Friday words #261

This week’s new-to-me word seems like one of those where people will say “Oh, that’s common in [some domain where I am not well read].” The word is fossick.

Per M-W, this means to “to search for gold or gemstones typically by picking over abandoned workings.” According to several dictionaries, this is a term from Australia and New Zealand. It sounds like the term was used as a kind of miner’s version of gleaning.

Since most of us don’t have much need to talk about working over the leftovers in a mine, any usage today is likelier to be metaphorical, along the lines of “To rummage or search around, especially for a possible profit.” An example given in Dictionary.com is “to fossick for clients.” A more general take yet is just “to rummage around,” as in this excellent example from a novel by James Runcie: “Her sister was fossicking through her clothes wondering which dress to wear.”

I can’t get a read on is whether fossick has a negative connotation. Is grubbing through an old mine a clever thing to do, or is it a sign of desperation? Similarly, if you say that someone is fossicking for clients, is your sense that they’re doing a good job finding clients, or that the effort has a whiff of the distasteful to it? I feel like fossicking through your closet is pretty neutral. But I don’t know this word, so I welcome clarifications.

I normally record the sources where I find these new-to-me terms, but I didn’t this time. Re-reading the source might have helped me get more context, oh well.

Origins. When I was a younger man, we all imagined that one of the benefits of growing up would mean we could get the most boss stereo ever, by which we meant a collection of gear to reproduce recordings. Hundreds of watts! Gigantic speakers! So many dials and knobs!

I knew even in my callow youth that stereo was short for stereophonic; it said so right on the vinyl records that we collected.[1] And I knew that stereophonic recordings had two channels, each with a different signal. At some point I learned about stereoscopic photography that involves two slightly offset images that when properly viewed produce a 3-D-looking image.

So had I thought about it, I would have said that stereo has something to do with two: two channels, two photos. But no.

The word stereo comes from a Greek root that means “solid.” One use of this root was in the word stereotype, which originally referred to a (solid) mold made from a frame of typeset type so that the page could be reproduced without having to be re-set. (This was a surprising origin for me a few years ago.)

When stereoscopic photography was invented in the 1830s, the inventor had this sense of “solid” in mind—he proposed “that it be called a Stereoscope, to indicate its property of representing solid figures.”

The word stereophonic was invented in the 1920s to refer to reproduced sound, based on the model of stereoscopic. It didn’t quite mean “solid” (can sound even be “solid”?), but it did refer to the illusion that the sound comes from multiple places. More generally, that the sound sounded natural, certainly in comparison to monophonic recording.

From then, it was a natural development to shorten the word to a stereo recording, and then transferred as a noun to the reproduction equipment (“my boss stereo”). I imagine that in unguarded moments, I might still occasionally use the term stereo to refer to sound-reproduction equipment, whoops.

In the 70s there was a brief fad for quadraphonic recordings, which reproduced sound in an even more natural way—an early version of surround sound. I think that the quadra- of quadraphonic probably influenced my interpretation of stereo to mean “two.” As a Wikipedia article explains, though, quadraphonic stereo is a not an oxymoron. The word stereo just refers to sound coming from several directions. The original technology emulated sound coming from two directions, but in quad sound, of course, it means coming from four directions.

For the sake of completeness, I’ll observe that the advent of stereophonic sound meant that stereo buffs needed a term to refer to the older technology. Sure enough, in the 1950s, the retronym monophonic or just mono started to be applied to pre-stereo recordings. (The word had existed before then, but not as applied to sound reproduction.)

This is probably more than you wanted to know about stereo (and possibly about my earlier days). Or to be timely, more than you wanted to fossick around in words about stereos, heh.

Like this? Read all the Friday words.

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[1] I am just old enough that in my early youth recordings were proudly labeled as being in stereo—that is, an era in which stereo was still new enough that it wasn’t necessarily assumed to be the default. (This applied also to TV listings that advertised “in color,” ha.) [^]