April 2012
16 Apr, 2012
My daughter has recently become a vegetarian so we are now eating a lot of new things. Our favourite is falafel. We make our own—the main ingredient being chickpeas ground up with a few spices and vegetables and deep-fried.
Chickpeas have been eaten throughout human history. Wild chickpeas have been found in a cave in Southern France associated with humans from about 6700 BCE. Cultivated chickpeas were found in the earliest levels of Jericho, the world’s oldest town. By the Bronze Age (about 3000 BCE) chickpeas were known in Italy and Greece. In classical Greece, they were called erébinthos.
At some point in history chickpeas were rolled into balls and roasted or fried as falafels. They are now served alongside kebabs in Lebanese and Turkish fast food outlets everywhere in the known world. It is as Middle Eastern as camels, minarets and black coffee. But, apparently, it is also a staple food in the cuisine of India and Pakistan.
But the origin of falafels has become controversial and the debate is taking on biblical proportions. The New York Times ran a long article about how Israel’s adoption of falafel as it’s national food has upset the Palestinians who believe part of their culture is being appropriated. Many Palestinians think that Israelis have stolen their cuisine and passed it off as native Jewish food. The Israelis suggest that falafels were eaten in Israel in biblical times and so therefore is as much their cuisine as anyone’s.
There are some clues to the source of falafels from its word history. Falafel in English, was first used in 1941 as a borrow word. It comes from the Arabic word falāfil (فلافل) which derives from the plural of filfil (فلفل) which means “pepper”. This is thought to derive from the Sanskrit (the ancient and formal language of India) word pippalī (पिप्पल) which means “long pepper”. This word history provides evidence for falafels coming from India.
However, another theory suggests the word, falafel, originated in Egypt, with the Copts (Egyptian Christians established about the time of the Roman emperor Claudius around 42 AD) that may have eaten falafels during Lent to avoid meat. The Egyptians used fava or field beans (which we call broad beans) to make falafel. The derivation proposed is from Pha La Phel “Φα Λα Φελ” meaning ‘of many beans’, which is a quite compelling theory and would take the origins of falafel to biblical times as is claimed.
14 Apr, 2012
Today is the centenary of one of the most famous distress calls of history. On 14 April 1912, during a moonless night in the middle of the Atlantic the Titanic hit an iceberg. Soon afterwards Captain Smith ordered the First Radio Officer, Jack Phillips, to radio for help.
These were the pioneering days of wireless communication. Wireless telegraphy had only just started to be used on ships through the work of Guglielmo Marconi (who was waiting in New York to join the Titanic on the return journey). Telegraphers used morse code to send messages by tapping out letters using a series of dots (short signals) and dashes (long signals).
CQD
When Phillips first sent the Titanic’s distress signal he tapped out: CQD CQD CQD CQD CQD CQD. British wireless operators used CQ as a general broadcast to all stations, and since 1904, CQD as a distress signal. The letters meant calling all stations (CQ) we are in distress (D) and did not represent a message such as Come quick danger.
SOS
After little response to the CQD message, Harold Bride, the Second Radio Officer suggested they also use SOS SOS SOS. SOS had been adopted in 1908 as the international distress signal (after much debate) because the three dots, three dashes and three dots were unmistakable and could not be misinterpreted. There is a popular but incorrect belief that SOS means Save Our Ship, Save Our Souls, or Send Out Succour.
The distress signals of the Titanic were recognised but the ships that responded were not close enough to get there before she sank.
Mayday
More than a decade later, with the development of voice transmission, a new international distress message was required. The Mayday callsign originated in 1923 when Frederick Mockford, a senior radio officer at Croydon Airport in London, was asked to think of a distress call easily understood by pilots and ground operators. Because most of the airport traffic at that time was between Croydon and Le Bourget Airport in Paris, he proposed the word Mayday from the French m’aider, a shortening of venez m’aider meaning come help me.
Pan-pan
The distress signal pan-pan is used for an urgent situation of a lower order than a Mayday (or SOS) such as a mechanical breakdown or a medical problem. It comes from the French, panne, meaning a breakdown. Similarly to other distress signals there are constructed meanings for the word: Possible Assistance Needed or Pay Attention Now.
These distress signals, CQD, SOS, Mayday and pan-pan, have all been derived from words or codes. The constructions of phrases around them are examples of “backronyms”, reverse or backward acronyms, phrases constructed around words rather than acronyms that are words constructed from phrases.
Today we will remember the lost souls of those passengers who, despite the signals of their radio operators, were not rescued from the waters of the freezing Atlantic a century ago.
2 Apr, 2012
If there is a word in the English language to avoid at all costs it is fulsome. Not because it is modern (it is quite the opposite) or informal (it is not that) but because it is one of a few words that has flipped its original meaning on its head. Fulsome is even more unusual because in common usage it is returning to its original meaning. Therefore you use it at your peril.
Fulsome was originally used in Middle English (in about 1250) to mean abundant and full. This construction and meaning is quite intuitive combining full with some.
Fulsome over the centuries has become a victim of its own meaning and become more and more fulsome—it has fattened up. Its meaning moved slowly from a neutral sense of abundance and fullness to mean plump and well-fed by the 1350s. It then changed slowly to mean overgrown and overfed by the 1640s. Fulsome was corpulent by the end of the 17th century and meant offensive to taste and good manners, in the sense of being excessive; overdone or gross; disgusting; sickening; repulsive; and tending towards obscenity. It came to mean excessively or insincerely lavish. And that is how it stayed until recently.
Since the 1960s fulsome, in popular usage, is used in a similar way to its original sense, meaning to encompass all aspects or abundant or copious. However, the problem is that those that use fulsome in its old positive sense are considered to be doing so out of ignorance of the established meaning. Standard English users do not accept the new usage. This is not simply conservatism but a necessary avoidance of ambiguity in the use of the word.
An added difficulty, at present, in allowing acceptance of the new meaning is that there is often an ironic undertone in its use. It is impossible to tell from the context what meaning is intended.
Fulsome is frequently paired with praise. An informed reader would read fulsome praise to mean excessive or overdone praise and perhaps even toadying flattery while innocents would read it to mean quite generous praise. William Safire (1929-2009), New York Times political journalist and language columnist wrote in 2008:
Fulsome is to ‘full‘ what noisome is to ‘noisy‘; a word that sounds the same but means something quite different. Noisome, rooted in Old French for ‘annoying,’ means ’smelly,’ and fulsome means ‘too much.’ If you’re on the side of clarity, hold that line.
Fulsome is having a strong resurgence amongst fashion writers who use fulsome for full in a parallel construction to wholesome or handsome. Dolce & Gabbana describe actress, Monica Bellucci, who models their new lipstick collection, in their press release as having:
… famed fulsome lips, impeccable complexion and daring, expressive eyes.
Fulsome is both an example of deterioration where a word changes over time to take on negative associations and amelioration, where a word slowly takes on favourable connotations. It depends on who you ask as too which way it is going.
2 Apr, 2012
William Lewis Safire (17 December 1929 – 27 September 2009) was an American author, presidential speechwriter, and political columnist for the New York Times. He started his career in public relations in 1955 and while working for Richard Nixon, set up the famous “Kitchen Debate” in Moscow in 1959 between Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev.
As a public relations professional working in politics it is not surprising that he developed a strong interest in the power of words. He joined the New York Times in 1973 as a political columnist but, from 1979, also wrote a column, On Language, in the New York Times Magazine, which focussed on words and other language topics. He published several books on language as well as politics.
Safire was engaged on Nixon’s Presidential campaign in 1968 writing speeches and developing strategies on how to overcome Nixon’s image as a two-time loser and to get him into the White House. After the victory, Safire became a senior speechwriter for Nixon and his Vice-President, Spiro Agnew.
In 1968 he published The New Language of Politics (later republished as Safire’s Political Dictionary), which he described as:
… an inventory of inventive invective, a lexicon of the words and phrases that have misled multitudes, blackened reputations, held out false hopes, oversimplified ideas to appeal to the lowest common denominator, shouted down inquiry and replaced searching debate with stereotypes that trigger applause or hatred.
He joined the New York Times as a political columnist in 1973 and won the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for work on a now obscure financial scandal. In 1996 Safire called Hillary Clinton a congenital liar in his column, which prompted US President Bill Clinton to famously say that he would have liked to punch him in the nose.
In 1979, Safire started the On Language column, in which he explored popular and political usage of the English language. He had a devoted following of correspondents that he called his Lexicographic Irregulars.
He wrote a total of ten books on English, becoming one of the most widely read writers on the language. In his books he included several list of rules for writers, which are very good indeed. Here are twenty of the best.
Twenty rules for writers from William Safire
- Remember to never split an infinitive.
- A preposition is something never to end a sentence with.
- The passive voice should never be used.
- Do not put statements in the negative form.
- No sentence fragments.
- If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
- A writer must not shift your point of view.
- And don’t start a sentence with a conjunction.
- Don’t overuse exclamation marks!!!
- Don’t use contractions in formal writing.
- It is incumbent on us to avoid archaisms.
- Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors.
- If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times, resist hyperbole.
- Also, avoid awkward or affected alliteration.
- Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague …
- Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
- Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
- Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
- Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
- Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
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