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World Records RSS Feeds772-1: Feedback, notes and comments - Macmillan competition We came third. The English Club was second. The winner was Wordsmith, the home of Anu Garg’s A Word A Day, which came romping up from behind at the last minute. But then his daily e-mail newsletter has rather more than a million subscribers, which makes World Wide Words’s 50,000 readers look paltry. I’m delighted he has won: he deserves to. Many thanks go to everybody who supported World Wide Words. And a special welcome to all who have subscribed through learning about us via the competition. Haywire Several readers argued that there was a specific reason why going haywire took on its sense of being out of control. Ken Shaw commented: “I was taught that when something went haywire, it was not only not working properly but was also dangerous. Hay bales are bound very tight. If the haywire snapped or was cut to open the bale, the...Feed Source: www.worldwidewords.org 772-2: Weird Words: Standing pie -
This old regional English term is now known mainly to cooks who have historical interests. A century ago, it was better known:
Hotels and inns provide a huge game pie for their customers, ‘standing pies’ they are called, being nearly a foot high, and filled with the choicest morsels of hare, rabbit, pheasant, &c.,[Folk-Lore, by Edward Nicholson, 1890.]
The origin lies in a technique, known from medieval times, in which a pastry case was created separately from its contents. Coarse flour and water were moulded like clay into the shape required and then baked hard. It was inedible in itself but served in the absence of suitable ceramics to hold whatever was being baked, which might be almost anything — meat or fish as well as game. They were called standing pies because the pastry cases stood by themselves. Such constructions were often ornate showpieces at banquets. The cases were usually thrown away after one us... 772-3: Wordface -
Words of 2011 The results were announced on Wednesday of the Macquarie Dictionary’s Australian Word of the Year awards for 2011. It’s the most complex of all the public contests, with votes requested for lists of words in 16 different categories. The Word of the Year is selected from among the category winners by the Word of the Year Committee, which is chaired by the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sydney, Dr Michael Spence.
The overall winner (and I chose that word with care) was burqini (often written as burkini), the all-enveloping modest swimsuit designed for Muslim women, whose name is a blend of burqa and bikini. It has been around since at least 2006 in the UK, when it was mentioned in the Independent on Sunday by columnist Deborah Ross; its relevance to Australia in 2011 is due to the British cookery broadcaster and writer Nigella Lawson, who wore one on Bondi Beac... 772-4: Articles: The Words of Dickens -
Next Tuesday, 7 February, is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens. It has been impossible to avoid knowing about this impending event for several months because of way that the British media has anticipated it, with its usual concern to get ahead of its competitors. Boredom has set in for many British readers and viewers, few of whom these days read him.
I was going to pass over it in silence, not wanting particularly to add to the hoopla. But then, in an idle moment of curiosity, I fired up the Oxford English Dictionary to learn more about the linguistic legacy the man has left us. He wrote such delightful and insightful descriptions of London and its people that I wondered if his verbal inventiveness matched his artistic abilities.
Dickens is highly rated by the OED. He is the 13th most frequently quoted source, well ahead of his contemporaries, though this may in part reflect his extraordinary output rather than his creativity. Among th... 772-5: Sic! -
• The San Francisco Chronicle’s website had a headline on 31 January (sent in by Jim Tang from Hawaii): “Ranger zaps off-leash dog walker with shock weapon”. I’ve long suspected that it’s the owner who’s on the leash, not the dog.
• Darren Zanon tells us the Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan is advertising for a director of software development. Among the post’s duties: “Works with end users to establish efficient processes and excrement customer care.”
• Will Gout e-mailed about a short-lived sentence on the ABC News website on 30 January: “The ACT bomb squad has closed a Canberra street after auspicious packages were found at the Israeli and French embassies.”
• An Associated Press story dated 31 January was spotted by Richard Collins on the website of the Wi... 772-6: Copyright and contact details -
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