Rings and circles
A few days ago Mark Liberman
pointed
out that the
OED lacks an
entry for the 'crime ring' sense of
ring,
though he found cites for it back to 1904 (all American), notably for
drug ring
and
prostitution ring, and
though the
OED does have
subentries for related specific (and older) senses of
ring (economic rings, in particular
price-fixing rings; political rings, like Tammany; and espionage
rings). All these uses for associations of people are negative in
tone.
The noun
circle referring to
associations of people is based on the same metaphor -- but this time
the connotation is neutral or positive. (The
OED's cites go back to 1646, and
come from both British and American sources.)
American
criminal
ring is in the news
thanks to Eliot Spitzer's connection to what has been referred to as a
"prostitution ring" (sometimes "high-class prostitution ring"); the
term in the trade for this form of prostitution is the more demure and
much less dramatic "escort agency" or "escort service". There are
prostitution rings, drug rings, smuggling rings, racketeering rings,
bootlegging rings, blackmail rings, extortion rings, kidnapping rings,
robbery rings, murder rings, abortion rings, and so on, including
generic crime rings. On screen you can find the 1938
Crime Ring and the 1941
Ellery Queen and the Murder Ring,
and probably others.
On the positive side, there's the webring (or web ring). In the
words of the
Wikipedia, this is "a collection of websites from around the Internet
joined together in a circular structure";
OED draft addition February 2004
for
web ring, "a number of
web sites with related content, offering links to one another in such a
way that a person may view each of them in turn rather than repeatedly
going back to a single referring site". But that's not an
association of people;
ring
used for collections of people, and with no reference to location in a
circle, is heavily negative in tone.
Compare
circle. The
relevant
OED subentry is:
21. a. A number of persons united by
acquaintance, common sentiments, interests, etc.; a 'set' or coterie; a
class or division of society, consisting of persons who associate
together.
with cites beginning with Sir Thomas Browne in 1646, including
references to "a polite circle", "the circle of one's acquaintance", "a
wide circle of friends and admirers", "their domestic circle" (the
obligatory Jane Austen citation), belonging to "the first circles"
(Austen again), "one's immediate circle", "the circles in which he
moved", and "political, social, and literary circles". These are
all neutral or positive in tone.
The difference in connotation between
ring
and
circle shows up in the
Google webhits for combinations of these nouns with preceding
crime/
criminal (negative) and
social (neutral or positive).
|
ring
|
circle
|
crime
|
163,000
|
2,120
|
criminal
|
12,400
|
1,190
|
social
|
2,500
|
2,260,000
|
The difference in connotation here looks roughly similar to the
difference between
gang
(negative) and
band (neutral
or positive): gang of thieves, band of brothers, etc.
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at March 16, 2008 11:27 AM