790-1: Feedback, Notes and Comments

Great Wen Someone I know only as Dick commented, “Being familiar with the word wen I have been amused recently to see it being used as the brand name for a heavily promoted line of hair-care products in the US. It doesn’t conjure up an appealing image ...” After exhaustive research (that is, I asked my invaluable US associate) it transpires that this has nothing to do with the Great Wen but is merely new spelled backwards.

Two comments suggest I sounded the death knell on Great Wen too precipitately. Louise Bolotin wrote, “It’s still in common use in speech in the north of England — possibly because of the north-south divide and the general feeling in the north that London is positioned as the centre of everything. People up here only travel to London when they absolutely have to and so you hear a fair bit of grumbling along the lines of ‘I’m off to the Great Wen on Tuesday for a meeting’. I first heard it in frequent use in Leeds in the 1980s, I’ve seen it a lot on Twitter and indeed use it myself. It has by no means become archaic, at least not in speech.” Richard Bos wrote from the Netherlands: “It is alive and well in certain parts of the internet, specifically certain Usenet groups, in the same spirit which keeps alive garden sheds, sloe gin and pickled walnuts. Even digitally, the English do love their traditionality; perhaps they love their traditionality even more than their traditions.”

Megatsunami Following last week’s piece, Peter Casey introduced me to the related term seiche (pronounced as /seɪʃ/ ), a phenomenon of lakes and bays, in which water can bounce back and forth between the banks as a result of changes in air pressure. It is commonly associated with the Great Lakes, particularly Lake Michigan, but the word came into the scientific literature as the result of studies carried out on Lake Geneva in Switzerland in the late nineteenth century. It is from Swiss French seiche, perhaps taken from German Seiche, the sinking of water.

Act of creation Philip Arnold e-mailed, “I am wondering if we may credit you with coining a new word. In the snippet on Great Wen you use eruditism. I could not locate it in any online dictionary, finding only erudite. Congratulations.” It’s very kind of him, but I can’t take any credit. Though it’s not in any dictionary that I’ve consulted, not even the Oxford English Dictionary, a search found a number of examples — one from the nineteenth century — which use it in the same sense as I did, for an erudite word. It wasn’t an error for erudition.