Am I the only one who gets a little irritated (it isn't strong enough to actually count as annoyance) by television programs which try to add a little interest by including linguistic information but do it by repeating folk etymologies and urban myths which five minutes with a dictionary would disprove.
Take the program that's on at the moment, Bargain Hunt. A few minutes ago the presenter was looking at an ivory carving of two gnomes. To spice it up the presenter asked us if we were familiar with the origin of the word "gnome". It is, he told us, an acronym meaning Guarding Naturally Over Mother Earth. This is of course utter nonsense. You should always hear alarm bells ringing when anyone claims that an old word (gnome was first recorded in the 16th century) is an acronym.
Gnome is of course no such thing. It is generally considered to have been coined by Paracelcus possibly based on a Greek word meaning "earth dweller". An alternate theory is that it was based on a form of "gignoskein" - to know.
What is pretty damned unlikely is that someone writing five centuries ago in German, at a time when acronyms were all but unused, would choose to coin a new word by forming an acronym from English words.
The trouble is that people believe these things - especially if given a specious authority by the almighty television.
A possible explanation is that there are several thousand hits in Google putting the same theory. Sooner or later everything turns up on the internet and they way things are going - with BBC researchers apparently using the internet as a primary source - truth is going to disappear altogether replaced by consensus belief.
I just wish they would check a bit more carefully before spouting nonsense to a gullible public.
(Incidentally, later in the program, explaining the inscription G-IV-R on a piece of furniture he referred to the GR as George Rex (so far so good) and the IV as "one vee, or four". Surely that should be read as "eye vee, or four".)
3 comments:
Although Roman numerals are now written using the letters of the Roman alphabet they derive from earlier non-alphabetical symbols used by the Etruscans. According to Wikipedia, "over time the Romans came to identify the symbols with letters of the Latin alphabet".
It could be argued, therefore, that he was right in saying "one", but not in using "vee". ;)
It could, were we Etruscans. We don't get many Estrucans settling in Wolverhampton though.
I saw that episode of Bargain Hunt and you are quite right about the alleged acronym being complete nonsense. Not only does the word gnome date to at least the 16th century, but the acronym uses the verbal element "guarding over" which is not an English construction - it should be either "watching over", or "guarding". Putting the adverb "naturally" in the middle of the verb is even worse gibberish and typical of modern sloppy grammar - this hopelessly ungrammatical misuse of English helps us to date the phoney acronym, since good grammar was a feature of our language up to the dreadful education "reforms" of the late 1960s.
Post a Comment