White of the egg

The other day I talked about buzzphrases, and one buzzphrase I've been hearing a lot recently is 'the white of the egg'. If the readers of a print publication, for example, are the yolk, then the additional audience that a web-based publication can interact with are 'the white of the egg'.

Yes, I think it's a horrible analogy too. And haven't these people ever heard of the word 'albumen'? Mind you, I can just imagine some sales manager standing up in a meeting and saying 'we need to attract the albumen' - not sure it would convey much meaning...

Buzzphrase!

We had this sentence in some recent copy:

'Carbon footprint' is among the latest crop of buzzwords

That got me thinking: 'carbon footprint' is not a buzzword, it's a buzz phrase. And 'buzz phrase' could itself become a buzz phrase, unless it was written as 'buzzphrase', in which case it would be a buzzword... or do I mean buzz word?

Sound over meaning

Further to JD's remarks on a tautologism that nearly got past us, earlier today I read straight through this: "...its importance to the economy cannot be underestimated". This phrase means the exact opposite of what the author intended.

And only minutes later one of our designers (highly creative chaps, of course, but not employed as wordsmiths) was checking a page proof for correct use of pictures and so on when he noticed the phrase "off my own back". He asked if it should read "off my own bat". He was quite right, of course; the error reminds us how easy it is to half hear a word or phrase and forget its roots.

For example, many youngsters say and even write the phrase "I should of done that" rather than "I should have done that". Having heard and used the elision "should've" they are guided by the sound without considering the meaning.

Have your cake and eat it

Apus' post on flipped phrases reminded me of the saying '(you can't) have your cake and eat it', which is an inversion of '(you can't) eat your cake and have it'. The original version, in my opinion, is superior; it is easy to have a cake then eat it, but quite a feat to eat a cake and still have it.

However I doubt we can blame our colonial cousins for flipping this particular phrase – first recorded in 1546, 'eat your cake and have it' was the more common form on both sides of the Atlantic right through until the 19th century. Quite what prompted the inversion I haven't been able to discover... can anyone help?

Pogonotrophic derivations

As JD has mentioned, I hide behind a beard and as a young shaver was inordinately proud of some rather impressive sideburns. Inspired by his use of a sesquipedalian word for bearded I looked into the etymology of sideburns and discovered they're named after the hirsute American Civil War General Burnside.

Our colonial cousins seem to have a penchant for flipping phrases in this way.

For example, the phrase "lock and load" so beloved of Hollywood scripwriters dates back to instructions issued for users of the US Army's Garand rifle in World War 2 – but the original instruction was to "load and lock".