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Jewish World Review July 26, 2005 / 19 Tammuz, 5765 Origin and meaning of ‘litterbug’; ‘K’ for thousand; ‘tarmac’; ‘lynch’; what is the correct usage between ‘struck’ and ‘went on strike’?
By
Editors of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Dear Editor:
Can you tell me who first came up with the term ‘litterbug’?
—G.G., Pasadena, Calif.
Dear G.G.:
In 1947, the New York City transit system commissioned a series of
‘etiquette posters’ by the artist Amelia Opdyke Jones, the very
first of which featured the slogan ‘Nobody Loves a Litterbug’ with
a cartoon-style drawing of a man strewing litter in his path. (The
following year there was a poster discouraging the ‘gumbug’ — you
can probably guess what that was.) Jones herself claimed to have
coined ‘litterbug,’ borrowing from the name of a then-popular
dance, the jitterbug. So what if the ‘bug’ in ‘litterbug’ had an
altogether ‘pesky’ connotation, not at all like the ‘bug’ of
‘enthusiasm’ in ‘jitterbug’? The term was catchy, and right away
it made headlines: ‘47,000 Subway 'Litterbugs' Pay $107,000 in
Fines in 1946 Drive,’ announced the New York Herald Tribune early
in 1947.
The term was popularized in the 1950s by various anti-litter
campaigns throughout the country, especially one launched by the
organization Keep America Beautiful, Inc. in 1953. It was this
campaign that created the ugly bug emblem that appeared on posters,
bumper stickers, and playground signs with the forthright
admonition, ‘Don't be a litterbug!’ Those early years also saw the
origin of a ditty that probably remains somewhere in the
subconscious of every American baby boomer: ‘Please, please, don't
be a litterbug, 'cause every litter bit hurts.’
Not everyone has subscribed to the bug image. The Saturday Evening
Post titled a 1953 article on littering in Yellowstone National Park
‘Tourists Who Act Like Pigs’ and didn't used the term
‘litterbug’ in the article at all. New York Mayor Ed Koch tried
using ‘litterpig’ when he launched a new clean-up campaign in
1984, explaining that ‘litterbug’ did not ‘truly convey the
disgust I have for these people.’
‘Litterpig’ hasn't caught on the way ‘litterbug’ did, though one
journalist did refer recently to ‘turnpike litterpigs’ in an
article about a recycling education center, finding ‘litterbugs’
to be ‘too cute.’ Actually the emblem of the litterbug propagated
in the 1950s was of a vile, refuse-strewing, thoroughly
reprehensible character — and anything but cute.
Dear Editor:
Can you tell me when ‘K’ came to be used as an abbreviation for
‘thousand’? Why don't we use ‘T’ as an abbreviation for
‘thousand’ instead?
—N.K., Des Moines, Iowa
Dear N.K.:
‘K’ is an abbreviation of ‘kilo-,’ meaning ‘thousand.’
‘Kilo-’ itself is a relatively new invention, first coined in the
late 1700s in French for the fledgling metric system. The French
took ‘kilo-’ as a rendering of the Greek ‘chilioi’ (meaning, not
surprisingly, ‘thousand’) and added it, along with a handful of
other Greek and Latin numerical root words, to their new system of
weights and measures.
‘K’ was used mostly in scientific articles until the advent of
computers, when ‘k’ and ‘kb’ (for ‘kilobyte’) became
commonplace. From there, ‘K’ moved into more general vocabulary
and is now often seen in sentences like, ‘The starting salary is
$34K.’
Dear Editor:
Why is the surface of an airport runway called a ‘tarmac’?
—G.A., Urbana, Ill.
Dear G.A.:
The word ‘Tarmac’ is a trademark for a bituminous binder used to
pave roads. In this use it is properly capitalized. Before
‘Tarmac’ there was a generic word ‘tarmacadam,’ formed by
combining ‘tar’ with ‘macadam.’ Macadam, which is named after
19-century British engineer John L. McAdam, is roadway or pavement
that is finished by a process of compacting into a solid mass a
layer of small broken stone on a convex, well-drained roadbed using
a binder (something that makes the mass cohesive). This makes the
road surface much smoother and safer for driving. Adding tar to
macadam makes the surface waterproof as well. Since airplanes must
take off and land in all sorts of weather, airport runways are often
paved with tarmacadam, as are public roads and highways.
Around 1926, the word ‘tarmac’ came into general use as another
name for a tarmacadam pavement, whether a road, apron, or runway. In
fact, airport runways are so often made in this way that ‘tarmac’
is sometimes used as a synonym for ‘airport runway,’ as in this
example from our files: ‘Passengers were made to identify their
luggage on the tarmac before it was allowed into the terminal or on
the plane.’
Dear Editor: What is the origin of the word "lynch"?
—B.V., Orleans, Mass.
Dear B.V.: We get this infamous word from the name of a man, but it
has only been in relatively recent times that enough evidence has
accumulated to identify that man with any certainty. Quite a few
possibilities, however, have been suggested over the years.
One of the first to be identified as the source of "lynch" was a
mayor of Galway, Ireland, named James Lynch Fitzstephen. He was
supposedly forced in 1493 to carry out the hanging of his own son, a
convicted murderer, when no one else would. Apart from the fact that
there's really no evidence to recommend this story, it also fails to
explain why we didn't end up with a verb "fitzstephen" instead of
"lynch," or why "lynch" didn't enter the language until centuries
after Fitzstephen's death.
Another man given credit (or blame) was Charles Lynch, a planter,
justice of the peace, and colonel in the militia in Virginia in the
late 18th century. Evidence in support of this claim rests on his
presiding, with others, over an extralegal court to suppress Tory
activity in Virginia during the American Revolution. Extralegal or
not, however, there is no evidence to suggest that the court
participated in execution without due process of law or as a result
of mob action.
Scholars now agree that the most likely suspect is Captain William
Lynch (1742-1820). Captain Lynch served with the Virginia militia
and presided over a self-created tribunal organized to rid
Pittsylvania County of a band of troublesome criminals that had
eluded the appropriate authorities.
Lynch and his followers entered into a compact on September 22,
1780. This compact stated the goals, reasons, and methods of the
group, who eventually became known as the "lynch-men." By 1782 their
code had become known as "lynch's law," and subsequently "lynch
law." The first written evidence for "lynch" as a verb dates from
1836.
Dear Editor: My sister and I were talking recently about a group of
striking workers, and she said they "struck" the night before. I
suggested that although factually she might be correct,
grammatically she was wrong: one should say that they "went on
strike." This provoked quite a debate. Can you clear this up?
—D.H., New York City
Dear D.H.: Sorry, but we agree with your sister. "Strike" regularly
appears both as a verb and as a noun. The verb is used most often
intransitively — "The workers are going to strike" — but is also
used transitively — "They plan to strike the company for higher
wages." The noun — "They called a strike" — may be more familiar to
your ears, but it didn't appear in written form until around 1810,
nearly half a century after the verb. The Oxford English Dictionary
dates the first use of any form of the word to 1768, and the use is
identical to your sister's, with the intransitive verb in the past
tense: "This day the hatters struck, and refused to work ..."
Perhaps "struck" sounds wrong to you in part because, as you
observe, we have a perfectly good alternative expression — "went on
strike" — that can be (and often is) used instead. Another reason
may be that, unlike the present tense "strike," the past tense
"struck" does not clearly echo the form and pronunciation of the
noun.
"Strike" as a verb has fairly straightforward inflected forms:
"strike" (present), "struck" (past), "struck" or "stricken" (past
participle), and "striking" (present participle). For the sense "go
on strike," the form of the past participle is always "struck," as
in, "The workers have struck." If you hear your sister say "the
workers have stricken," feel free to correct her again. The form
"stricken" is pretty much limited in use to the senses "afflicted
suddenly" — as in "stricken with illness" — and "canceled or
deleted" — as in "stricken from the record."
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Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||
