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Re: correction
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In a message dated 02/03/2009 01:03:56 GMT Standard Time, skylark05@MAIL.RU
writes:
doryphore
Weird Words: Doryphore/ˈdɒrɪfɔː/
(http://www.worldwidewords.org/pronguide.htm)
A pedantic critic of minor errors; a nit-picker.
We owe this word to Sir Harold Nicolson, who introduced it to the world in
the Spectator magazine in August 1952. In an issue of the same magazine later
the same year, he described a doryphore as a “questing prig, who derives
intense satisfaction from pointing out the errors of others.” A writer in the New
Yorker in 1989 described being taken out to lunch one day by the magazine’s
editors: “They were rigidly abstemious, lest they fuddle their minds and give
hostages to subsequent doryphores on returning to work.” (Your present
editor follows a similar regime, with less success.) In 1996, Herb Caen commented
in the San Francisco Chronicle: “For a doryphore, what is more delightful
than a mistake in a correction?”
Sir Harold took it from French, in which it’s the usual name for the Colorado
beetle, hence a pest. Doryphora was at one time the genus of the potato
beetle, though its formal name these days is Leptinotarsa decimlineata
(decimlineata, ten-lined, in reference to its striped back). The old genus name was
taken from Greek doruphoros, a spear-carrier, which echoes a one-time folk name
for the insect in the US, the ten-striped spearman. The French presumably
acquired their term for it from its old genus name.
As an aside, doryphore was French slang for the occupying German soldiers in
World War Two and later became a derogatory term for tourists, much as the
locals in Cornwall call them emmets (ants).
Anthony Stadlen
Anthony Stadlen
"Oakleigh"
2A Alexandra Avenue
GB - London N22 7XE
Tel.: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857
Email: stadlen@aol.com
"Existential Psychotherapy & Inner Circle Seminars" at
_http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/_ (http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com/)
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