Just a jiffy

This morning, on ABC Radio Melbourne, the presenter was having fun with 'useless facts'. I love useless information, because it's never actually useless.

They talked about the word jiffy. It turns out that this term has a couple of specific meanings, apart from its handiness in referring to an indeterminate short period of time. I looked around on the Net and found this link to its meaning in physics, chemistry and computer science.

I've arrived at the stage of life where there's not much room in my brain for new information, so I'll leave it to you to follow the link and discover this not-useless fact.

It's believed the word has been in use since at least the late eighteenth century.  The English Language and Usage site quotes it in a text from 1780. The lengthy discussion on the site also mentions the variant jiffin from 1767.

The Phrase Finder says the coiner of the word jiffy did not refer to a specific item that epitomised quickness, but to me this seems strange. There's never a totally random nature to the coining of a new word. I notice that in the examples given of idioms of similes that do refer to an existing item that was known to be speedy, one is 'as fast as greased lightning.'

This gels with what was said on The English Language and Usage site - that jiffy was originally a thieves' cant term for lightning.

It beats me why thieves would have needed a secret word for lightning. But that's language for you - interesting and mysterious.

opposite of widdershins

A friend and I  were sharing a nice pot of tea in a new teashop in Ivanhoe today and she made sure to turn the teapot a few times before pouring the first cup. We both agreed it's traditional to turn the pot widdershins.

In preparing this post, I had a quick look around the internet and came across a hilarious conversation on reddit about pot-turning. Here's one of the comments (obviously tongue-in-cheek):

It's well-known that the tea plant absorbs minerals into the leaf as it gets more mature, thus the higher amount of fluoride in mature leaf as opposed to young buds. High quality tea is often made from the leaf of very old plants, which have absorbed many of the minerals from the soil.
Some of those are ancient ferrous minerals. This means that the dried tea leaf is slightly magnetic. When the water is initially added, the leaf is jumbled every which way. However with the turning of the pot, it allows the ferrous minerals in the leaf to align with the magnetic pole, much like a simple compass made of a magnetized needle on top of a floating cork.
Once the tea leaf is aligned magnetically, the tea itself becomes much more harmonious with nature. You don't want to be drinking tea where it's magnetically pointing every which way as it goes into your stomach! If the earth's magnetic poles were to suddenly flip (which it is due to do any century now) it could result in the tea in your stomach also flipping, causing mild indigestion.
And that is why you rotate the pots.

I'll admit that, although we had our traditional-old-fashioned-tea-drinker hats on, I did pull out my mobile phone so we could check the opposite of widdershins.
My friend thought it was something like diesel.

She was correct in general about the word, but there were different spellings —deosil, deasil, deiseil, to name a few.

Here's a discussion about these two words. If you're like me, it will leave your mind whirling, but when the tealeaves-of-information settle to the bottom of the pot, you'll perhaps know why my mother told me to always turn the pot widdershins before pouring.

I'll admit I'm none the wiser.

But it was a lovely cuppa in a nice shop, with ribbon sandwiches, good company and a delicious glass of trifle to finish.

Trying to think like a cryptic puzzler

Having recently immersed myself in David Astle's book Rewording the Brain, I keep noticing the intricacies of words as I see or hear them.

Just for my own enjoyment I'm going to keep a list here of ideas that pop into my head. I'm intending to come back to this post and add to it.

So...
prancer - Topless dancer uses PR to become a famous hoofer.
emulate - copy a bird dead (Hmm... this one doesn't really work, but I'm having fun.)

Okay... this is all a bit harder than it seemed at first.

emulate - successfully rival a bird left devoured. Nope, not going well. I wonder if I could somehow incorporate the word port, as in the left side of a ship.

Bird left and dined. No, now I'm missing the vital clue as to the entire meaning the answer.
Wait a minute... Rival bird left and dined. I like that.

Let's try another one.

sourdough - spiteful Doug initially has bread. That might work. I'll have to reread the chapters on types of clues and on the use of uppercase letters in a clue.

kith - friends help with a set of tools

A search of Macquarie Dictionary surprised me on this one. I thought 'kith and kin' meant family, but it turns out kith means acquaintances or friends and only the word kin means relatives.

Now, just as I'm about the stop writing here, I've noticed the word beet blutacked to my wall. What about that one? Bee has a drink.
But how do I work in the overall meaning of beet?
Et means and in Latin.
Or I could make it a container clue (page 115 of Astle's book) with bet containing the letter e.

No, I must make myself stop right now and get back to reading the book.

beseech and beseek

Yesterday's cryptic crossword clue was: Begged Hugo Best to reform.

Okay, I could get that, especially with the help of Andy's Anagram Solver. 

The answer was besought.

I don't believe I've ever before come across this verb in the past tense. It occurred to me it sounded as if it should be the past tense of beseek, as in the similar verb seek - sought - have sought.

There's no verb beseek, as far as my sketchy research could discover.

Beseech does come from the same old word as seek, though. The Online Etymology Dictionary says:

c. 1200, bisecen "to entreat, beg urgently," from Old English besecan; see be- + seek. "in contrast to the simple vb., in which the northern seek has displaced the southern seech, in the compound beseech has become the standard form" [OED]. Cognate with Old Frisian biseka, Dutch bezoeken, Old High German bisuochan. German cognate besuchen is merely "to visit". Related: Besought (OED writes that beseeched is "now regarded as incorrect"); beseeching. 

I'd still say beseeched. I must check out an Australian Dictionary. I'll try Macquarie...

Yes, Macquarie in 2017 still gives it as an alternative. 

verb (t) (besought or beseeched, beseeching)
1. to implore urgently.
2. to beg eagerly for: solicit.

Interestingly, the Australian dictionary gives it as a transitive verb, but both Miriam-Webster and Dictionary.com say it can also be used intransitively, and Dictionary.com gives this example: Earnestly I did I beseech, but to no avail. 

No, I can't imagine myself using it as an intransitive verb, and a moderately determined internet search didn't find any such usages. (Is 15 minutes of lounging around at my computer to check out a couple of sites a 'determined' search?)

Oh well, off to bed to dream about words.

Walking the streets in fits and starts

My dog Penny and I set off briskly. After all, we hadn't had breakfast yet, but given the prediction of a hot day, we were trying to beat the heat. What was this? Oh yes, an interesting tree to sniff, and grass that might contain some recent pee-mails by local dogs.

We proceeded. And stopped again. Lamp-posts are always fascinating.

And so it  went, around the streets.

This surely must be the definition of  a walk that proceeds in fits and starts. Literally.

The Concise Oxford English Dictionary: Luxury Edition defines this phrase as with irregular bursts of activity.

Yep. That's how it went.

The Word Detective looks at the phrase in some depth. In part, he says:

"Fits and starts" does indeed mean "intermittent" or "off and on, spasmodically, not making  steady progress."

Spot on!

The writer explains that the expression 'by starts' probably appeared around 1421, and the expression 'by fits' can be dated to 1583. Joining the two is described as a more-is-better model, like similarly redundant phrases such as 'in leaps and bounds.'

Once I had mentioned to Penny that breakfast awaited us in the kitchen, the pace picked up amazingly. Vertical surfaces lost their appeal. We raced home.

when sadness is heavy upon our soul

The word sadiron landed in my inbox today as my daily mail from A Word a Day. The meaning of the word is

noun: a heavy flatiron pointed at both ends and having a detachable handle. And the etymology is 'From sad (obsolete senses of the word: heavy, solid) + iron Earliest documented use: 1759.

When I'm sad I do feel heavy, in every limb, so I can understand how this word came to have such a meaning.

The Online Etymology Dictionary says:

sad (adj.) Old English saed "sated, full, having had one's fill (of food, drink, fighting, etc.), weary of," [and gives further detail in the full description of this word's history.] Sense development passed through the meaning "heavy, ponderous" (i.e. "full" mentally or physically), and "weary, tired of" before emerging c. 1300 as "unhappy." An alternative course would be through the common Middle English sense of "steadfast, firmly established, fixed" (as in sad-ware "tough pewter vessels") and "serious" to "grave". In the main modern sense, it replaced Old English unrot, negative of rot "cheerful, glad." 

I wonder what other utensils are sad? Surely it's not just the irons and pewter vessels.

At Words, Words, Words, the writer of the blog writes more about this history, and ends with this:

But one thing that people don't know about sadness is that it is silent. You can't spot it from a mile away, it could be right next to you as you read this. But it is not the be all and end all, you can overcome sadness, but first you have to be able to see it.

I agree. We need to keep our radar scanning for sad people around us, and also to check inside ourselves to see if we are dealing with our own sadness.

Dickens and the origin of the word boredom

One of the many problems with the internet is that we can inadvertently perpetuate myths. It seems I've done this myself, in my post about the origin of the word boredom.

I'd been watching an episode of QI in which Stephen Fry said Charles Dickens coined the word.

I'm glad that I make no pretence about being an expert on language. I'm just a person who's interested in words. So I guess I don't have to be too embarrassed about my lack of proper research. (Of course, I'm a teensy bit red in the face.)

Paul Vargas has gone to original sources, having read texts where the word was in print in 1838, 1847 and 1844, amongst others. Those texts predate the supposed first use of it by Dickens in 1852. Vargas' blog post is well worth a read.

Dictionary.com has similar information. The writer says:

Charles Dickens is often given credit for inventing words that he was not the first to use. This is not surprising, if only because he was much more widely read than some of the people who had used these words before him. Dickens was also far more attuned to the language of the streets than were most of his contemporaries, and so his writing contains many examples of recently-invented terms. Writing in the Quarterly Review in 1839, Richard Ford refers to Dickens as the "regius professor of slang."

I'm grateful to Paul Vargas for alerting me to my error.

Using punctuation to mislead

When a new pharmacy opened in my local shopping centre, I was interested to see the sign saying it was Australia's Cheapest Chemist.

But wait a minute...

There's some tiny print on the sign - Is this?

So, the sign might say, 'Is this Australia's cheapest chemist?'

Horrible punctuation, though - 'Is this? Australia's cheapest chemist.'

Who knows? I'm not going to find out, because I think a shop that indulges in such deplorable punctuation is best avoided.

noisome cryptics

I was working my way through edition 121 of The Puzzle People's Cryptic Crosswords magazine. In puzzle number 60 one of the clues was:

'Small number is nothing to me, just offensive.' 

Hmm...

Small number could be 'no' - as in the shortened form of numero. Next, 'is'. Okay, getting there... what about 'nothing'. Well, that's usually a letter O, as used to represent 'zero'. Then 'me'.

Okay, I knew the answer would mean offensive, and I knew noisesome would fit the bill. Yet I had too many letters. But what if I took it exactly as the clue said: no-is-o-me.

At this stage I realised I've probably been mispronouncing noisome all my adult life. (But only in my head, when reading, because I can't recall ever actually using it in conversation.)

A look in the dictionary told me it's not noise-some, as I always thought. So, what's the etymology of this strange word I thought I knew but didn't?

According to this article in The Interpreter Magazine, I'm not alone in my confusion. (At least I did know the meaning, even if I didn't know how to spell it.)

I like the definition on this page, because it places the word noisome in its family of negatively weighted words, looking back to the earlier Latin origin:

noisome
1. Offensive, especially to the senses, as to arouse feelings of disgust or repulsion.
2. Extremely harmful or dangerous.
3. Etymology: from Middle English, noysome, "harmful, noxious", from noye, "harm, misfortune"; a shortened form of anoi, "annoyance"; from Old French anoier + -some. The meaning of "bad-smelling" was first recorded in 1577.

And I think I'll remember how to spell it now, because I'll think of it as an annoyance.

organic or pretend organic?

Have a look at these bags of planting mix. Organic or just pretending to be organic?

My understanding of quotation marks around a noun means to be wary of the genuineness of the thing named. It implies irony in the use of the marked word.

Cambridge Dictionaries Online says:

 We also use single quotation marks to draw attention to a word. We can use quotation marks in this way when we want to question the exact meaning of the word:
I am very disappointed by his 'apology'. I don't think he means it.  

NEW 'WAR' OVER NORTH SEA FISHING PLANS

This Washington State University site on American usage discusses the same sort of thing I've noticed on the bag of planting mix:

There are many ways to go wrong with quotation marks. They are often used ironically: 

She ran around with a bunch of "intellectuals." 

The quotation marks around "intellectuals" indicate that the writer believes that these are in fact so-called intellectuals, not really intellectuals at all. The ironic use of quotation marks is very much overdone, and is usually a sign of laziness indicating that the writer has not bothered to find the precise word or expression necessary.  

Advertisers unfortunately tend to use quotation marks merely for emphasis: 

"FRESH" TOMATOES

59 CENTS A POUND 

The influence of the more common ironic usage tends to make the reader question whether these tomatoes are really fresh. Underlining, bold lettering, all caps - there are several less ambiguous ways to emphasise words than placing them between quotation marks. 

I managed to overcome my initial reaction to this strange punctuation, and bought the product to plant my nice new Jonathan apple in enriched soil.

a clever advertisement

I've been noticing this sign for years, and today I finally got organised to pull over and take a photo of it.

Isn't it clever?

Firstly -  Musica is the Latin word for 'the art of music, or music itself (including poetry).

Secondly -  If you study at this place, I suppose you will get plenty of music.

Thirdly -  It calls to mind the expression aplenty. Dictionary.com defines this as either an adjective or an adverb:

adjective in sufficient quantity; in generous amounts (usually following the noun it modifies); He had troubles aplenty.                                                                                                     adverb sufficiently; enough; more than sparingly: He howled aplenty when hurt.

Correctly, the advertisement places the word 'aplenty' after the noun, 'musica'.

And, fourthly, cleverest of all in my opinion, the music school is on Plenty Lower Plenty Road, so you could read it as 'music at Plenty', if you wanted to.
I love to see language used so creatively.

calf in our leg and calf in a field

Recently, at an exercise class, as the teacher encouraged us to 'stretch our calves', I wondered whether this word is related to the word for a young animal - calf.

Some internet sites say the words are related historically, because the large fleshy back of the human leg can be thought to look like the shape of a young cow or bull. I can't really see this, but maybe our ancestors who lived by cattle herding might have been more attuned to such things.

Of course, I had to experiment. Who wouldn't? So here's a photo of my own calf.

Nope. Doesn't make me think of baby cows. So I tried turning the photo...

Hmmm. I decided to check the dictionary again.
The Online Etymology Dictionary says:

"young cow," Old English cælf (Anglian cælf) "young cow," from Proto-Germanic *kalbam (cognates: Middle Dutch calf, Old Norse kalfr, German Kalb, Gothic kalbo, perhaps from PIE *gelb(h)-, from root *gel- "to swell," hence, "womb, fetus, young of an animal." Elliptical sense of "leather made from the skin of a calf" is from 1727. Used of icebergs that break off from glaciers from 1818. 

The idea of a connection with the root meaning "to swell", might explain the connection, I suppose, since this muscle swells and shrinks as we move our legs.

mens and womens

Recently I went to see the film 'The Railway Man.' I was upset about the frightful treatment of the soldiers,  but enjoyed the film overall because of its message of hope for a peaceful world.  A friend who saw it with me said there was nothing in it that she hasn't seen in documentaries about the terrible conditions under which Allied soldiers slaved on The Thai-Burma Railway, but I think the gut-wrenching impact of the torture occurs because the viewer is so immersed in the main character's point of view.

Anyway, that's not what I'm blogging about here...

I can't resist showing these two photos of the male and female toilet signs at the picture theatre. Why pay all that money for such a posh, well-lit sign and not employ someone who knows about the apostrophe of possession?

misspelling of the words stationary and stationery

I've posted previously about how I remember the difference between the words stationery and stationary. My sister does it by thinking of the word car, and the fact that a car moves and is spelled with ar. Something that is stationary doesn't move. Hmm...I sort of see the logic of this one.

My method is to say that in a stationery shop there will be envelopes, and envelope begins with the letter 'e'.

I was in a great little store at Westfield Doncaster today,  called daiso. I love this store, with its huge range of bits and pieces to make life easy. It's a bit like the Tardis, small on the outside but enormous on the inside.

I was with a group of teachers, and needless to say we're nit-pickers when it comes to spelling, so of course I pointed out this sign:

Loved the immediate quip by one of my friends. 'Well, the stock on that  display's not going to move fast.'

Thomas Jefferson said then and not than about his slaves

Recently, when I received a daily bulletin from delanceyplace.com, I was interested to see that Thomas Jefferson had used the word then where we nowadays would use the word than.

Here's the link to the particular article in the archive: http://www.delanceyplace.com/view_archives.php?2258

In a chilling assessment of the economic value of slave ownership, Jefferson said:

A child raised every 2. years is of more profit then the crop of the best laboring man.

I wondered if the word 'then' was a typo, so I looked around the internet and found what I take to be a reliable article, on the Smithsonian website. The article, The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson, was a revelation to me about the disgusting practice of slavery. Whippings; selling of children 'down the river', never to be seen again; hypocrisy; brutal overseers doing the work Jefferson professed to detest - all these were part of a gripping article that I felt compelled to read to the end.

I've posted previously about the mixed history of these two spellings. I still think it's likely that in the future we will spell both words as 'then'.

concision in fiction

An article on AVClub in January introduced me to a new word - concision. In defence of short story writing as a stand-alone career (asserting the right of authors to not write novels), Kevin McFarland said: 'There is nothing wrong with concision in fiction.'

When I read this word, I knew it meant the writing was concise, but I had thought the noun for this concept was  conciseness. 

The Australian Macquarie Dictionary defines conciseness as 'the quality of being concise' and concision as  'concise quality; brevity; terseness'. So I guess I can add this new word to my vocabulary as a synonym for the word I already knew. 

WordReference Forums, which appears to be north-American based, has a discussion of these two words, and the consensus seems to be that conciseness is the more usual term, with concision seeming pretentious and somewhat old-fashioned. One interesting comment is that concision implies an action (like words such as decision, incision, division), while conciseness implies a quality.

a house full of ungrammatical products

I'm sure we will get good use out of our new flexible silicone draining net...

But it's a fact that my purchase was influenced by the great example of language change on the back.

This new product can join the fascinating 'Frying Dragon' lock that I also couldn't resist buying.

It's hard to read about the drainer with the packet sideways, so here it is the right way up.

Yes, there it is again - 'then' instead of 'than'. 

It's winning!

then or than

I've just read yet another example of someone writing 'then' instead of 'than'. It's in an article in news.com.au about a soon-to-be published book of dog photos. The article quotes the photographer, Carli Davidson:

"I shot [photographed] over 100 dogs, but some chose not to shake, so I scheduled a lot more then I needed."

Presumably this was a spoken quote, so whoever wrote it down decided on the spelling. I wonder if Ms Davidson said 'then', or whether she actually said 'than'. 

As I've posted previously, I believe that in the next few years the word 'then' will replace the word 'than' in this context.

Aboriginal Cultural Trail at Melbourne University

Melbourne University has developed a self-guided Aboriginal cultural walk around the campus. It aims 'to remind walkers of the Wurundjeri people's continued traditions and connection to this part of the Melbourne landscape'. Its called Billibellary's Walk.

It sounds great and I'll try to get to the University and take the walk, but I'll wait until the permanent signs are in place.

However, as I read about the new walk in today's edition of The Age newspaper, my eye was caught by this basically unreadable sentence:

According to Shaun Ewen, Deputy Director of the Centre for Health and Society in the Onemda VicHealth Koori Health Unit at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health and Associate Dean (Indigenous Development) for the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences, the concept of the walk originates in one of the graduate attributes envisaged for all students across the University - that of being attuned to cultural diversity by valuing different cultures.

Whew! What a mouthful. I applaud the sentiments at the end of the sentence, but it sure took a long time to get to the point.

And later in the article:

For someone like Craig Torrens, a Wehumbul man from the Bundjalung nation north-east of New South Wales, who is with Shawana Andrews a member of the Billibellary's Walk research team and works as a corporate records officer in the University's Secretary's Department, taking the tour is an honour, and has also been an educative experience for him. 

There's an online link to the article here. I wish they had shortened some of the sentences in that article by inserting links.

And more information, including some about Billibellary, here.

desire lines

I noticed this poster the other day.

I seem to recall that you have to encounter a word or expression a certain number of times before it enters your vocabulary. So perhaps desire line will soon become an everyday expression for me. I've come across the word twice now.

The last time I wrote about it I used the slightly different expression desire path, so I thought I'd better check out the definition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. They say:

The title Desire Lines refers to the wayward, improvised tracks created by walkers and others who defy the ways designed for them by urban regulators and councils. Sometime known as ‘goat trails’ they show the preferable path, and indicate our more maverick and intuitive navigations. 

Yes, that about describes the situation in Clifton Hill where the council seems determined to regulate our favorite short-cut out of existence.

It sounds like an interesting exhibition:

Extrapolating from this premise, the exhibition takes us on a number of unexpected journeys, unleashing many lines, both actual and conceptual, pragmatic and poetic. Geographies, geometries and g-force elements are all activated in works that form poetic encounters and memorable moments, as artists seek to follow their hearts, minds and navigational desires. Including work by more than thirty artists, this international exhibition features important and seminal works by Samuel Beckett, Bruce Nauman, Lawrence Weiner and Richard Long, videos from the significant ArtAngel commission Seven Walks by renowned artist Francis Alÿs; new projects by Mel O’Callaghan, Steven Sutcliffe, Charlie Sofo and Dan Shipsides, rarely seen works by Pierre Bismuth, Marcel Broodthaers, A K Dolven and Catherine Yass and introduces many more new artists to Melbourne audiences.

Desire Lines will also feature several key performances, including

• British artist Dan Shipsides will create one of his renowned climbing based artworks on the exterior of the ACCA building.• Sydney artist Mel O’Callaghan will create a moving sculpture of rocks on ACCA’s forecourt.

Desire Lines – 15 December, 2012 to 3 March, 2013.