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World Records RSS Feeds587-1: Feedback, notes and comments - Pilcrow Lots of people supported my view that this word isn’t as dead as the Oxford English Dictionary suggests it is. But it turns out they mostly meant that the symbol is still common, as indeed it is, since it is widely used — as just one example — in word-processing programs to display otherwise hidden paragraph breaks. Chickens roosting My mention of the incongruous image created by the phrase “wild oats are coming home to roost”, reminded Anelie Walsh of one of her favourite mixed metaphors, in Tom Stoppard’s play The Real Inspector Hound, in which the character Birdboot comments, “The skeleton in the cupboard is coming home to roost.” Know-All Donald Kaspersen picked up on a term that I employed in this section last week, “The expression ‘know-all’ seems to be missing so...Feed Source: www.worldwidewords.org 587-2: Weird Words: Struthonian - Tending to hide one's head in the sand.
This is a modern weird word, used a few times after the late Arthur Koestler invented it in 1963, but now almost unknown. His aim, in an article he wrote in Encounter magazine, was to describe pundits who prefer honest self-deception to ignoble truths.
You may recall that there is an animal famed for its in-sand head-burying, so you won’t be surprised to learn that struthonian is from the Latin struthio, an ostrich. Related to it is the standard — albeit technical — English struthious, of or like an ostrich.
An ancient, rare and defunct name for the bird, by the way, was struthiocamel, from the Latin struthiocamelus. The Romans took it wrongly from the Greek strouthokamelos, literally “sparrow camel” or, more loosely, “camel-bird” (the scientific name of the ostrich to this day is Struthio camelus). It&rsquo... 587-3: Recently noted - Ketogenic diet This phrase was all over the newspapers this last weekend following a report in The Lancet of a study at University College London that showed epileptic children had fewer seizures if they were given a special diet high in fat. One intriguing aspect of the story is that there’s nothing at all new in the idea. The diet, and its name, are recorded in the literature as being helpful in reducing epileptic seizures as far back as the 1920s. It went out of favour when anticonvulsive drugs became available; interest in it has been growing again in recent years to help sufferers who don’t respond well to drugs. The study is surprisingly claimed to be the first ever gold standard clinical trial (one conducted using the very best controlled and randomised methods) to have been carried out. The diet is similar to the famous Atkins diet and has been used for various therapeutic purposes for many years. It’s said ... 587-5: Questions and Answers: Cock and bull story -
[Q] From David Armstrong, Ontario, Canada: “Whilst at a meeting recently, someone told the story of how Cock and bull story got its name. According to the tale-teller, there were two inns in England (the name of the town escapes me), The Cock and The Bull. To entice customers into either inn, each had its own barker, constantly extolling the virtues of his inn. Each time the barker tried to get a customer to come in, the story would be more outlandish than the previous, and hence the term. This seems simplistic to me, is there a grain of truth in this?”
[A] Nary a smidgen of a trace of a germ of truth. It’s a cock-and-bull story in two senses.
The tale is a variation on the standard version, which tells of two inns of those names wh... 587-6: Questions and Answers: Bad cess -
[Q] From Ruth McVeigh: “I know Bad cess is an Irish curse, but where does it come from?”
[A] To say bad cess to you to somebody is to wish them bad luck, so it’s not pleasant, though as curses go there are worse. The second word is the problem in working out the phrase’s history. An initial idea might be that it has some connection with cesspits or cesspools, suitably revolting associations for any imprecation.
It’s a red herring, however, because it was possible at one time to wish a person good cess — to wish them good luck — and so there’s hardly likely to be a link with sewage. The US publication Putnam’s Magazine, in an issue of 1857, has an Irish character saying: &ldq... 587-6: Sic! - • Department of inadvertent inversion: David Killeen reports that on 1 May The Australian began an article headed “Literacy plan works, take it as read” with “A simple edict that Aboriginal children read and write for two hours every morning is finally reducing appalling levels of literacy in remote parts of Australia.”
• An advertisement for cleaning services in Arlington, Virginia, failed to impress Susan Gay: “Check listed deep cleaning by hard-beaten professional maids.” As a motivational technique, she felt it left something to be desired; she added, “I assume they were going for ‘hard-bitten’ but even that’s pretty awkward.”
• Alan Turner had to make a couple of attempts at understanding the headline over a story on AOL news this week. His first impression was that some poor schoolmaster had b... 587-7: Copyright and contact details - World Wide Words is copyright © Michael Quinion 2008. All rights reserved. You may reproduce this newsletter in whole or part in free online newsletters, newsgroups or mailing lists provided that you include this note and the copyright notice above. Reproduction in printed publications or on Web sites or blogs requires prior permission, for which you should contact the editor.
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