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Countries RSS Feeds696-1: Feedback, notes and comments - Taxi Following my discussion of the origin of the noun last week, numerous readers queried the origin of the verb, which is applied to aircraft moving on the ground. This appeared in the early days of aviation, no later than 1911. It seems certain that it was taken from the hire-vehicle sense, though it isn’t immediately obvious why. The best suggestion I’ve come across is that it compared the slow movement of the plane to a taxi driver cruising for fares. I wondered why the French should have adopted taximètre, when the German was Taxameter and the root in French would seem to have been taxe, a tariff. Marc Picard pointed me to the answer. It was as the result of a scholarly intervention by the famous Hellenist Théodore Reinach in a letter to Le Temps newspaper in 1906; in it he advocated instead going back to the classical Greek taxis, an arrangement or ordering (which appears...Feed Source: www.worldwidewords.org 696-2: Weird Words: Curtain lecture -
Curtain lecture may be simply defined as a censorious lecture by a wife to her husband, often while in bed. It has almost, but not quite totally, vanished from the language; anyone coming across it now might wrongly associate it with a talk preceding a performance in a theatre. The direct mental link between beds and curtains has disappeared because the four-poster, with its canopy and curtain creating an intimate enclosure, is no longer a standard item of domestic furniture.
The most famous giver of a curtain lecture was fictitious, by the name of Mrs Margaret Caudle. She was “interminably loquacious and militantly gloomy under fancied marital oppression”, as a writer later described her. Mrs Caudle was created by Douglas Jerrold, a nineteenth-century humorist, once famous but now almost forgotten, who was a contributor to Punch magazine from its second issue in 1841 until his death in 1857.
Mrs Caudle’s monologues were first published in P... 696-3: Wordface -
Incoming! A usage by the letters editor of the Guardian on Monday struck me as strange: “Generally around 5%-10% of the letters, faxes and emails we receive are for onpassing to someone else in the organisation.” Several readers on the website queried it, along the lines of “is this a real word?” I uplooked it online and found that Mark Liberman had discussed it in Language Log in 2005. He had found it odd, too, though he noted it was well-established for some people, especially in the financial world, with the earliest examples appearing in print in the 1980s. He commented that, in itself, the construction — in which the preposition of a phrasal verb is turned into a prefix to the verb — is not so unusual. He cited uplift, bypass and some others as parallel formations.
... 696-4: Questions and Answers: Dilemma -
[Q] From Andrew Lewis, UK; a similar question came from Jim Black in the US.: “My daughter, who lives in the Cayman Islands and works in the media, asked me the other day whether dilemma is ever spelt dilemna. Apparently her boss insisted that it was and my daughter said that she had a residual memory of having been taught that at school. Good grief, what schools did I send her to? Do you have any views or comments on this?”
[A] This is very strange. A search in mailing lists showed that many other people also report they had been taught that spelling, though always told that it was pronounced as though with a double M. The error has been reported both in the US and in the UK.
There is no doubt about the correct spelling: the word ... 696-5: Sic! -
• Helen Thursh spotted a headline on 15 July in the News-Gazette of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. Inspections had turned up problems at same-day surgery clinics: “Reused devices, tainted sanity areas among lapses seen at 22 of 29 facilities inspected.”
• A sign, says Ray Neinstein, that’s posted conspicuously in three places at Ralph’s Ice Cream in Glen Head, New York, announces that “coupons will only be accepted a week after their expiration date.”
• Monday’s Yahoo! News, Gary Christian notes, had an article headed “WWI troops found in mass grave reburied in France”. It reported, “The ceremony was attended by Prince Charles, wearing a grey suit hung with military decorations and top Australian officials.”
• Stephanie Stapleton, who lives in Florida, found this A... 696-6: Copyright and contact details -
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