Let Me Rephrase That ...

Filipino receives first US anti-child labor award

--Michael Quinion, World Wide Words

Quinion also has "Shoes 3 for $20," which brings to mind the Snopes in Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County who steals a carload of left shoes.

It's Pronounced YOW-ee

Michael Quinion the word man introduces me to “Yaoi,” hitherto unknown to me, which he describes as (link):

…a type of manga or anime, so originally Japanese, that focuses on male-to-male sexual relationships. Though it's therefore popular among gays, it has proved to be still more popular among women. So it has that in common with the - originally SF - genre of slash fiction, in which male stars of popular TV shows and films are portrayed as engaging in gay relationships, a genre that's also popular with and mostly written by women.

Quinion’s a generous guy: he assumes you already know that a manga and anime are avatars of Japanese comic art. Two points in particular caught my notice.

One--my friend Ignoto, in the entertainment business, told me that the nice thing about lesbian porn films (from a marketing standpoint) is that some women will watch them, while men will watch anything—so you increase your market share. Didn’t realize it worked the other way around.

And two, Quinion showcases this:

One of the earliest examples of “yaoi” Shakespeare is Yasuko Aoike’s manga for girls, titled Ibu no musuko tachi ( Sons of Eve, Tokyo, 1978), in which Shakespeare, Lear, Hamlet and Romeo appear as male gay characters.

...Crediting Peter Holland, Shakespeare Survey 60, 2007

Quinion also introduces us to “the Twaddell Scale,” deployed inter alia for the proofing of Scotch whiskey.

Quinion on "Cad" (With a Footnote on "Bounder")

Michael Quinion, in his splendid weekly newsletter, honors the passing of a popular author, and offers a disquisition on one of my favorite words--"cad" (link):

A man who behaves dishonourably, especially towards a woman. ... "Cad" is the classic British contemptuous epithet of the nineteenth century. It appears, as one example, in Jerome K. Jerome's Passing of the Third Floor Back: "That you and your wife lead a cat and dog existence is a disgrace to both of you. At least you might have the decency to try and hide it from the world - not make a jest of your shame to every passing stranger. You are a cad, sir, a cad!"

Its history is as weird as one might like. The word started life as "cadet", either a military trainee or a member of a younger branch of a family. That developed into "caddie", now solely a golfer's bag carrier, but in the eighteenth century any lad or man who hung about in the hope of getting casual employment as an errand-boy, messenger or odd-job man. Both "cadet" and "caddie" were shortened to "cad". ... The shift seems to have happened at the university of Oxford. Lads from the town who hung about colleges in the hope of casual work of the caddie type were called cads by the undergraduates. It became a contemptuous way to describe townsmen and by about 1840 it had achieved its full flowering as a term for a man whose behaviour
was unacceptable.

This is wonderful, and it prompts me to return to a question that has bugged me before: can one be a “cad” today? Yes, I know that men continue to behave badly. But isn”t caddishness a form of misbehavior that arises only as part of a particular social context?

An answer to me would be: words change their meanings. A man can still be a “cad” even if the term carries a different resonance than it might have carried for Jerome K. Jerome (I wonder when, where and how often (if ever) Carrie Bradshaw refers to anyone as a “cad”). Cf., “snob,” which once meant (if I remember right) an underling in a great house, and only later came to mean one who lords it over others.

I have another assignment for Michael: “bounder,” as in “you, sir, are a cad and a bounder.” Just exactly how is a “bounder” different from a “cad,” so as to require separate naming?

Fn.: Revised 20 Jan, 2008.

We Go Forth, and You Can Too

We’re off again, this time for just a couple of days, to help with the launching of a 17-year-old, on her way off to University in Britain. This is our third launching of a 17-year-old this season (all girls, as it happens). Proof enough that the next generation is well on its way. No wait, let me count here: that’s one, um, two and – eeuw, the next after the next generation. Now, that is depressing.

Meanwhile for entertainment while we are away, he’s a squib from the ever dependable Michael Quinion (link), except somehow he forgot to mention Tom Stoppard’s wonderful play, Albert’s Bridge:

GO FORTH When somebody says some job is like painting the Forth Bridge they mean it's never-ending. Although the famous railway bridge across the Firth of Forth north of Edinburgh was opened in 1890, recent research by the Oxford English Dictionary shows that the metaphor first appears in print only in 1955. But the symbolism of the endless task was around long before then. As early as 1894, it was reported in the Glasgow Herald: "The Forth bridge receives a new coat of paint every three years, and one-third is done each year, so that the painters are continually at work." In 1901, US papers commented "The Forth bridge is constantly being repainted" and the factette was repeated down the years until it was embedded in the public mind on both sides of the Atlantic. Now an expensive refit is using epoxy resin and polyurethane coverings in place of traditional paint (though still in the same rust-red colour). Last week, a BBC television programme reported that the finish is so much more resistant to the rain, gales, salt spray and ice that batter the bridge that when the refit ends in 2009, nobody will need to paint the bridge for 30 years. But how long will it take for the cliché to die?

And come to think of it, I remember hearing somewhere that the Eskimos really don’t have any more words for snow than we do.

Mr. Bowser's Wonderful Machine

Thanks to Michael Quinion’s admirable newsletter on word history (link), we learn that there really was a Mr. Bowser:

Floods have caused enormous damage in parts of southern Britain in the past week or so; ironically, one result is that in the worst- hit areas local residents have lost their water supplies because treatment plants have flooded. On Monday, BBC News reported that drinking water was to be brought into the stricken areas usingbowsers. This word had presumably been taken from information supplied by Severn Trent Water, the water company that is most affected. BBC reporters - together with other radio and TV news broadcasters and some newspapers - felt it necessary to explain this odd term in case it would not be understood. "Bowser" is rather specialist, not being the sort of word that you naturally drop into daily conversation unless you run a service station or an airport. But it's neither archaic nor especially rare, though it doesn't mean the same thing in every country in which it's used....

We owe its existence to the late Mr Sylvanus Bowser, of Fort Wayne, Indiana. Early in the twentieth century he invented what he called the self-measuring gasoline storage pump but which we have long since abbreviated to petrol pump or gasoline pump. ... At some point, the usage extended beyond providing fuels to supplying water, especially in military situations and on construction and building sites. They may not have recognised the word, but many flood-affected people have been very grateful for bowsers.

Welcome to Valhalla, Mr. Bowser. Mr. Dempster and Mr. Jacuzzi are here waiting. Any minute we’re expecting Mr. Two-row Cotton Picking Machine.

Fn.: Cleaned up to ungarble a garbled paragraph, January 20, 2008.