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Take Our Word For It NOE No. 17
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Melanie Crowley
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Feb 08, 2004 19:19 PST
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Take Our Word For It NOE No. 17
http://www.takeourword.com
For Mac users who have trouble with our regular homepage:
http://www.takeourword.com/indexmac.html
**Greetings**
Just couldn't get a new issue up with Melanie having been out all last
week and Mike having been out much of it. We'll attempt to get a new
issue ready for next weekend.
Meantime, do check our bookstore
(http://www.takeourword.com/bookStore.html) or our home page
(http://www.takeourword.com/index.html) as you'll find in both spots a
special deal on WildWords, the game we reviewed two weeks ago. Buy a
copy and a donation goes to TOWFI!
**This Week's NOE**
There are a lot of Internet hoaxes running around these days. We, in
fact, recently saw a reference to such on our bank's web site, and that
prompted us to choose "hoax" for this week's NOE (newsletter-only
etymology, for you new readers). It first turns up in 1796 in Francis
Grose's "Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue". Grose says that the word
originated as university slang. The OED notes that the word is
supposedly a contraction of "hocus", and that such a derivation is
plausible, but there is no direct evidence of it. "Hoax" originally had
a sense of amusement about it: "to deceive or take in by inducing to
believe an amusing or mischievous fabrication or fiction". Now, of
course, the "amusement" sense is all but gone (except, perhaps, in the
eye of the hoaxer!).
"Hocus", of course, is short for "hocus pocus", words said when one was
conjuring or performing a trick, and they derive from a "sham" Latin
phrase that a juggler in the court of King James I often used when
performing a trick. The suggestion that "hocus pocus" is a corruption
of "hoc est corpus", from the Catholic Mass, was first made by John
Tillotson (1630-94), Archbishop of Canterbury, but the OED says that the
suggestion is unsubstantiated (and not transubstantiated!).
**Laughing Stock**
Keep 'em coming!
**Next Issue**
We hope to be back next weekend.
Until next time,
Take Our Word For It!
Melanie and Mike
http://www.takeourword.com
http://www.takeourword.com/indexmac.html
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