Tooth & Neck
I'm sure it says something deep and revealing about me that as financial markets crumble about my head I listen to how people talk. Perhaps it's just the result of my long years of aching to be recruited for the grammar police, or perhaps my few years in the crucible of the usenet group "soc.motss", where conversational effervescence was what kept one afloat.
Regardless, because of the current difficulties, my attention was drawn to an episode of This American Life called "The Giant Pool of Money". Host Ira Glass talked to people to try to understand how problems (to use the euphemism for greed and stupidity and folie à milles) with the market in so-called subprime mortgages could have such devastating effects on Wall Street.
To be honest, I listened to the opening of the episode and found too much preamble when what I wanted was analysis, so I switched my attention to the abridged version that was heard on National Public Radio, called "Global Pool of Money Got Too Hungry". The title may be a bit more lurid in its imagery but it also lays out the premise of the plot: in the early years of the current century the "global pool of money" (money looking for investment) suddenly doubled in size to some $70 trillion dollars and it desperately wanted to be invested, so investments had to be found even if they weren't good investments.
It's worth listening to, but not entirely for its analysis, although that was interesting enough. What really snapped my ears to attention was hearing a rather remarkable variant on a clichéd phrase.
If you're listening along, it happened about 8 minutes and 41 seconds into the piece. One Mike Garner, of Silver State Mortgage in Nevada, was talking about how Wall Street kept lowering its standards for mortgage qualification in order to increase the number of mortgages written to feed the investment monster. They were so desperate that they finally worked their way down to the "NINA", or "No Income-No Assets', apparently AKA "the liar's loan". Garner, speaking of his boss, who thought this was financial craziness, said
"He hated those loans… He fought the owners and sales force tooth and neck about these guidelines."
Now, the cliché that most of us would reach for right there would be "tooth and nail" ("nail" as in fingernail, metaphorically "fangs and claws", biting and clawing as a wild animal might). Hearing "tooth and neck" almost gave me whiplash of the ears.
This is a ground-floor opportunity to watch this phrase spread. Google right now reports only 31 instances of "tooth and neck".*
Of those at least a dozen are concerned with pain management or some aspect of dentistry. Several (e.g., here, here, and here) seem to be about the instance uttered by Mr. Garner as documented above, although these bloggers are rather weak on specifics ("I heard some guy say this the other day….") and references.
One interesting instance is technical, from a book called Materials Handling Handbook, by David E. Mulcahy. It seems to be talking about the proper spacing of the sprockets in a carousel mechanism on a slide projector in a section on "Small-Item Horizontal Transport Concepts". (In the same section you'll learn about carousels for baggage, as at airports, or carousels for laundry, as you might see at a dry cleaner's. Fascinating stuff.) Another seems to be about a place in Japan where a tooth and neck bone of a dinosaur was discovered.
A few other instances look like bona fide occurrences, albeit with unusual aspects.
One example is from everyting, a page about "redheads", subsection "sunlight"; make of it what you will:
Greek Mythology held that redheads and vampirism went tooth-and-neck. Perhaps. But perhaps it may have had more to do with our tendency to go scarlet after only brief exposure to the sun. Most redheads don't do well on the beach–look for lots of t-shirts, zinc, and hats.
One is from a blog article called "Your [sic] so gullible – A shortened history on why", but the English orthography throughout the article suggests that the author's mother tongue is something other than English and that his use of "tooth and neck" might not be so interesting. Yet another example seems to be from a piece of Harry Potter fan fiction.
Finally, I found "tooth and neck" in three blog postings (first, second, third) where, oddly enough, the phrase appeared each time in the text of one of the commenters. There was, by the way, no evidence that the commenter in each instance might be the same person.
Obviously further research is called for, but I haven't decided in what direction. Perhaps I can monitor the number of instances documented by Google over the next few months and we might get a good estimate for the growth rate of "tooth and neck" as it spreads through the vernacular–at the speed of cliché!
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* Yesterday, when I first looked, Google reported only 30 instances. It must be spreading already!
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on Tuesday, 16 September 2008 at 20.19
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You remind me of an episode of the British television series "Midsomer Murders," where the solving of the crime hinges on Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby's noticing two characters, apparently unrelated and unknown to each other, both misusing a familiar cliche, saying "the long and the tall of it" rather than "the long and the short."
I'm not sure that Midsomer Murders has ever made it to PBS. I see it here on the B. C. Knowledge Network. The series is based on the detective novels of Caroline Graham.
on Tuesday, 16 September 2008 at 22.27
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I think I could really enjoy a detective who has the same sensitivity to cock-eyed cliches that I do. I think I've lost much of my taste recently for reading highly contrived mystery stories, but I might still go for them if they are very highly contrived. Twenty years ago I read everything by Michael Innes I could find; I found his books exceedingly contrived and very, very funny. I think his From London Far may be the only book that ever made me guffaw.
on Tuesday, 16 September 2008 at 23.23
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London's going, Rotterdam's gone.
I don't know anything about the Caroline Graham novels. The television series is pleasant, and mostly fantasy — a rural English cluster of villages where everyone is white, mostly middle aged and above, almost all wealthy; and where the murder rate is extreme. The series isn't called Midsomer MurderSSSS for nothing, there are always several corpses in each episode.
on Wednesday, 17 September 2008 at 00.07
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Jeff, you write ingeniously well about something fascinating to you. Meaning no putdown, because there isn't and shouldn't be right or wrong as to where such fascination resides or leads, I'm straining for an apt analogy to explain how this strikes me.
The best I can come up with is this. Someone goes to an exhibit where the beautiful Venus de Milo is on display. Instead of delighting in what's on display, this person concentrates on what those missing arms must've looked like, what happened to them, where they might be now, and so on. All of which is legitimate and possibly quite interesting, but still. . .
I mean, the U.S. economy is teetering on the brink. Taxpayers are being soaked for tens of billions every few days now to keep it from going over. This scary passage might come to be looked back on as a perversely appropriate Gotterdammerung ending for the Bush-Cheney years.
And in the midst of this awful drama, bless you, there's fascination to be found in "tooth and neck." That amazes me, but I wouldn't want you to change.
on Wednesday, 17 September 2008 at 20.27
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But just imagine those arms!
Recall that I heard it while listening to a program about financial greed and economic analysis, which you now know about, too. That's always part of the hidden seriousness — after all, if I were giving a tour and drew your attention to the voluptuous missing arms of the Venus, you'd probably see the Venus, too.
But I think my real motivation is that I usually enjoy something quirky when I can find it–or it simply presents itself. And I think the USO is a great idea, too, particularly in the midst of war. I used to tell a program manager of mine, who said he could never tell when I was serious, that I was always serious but never solemn.
Besides, thousands (or more) of bloggers are writing about write a lot of words about these issues and we all are reading some of them and I'm not sure there's much benefit to my adding mine if I don't have a particular contribution to make beyond writing what everyone else is writing anyway.
Besides, I'm a physicist; it's my job to do useless things.
on Thursday, 18 September 2008 at 03.32
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"Besides, I'm a physicist; it's my job to do useless things."
To quote the immortal Maynard T. Krebs, "Surely you jest."
on Thursday, 18 September 2008 at 13.26
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usually I jest but, although I'm rarely solemn, I'm usually serious. However, when pondering the daily activities of physicists I would expect most people to react by thinking said activities on the useless side.
Note this distinction though. Physicists are rarely thought useless in themselves–that's saved for politicians, lawyers, and economists.