815-1: Feedback, Notes and Comments

Bill Marsano wrote about the hash sign, mentioned last time: “I’ve always known it as the trepan. Brain surgeons having to put a hole in a patient’s skull at one time used four shallow saw cuts to do so, as using a conventional drill bit would almost certainly injure the brain. The procedure, called trepanning or trepanation, works well on any spherical form.” Lots of others pointed out that in my brief list of names for the sign — not intended to be comprehensive — I’d omitted octothorpe, a less common term but one with a tale. John Gray commented that in the UK you would never hear the equivalent of hit the pound key. “In our gentler society we simply press the hash key.”

Statistics about the pronunciation of GIF came from Stan Carey: “In a post on my Sentence First blog a few weeks ago, I conducted a poll to informally quantify people’s preferences. At the time of writing, it’s 69% hard-G and 23% soft-G (the remaining minority pronounce the letters individually).” Rowan Collins added: “As a footnote, you might be interested to note that the official standard for another image format, PNG, explicitly states that it should be pronounced ping. The existence of an official pronunciation was frequently listed among its advantages over the earlier format.”

“Your item on Jobation,” Anthony Massey e-mailed, “referred to a cabin lecture, which reminded me of the British Army term for a dressing down of an officer by his superior, an interview without coffee. Apparently the next stage, when you’re really in trouble, is to be ordered to attend a carpet parade. In the Royal Navy I’m told that the standard admission of guilt, again by an officer to his superior, is to say at the very beginning of the hearing, I’m thinking of buying a pig farm, sir.”

At one moment it felt as though every Australian subscriber was communicating with me about the term fibro majestic. They all pointed out that it was a local joke on a once-famous up-market hotel in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, the Hydro Majestic. Tony Rodd revealed, “In our younger days it was renowned as the place Sydneyites took their mistresses off for what was then called a dirty weekend, no questions asked.” Christopher Yates recalled, “Rumour had it that the staff would ring a bell at 6am as a cue for philandering guests to return to their own beds, such was the reputation of this pretentious pile.” Margaret Neville categorised the phrase as “another typical Aussie tongue in cheek case of naming something as its opposite.” Jack Harvey corrected my description: “Fibro does not specifically refer to asbestos. It is a contraction of fibro-cement sheet and variants thereof — thin cement sheeting reinforced with fibres — formerly asbestos, now cellulose.” David Barklay noted: “Fibro was a very common building material in the post-war building boom and enabled many people to build their own homes”. The Maquarie Dictionary’s voting page, by the way, does include a fuller description of fibro, together with the origin of the joke; I didn’t include it, not wanting to overload what was intended to be a brief note accompanying a link.

Numerous readers responded to my piece on swiz by mentioning its appearance in the Molesworth books by Geoffrey Willans, especially Down with Skool! of 1953: “A chiz is a swizz or a swindle as any fule kno.” Chiz is almost certainly an abbreviation of chisel, a slang term first recorded in 1808, meaning to act deceitfully or to cheat (the image must be of slicing material from the person being cheated). Willans is the first known user of chiz as a noun (one earlier example is known for the verb) and it would seem that he modelled it on swiz.