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World Wide Web RSS Feeds597-1: Feedback, notes and comments - Chequered In last week’s piece, I mentioned exchequer, a table covered with a cloth divided into squares on which the accounts of the revenue were kept by means of counters. Dvora Yanow e-mailed from Amsterdam to ask if this was the origin of counter for the serving position in a shop. It is. The word was at first anything used in keeping count or accounts, such as tokens; later — in the fifteenth century — it became a table or desk on which accounts were kept; two centuries later still it began to be used for a money-changer’s table and also for a table in a shop where the money for goods was paid over. Laws Following up comments in this section last week about the Law of Prescriptive Retaliation and McKean’s Law, several readers told me about Muphry’s Law, which is pretty much identical. One way of putting it is this: “if you write anything cri...Feed Source: www.worldwidewords.org 597-2: Weird Words: Pharology - The scientific study of lighthouses and signal lights.
Pharology is first recorded in 1847 in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Arts of London. The author of the paper noted it had been “first introduced by the late Mr Purdy”. This otherwise unsung gentleman must have had in mind the famous lighthouse, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, that was erected around 280BC on the island of Pharos, off the coast of Alexandria.
The word is well known among those whose hobbyist or professional interest lies in studying or looking after lighthouses. Now that all the British lights are automated, and the job of lighthouse keeper no longer exists, you might think that pharologists have less to interest them. Not so. Many of the lights are in remote locations that required great determination, skill and endurance to construct them and special qualities in the men isolated on them for a month at a time. In Britain, the As... 597-3: Recently noted - #@%$?*! Dave Aton pointed out an interesting word, which he found on the Ask section of typography.com. It’s the name given to those strings of random non-alphabetical characters that cartoonists use in speech bubbles to indicate profanity. They call them grawlixes. The word was created by the cartoonist Mort Walker. He first used it in 1964 in an article he wrote for the US National Cartoonists Society and then included it in his book The Lexicon of Comicana of 1980, a satire on the comic devices that cartoonists use but which ironically became a textbook for art students. Other terms that he invented for various comic-artist graphical conventions include waftarom, squean, spurl, neoflect, plewd, vite, dite, hite, direct-a-tron (and throwatron, sailatron, staggeratron, swishatron .), briffit, solrad, whiteope, ... 597-4: Questions and Answers: Faffing -
[Q] From Raymond Wargo, Vancouver: “What’s the origin of faffing which means to aimlessly waste time doing useless tasks?”
[A] It’s originally British, informal but not rude, and moderately common, especially in the form to faff about. The Daily Telegraph included this on 15 March 2008: “The early boarders certainly bag their seats quickly, but then they immediately relax and happily faff about putting their things in the overhead locker, generally getting in the way of the other passengers.”
It can be used as a politer alternative to another four-letter word beginning with f but has no link with it. It starts to appear as a dialect word in Scotland and Northern England at the end of the eigh... 597-5: Questions and Answers: Hoodwink -
[Q] From Frank Danielzik, Germany: “I know what to hoodwink means, but cannot imagine how it came about. There seems no connection between its meaning and the individual words it is made up from.”
[A] The original sense of hoodwink was to prevent somebody seeing by covering their head with a hood or blindfolding them. Our main sense now is a figurative one derived from it, to deceive or trick (as we might also say, to pull the wool over someone’s eyes), which appeared in the early seventeenth century.
There’s no problem with the first part, but wink here isn’t in the sense we use now of closing and opening one eye quickly as a signal of some sort. When it first appeared, in Old English in the form wincia... 597-6: Sic! - • Another Eden? Barry Prince, a retired journalist in Auckland, New Zealand, sent through a e-mail he’d received on Friday promoting BBC World. A blurb about a forthcoming programme on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel says, “This programme explores some of the main challenges he faced by recruiting two modern fresco artists, Fleur Kelly and Leo Stevenson, to produce their own version of the iconic scene where God creates Adam at a church in London.”
• “A notice was posted at the local Shoppers Drug Mart,” Vin Murph e-mailed from Canada. “‘Shopping carts are no longer allowed to leave the store.’ Are they being punished for bad behaviour?”
• Ann Jones was looking at the Web site of the Solomon Star, based in the Solomon Islands. An item quoted the New Zealand Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters, commenting on his ... 597-7: 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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