers bothering with a ten-year-old system? We revert to the old tried and tested system: Security-by-Obscurity – as they used to say in the world of VMS.

<OpenVMS>
Not that that was the whole story. OpenVMS was a much more robust system than some I could name, and not a prey to nearly as many viruses as we have become inured to in the M$ world. But the fact remains that being surrounded by lower-hanging fruit, malware-wise, is a fairly good guarantee against infection.
</OpenVMS>

A less benign outcome seems possible though, in the light of the behaviour of tech firms in recent years, punishing users who are content with things as they are. For the TEMERITY of not upgrading, they are deprived of even what they had; that'll teach them not to genuflect at the altar of Perpetual Upgrades. Per me si va nella città d' aggiornamenti perpetui (which is the way I imagine Dante might have said perpetual upgrades).

<digression>
Hmm. What a charming way Italian has with the word for 'upgrade': aggiornare. Think of giorno. A bit like the Creation, in Haydn's version: And there was [wait for it] light.
</digression>

Still. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Perhaps everything will be hotsy-totsy, as St Matthew might have put it.  And I have two weeks to find out.

<seasonal_novelty>
I'll sign off with something that came to me recently. It may have been the most middle-class of cracker jokes, remembered from Christmas 2018, or it may be original (not to say meaningless to most):

Q. What sort of hair conditioner does Santa Claus use?
A. Ho-ho-ho-ba. [Bou-boum and indeed tsh].

Like I said, meaningless to users of the – possibly more common,  – /ʤә'ʤәʊbә/ version (which is fine by me if that's what fleauts your beaut  – I'm not going to kick off the new year by laying down the law about talking proper (although  I haven't found a dictionary that recognizes the /ʤ/ version – just saying).
</seasonal_novelty>

Frohes thingummy.

b

It depends what you mean by "bee" and "bonnet"

The latest issue of Third Age Matters has the usual contribution by professional stick-in-the-mud Eric Midwinter, to which a sub-editor has contributed the ridiculous idea of theft (as if a meaning, whatever that may be, could be "stolen"):

For many years...

<digression>
(I was about to write "sixty-odd", but that would imply that when the word was coined in 1958, I [extraordinarily gifted child that I was] immediately adopted it into my seven-year-old's working vocabulary; improbable, I think)
</digression>

...I have used the word (ABused it, from the point of view of Mr Midwinter) in the way suggested by the New York Times interview quoted by Etymonline

It's a quite simple bit of word formation. As aristocracy is rule by the best (aristoi) and theocracy is rule by God (theos), meritocracy is rule by people judged on merit. But nous avons changé tout cela as le bourgeois gentilhomme was told, and as Mr Midwinter would have it; strictly, though, the Midwinter version would be "almost everyone has changed it, but they're wrong".

Michael Young, writing in an introduction to the 1994 edition of his work, wrote:

The case against meritocracy (the one and only true meaning of meritocracy, in the view of Midwinter and his ilk) is that people who get into a position of power on the basis of merit then protect their progeny regardless of merit. In other words, meritocracy works once, and thereafter arrogates power and influence to the privileged, regardless of merit. To insist that this flawed sort of one-time meritocracy-followed-necessarily-by-mediocracy-in-perpetuity is the only sort – the TRUE meaning of "meritocracy" – deprives the word of any useful meaning.

Over time, meanings change. Here I give lots of instances of  change, sometimes complete reversals, finally getting round to this explanation  of "backlog":

The words back and log were first fused together (to use an appropriately fiery metaphor) in the late seventeenth century. They referred to a log placed at the back of a fire. Such a log was desirable; it was a Good Thing. It protected the fire from going out. But about two hundred years later it was used metaphorically to mean a Good Thing in the commercial world: a stock of unfulfilled orders. 

Here's where the reversal in polarity happened, possibly influenced by another meaning of log. The metaphorical ledger ... could be the record of a Bad Thing – work that hasn't been done and gets more and more embarrassing as more is added to the mountain faster than it can be done.

But no sane observer scans the airwaves, searching obsessively for people using "backlog" to refer to a Bad Thing and complaining that they've stolen its meaning. Like Aung Sang Suu Kyi, flipping from fêted to fœtid overnight.

Mr Midwinter thinks "meritocracy" is another case of such a flip – but from Bad Thing to Good Thing, rather than vice versa. I think he's simply wrong; that "meritocracy" does what it says on the tin,  and the satirical background to the first use of the word doesn't affect that meaning – the notion that the word can only ever be used to refer to one side of a multi-faceted argument in the original work of fiction that gave it its first airing more than 60 years ago is frankly ridiculous.

(Not that this prevents Mr Midwinter from writing to any organ that will publish him, accusing various public figures of this "abuse":   with the search string Eric Midwinter meritocracy I get over 14,000 Google  hits –  never, in the history of human apiculture have so many bonnets attracted so many bees, vainly swatted at by so few).

On a more festive note, I'm reminded of words I sang in last Saturday's concert, in Ralph Vaughan Williams' charming Fantasia on Christmas Carols:

God bless our generation who live both far and near.

This was not Roger Daltrey's My G-G-G-Generation. I was not singing God bless all baby-boomers  but nobody else. Words change their meanings, and when someone's  meaning is clear  it's unproductive  – not to say patently absurd  – to insist that they are among the great majority who are all out of step.

b

Update: 2019.12.20.12:50  – Added PS

PS I have belatedly found a source for Midwinter's article online. Here's a taste:

It is just over 60 years since Michael Young, co-founder of our marvellous U3A movement, published his perceptive and prophetic text The Rise of the Meritocracy.
He had foreseen that social mobility worked fully only once, recruiting a new oligarchy of power, influence and wealth which, like all former ruling castes, then ensured the power, influence and wealth was bestowed on its children. 

Social mobility does not obey the law of gravity; very, very few go down the social ladder to be replaced by an urgent climber-up. It is not normal to find the children of the privileged among the homeless or the customers of food banks – and vice versa. 

I fear his word has been abused to the point of it sounding like a good thing, not least in the mouths of prime ministers, including a speech by Theresa May some months back in which she used the word “meritocracy” 20 times, with perhaps unconscious irony, as if it were something for which to aspire. 

This led me to write a correcting letter to the press and I quickly evade the charge of political bias by pointing out that Tony Blair was an even worse offender, to the point where a despairing Michael Young, a short time before his death, published an article pleading with the then prime minister to refrain from using the coinage “meritocracy” as the opposite of what it actually meant.

Found in translation

In an early post I looked at the mistranslation of a single word that jumped out at me while I was listening to a Book of the Week. The word was "Romanesque" – used in a context that had nothing to do with architecture. It referred to President Mitterand, whose predilection for seeing himself as a character in a roman provides a strangely appropriate parallel with a fictional  character who shared the first four letters of his name: Walter Mitty. (The source of the mistranslation was well hidden, and is arguable; if you're interested, feel free: here.)

But the reason for picking on that one word  is clear,  given my interest in the process of translation. More recently though I've found another case of mistranslation, that doesn't make the same kind of sense unless David Baddiel (the single-word-mistranslation-hunter in this case) has a similar background to mine (which I doubt). Wikipedia may cast some light, though I'm not minded to spend much time on it.

The case was documented in an article brought to my attention by an accident (I was toying with the phrase freak accident, but thought better of it. "Freakish" is an accolade that I think is too easily attached to accidents. Freakish is the accident that unearthed the Dead Sea Scrolls, say, and this Baddiel cutting was unearthed less dramatically in a stash of documents that referred not to the early days of Christianity but to an era that could be described as BHD (that is, before this blog started in late 2012).

<digression subject="'-eak' words in clichés">
I'm sure it's just an accident ('-eak' attributes becoming meaningless), but the latest Radio Times claims to have a "sneak preview" of a new Doctor Who series. The "sneak" bit added something once (when there was an unofficial and/or unsanctioned foretaste of some media event) but in this case there was nothing sneaky about  it. The PR department wanted the preview to appear. What's unsanctioned about that?
<digression>

The one word (well two if you want to be pedantic) was Careers Officer. A Baddiel novel used this expression, and it was rendered in the German translation as 'Reintegration into the Working Process Responsible Person'. (the "original" German was Wiedereingliederung-in-den-Arbeits-Prozeß-Betruer  – as opposed to the more predictable [not to say less RSI-inducing] Karriereoffizier). Baddiel met the German translator at some publishing shindig and asked why she had done this. The answer was, in my translation,

'Because I felt like making up a word, regardless of your intentions. I thought it'd be cool.'

In an update to an old post about local colour, I mentioned a song by Antonio Carlos Jobim, and wondered whether the word Rolleiflex had survived in the translation. In a later update I added:

 The good news is that it [HD 2019: the translation] has kept the Rolleiflex. The bad news is that it has introduced an irrelevant bit of cleverness:

I took your picture with my trusty Rolleiflex
And now all I have developed is a complex

Why can't translators just
GET OUT OF THE FRIGGING WAY ?

Five years earlier, if I'd read that edition of The Times, I could have cited yet another instance of overweening  translatorrhoea.

That's enough for today. In a later post I mean to look at the rest of this stash  of early-21st-century cuttings – a number of pieces from the Ben Mcintyre Last Word column. Now though I must go and do a bit of note-bashing for our carol concert: 14 December, 6.00 pm, All Saints', Wokingham.

b

Who fact checks the fact checkers?

For the duration of the one-sided leaders debate ("one-sided" because both participants were more-or-less avowedly Eurosceptic...

<I-know-I-know>
(or in Corbyn's case "Euro-agnostic" according to the party line [which some people find hard to credit – first Cameron renegotiated UK's deal with the EU, then May negotiated a withdrawal agreement, then Johnson tinkered with that.]
</I-know-I-know>

...privileged, white men) the Conservative Press Office's Twitter profile enjoyed a name-change: "CCHQ Press" became "FactcheckUK".

James Cleverly tried to justify it by saying that the Twitter handle was not changed, so there was no attempt to deceive. This is disingenuous  at best, and at worst – to use Emily Maitlas's choice of words – dystopian.

<autobiographical-note>
"The Twitter handle" has become diminishingly significant. When I started using Twitter about 10 years ago, the Twitter handle was all you saw in the way of ID. People had witty/creative handles that said something about what they did and what their interests were. I followed, for example, @langwitch because all I knew about her was that she was an intelligent teacher of modern languages. I didn't know her name or want to know it; if I wanted to know, wouldn't that make me a stalker (or at the  very least plain nosey)?

Then Twitter screwed this up by letting people rename their accounts while keeping the same (scarcely visible, depending on the client or app you use) handle, by doubling the maximum word-count, and by a plethora of other little time-wasting tweaks that have made Twitter a virtual no-go area for me and for anyone who resents its attention-grabbing trickery.
</autobiographical-note>

This caused a predictable Twitter storm The Guardian had the unequivocal headline

Tories pretend to be factchecking service during leaders' debate

The public have increasingly turned to factchecking websites, such as the independent Full Fact, the BBC’s Reality Check, Channel 4 News’ FactCheck and the Guardian’s Factcheck, to verify claims made by politicians. 

During Tuesday night’s debate between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, the Conservative party renamed their main media account as “factcheckUK”, changed its logo to hide its political origins, and used it to push pro-Conservative material to the public. 

More here

Cleverly and his ilk would have chosen a different verb from that pretend, and in his Newsnight interview he made an unconvincing defence of the brainless wheeze dreamed up by some low-ranking minion, saying that he would continue to "call out the lies".  But that‘s not what the misbegotten rebranding of the CCHQ Press Twitter account did. Dressing up as policeman before trying to get your own way is simply a crime. The Cleverly defence is as jaw-droppingly inappropriate as a sign that says

POLITE NOTICE

NO PARKING

It doesn't fool anyone. When is a fact-checking service not a fact-checking service? When it's bare-faced Tory spin.

b

The Etymological Clock

Last year, in a belated update to this very early post, I recalled how a bit of wartime parlance happened to get adopted into the Knowles family lexicon.

<TO-BE-EXACT>
I say "Knowles family lexicon" as I haven't come across this usage anywhere else. But the word "salvage" may have a wider application in this sense.
</TO-BE-EXACT>

Recycling waste paper is not as trendy a thing as some of the greenwash we get from politicians might lead one to think. In my childhood, in the 1950s we distinguished between household waste (which went in the bin)  and clean waste paper (which went in 'The Salvage Box'). We had no idea, nor any need to know, what salvage meant; the linguistic 'clock' just happened to stop in WWII, when salvage mattered.

This is what I have called in that  post and elsewhere the etymological clock...

<weasel-words>
(I may not have used those precise words; but the post did use the Corpus Chronophage [look it up] as a metaphor for linguistic change)
 </weasel-words>

... – the engine that drives the coining of new words and expressions, and just stops at seemingly random moments, leaving us with  a reference to some arbitrarily fleeting expression like "nine days' wonder" or the semantically similar "flash in the pan", whose provenance most present-day English speakers don't know about and neither care nor need to know about.

<EXAMPLES which="Those two">

• Flash in the pan
  A reference to a long-gone firearms technology, which I've mentioned before – more than once. Here, for example:

[I]n a flint-lock, the trigger sparked off an explosion in a pan which itself set off the main explosion. Sometimes there was a flash in the pan, but the main charge was unaffected.

• Nine days' wonder

In 1600, William Kemp, an Elizabethan clown actor, who is thought to have been the original Dogberry in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing,1599, danced a morris dance between London and Norwich. He took up the challenge for a bet and covered the distance of a hundred miles or more in nine days (spread over a few weeks). Some doubted that he had achieved this and, to quell dissent, he wrote 'Kemps nine daies vvonder', published in 1600:

More

 But that's not the last word on that derivation (or rather it's not the first word) as further reading of that Phrase Finder excerpt explains. In short, the expression had been around for about 300 years when Kemp used it (dubiously). As so often, the etymological clock just happened to stop at a juicy (and quite old) publication date. 

<and-another-thing>
Another example, heard on the radio just now, is "Parts of the Australian outback are a tinderbox". Tinderboxes haven't been in regular use for over two hundred years, but the metaphor lives on.
</and-another-thing>

</EXAMPLES>

Where was I? .... Got it: a Radio 4 programme about Bonfire Night food led me to recall another instance of such wartime jargon (words such as salvage, that is) becoming domesticated. (The context – food – was irrelevant to the memory, so I‘m not bothering with a  link; it just triggered the memory of what I used to wear  on 5 November in the  mid ‘50s.)

The garment was in modern parlance a onesie  though Lexico dates this word to the 1980s,  "... from Onesies, a proprietary name for a garment of this type, based on one + -sy."  But this was a good 30 years before that word was coined. We called it a siren-suit...

<CULTURAL-APPROPRIATION defence="Moi?">
I say "we", though in this case the words  had a much wider application. For Wikipedia's take, click away.
</CULTURAL-APPROPRIATION>

.... Being the second youngest of six children,  I  have a brother who was alive during the war, and at the time was about the right size to bequeath me this hand-me-down. When the air-raid siren sounded at night, a siren-suit was a one-piece garment to wear over pyjamas.

Enough for now. This post was originally intended for a 5 November publication date. Events, doncherknow.

b