Word of the week
4 Jan, 2010
We leave the noughties, the first decade of the 21st century, and are now in the Year 2010. Common usage will determine whether this is going to be two thousand and ten, twenty-ten or Oh-ten but nonetheless it is the Year Something Ten and not the Year Something Decem, as it would be in Latin, or Something Deka, as it would be in Greek.
Ten is proudly an Old English word, uninfluenced for more than a millennium by foreign language pretensions or even by marauding heathen hordes. Old English was a Germanic language and had four main forms: Mercian, Northumbrian, Kentish, and West Saxon corresponding to four independent kingdoms in ninth-century Britain.
We can thank Alfred the Great (849-899), the King of Wessex, for the success of ten. Ten comes from the Mercian dialect (tien being the West Saxon version). Alfred protected parts of Mercia from being invaded by the Vikings.
In 865 the Great Heathen Army of Danish Vikings arrived in England. To them 10 was tiu. They soon overwhelmed Northumbria, East Anglia and Kent on the eastern coast. Wessex, in the south-west, was invaded but Alfred, after early setbacks, managed to stay Viking-free.
The eastern parts of Mercia, which had stretched across the English Midlands, succumbed to the Viking hordes while the western portion survived in a strong alliance with Alfred (the combined armies of Mercia and Wessex eventually defeated the Vikings about three decades later).
Alfred managed to push back the Vikings to the northeast and eventually he became King of England. He ruled much of the south of England. His scholarship and patronage of literature led to the adoption of Late West Saxon as the first standard for written English. The borrowing of ten from the Mercian dialect probably dates from this time.
Alfred the Great’s achievement was to resist the marauding Viking invaders who were intent on imposing their heathen culture on the Christian, civilized Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of Britain. Had the Vikings triumphed we could well be living in the Year Two Thousand and Ti (ti is the modern Danish word for ten) but because of Alfred we are living in Two Thousand and Ten instead.
17 Dec, 2009
This year’s Christmas word is ho. It is a word used to focus people’s attention but lacks any real meaning. It has been used this way for about 700 years (according to the Online Etymological Dictionary).
It can be used after the name of a place to which attention is called, like Westward-Ho, from about 400 years ago. And was originally a mariners call announcing departures for a particular destination. Sydney-ho!
Heave-ho is similar in calling attention to a physical action or effort. It is also modern slang for being sacked or forcibly removed, as in being given the old heave-ho.
Tally ho the cry of a participant at a hunt to encourage the hounds when the quarry is sighted – is probably an alteration of French taïaut from about 250 years ago.
Gung-ho, meaning unthinkingly enthusiastic and eager, especially in battle, was introduced into English during the Second World War by Lt Colonel Evans Carlson (1896-1947), the leader of the famous Carlson Raiders. He used the Chinese motto, gōnghé (to work together), at meetings with his Marine battalion and they began calling themselves the Gung Ho Battalion.
Even hello is related to ho as it comes via hullo and hallo from hollo, a shout to attract attention, first recorded about 400 years ago. [Hello, the American form took over from hullo, the English form with the spreading use of the telephone about 120 years ago].
A very modern, slang use of ho is as an insult implying the subject is a prostitute. It is obviously a variation on whore.
By this stage, you might be thinking ho-hum (an 80 year old expression), this is so lacking in interest as to cause me mental weariness, or the rarer heigh-ho (a four hundred and fifty year old phrase), an exclamation of yawning or sighing, but don’t despair I am almost finished.
Ho-ho-ho expressing laughter, so often associated with Santa Claus, you will be please to know is not an invention of greeting card publishers or Hollywood family films but one of the oldest recorded uses of the word ho and dates from about 850 years ago.
So ho-ho-ho and have a Happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year from me and Madrigal Communications.
9 Dec, 2009
I was involved in an online discussion about the use of the word leverage in marketing. I was surprised that quite a few participants considered leverage to be a weasel word – that is a word that sounds good but really doesn’t mean anything.
In its original, physical sense, leverage is the advantage gained by converting a weak force over a long distance into a strong force over a short distance. A lever is a long pole that is used to lift an object using a fulcrum.
Lever comes from the Latin word levare meaning to raise (fulcrum also comes from Latin and originally meant the post of a couch or bedpost). This Latin root, levare, crops up in a wonderfully diverse set of words but all with a common sense of something being raised:
- A levee is a raised embankment that stops rivers overflowing.
- To levy is to raise funds; originally referring to the collection of taxes.
- Leaven is a substance, usually yeast, added to dough to make it rise.
- To levitate is to rise, or cause to rise and hover in the air.
- Elevate is to lift to a higher position or raise to a higher level or status.
- The Levant is the Mediterranean lands east of Italy, so called because it is in the direction from which the sun rose.
In the financial sense leverage refers to the amount of debt used to finance assets, for example, a company with significantly more debt than equity is considered to be highly leveraged.
In the marketing sense leverage is less well defined and used rather loosely. However it relates to the power or ability to influence people or their buying decisions. So leverage in marketing relates very closely with concepts like brand and reputation. The stronger your brand the more leverage you have in selling products.
It is apparent in major brands selling a wide range of products – it is not the quality of the individual product that sells it but the reputation of the brand. This is where leveraging is very tangible, when companies make the most of their brand to sell a range of products. It is also evident in the power of celebrity advertising – using well-known people to sell products is leveraging their reputation to the product brand.
The case for using leveraging in the marketing sense is legitimate and not really very weasel like.
25 Nov, 2009
The rather mundane word, bracket, has a sexier history than you might expect.
A word that changes its meaning can be either an example of melioration, where the word takes on a more favorable connotation (see the recent post on paradise which changed its meaning from an orchard to the heavenly garden of God) or deterioration where it takes on a more negative association.
So how will we describe the change in the Spanish word, bragueta (from which English borrowed bracket), which was initially a word for codpiece but became used for the object that holds up a shelf?
And how did a codpiece become something that holds up shelves? With very little imagination at all: bracket describes an architectural member that stands out at right angles from the wall and often supports a shelf or beam. Lets say no more or we shall find ourselves deeply in the realm of double entendre.
So is the transformation of bracket from a codpiece to a piece of hardware for erecting shelves an example of the word taking on more favourable or less favourable connotations? Is it melioration or deterioration?
Changing from a term for something that is sexy, if perhaps nowadays a little vulgar, to a term for something mundane but certainly more respectable is neither more favourable nor more negative. One minute you are the very epitomy of renaissance manhood the next you are a piece of hardware for holding up a kitchen shelf. Sounds very much more like middle-agedness.
1 Nov, 2009
We are now in the countdown to the Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change so you will need to intimately understand what a megawatt is and how it is used. It may not become the scientific buzz-word that its cousin megabyte did, but if you want to properly participate in the greenhouse debate, you need to throw megawatt into your conversation every now and then and even megawatt hours.
A megawatt (abbreviated to MW) is a metric unit of power. It is made up of mega – the Greek word designated to mean one million – and watt, named after James Watt (1736-1819) the British Engineer who “invented” the modern steam engine and in doing so is credited with creating the industrial revolution.
A watt is the metric measurement of power that replaced horsepower (a much more tangible measure). A horse (we assume a standard working horse of the 18th century) when harnessed to a machine will lift 550 pounds at the rate of 1 foot per second. This is one horsepower, as defined by James Watt.
The watt is the basic metric measure of power and is defined in reference to other metric measures. The watt is equal to a power rate of one joule of work per second of time. In electrical terms, one watt is the power produced by a current of one ampere flowing through an electric potential of one volt. At this point we move on.
So back to the megawatt! It is therefore equal to one million watts, which for reference is equivalent to about 1340 horsepower (if that helps).
In the energy industry the MW is used to describe the capacity of power generating plants or the usage level of the power. One megawatt is enough to power approximately 800 residential homes.
Australia has a total power capacity of over 53,000 MW.
According to ANSTO three-quarters of Australia’s electricity comes from coal, 14 per cent from natural gas, eight per cent from renewable sources (mainly hydroelectric, wind power and bioenergy) and one per cent from oil.
The Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme has a capacity of about 3756 MW.
At the close of 2008, there were 50 wind farms in Australia, with a total of 756 operating turbines. The total operating wind capacity was 1,300 MW meeting 1.3% of Australia’s energy demand.
In May of this year, Australia’s Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, announced plans to build the world’s largest solar power station with a capacity of 1000 MW.
But one more thing you need to know: the metric unit of energy, especially electrical energy, is the megawatt hour (MW h). This is a measure of how much energy is produced (or consumed). The megawatt tells you the capacity of a plant and the megawatt hour tells you have how long it was running and therefore how much energy it produced.
15 Oct, 2009
I struggled with the word puzzle in the Sydney Morning Herald a few days ago to find, after rather too much time, the anagram’s solution was CARBUNCLE. I was disappointed for not recognizing this delightful word which, twenty-five years ago, spearheaded Prince Charles’ attack on the designs of modern British architects and in particular the design for the extension to the National Gallery, when he used it to say:
What is proposed is like a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much loved and elegant friend.
It caused much controversy and promoted lively debate about architectural design and planning. His views were not accepted by most architects but carbuncle became a popular and mainstream descriptor for ugly buildings. I was living in London several years later and I heard it used often.
The carbuncle to which Prince Charles was comparing the extension of the National Gallery is a red and swollen, bacterial infection of the skin and subcutaneous tissue that usually has several openings through which pus is discharged (making it different to a boil that has only one).
But carbuncle has another much more attractive use; my old Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines it as the name of various precious stones of red or fiery colour; anciently of sapphires, spinels or rubies, and garnets; and more recently in lapidary work for garnets that have been cut and polished a certain way.
So how did these two, so very different, things come to have the same name? The Latin scholars will know straight away: carbuncle comes from carbunculus, which literally translates as a little coal. Hence the red gemstones and red, swollen sores both appear as burning little coals.
29 Sep, 2009
Fantastic, marvellous (US marvelous) and tremendous are three of modern English’s great intensifiers. There are many intensifiers in English (for example: fairly, quite, rather, so, too, very). They are adjectives or adverbs that heighten (or lessen) the meaning of a word or phrase:
Mr Black is quite important.
Scott is very late.
Grant is just too clever.
But my big three, the super-intensifiers, are fantastic, marvellous and tremendous (there are quite a few more big ones such as wonderful and miraculous but they share their meaning with marvellous – there are others of course, such as extraordinarily, extremely).
These intensifiers, although they serve to magnify meaning, still retain vestiges of their original meanings, which you must understand when you use them. The original meanings became less literal and more metaphorical, then, perhaps, the words became quantifiers where they simply meant very big amounts of something and then they lost any meaning at all. Here are some notable quotes that show a range of meanings:
John Betjeman (British poet 1906-1984)
And is it true? And is it true, / This most tremendous tale of all, / Seen in a stained-glass window’s hue, / A Baby in an ox’s stall?
Franklin P. Jones (an American businessman 1887-1929) said:
Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.
Jim Morrison (American singer and song-writer 1943-1971) said:
Those first few songs I wrote, I was taking notes at a fantastic rock concert going on in my head.
Tremendous has two main meanings: is extremely large in amount, extent, or degree; enormous; or capable of making one tremble; terrible. It also, of course, has an important role as an intensifier as Betjeman uses it here. In his usage from a poem of the 1950s he means neither a large tale nor a trembling one. He is using tremendous solely as an intensifier – it has lost its real meaning.
Marvellous, was once synonymous with miraculous and wonderful in referring to the creations of God. Marvellous, according to most dictionaries has several meanings (here according to the Macquarie Dictionary): to excite wonder, surprising, extraordinary; excellent, superb; and improbable or incredible.
The use of marvellous in the quote from Jones is in the role of intensifier but it still hints at a mix of the literal meaning of marvellous with an ironic twist.
Morrison’s use of fantastic in fantastic rock concert, is the most precise use of any of the words. Fantastic, has been around in English since the 14th century and has maintained its original meaning of existing only in imagination, (originally from Greek phantastikos for able to imagine) alongside its popular usage as a superlative, synonymous with our other super-intensifiers.
The subtleties in the meanings of the super-intensifiers mean that they are not always interchangeable. Betjeman could not have used fantastic or marvellous (or indeed miraculous or wonderful) to describe his tremendous tale because he was attempting to highlight its truth not its supernaturalness.
On the other hand, Jones could have used any of the super-intensifiers to make his point. His marvellous thing could have been a fantastic or a tremendous thing.
Morrison had no choice but to talk about his fantastic rock concert. His concert was not tremendous or miraculous but a fantasy played out in his imagination.
So although our fantastic, marvellous and tremendous words can be used as super-intensifiers you must be aware of their meanings and use them very carefully.
13 Sep, 2009
Somewhere between zounds and zulu in the dictionary you may find zugzwang. It is a recent migrant from German and has not quite made it into all English language dictionaries. But it is a very useful word, particularly in chess circles, and has a spelling that makes Scrabble players squirm with delight.
Zugzwang is a chess term for compulsion to move. It describes situations where players are forced to weaken their position by making a undesirable or disadvantageous move. In chess there is not the option of passing or not moving.
It comes from the German words Zug, meaning to pull or move and Zwang meaning compulsion.
Arthur Bisguir, a chess grand master described the word:
Zugzwang is like getting trapped on a safety island in the middle of a highway when a thunderstorm starts. You don’t want to move but you have to.
1 Sep, 2009
And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; … And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. (Genesis 2:9)
The concept of paradise has fascinated religious and spiritual people from our earliest history. The concept of a paradise both as an earthly place and as a heavenly destination has also inspired musicians, poets and writers.
Virgil’s Aeneid describes his hero discovering the Elysian Fields, the Roman heavenly paradise:
… they came to the happy place, the green pleasances and blissful seats of the Fortunate Woodlands. Here an ampler air clothes the meadows in lustrous sheen, and they know their own sun and a starlight of their own.
But from where has the word, paradise, come? This word that evokes a heavenly place of abundance, peace, beauty and serenity has a long and fascinating history but its origins are rather more earthy.
Zoroastrianism, the ancient religion of Persia (now Iran), encouraged its followers to tend their own gardens. Xenophon, a Greek mercenary who worked for the Persian army, on his return to Athens wrote about the pairidaeza, the large garden parks of the Persian nobles, and took the word into Greek.
The Old Persian word pairi-daeza meant a walled orchard (pairi – around and diz – to make or form). Ancient Hebrew took pardés from this and the Greeks took a similar form paradeisos (from peri around and dheigh to form or build), which became the Latin paradisus.
The Hebrew pardes was used in the Old Testament and when it was transcribed into Greek as part of the Christian Bible the Greek form paradeisos was used.
From the Greek to the Latin was a small step. The Latin form became the word to describe both the earthly and the heavenly paradises.
The Latin chant, In paradisum (into paradise), is sung during the Catholic burial service, or sometimes as part of a Requiem Mass, to accompany the dead to their heaven.
In paradisum deducant te Angeli (May angels lead you into Paradise)
This gradual change of meaning is an example of melioration, where a word’s meaning improves over time. The word has travelled over a millennium and a half, across several languages and religions. The change took 1,500 years, the word developing from a walled orchard, to the Garden of Eden, to heaven, and then to a heaven-like place. It has travelled linguistically through Ancient Persian, to Hebrew, to Greek, and to Latin before arriving in English. It has Zoroastrian roots, Pagan and Jewish parentage before it arose in Christianity.
19 Aug, 2009
The hobgoblin
What is a hobgoblin? It is a mythological or magical sprite (an elf or fairy) that is smaller than a goblin but far more mischievous. (It is a common mistake to think that a hobgoblin is larger than a goblin.) The goblin, apparently, originated in France, as a Gobelin, a particular sprite haunting parts of Normandy. In England the native woodland sprite was known as Robin Goodfellow. The name Robin (and Robert) was often used to denote a country fellow and the familiar form of this was hob. So the hobgoblin is a merging of the native Robin (hob) Goodfellow sprite with the Norman French goblin to create the local British sprite.
Another contraction of Robin is dobbin or dob, that gave dobbie, which is the name given to household sprites (although only as late as the nineteenth century). There is also a character so named in the Harry Potter series. It appears that a dobbie is the household cousin of the woodland hobgoblin.
The hobgoblin is also related to the more modern gremlin, a term that came into usage during the Second World War to describe the sprites responsible for electrical and mechanical faults.
According to Michael Aislabie Denham, a nineteenth century folklorist, every village had its apparition and, among the almost two-hundred he listed, many began with the hob form: hob-and-lanthorns, hob-headlesses, hob-thrushes, hob-thrusts, hobbits, hobby-lanthorns, hobgoblins, and hobhoulards. Denham has recently been attributed with the first use of hobbit from this passage of list.
Where I first met the hobgoblin
While I was living in Tewkesbury, a Gloucestershire town in the west country of England, I became acquainted with hobgoblins in rather unusual ways. Firstly I became quite fond of Hobgoblin, a strong, dark ale. It is brewed at the Wychwood Brewery in west Oxfordshire, not far away in the next county. Their branding is very distinctive with colourful labels, to evoke the folklore links with the medieval Wych Wood Forest, from which the brewery has taken it name.
Tewkesbury has its own Hilton Hotel, Puckrup Hall. It is located between the Avon and Severn Rivers. Puckrup means place of the hobgoblins: puck is another name for a hobgoblin. There are many such place names in England.
Alias Puck
The most famous of all English hobgoblins is Shakespeare’s Puck (also known as Robin Goodfellow). Shakespeare was born and schooled at Stratford-upon-Avon, only 35 miles (55 kilometres) north of Puckrup Hall, and it is most likely that his Puck character comes from the same local folklore.
Puck is the mischievous and central character of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He is introduced when a fairy recognizes him in the woods:
Either I mistake your shape and making quite,
Or else you are that shrewd and knavish sprite
Call’d Robin Goodfellow: are not you he
That frights the maidens of the villagery;
Skim milk, and sometimes labour in the quern
And bootless make the breathless housewife churn;
And sometime make the drink to bear no barm;
Mislead night-wanderers, laughing at their harm?
Those that Hobgoblin call you and sweet Puck,
You do their work, and they shall have good luck:
Are not you he?
Note that Shakespeare’s hobgoblin can make “the drink bear no barm”, that is to take the head from a beer, so Wychwood was brave when it gave its beer this name. The beer does not seem to have suffered from it, though.
Lager’s hobgoblin
In England there is an ongoing campaign to defend traditional English beers against the terrible import, lager. Its members are stereotyped as middle-aged men with beards who go to beer festivals (lager drinkers as young metrosexuals or soccer hooligans).
Wychwood ran a great advertising campaign at Halloween that featured the hobgoblin saying:
Afraid of the dark, Lagerboy?
These five words conjured up Halloween, the generation gap, the superior dark flavour and challenged you to try the beer. It was wonderful copywriting!
There was an unsuccessful complaint about the ad campaign to the Advertising Standards Authority. The complainant was referred to only as “a lager drinker”.
13 Aug, 2009
I am heading into the city to have a couple of beers with my friend David. Reading the Sydney Morning Herald on the train I come across the sentence:
A debate continues to ferment in the market over whether Westfield group will launch a big equity raising fairly soon.
Now surely the debate is fomenting not fermenting I think.
By the time I get to James Squires Brewery on the King Street Wharf (in Sydney) my mind has concerned itself more with fermentation than fomentation. There is a selection of real ales and beers to choose from and I choose a nice golden-coloured ale to start.
His first question to me is about our responses to an online debate in which we both had been participating. So my mind shoots back to the question of whether a debate ferments or foments and I show him the article.
Surely it is foment, I say.
I don’t know the word, says David, that’s your business.
Foment is about stirring up, inciting, … I say.
Perhaps it depends on whether it is intransitive or transitive, says David.
There is a pregnant pause – this is upping the ante too much. I change the subject.Do you know the difference between lager and ale, I ask. Lager is bottom-fermented and ale top-fermented?
When I get home I check out the foment/ferment situation. As it turns out David is correct: you can ferment unrest and you can foment unrest: this is the transitive form, having the subject (you), verb (ferment/foment), and the object (unrest). However, you can ferment but you can’t foment: this being the intransitive form without the object. You need something to stir up.
So going back to the original article, I have to admit that Jamie Freed, its editor is correct. I return to my beer relieved that it is fermented but worried about the future of foment.
23 Jul, 2009
The McVitamins website tells us:
The prostrate is a small chestnut sized gland located just beneath the urinary bladder
No, not quite! This is a very common error. It is now so common that the prostate, the gland surrounding the neck of the bladder in male mammals (which comes from Greek prostates, one that stands before) is commonly misspelled as prostrate meaning lying stretched out on the ground with one’s face downwards (which comes from Latin prosternere, to throw down). It is also common to find people prostating themselves.
If you Google prostrate you will find several sites for prostrate [sic] cancer. These are either mistakes or deliberate attempts to capture people searching using the wrong term. Also on Google there any many links to individuals who would prostate [sic] themselves before all manner of things but not a bladder.
So be careful! This is an area for embarrassment. Your spellchecker will not pick these up but an editor or proof-reader will.
5 Jul, 2009
The Australian Government’s Utegate affair has been a wonderful bit of political accusation, counteraccusation and media manoeuvring. It has tested the media and political skills of both sides of politics.
As far as political scandals go the effects of Utegate are likely to be transitory. The Australian Government managed to deflect the issue into challenging the credibility of an email at the centre of the allegations. So the PM managed to avoid damage by shifting the spotlight on to the Opposition Leader, who ended up with engine oil on his face.
The whole thing revolved around Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd’s ute – a 1996 Mazda – lent to him by a Canberra motor dealer who then, allegedly, got special funding treatment from the Treasurer.
Now, although corruption is corruption, I think the PM borrowing a rusty, 13 year-old Mazda isn’t comparable with the British politicians and their rorts. The ute is not in good condition (probably worth less than $4,000) and so basic that you would only drive it to move dirt from one place to another (or political slogans in this case). The state of the vehicle is probably more of an embarrassment for the prime minister than the bribe implication. We haven’t yet seen Mazda using the vehicle to promote their product range.
Many object to the press naming the incident Utegate. However, this is the most interesting part; it is very Australian and makes it completely incomprehensible to anyone from overseas.
If you from anywhere else in the world you would be asking the question what on earth is a ute? The answer is simple: it is short for a utility vehicle, that is, a sedan-sized truck mostly with a sided tray and a hinged tail-gate. The Americans call them pickups and the South Africans bakkies (most likely derived from the Afrikaans word bak for a baking tin but perhaps also derived as a variation on buggy).
25 Jun, 2009
I read a story recently about outrage over a former children’s performer appearing in Ralph magazine. Kellie Crawford, who had appeared on the children’s program Hi5 for ten years, had posed in lingerie for the May Edition of Ralph magazine.
It caused great concern to Julia Gale from Kids Free 2B Kids who said:
Older teenage girls will wonder why performers feel the need to pornify their image.
I was outraged and disgusted … PORNIFY – thats not a word. While Ms Crawford tastefully poses for Ralph Magazine Ms Gale tastelessly misuses the English language. But she is not the only one! Someone has coined Pornification to refer to a game where you change a legitimate movie title into an X-rated version. It can also be done for Shakespeare plays; some examples:
Two Gentlemen and Verona
Measure for Pleasure
The Desperate Wives of Windsor
Any other tasteful suggestions (moderation applies)?
14 Jun, 2009
In the early 19th century, a purple-flowered, native European plant called Purple Viper’s Bugloss, or Echium plantagineum, made its way to Australia. It has been a villain and a hero to generations of farmers in the inland. The outback farmers gave it a few names that reflected their relationship with it.
Nurseries sold echium in the 1850s as an ornamental plant to be grown in country gardens. Due to its high seed production it soon escaped to the wild and spread rapidly. One of the main sources of the spread was the homestead garden of the Patterson family near Albury. The plant’s seeds were carried widely by the cattle that travelled along the stock route through the property.
Echium became known as Patterson’s Curse because it chokes pastures and poisons stock. The large number of seeds was difficult to control. When eaten it causes liver damage to animals resulting in loss of condition and sometimes death. Most susceptible are pigs and horses with sheep, goats and cattle less affected.
Less poisonous to cattle, Patterson’s Curse was used as emergency fodder for them during severe droughts. To some this rescue led them to call the weed Salvation Jane. Others suggest it was given this name by beekeepers because of the high quality of honey that it produces. The beekeepers almost stand alone against the modern eradication of the weed because it will reduce the quality of their honey.
Less commonly, but for at least a hundred years, the plant has also been called Riverina Bluebell. This it earned in the flower trade where it was commonly used in flower arranging.
Many years ago I worked as a farm hand on the Breeza Plain in the New England region of New South Wales. In the December heat I chipped the weed out of the wheat field before the harvestor came through. That summer the local kids, celebrating finishing school, used a lawn-mower to write a huge and frank expression into the Patterson’s Curse on the hill overlooking Tamworth, the major provincial town. This was Patterson’s Curse Hollywood-style.
4 Jun, 2009
The author, J.G.Ballard, died in April. He was known mostly for his successful autobiographical work, Empire of the Sun, but his work is found most often on science fiction shelves. His brand of science fiction created dystopian visions of society challenging his readers’ perceptions.
As a young man I had read mountains of science fiction, including Ballard’s, which I either bought or borrowed from the library. I was a bit surprised when I searched through my old and yellowing paperback collection to find only one of Ballard’s books amongst the Vonneguts, Moorcocks and Philip K Dicks. I enjoyed reading the pulp adventures stories of galactic battles and malevolent extra-terrestrials but it was these writers exploring the perversities of our own real world that I recognized as providing the true alternative futures.
Ballard was one of these writers who used the science fiction genre to explore the dark side of modern, suburban life; to create dystopian worlds where what we take for granted is twisted and darkly exposed. In an obituary his works were described as apocalyptic fables of technological and social anarchy.
Dystopian is the opposite of utopian. Utopia was an island invented by Thomas More (1516) as the location of his perfect society; a society with perfect legal, social and political systems. His derivation of the word is based on Greek and its literal meaning is nowhere - a deliberately ironic derivation. Utopian came to mean idealistic and impossibly visionary.
Dystopia was coined by John Stuart Mills (1868) to describe a society where all things are bad. It is a portmanteau word made up of dys meaning bad, abnormal, or difficult and a modification of (u)topia.
The great fictional dystopias include the Brave New World of Aldous Huxley, the society of George Orwell’s 1984 and the misfunctioning bureaucratic place of Franz Kafka’s The Trial. They were Ballard’s stock in trade.
17 May, 2009
What meteorologists call the Intertropical Convergence Zone is known to sailors as the Doldrums.
The trade winds from the southern hemisphere and the northern hemisphere meet near the equator. The winds converge and, for most of the time, produce upward air currents that cancel out the surface winds. Pockets of low-pressure air form that often create hot, humid and very still conditions.
These equatorial conditions became known as the Doldrums by the sailors who travelled through them. The sailing boats, without winds, could become becalmed for weeks at a time.
Coleridge described being becalmed in his Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner:
Day after day, day after day,We stuck, nor breath nor motion;As idle as a painted shipUpon a painted ocean.
This is what Eric Hiscock said in Voyaging Under Sail (1966) about sailing through the Doldrums:
… an experience which every sailor-man ought to have once in his lifetime … But once is enough, and if I ever have to pass through that area of calms, squalls, heat, and rain again, I hope to have an engine of useful power and a plentiful supply of fuel for it.
The sailors of the time before engines found these long periods of inactivity at first monotonous and then despairing as water and food started to run out. Hence, the Doldrums gave its name to periods of stagnation and depression.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary the first recorded use of Doldrums is in 1811 with an origin from Old English dol meaning dull or foolish. This may have been preserved in a local English dialect spoken by some of the sailors. The OED also suggests that the ending is perhaps based on tantrum (first recorded 1748), which describes a fit of passionate bad temper. It is more likely to have been based on humdrum (first recorded use in 1553), an older word that describes a sense of monotony and dullness.
21 Apr, 2009
Tender has several meanings in English that come from opposite ends of the spectrum. At one end tender, as an adjective, describes something that is soft, gentle or sympathetic. At the other, as a verb or noun, it is represents the formal offer or presentation of goods, services or currency in a business exchange.
Tender writing then has several usages. The gentle and beautiful writing of John Keats is tender. Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale gave the title to F Scott Fitzgerald’s famous Tender is the Night:
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night…
And as poor Keats earlier in the Ode calls to the bartender for his draught of vintage we find ourselves with yet another manifestation of tender as a version of tending, that is looking after or attending to something.The other major usage of tender writing is the difficult job of writing business proposals to meet a specification for a project. This is not something that Keats or Scott Fitzgerald would attempt. It requires a very different style. Tender writing for business is technical and precise but at the same time needs to make a product or service attractive.
Why do we have two very different tender writers? Because the word is a convergence from two different Latin roots.
Keats type of tender comes from the Old French tendre, from the Latin tener ‘tender, delicate’.
Whereas the tender writing that Madrigal Communications undertakes has its origin in the Latin tendere stretch, strive, hold forth.
2 Apr, 2009
Niche (pronounced neesh or nitch) is a word used both in ecology and marketing.
Its original use is as a noun to describe a shallow recess, especially one in a wall to display an ornament. It came into English from the French verb nicher to make a nest.
In ecology niche theory describes how an organism or group of organisms is always competing with others for the resources they need to survive. A strategy to reduce competition is to find a niche that other organisms aren’t using or not using very well. Here is a short explanation from Dr Seuss:
And NUH is the letter I use to spell Nutches,
Who live in small caves, known as Niches, for hutches.
These Nutches have troubles, the biggest of which is
The fact there are many more Nutches than Niches.
Each Nutch in a Nich knows that some other Nutch
Would like to move into his Nich very much.
So each Nutch in a Nich has to watch that small Nich
Or Nutches who haven’t got Niches will snitch.
It is similar in business. Your business is competing hard for customers and you have to work very hard to keep them or they will get snitched.
One way to decrease competition is to use a niche marketing strategy, which concentrates on a narrow sub-segment of customers. First you identify the customer needs or wants that are not being satisfied by existing businesses and then develop specialist goods or services that do satisfy them.
A very quick way of estimating whether your business can develop a niche marketing strategy is to look at your most loyal customers. First, determine if your best customers are price sensitive and second work out if they share particular characteristics.
If the core customers are not sensitive to price it means you can create a more specialist product or service that might cost more but will still be desirable.
If the customers share characteristics it means you can create more targeted sales and marketing tactics that will produce a higher return on your marketing budget.
There is a useful prediction from 1989 (Laurel Cutler, quoted in Phillip Kotler 1997 Marketing Management p251):
There will be no market for products that everybody likes a little, only for products that somebody likes a lot.
18 Mar, 2009
The boomerang generation earned the name because of the tendency of many of its members to return to live with their parents after a short period of independence or pseudo-independence (that is coming home on weekends with their washing and unpaid bills). They are part of the generation that are now young adults born after 1975.
Their parents already have the mortgage, the cars, the white goods, the furniture, the televisions and stereos as well as the well-stocked pantry so the boomerangers have an expendable income for going out, for gadgets, for holidays and for home entertainment. They also have a good deal of free time for gaming, web-surfing and online socializing while their mothers clean and cook for them.
It is an international phenomena, which has attracted an international vocabulary.
Parasite single
In Japan it is the parasite singles (parasaito shinguru), individuals who live with their parents until well into their thirties to avoid the financial stresses and life demands of adulthood.
Bamboccioni
In 2007 the Italian Minister of Economy and Finance defined the large part of the population who were 20 to 30 years old and still living with their families as bamboccioni (big dummy boys). It created a bit of bad publicity for him.
Twixter
Twixter describes the Americans generation seen as being trapped, betwixt (that is, between) adolescence and adulthood. Sometimes also known as basement dwellers.
NEET
NEET is a mainstream acronym in the UK for young school-leavers that are not engaged in education, employment, or training. They also live at home.
Hotel Mama
In Germany the stay-at-home phenomena is known as Hotel Mama, describing the parents’ house where young adults choose to live with their mothers still undertaking the old-fashioned role of cooking, cleaning and washing.
Hikikomori
But the Japanese have extreme boomerangers, the hikikomori.
Hikikomori translates as “withdrawal” and refers to individuals who become hermits in their rooms for six months or longer with no social life beyond their home.
A BBC report describes a case where a boy took possession of his family’s kitchen and refused to allow anyone else in. He had his meals provided and his own bathroom. The family had to build a new kitchen.
The report also provided an academic appraisal of the condition. Dr Henry Grubb, a psychologist from the University of Maryland who is undertaking a study of the hikikomori:
… there’s nothing like this in the West. If my child was inside that door and I didn’t see him, I’d knock the door down and walk in. Simple.
Which may indicate a broader truth that the root cause of the problem of the boomerangers, parasites, basement dwellers, bamboccioni, twixters, NEETs, Hotel Mamas may not be the young generation themselves but the parents who are not helping their children out to face the world.
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