Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

Start at the beginning. Which, in this case, means going back to Guido d'Arezzo, an 11th-century Benedictine monk and a teacher of singing. He laid the foundations of musical notation as we know it by inventing a "Great Scale" using letters to indicate the notes, but because of the difficulty of singing consonants he used syllables. So, he began the scale with the Greek letter Gamma, G, and called its corresponding syllable note Ut.

Why Ut? Guido found the inspiration for his syllables — Ut, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol and La — in a popular hymn to St. John the Baptist:

Ut queant laxis Resonare fibris
Mira gestorum Famuli tuorum
Solve pollutes Labiis reatum
Sancte Iohannes.

("That thy servants may sing out the wondrous acts strongly and freely, remove the guilt from their polluted lips, St. John.")

Ut was later changed to Do, which is easier to sing since it ends in a vowel and Si was added, probably from the initial letters of Sancte Iohannes. The entire scale was known as the gamma-ut, from the first note and its equivalent syllable. And this gives us, yes, the noun gamut, which means the entire range of something. In March last year, Outsourcing Times reported that Capita Plc. had signed a human resources contract with the BBC: "Capita will provide a gamut of HR services to the BBC and the broadcasting giant expects the deal to provide significant benefits in terms of reduction in cost." Now, you'll never forget the origin, meaning and use of gamut.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 5 March 2007 at 6:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This is it; the end of the road. Well, the end of the alphabet, anyway. Our Word for the wise © series has reached its conclusion and after today, after Z, we must move on. So, here goes:

zounds is a euphemism dating from the days when uttering the name of God was suppressed. What readers of archaic works often regard as a mild expression of surprise or annoyance is, in fact, a late 16th century shortening of "by God's wounds!" Similar to "zounds" is "gosh", which the Oxford English Dictionary termed a "mincing pronunciation of GOD". It is fascinating that in three centuries English went from the openness of medieval religious swearing so obvious in Chaucer to the Puritan injunction against profanity.

When swearing moved its focus from the religious to bodily functions, we begin to see an erosion of the name of God in forms such as gospel ("God's message"), gossip ("relation to God") and "goodbye" ("God be with you").

Goodbye is a good word with which to end our Word for the wise © adventure. Over the past 26 weeks (!), the trek from A to Z has shown, in a small way, the enormous social and semantic changes that have taken place in English during the past millennium, and thanks to the "Categories" feature of Movable Type you can now spend hours enjoying Rainy Day's Word for the wise ©.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 18 December 2005 at 7:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

We're rapidly running out of letters in our Word for the wise © A-Z odyssey. Instead of ending in "y", however, our word this week begins with the penultimate letter of the alphabet. Yes, that's right, we've arrived at Y:

yes can have the plural form of "yeses" or "yesses" and you'll find either, depending on who's doing the reporting, in sentences like this: "The yeses have 65 per cent and the noes 35 per cent, so the motion is carried." The word "yes" is contained within the title of James Joyce's novel Ulysses and the great work ends with the most evocative use of the "assent indicator", as the grammarians call it, in English-language literature. So, take it away, Molly Bloom:

"yes and all the little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibralter as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

Next week, we're at "Z".

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 10 December 2005 at 9:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Our ongoing but soon-to-be-ended Word for the wise © expedition through the alphabet has brought us as far as X:

xenophobia is defined as "an intense fear or dislike of foreign people, their customs and culture, or foreign things." This can extend to language, where the phenomenon is known as "linguistic xenophobia". The word "barbarian" is worth noting in this context. It is derived from a Greek version of the Latin balbus, "stammering", being a derisive imitation of the foreign languages encountered by "superior" civilizations. The term was applied to those who were non-Hellenic, then non-Roman, then non-Christian. In the 19th century, the word turned up in an official Chinese document referring contemptuously to foreigners. An early quotation in English, from 1549, is in Scots dialect: "Euere nation reputis vthers nations to be barbariens."

Coming bang up to date, on 3 May this year, the German town of Mühlhausen in Thuringia joined the "Verein Deutsche Sprache" (Society of the German Language") with the expressed goal of removing Anglicisms and Americanisms from the native language of north Germany. Mühlhausen boasts a "Factory Store" and a clothing shop offering "trendige Kindermode for Boys and Girls", while hairdresser Melanie Bauer hopes to attract a more hip clientele with her "Stylissimo" salon. All this is too much for the town's mayor who feels that the evolving mix of German and English, known as "Denglisch", has gone too far. Retrogression won't help the mayor in his Canute-like battle with the incoming tide of English, however, but it may distract people for a while from reality and bankrupt politics.

Next week, we're at "Y". Given the season that's in it, "Yuletide" has been nominated.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 3 December 2005 at 4:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here we are at W in our Word for the wise © wander through the alphabet. Last week, we entered the canon (canyon?) of the Seven Deadly Sins: Avarice, Envy, Gluttony, Lust, Pride and Sloth. Today, we grapple with the missing one:

wrath means fury marked by a desire for vengeance. The modern equivalent is "anger" and although it's not quite respectable, it is no longer regarded as absolutely opprobrious. When you hear corporate trainers speak of "Anger Management" seminars in the same breath as they mention "Project Management" ones, you know that anger is no longer seen as sinful. How could it be, if it can be managed to the benefit of the corporation?

Look around, and you'll see that our sports arenas offer public spectacles of anger measured in sin bins (!), red cards and the like, while politics, as mediated by television talk shows, is nothing but anger-filled chatter. The success of these exhibitions is often related to the amount of rage expressed by the participants. And speaking of "rage", what is it but another form of Middle Ages "wrath"? Maybe there was "road wrath" back then. You know, "Get your carriage out of my way, pig-faced coachman! Where'd you learn to drive? Hackney!"

Next week, we're at "X". The sole candidate is "xenophobia".

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 26 November 2005 at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ours is an age of doubt. Maybe that's why we don't build cathedrals much anymore. And the same goes for the architecture of the mind. How many now read the Summa Theologica of Aquinas or the Divina Commedia by Dante? Certainly can't imagine anyone writing such works anymore. Our glories today are technical and commercial and, inevitably, this has led to a shift in values and language. All this, believe it or not, brings us to V in our ongoing Word for the wise © tour d'alphabet.

vanity comes from the Latin vanus, meaning "empty, without substance", which is the source of the English "evanescent" and "vanish". Under the ethos of conspicuous consumption, what was once seen as a vice is now respectable and vanity has become entirely acceptable since the Industrial Revolution. What began with such feminine accoutrements as vanity case and vanity bag, has extended its reach to vanity (license) plate, vanity publisher and vanity (web) domain. Why, there are even vanity Wikipedia entries.

Vanity is the cousin of Pride, another word that does not carry the negative connotations that it once did. Think of Gay Pride, for example. With Pride, we enter the canon of the Seven Deadly Sins. Remember those? Avarice, Envy, Gluttony, Lust, Pride, Sloth. Open any magazine today, watch any bunch of TV commercials, and you'll find what amount to endorsements, blatant or latent, of precisely these attributes.

Next week, the seventh Deadly Sin. Why? Because it begins with "W".

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 20 November 2005 at 9:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We're passing the 20th milestone with this one. The landmarks are the letters of the alphabet and we have reached letter No. 21 with U in our Word for the wise © adventure that will end five weeks hence with Z.

U, meaning upper-class, and U (other class) joined the debate on linguistic class-distinction in 1954 thanks to a paper by Alan S. C. Ross in the learned journal Neuphilologische Mitteilungen. Nancy Mitford popularized the terms in a humerous collection of essays titled Noblesse Oblige (1954), and Ross returned to the debate with What are U? in 1969.

U terms, said Ross, include napkin (non-U serviette), lavatory (non-U toilet), scent (non-U perfume), and excuse me (non-U pardon). In U, "cupper" is a cup of tea, while the non-U counterpart is "cuppa". There's a certain baby talk aspect to U usage in forms like gee-gee, wee-wee, hanky-panky and hoity-toity. Interestingly, "rugger" for rugby is U, but "champers" for champagne is non-U. In keeping with the Thatcherite early '80s, "Roller" for Rolls Royce became U in Ann Barr's and Peter York's facetious volume The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook (1982). Along with using lots of faux U terms for sexual intercourse such as "interior decorating", Sloanes loved using non-U words in common accents, and it is noteworthy that both U and non-U favour the kind of four-letter words and blasphemous terms that the middle classes find embarrassing. But it was ever thus. Here, the splendid Harry Hotspur pours scorn on the mealy-mouthed, "decency" of his wife:

Swear me, Kate, like a lady as thou art,
A good mouth-filling oath; and leave 'in sooth',
And such protest of pepper-gingerbread,
To velvet guards and Sunday-citizens.
(Henry IV, Pt.I, III, i. 257-60)

Next week, we're at "V". Candidates include "vermillion" and "vichyssoise".

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 12 November 2005 at 7:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Journalists, burned out from writing daily "dog-bites-man" stories, dream of the elusive "man-bites-dog" story, but it happens only once in a very blue moon. Imagine, then, the astonishment of all those downtrodden hacks when "woman-beats-up-man" flashed across their screens early Thursday morning. But it wasn't just any woman who was doing the physical abusing — it was Rebekah Wade, the editor of Britain's best-selling daily newspaper, the Sun, and it wasn't just any man that she had been arrested on suspicion of assaulting. No, indeed. The alleged victim was her soap star husband, Ross Kemp. To add to the juiciness of it all, Wade had recently launched a campaign in her paper to stamp out domestic violence. And there she was now, in a police cell in the rather aptly-named Battersea, in south-west London, being subjected to fingerprinting and DNA testing.

All this is by way of introducing the letter T in our Word for the wise © stroll through the alphabet.

tabloid implies journalism that is sensationalist, bigoted and cheap, but this derogatory meaning is relatively new. The word tabloid was originally registered as a trademark by Burroughs, Wellcome in 1884 and when the great Victorian press baron Lord Northcliffe used the term to describe his half-size compact newspapers (Daily Mail, Daily Mirror) the owners of the trade mark got an injunction preventing him using the word in this way. In 1903, however, a Mr Justice Byrne ruled that despite the original pharmaceutical meaning, the word had "acquired a secondary sense in which it may legitimately be used." Thus, tabloid journalism with its huge headlines, compressed writing and dramatic images became a concentrated form of information similar in nature to the original Burroughs, Wellcome drug.

As the sun was rising over London on Thursday morning, it emerged that the Sun was working on a sensational domestic violence story that featured Martin Kemp's onscreen brother, Phil Mitchell, played by Steve McFadden. It seems he was the subject of a beating in Highgate, north London by a former girlfriend. Police said they were called to McFadden's home at 9.35am on Wednesday and arrested Angela Bostock outside the house for alleged assault. She was cautioned and released. Meanwhile, over in Wandsworth Prison, Rebekah Wade, 37, ...

Next week, we're at "U". Candidates include "U" and "non-U".

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 5 November 2005 at 9:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

This week, our Word for the wise © is brought to you by the letter S. After reviewing the merits of "scab" and "senile", we have opted for something slightly dissimilar.

shall is used to express the simple future, but that's the simplest thing one can say about the word. Grammarians have been attempting to define the differences between shall and will since the 17th century, with limited success. The revered Fowler brothers devoted 20 pages to the matter in The King's English and their conclusion seems to be that you understand the distinction instinctively or you don't. If you don't, you never will. If you do, you don't need to be told.

The rule most often stated by English teachers is that to express the future you should use shall in the first person and will in the second and third persons, and to express determination you should do the reverse. OK? So, have all who sing "We Shall Overcome" got it wrong? And did General MacArthur err when he said, "I shall return"? Was the great stylist who vowed, "We shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender," mistaken? If Churchill couldn't get it right, what hope is there for the rest of us?

The debate is pointless as most people don't see any difference between shall and will and the distinction is irrelevant, especially if you speak Irish, Scottish or American English.

Next week, we're at "T". Candidates range from "tabloid" to "trivial".

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 29 October 2005 at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Making promises is a risky business. Because our weekly Word for the wise ©, which is snaking its way through the alphabet, has arrived at the letter R, we must live up to last week's pledge to reach for the "rude" words. And seeing that the Chinese regard 2005 as the "Year of the Rooster", we've got something concrete to work on, but as this is also the week of avian 'flu hysteria we must try to kill, ahem, two birds with the one letter, as it were.

rooster is American English for a male chicken. The British English word is cock. The distinction between the two words is that cock is what the animal is, while rooster is derived from the place where the bird lives because a roost is a perch. Figuratively, troubles come "home to roost" and the alpha male "rules the roost". He's the boss, in other words. The symbolic idea is masculinity, while the word itself is a statement of function.

Cock, on the other hand, has always had heavy sexual connotations. Outside North America, the word is the colloquial term for the male organ. Although not obscene anymore, the Oxford Concise Dictionary rates it as "vulgar". Chambers, in fact, regards it as merely "coarse", so times are changing.

With "rooster" and "cock" one is in the fascinating, and sometimes embarrassing intersection between British English and American English. Why is it an insult to call a woman a "cow" but acceptable to refer to her a "filly" in different strata of British society? In "Mother Tongue", Bill Bryson explores this minefield to great effect. He cites the expression "keep your pecker up", which is crude in America but harmless in Britain, whereas "fanny" in the US is an innocent synonym for a woman's buttocks but the mention of it would cause embarrassed silence over a British breakfast where it is regarded as a synonym for what a shy patient of a doctor friend of ours memorably called her "front bottom".

Next week, we're at "S". Candidates range from "salt" and "synergy".

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 23 October 2005 at 12:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

To celebrate the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language, our Word for the wise © this week features one of his definitions beginning with the letter Q:

quack, "a boastful pretender to arts he does not understand," was how the great lexicographer damningly put it. Interestingly, the quack's lexical trail stretches back to mountebank, which the great Doctor defined as "a doctor that mounts a bench in a market and boasts his infallible remedies and cures".

Quackery quickly progressed to the point that some of its cleverest practitioners moved from the marketplace to the mass media, and a London journal of 1772 carried the following claims for an aphrodisiac called "The True Cordial Quintessence of Vipers": A few Days of it only give such a general Warmth, and so exceedingly delight the Vital and Animal Spirits, Senses and Nerves, as soon to show what it will do upon a little Continuance of it; for it not only promotes and prompts Desire, but also furnishes proper Matter for the Support and Establishment of a true and lasting Power and Inclination. Price 10s.6d a bottle."

Note: the Johnson Dictionary Project is putting the whole Dictionary online. Next week, we're at "R". We'll be picking from the "rude" words.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 15 October 2005 at 8:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In an echo of what is currently happening on the other side of the Atlantic with the Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers, John Allen, author of the must-read weekly "Word from Rome" writes that "if the Catholic left fears the new pope will translate his ideas expressed as a cardinal into policy, many on the Catholic right seem to fear that he won't." All that's by way of saying that our Word for the wise © this week begins with P.

pope became a hate word in English in the days of King Henry VIII and this fanatical usage persisted until quite recently. Indeed, 5 November was termed "Pope Day" at least until 1903. In the verbal armoury of English bigots, pope meant the effigy burnt on Guy Fawkes Night (5 November), a celebration to commemorate the successful foiling of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. A nursery rhyme popular in Northern Ireland goes:

Remember, remember, the fifth of November,
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot

In the week or so preceding 5 November a rag-stuffed figure representing the pope is taken about the streets by children begging for fireworks money ("a penny for the Guy"). On the night itself, also known as Bonfire Night, bonfires are lit in which, traditionally, the effigy, or Guy is burnt.

The Gunpowder Plot was led by a group of Catholics wishing to restore civic rights to members of their faith. They allegedly planned to blow up the Houses of Parliament and so rid England of its Protestant rulers. Gunpowder had been stored in a vault under the House of Lords and Guy Fawkes, one of the conspirators, was to set the fuses alight. One of the plotters, however, warned a relative, Lord Monteagle, who revealed the plot to the authorities. On the night between November 4 and 5, 1605, the cellars underneath Parliament were searched and Guy Fawkes was arrested and tortured until he named his alleged fellow conspirators. The conspirators were tortured and then executed, and the hopes for Catholic Emancipation received a severe setback.

Next week, we're at "Q". Candidates include "quack" and "queer".

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 8 October 2005 at 9:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

And here we are at O. Our Word for the wise © this week was going to be "ordinary", which along with "common" and "banal", conveys the idea of the unremarkable. Interestingly, all three have converged from very diverse, specific medieval meanings, but because we've been a bit too medieval here of late, in terms of words, we're doing something different today.

only ought to be attached to the word or phrase it modifies. This example, then, should serve as a warning: "In Dublin, the 47A bus only ran on Sundays." The literal meaning there is that on the other days of the week the bus did something quite different — flew, sailed? Far better is "the 47A bus ran only on Sundays" or "the 47A bus ran on Sundays only". But we need to be careful here because in idiomatic English only is often found in a more forward position: "Don't worry. This will only take a second." Or "England's winning of the Ashes can only be called a miracle." The fact is that the rule about the positioning of only is no longer the ironclad matter it once was. Communication is the goal and if fussiness gets in the way, well, it should move aside.

Next week, we are at "P". The candidate is the Latin word that means an illusion or delusion.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 1 October 2005 at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

With N, we have passed the mid-way point in the alphabet in our Word for the wise © series. It's downhill (!) from here.

nite is proof that the goal of phonetic English spelling did not go to the grave with the great American lexicographer Noah Webster. It was Webster who began hacking away at the silent consonants of English and this work has given us "thruway" instead of "throughway" and "lite" instead of "light". Through (thru?) its association with "niteclubs" and "nitelife", the word "nite" suggests excitement after dark. Boring old "night" cannot compete with that. Other innovations include "donut", "pak" and "kreem". Is this illiteralism? Is this a recipe for orthographical mayhem? Dr Johnson noted that English spelling was "unsettled and fortuitous" and so it continues to be. Note that "fortuitous" means accidental or by chance and should not be confused with "fortunate". A fortuitous occurrence may or may not be a fortunate one.

Next week, we are at "O". The candidates include "oligarchy" and "ordinary".

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 22 September 2005 at 8:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In 1966, Kingsley Amis remarked: "The treatment of media as a singular noun is now spreading to the upper cultural strata." That's by way of announcing that we have reached M in our Word for the wise © meanderings.

medium was used until relatively recently to mean, literally, the agency by which meaning was transmitted. Four centuries ago, Francis Bacon observed that "cognitions" are conveyed by "the medium of words" and terms such as "the medium of the cinema" are still used, but it was Marshall McLuhan with "the medium is the message", who began to reshape our view of the word. McLuhan's thesis that societies are shaped more by the style of their media than by the content ushered in the concept of the "media" as an entity which acted not so much as a mirror reflecting our world but as a lens with a particular focus giving the reader or listener an ideologically refracted view of things. Plural or singular? Websites, newspapers and TV stations are plural enterprises and the word should be too.

Next week, we're at "N". Candidates include "naval" and "navel".

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 17 September 2005 at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

With L, our Word for the wise © comes from the Latin libellus, meaning "little book".

libel is defined in most dictionaries as a statement that defames a person or damages his or her reputation. But it is worth noting that it must do so unreasonably or inaccurately. It is not the severity or the viciousness of a contention that makes it libelous; it's the wrongness that's fatal. And a libel must be published. So, did the The Sunday Times defame one of the greatest athletes of our time when, in reviewing the book LA Confidentiel: les secrets de Lance Armstrong, it reprinted the authors' doping allegations against the seven-time Tour de France winner? The cyclist's libel case against the paper will be heard in the High Court in London in November. London was the scene of perhaps the most famous libel trial of all, which began on 26 April 1895. Here's a critical exchange from it:

Sir Edward Carson, the Marquess of Queensberry's barrister, asked Oscar Wilde regarding a boy named Walter Grainger, "Did you kiss him?" Without thinking of the consequences, Wilde replied. "Oh, dear no. He was, unfortunately, extremely ugly. I pitied him for it."

Next week, we're at "M". Candidates include "medium" and "media".

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 7 September 2005 at 7:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded." Edmund Burke. Our trek through the alphabet has brought us to K. The Word for the wise © this week provides an example of how some went up and others went down in the world depending on how Anglo-Saxon words evolved and were employed.

knight is an elevation of the Anglo-Saxon cnith, meaning "boy" or "servant". The armed man on the horse becomes the gallant knight, while the other Anglo-Saxon word for "boy", cnafa, becomes his mortal enemy, the craven knave. With the knights and knaves battling it out using the stirrup (Anglo-Saxon stig-rap, "rope for mounting"), the boy who brushed the animals, the groom, is left holding the horses, as it were, unlike the boy who tended the mares, Old Teutonic, marhosskalkos, Old French, mareschal, who became the marshal, rising to Field Marshal. One the other hand, the man who looked after the stable, comes stabuli (Late Latin), became the constable. From the 17th century on, however, his power declined as the military role of the cavalry eroded. A certain kind of horse-power was nearing its end.

To show that etymology has its witty side, it's worth quoting here Denholm-Young's assertion: "It's impossible to be chivalrous without a horse." Witty? Well, cheval is the root of chivalry. Oh. And talking of French, here we come bang up to date with what's happening in the French Quarter of New Orleans where chivalrous knights are desperately needed, but as James Lileks notes: "Last time I checked the French weren't helping much, either — odd. The one place in the country where their guys could read the signs, and they don't bother to pitch in."

Next week, we're at "L". Candidates include "labiate", "listserv" and "lobscouse". Nominations welcome.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 2 September 2005 at 6:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

With J, we have reached the 10th letter of the alphabet. Not bad going, eh? The Word for the wise © today centres on a people who have faced perennial malice and massacre. They were the first group of foreign merchants to establish themselves in England early in the 11th century, but as aliens they were regarded with suspicion and were vulnerable to hostility and frequent royal confiscations. They were expelled with popular approval in 1290 during the reign of Edward I.

Jew is recorded in English from 1606 on in the sense of "a grasping or extortionate money-lender or usurer." Although the Jews had lent substantial sums to the Church for the building of monasteries and cathedrals, they were forbidden under the Ordinances of 1253 to "enter any church or any chapel save in passing through, nor stay therein to the dishonour of Christ" (Bland, Brown and Tawney, 1933). It would seem that envy and xenophobia were the main drivers of the stereotype, and despite the deportation and the passage of time, the opprobrious figurative use of the word "Jew" that became part of English some 400 years ago lives on.

Along with disfiguring the English language, hatred of Jews has perverted European society and when Pope Benedict XVI visited the Cologne synagogue on 19 August, he warned of rising anti-Semitism saying, "How can we fail to see in this a reason for concern and vigilance?" Among the vigilant is UN Watch, an NGO in Geneva that combats anti-Semitism and the discriminatory treatment of Israel at the United Nations. It's currently seeking an Assistant Executive Director."

Next week, we're at "K". Candidates include "karaoke", "kebab" and "kismet".

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 26 August 2005 at 6:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Our journey through the alphabet has brought us as far as I and the Word for the wise © today has been determined by the goings on up in Cologne at the World Youth Day. For many fundamentalists, the scenes of all those young men and women dancing and singing and chanting "Benedetto!" is a source of great scandal and, to top it all, the Vatican announcement that indulgences would be granted to the pilgrims must have sent old Martin Luther spinning in his grave. After all, it is said that the manner in which indulgences (release from the temporal penalties for sin through the payment of money) were being sold to raise money for the building of St Peter's in Rome was the final straw that sent him nailing his 95 theses to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg in 1517.

idol may not sound incendiary to our ears today, but the Act of Supremacy (1534) in which King Henry VIII made the final break with Rome by a 'coup d'eglise' brought the fanatics out of the woodwork. In that year, John Bale published a pamphlet Yet a course at the Romyshe foxe in which he referred to Catholics as "flythye, whoremongers, murtherers, thieves, raveners, idolatours, lyars, dogges, swine ... and very devils incarnate." Another pamphleteer denounced "this mischievous idol of the mass" and "idol" became applied polemically to images of divine beings and saints: "He set vp in the same place another idol of S. Iohan Baptyst" (1545).

Of the Puritan extremists who set about defacing "idolatrous" images in churches, William Dowsing was the most notorious of all. He noted his grim pleasure at the destruction he wreaked on local churches in his Suffolk Journal (1643-4): "Clare, Jan.6. We brake down 1000 Pictures superstitious; I brake down 200; 3 of God the Father, and 3 of Christ and the Holy Lamb, and 3 of the Holy Ghost like a Dove with Wings."

Next week, it's "J" and a choice between "journalism" and "junta".

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 21 August 2005 at 8:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Our lexical wanderings have led us as far as H and the Word for the wise© today is a "deplorable consequence of democracy", as de Tocqueville said of something else. It means to shout insults or questions to disconcert somebody who is making a speech.

heckle has its physical origins in the business of "beating flax". The verb went metaphysical in the 18th century around Dundee, once a great flax harvesting area, where it came to describe the robust Scottish tradition of the "public questioning of Parliamentary candidates." Once heckling became acceptable behaviour, the ability to put down a heckler with a sharp retort turned into an essential political skill. Here's an example: heckler (interrupting British Prime Minister Harold Wilson during a speech about his government's spending plans): "What about Vietnam?" Wilson: "The government has no plans to increase public expenditure in Vietnam". Heckler: "Rubbish!" Wilson: "I'll come to your special interest in a minute, sir." Today, alas, heckling is a dying art as politicians minimize the potential for disruption by delivering their speeches to carefully pruned audiences in staged settings. By the way, and this is pertinent, did you know that an "international journal of verbal aggression" exists? It's called Maledicta and here's an article Andrew Conway wrote for it in 1994 about that bane of the stand-up comedian, the heckler.

Next week, it's "I", which offers all those -isms and -ists.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 11 August 2005 at 6:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Our alphabetical journey has brought us to G" and our Word for the wise© this week comes from the Spanish word for war, guerra.

guerrilla is first found in English, and this may surprise you, in a dispatch (1809) of Wellington's during the Peninsular War. Since then, the word has become popularly associated with anti-colonial military activity. Although it suited Che's image as perfectly as a Caribbean cigar goes with a glass of rum, "guerrilla" sounded odd in the context of Northern Ireland's boggy borderlands and South Africa's broad veld, so "freedom fighter", which originated in a 1942 poem by John Lehmann, was preferred. In more recent conflicts, the "freedom" bit has been trimmed and "fighter", along with the euphemisms "militant" and "insurgent", is now preferred by those who like their ideology mixed with a bit of "rough".

Talking of violent lexical evolution, the ultimate term of hostility and the one that occupies us greatly these days is terrorist. This expression of the Jacobin Reign of Terror in France was later applied to the members of the revolutionary societies in Russia, where it was especially associated with Bakunin. However, according to terrorism expert Walter Lacqueur, the title of "Godfather of Terrorism" should be awarded not to Bakunin but to a revolutionary German philosopher who predated him, Karl Heinzen. He was born in 1809, the year in which Wellington first mentioned "guerrilla", and died in 1880, the year in which the Australian bushranger/militant/insurgent Ned Kelly was hanged."

Next week, it's "H" and the colourful candidates range from "hawker" to "huckster".

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 6 August 2005 at 7:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We are now at "F" and our Word for the wise © today involves a bit of sleight of hand in that the really interesting term begins with "h" instead of "f". So bear with us as we try to put this one over.

Faderade is the name given to the mix made with the popular American soft drink Gatorade and vodka so as to get young drinkers totally wasted. It's a homemade alcopop and the word conveys the idea of the passing out that comes after swallowing too much of the stuff. Adults do this all the time with Bacardi and Coke, of course, but no one thinks the mix or the behaviour weird.

Anyway, out of the same lexical mould that produced "Faderade" pours "haterade", a true word for our times in that it conveys the aggression of the dissatisfied, from the "yoof" in the streets to the tribes in Northern Ireland to the London bombers: "People be sippin this when they hatin cause they ain't got that pimp juice like u do."

Over at the Urban Dictionary "haterdade" is defined as: "noun; a fictional beverage, parodying the popular sports drink 'Gatorade', purportedly consumed by individuals who are jealous of others, supposedly fueling their ability to be jealous of, or 'hate on', others." As we know to our cost, the wells of Pakistan have been poisoned with haterade and the swamps of Iraq are filled with it so we've got a major drainage project ahead of us, and we don't need the likes of Naomi Klein pouring more of the stuff on us, either: "She be hatin' on people so much that she had to take haterade in order to continue."

Next week, it's "G" and one candidate is "garble", which is an example of what us word watchers call "the shift to opposite". You know, "fast" originally meant "fixed" but now means "rapidly", and the original Anglo-Saxon "wan" meant "dark" but now means "pale". So you be doin' your homework on "garble" now.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 29 July 2005 at 7:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

We have arrived at "E" and our Word for the wise © today comes to us via Old French escuser from Latin excusare, literally "to remove from accusation", from causa "accusation".

excuse Within hours of the 7/7 bombs exploding, the excuses for the murder and maiming of Tube and bus passengers in London began. Bush, Blair and Iraq were to blame. Instead of condemnations of mass murder and expressions of grief, we got excuses for the atrocity from those who pleaded "root cause". Norman Geras, professor emeritus in government at the University of Manchester, nailed this one perfectly yesterday in The Guardian:

"Ever on the lookout for damning causes, the root-causers never go for the most obvious of these. This is the cause, indeed, which shows, by its absence, why most critics of the Iraq war or of anything else don't murder people when they are angry. It is the fanatical, fundamentalist belief system which teaches hatred and justifies these acts of murder. That cause somehow gets a free pass from the hunters-out of causes.

There are apologists among us, and they have to be fought intellectually and politically. They do not help to strengthen the democratic culture and institutions whose benefits we all share. Because we believe in and value these, we have to contend with what such people say. But contend with is precisely it. We have to challenge their excuses without let-up."

The ideological delinquency that excuses frauds such as Michael Moore and savages such as Osama bin Laden springs from the void that Benedict XVI calls "relativism" — the postmodern disbelief in any absolute moral standards. As a Rainy Day reader it is your duty to fight relativism and expose its excusers amongst us.

Next week, Michael Frayn and Paul Fussell are some of our "F"word candidates.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 22 July 2005 at 7:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Here we are at "D" and our Word for the wise © today is George Orwell's brilliant diagnosis of the simultaneous accommodation of fact and myth.

doublethink Winston Smith has his seminal insight into the workings of Ingsoc as he clandestinely reads War is Peace, the third chapter of Emmanuel Goldstein's The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism: "Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously and accepting both of them... Doublethink lies at the heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty."

The abuse of language is at the centre of the dystopia Orwell created in Nineteen Eighty-Four (first published in 1949). In this age of "Political Correctness", his Newspeak is a warning to us all about what can happen when tyrants gain control of semantics, history and media. So far, this has happened only in places like the USSR and China, but we've been warned. Because Orwell is so special, here's one more example of his perception:

"The words Communist International, for instance, call up a composite picture of universal human brotherhood, red flags, barricades, Karl Marx, and the Paris Commune. The word Comintern, on the other hand, suggests merely a tightly-knit organization and a well-defined body of doctrine... Comintern is a word that can be uttered almost without taking thought, whereas Communist International is a phrase over which one is obliged to linger at least momentarily."

Superb. Next week, "earl" and "extermination" are among the "E" candidates.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 14 July 2005 at 7:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale were ministers in the court of the King Charles II, who governed England between 1667 and 1673. The notion that the word "CABAL" originated as an acronym from the names of this secretive group of ministers is an urban legend, but it's a good one, hence, our Word for the wise © this week.

cabal The English word derives from Kabbalah (which has numerous spelling variations), the mystical interpretation of certain combinations of numbers, words and letters. Via medieval Latin from rabbinical Hebrew qabbalah "tradition", from qibbel "to receive, accept". The underlying idea is "something received or handed down".

Cabal is beloved of conspiracy theorists and the combination "Bush+cabal" has Google delivering 635,000 results in 0.05 seconds. Talking of science fiction, in the TV show Star Trek: Enterprise, the Cabal governs the villains known as the Suliban, while in Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver, we travel back in time to the days of Charles II, where we find a cabal formed by the ministers Comstock, Anglesey, Bolstrood, Apthorp, and Lewis. What goes around, comes around. Sort of. Next week, the letter "D". No candidates yet.

Posted by Eamonn Fitzgerald on 7 July 2005 at 6:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Time again to share with you some of that impressive Rainy Day vocabulary. It's the letter "B" today and our Word for the wise © comes at a time when a barrel of this stuff costs over $60, shares in this search engine are topping $300 and a five-bedroom house in Dublin will set you back the best part of €5 million.

bubble Speculation was rife in the early part of the 18th century with companies luring the gullible by purporting to deal in such valuable commodities as hair, wheels of perpetual motion and, best of all, "a design which will hereafter be promulgated." In the course of eight months during 1720, the South Sea "Bubble", as it came to be known, expanded as stock in the South Sea Company soared from £136 to £1,000. Then, the bubble burst and thousands of investors were ruined. A poet of the day commented:

We madly at our ain expenses
Stock-jobb'd away our cash and senses.

When Dr Johnson came to write his great dictionary, he didn't hide his contempt for the stock-jobber: "A low wretch who gets money by buying and selling shares in the funds." Instead of trenchancy, however, Swift brought satire to the issue and helped coin the "bubble" term: