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Chris -- 2018-04-11
This morning the following appeared at the top of a story in the Washington State University Daily Evergreen: “While you may poo-poo the compact disk format as ancient in the wake of tiny new MP3 players and USB flash drives, you should remember what the CD has done for you.”
http://www.dailyevergreen.com/story/22927
Aside from the fact that the author doesn’t know how to spell “compact disc” (the subject of his column) the “poo-poo” for “pooh-pooh” gave me a laugh. There are plenty of deliberate puns like the following in the title of an article about using cattle waste to produce methane:
“Don’t poo-poo this alternative energy source”
ttp://www.ibabuzz.com/energy/2007/02/23/dont-poo-poo-this-alternative-energy-source/
But there are clearly people who think the expression “pooh-pooh” is analogous to phrases like “I shit on your idea!”
It comes of course from uttering a disdainful double “pooh” at ideas, things, and people.
“don’t poo poo my love of soundtracks.”
http://journeytoblissville.blogspot.com … -head.html
“Just don’t poo-poo marriage or even “romantisize” it until you been there.”
http://www.experienceproject.com/uw.php?e=1396
This inspired me to add a new entry to my “Common Errors in English.
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/poopoo.html
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I’ve always been at one with Dorothy Parker in her loathing of A A Milne, and your post has made me wonder whether those ‘pooh sticks’ and ‘Pooh the Bear’ with their implicit scatalogical connection may be the real reason. I’d always assumed it was down to class and his affectedly twee prose.
Oddly enough, today I came across a reference to ‘pupu’, which is Persian for the hoopoe, a bird which is apparently associated with being easily duped or fooled – much like the ‘silly goose’ or the booby or even, staying with birds for the moment, gulls, as in ‘gullible’.
The connection is admittedly tenuous, but the scornful dismissal of ‘poo-poo’, ‘pooh-pooh’ or ‘pupu’ has some of the disdain which one might associate with the qualities these poor birds supposedly represent. (I’m not sure that last sentence means anything at all…)
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Thanks for the “pooh sticks” reference, Peter (and for the wonderful comments on birds and gullibility). There was a charming if twee indie-rock band in the late 1980s or early 90s called “The Pooh Sticks,” and the name always seemed to me incongruously scatological for such a light and fluffy group.Your comments made me go and find the reference to a game played in the Pooh books.
Brians’ “compact disc” comment brought back different memories. I worked in music retail for too many years, and I recall that even the press releases from major record companies couldn’t make up their minds between “compact disc” and “compact disk.” The former is the clear front-runner and always has been, but I saw the latter spelling all the time – even occasionally on compact discs themselves.
So is “compact disk” a misspelling or a spelling variant? Depends on who you ask. The OED says this:
compact disc (or disk), a disc on which sound or data is recorded digitally as a spiral pattern of pits and bumps underneath a smooth transparent protective layer and reproduced by detecting the reflections of a laser beam focused on the spiral.
They give “compact disk” as a variant, but they use the “disc” spelling in their own definition. That seems consistent, at any rate. Their entry also provides a use of “compact disk” from the New York Times:
1983 N.Y. Times 18 Mar. D1 Many see the compact disk as a potentially enormous growth area for the languishing consumer audio-electronics industry.
Of course, that was written right at the beginning of the CD age, so the standard may not have been clear yet. And the OED’s other musical entries use “disc.”
Merriam Webster online opts for “compact disc” and doesn’t even give “compact disk” as an option:
Main Entry: comï¡pact disc
: a small optical disk usually containing recorded music or computer data
They’re sort of inviting confusion, however, by choosing the “disk” spelling in their own definition.
Somewhat eccentrically, MSN Encarta online uses “compact disk” as the main entry, and gives “compact disc” as the variant:
comï¡pact disk (plural comï¡pact disks) or comï¡pact disc (plural comï¡pact discs)
http://encarta.msn.com/dictionary_/comp … 0disc.html
If the man in the street is a bit confused about the proper spelling, he’s apparently not alone. But if the format goes on dying out, we may not have to worry about it.
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The correct spelling of “compact disc” was established by its official logo:
http://z.about.com/d/stereos/1/0/5/1/cd … l_logo.gif
The New York Times resisted this spelling for many years, often reviewing “disks” in columns next to ads for “discs.” But even the Times finally gave in and now refers to “compact discs.”
I get a bit annoyed by the assurance of popular media that the CD is dying.
For pop music maybe, but this is a golden age of the classical compact disc. The big labels having largely turned their backs on classical listeners, smaller labels have proliferated, catering to collectors who are less likely to want to cram 5,000 “songs” on their iPods and who value liner notes highly.
If you’re one of those rare classical collectors, you need to know about Fanfare:The Magazine for Serious Record Collectors.
http://www.fanfaremag.com/
The SACD, pronounced dead on arrival by many young salespeople, also flourishes in the classical realm, with many new releases every month.
Finally, according to Wikipedia, “Pooh” was originally the name of a swan Christopher Milne had encountered:
“Christopher Milne had named his toy after Winnipeg, a bear which he and his father often saw at London Zoo, and “Pooh”, a swan they had met while on holiday. The bear, called “Winnie”, was known as a gentle bear who never attacked anyone, and she was much loved for her playfulness. This is exactly what inspired Milne to write about Pooh Bear. Pooh the swan appears as a character in its own right in When We Were Very Young.
“In the first chapter of Winnie-the-Pooh, Milne offers this explanation of why Winnie-the-Pooh is often called simply “Pooh”: “But his arms were so stiff … they stayed up straight in the air for more than a week, and whenever a fly came and settled on his nose he had to blow it off. And I think – but I am not sure – that that is why he is always called Pooh.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnie_the_Pooh
Last edited by brians (2007-08-23 12:46:26)
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