go pear-shaped; prevaricate

[Arnold Zwicky]

some very quick exchanges on the net...

From: zwicky at Turing.Stanford.EDU (Arnold Zwicky)
Newsgroups: soc.motss
Subject: Re: Thoughts upon returning home from the store
Date: 3 Sep 2002 01:38:30 GMT

in article <H1tCw4.oAy at ecf.utoronto.ca>, chris ambidge
<ambidge at ecf.toronto.edu> joins in some wondering about words:

 >      [ed]
 >...   [re: pear-shaped]

  >>...  The fact that I - among others here - didn't get your
  >>meaning, is not an artifact of your commo skills.  Pure lack of
  >>prior exposure on our part. [vide sub]

  >>...[v.s.]  I notice that the BBC uses "prevaricate" in places
  >>where most North Americans of the english speaking type would
  >>employ "procrastinate," or perhaps "dither."  (There is still
  >>another word that is more apt, but it won't come to the top of the
  >>rolodex right now. Obfuscate ? .... )

  >>When did the British use of "prevaricate" lose the connotation of
  >>"uttering un-truthful statements," or when did it acquire that
  >>connotation in NA usage ?

both questions turn out to be interesting, but "pear-shaped" is
easier.

i have a large and growing collection of english dictionaries, and on
"pear-shaped" they take one of four routes:

  (1) no listing at all.  the OED2, for example, omits the expression,
presumably because it's completely transparent, so that if they gave
it a subentry, they'd have to give one to "apple-shaped",
"mango-shaped", "banana-shaped", "avocado-shaped", and on and on, and
that would be a space disaster.

  (2) only the literal meaning, 'shaped like a pear'.  this is not
entirely ridiculous, since there's a specialist use of "pear-shaped"
in referring to diamonds and other cut gems.  (hey, they *could* have
been called "teardrop-shaped" or "avocado-shaped" or lots of other
things.  the conventionalization of "pear-shaped" is worth noting.)
the macquarie 1981 dictionary of australian english takes this route.
(i mention the macquarie because God recently reported "go
pear-shaped" to me as an australianism.  this particular macquarie was
published two decades ago, however.)

  (3) the literal meaning and one specialized meaning referring to the
shape of human bodies (roughly, 'hippy'), especially female bodies.
this is what the collins cobuild 1995 (british) dictionary does, and
also the new oxford american 2001.

  (4) both of these *plus* the 'awry' sense.  in my collection, only
the chambers 1998 (british) dictionary does this.  its entry is a
wonderful condensation of the presumed semantic development; following
on "pear-shaped" as above, it moves to:
   _go pear-shaped_ (colloq) to put on weight around the hips,
   waist or bottom; to go awry or out of kilter

chambers doesn't have any actual citations of this last use, but it's
probably significant that the dictionary is both british and very
recent.  all the sightings of "go pear-shaped" that i've seen have
been from british, canadian, or australian speakers.  a first
appearance in a recent dictionary, marked as "colloq", could suggest
that the metaphorical extension is maybe a couple of decades old.  but
i'll see if the pro lexicographers have some actual cites.

on to "prevaricate".  this one is really interesting to me as a
student of prescriptive grammar.

first: i have a huge collection of english usage handbooks, going
back roughly a century, and so far as i can tell the 'procrastinate'
sense of "prevaricate" has been castigated in only the most recent,
and by no means in all of those.  specifically, in burchfield's
New Fowler's (1998) and in bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words
(2002) and that's it.  the gold standard usage dictionary (MWDEU),
the AHD3 usage notes, and the new garner usage dictionary don't
mention it at all.

burchfield and bryson both see this usage as an ignorant confusion
with the phonologically similar "procrastinate" and tell their
readers to avoid it.  "prevaricate" means 'speak falsely, deviate
>from  the truth, equivocate, quibble, lie' etc. (AHD has a usage note
at "lie" that tries to untangle some of these) - and that's the
end of it.  case closed.

but my two recent british dictionaries suggest something more
complicated.  the chambers 1998 elevates the 'put off' component of
"prevaricate": "to avoid stating the truth or coming directly to the
point; to quibble."  and the collins cobuild 1995 gives as its *only*
definition a 'put off' sense:

  If you _prevaricate_, you avoid giving a direct answer or
  making a firm decision.

and it gives an actual citation:

  ...After months of prevarication, the political decision had at
  last been made.

"prevaricate" originally meant something like 'go at a slant, proceed
indirectly', so you can see how it would come to mean 'speak
equivocally' (even 'lie').  or 'avoid speaking', then 'avoid acting',
that is, 'put off acting', that is, 'procrastinate'.

the usage manuals that inveigh against "prevaricate" in this 'put off'
sense assume that it's a classical malapropism (as in mrs. malaprop),
in which people who strive for a fancy word get a wrong, but
phonologically similar, word and go with it. (quite separately, some
of the usage manuals caution again using "prevaricate" as a merely
fancy-talk variant of "lie".)  but maybe it's a semantic extension,
and the phonological similarity just helps things along.

From: ambidge at ecf.toronto.edu (Chris Ambidge)
Subject: Re: Thoughts upon returning home from the store
Date: Tue, 3 Sep 2002 02:34:53 GMT

        I hadn't thought to wonder about the origin until
        questioned here.  So i asked google about "go pear shaped
        etymology" and got all sorts of citations.  One resource
        useful perhaps for more than this is a reasonably comprehensive
        collation of UK English slang and colloquialisms:

        http://www.peevish.co.uk/slang/

        from other sources (not this one, which doesn't have a lot
        of etymology), it would appear that "going pear shaped" as
        in going askew is of late 40s-early 50s origin in British
        English, and has spread from there (more to Oz than Canada,
        I suspect; after asking about in the last couple of days -
        only those born like me in the UK did not give me the "what
        ARE you talking about?" look).

        while biiig arnold only found it in print in a 98 UK dictionary,
        I'd  certainly heard it long before that - maybe even before
        I left in 65, though it's a bit "grown up" and not the sort of
        figure of speech one would expect from a pre-teen.