World Wide Words -- 19 Aug 00
Michael Quinion
words at QUINION.COM
Sat Aug 19 07:44:41 UTC 2000
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 201 Saturday 19 August 2000
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Sent weekly to more than 8,900 subscribers in at least 97 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion ISSN 1470-1448 Thornbury, Bristol, UK
Web: <http://www.quinion.com/words/> E-mail: <words at quinion.com>
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Contents
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1. Notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Haptic.
3. In Brief: WAPathy.
4. Q & A: Holy smoke, Cool, Deadhead.
5. Beyond Words.
6. Administration: How to leave the list, Copyright.
1. Notes and comments
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BILLY-O Several American subscribers pointed to the expressions
'billy hell', 'billy-be-damned', and giving somebody 'all Billy
hell' and other examples where 'Billy' has been used as a euphemism
for the devil, suggesting that 'billy-o' may have a similar origin.
ADDRESSES If you are responding to this newsletter, or making some
general enquiry, please use the <words at quinion.com> address. Use
<qa at quinion.com> only if you are asking a question on language that
may appear in a future Q&A column. And if anybody still has an old
address on file at quinion.demon.co.uk, or at clever.net, do please
delete them, as those address are now extinct.
2. Weird Words: Haptic
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Of, or relating to, the sense of touch or tactile sensations.
This is a good example of a relatively unusual scientific word that
in recent years has become more widely known through a specific
use. It appeared near the end of the nineteenth century, at first
as a medical term. It was coined from the Greek 'haptikos', able to
sense or touch, which derives from the verb 'hapteln', to fasten.
It's closely related to the rare English prefix 'hapto-', as in
'haptotropism' for the reflex action in plants such as honeysuckle
or bindweed that causes them to twist around objects they touch.
In the past decade or so, 'haptic' has become more widely used in
the world of immersive virtual-reality computer systems by those
who design techniques and tools that reproduce the sense of touch.
Joysticks and the like are now being designed so that they feed
tactile information back to the user about the way the system is
functioning. An object that has been visualised on a computer may
soon be capable of being felt as well as seen. Such tools are
commonly known in the business as 'haptic devices'.
3. In Brief
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WAPATHY The early promise of WAP-enabled mobile phones (see
<http://www.quinion.com/words/turnsofphrase/tp-wap1.htm>) is
already looking like over-hyped dot.com optimism. Slow connections,
limited information and bulky phones are holding back sales and
usage and leaving potential subscribers apathetic (hence WAPathy).
4. Q&A
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[Send queries to <qa at quinion.com>. Messages will be acknowledged,
but I can't guarantee to reply, as time is limited. If I can do so,
a response will appear both here and on the WWWords Web site.]
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Q. I'm interested in the history of the word 'cool' as a slang
word. Apparently it was first used in the musical _West Side Story_
by Bernstein. Is this true? Can you enlighten me any further?
[Stephanie Matthews]
A. 'Cool' has had several meanings, nearly all of them older than
_West Side Story_. Its history is more than a little complicated,
because several of its senses overlap, and it's hard to be sure
when the rather ill-defined modern slang term came into the
language. Also, it's not always possible to understand how it was
being used in some older examples.
One slang sense is "controlled, cautious or discreet", which was
fashionable in the early 1950s in the phrase 'stay cool'. This is
first recorded near the end of the nineteenth century, but it's
really a subtle transformation of a standard English form that goes
back to Beowulf, in a rather literary metaphor for being unexcited,
calm or dispassionate. This turned up in the eighteenth century in
the slangy expression 'cool as a cucumber' that is still with us,
and in the mainstream language as 'keeping a cool head' - being
unemotional or in total command of oneself.
Some researchers suggest that at about the same time a second sense
grew out of this standard English meaning, to refer to something
that was superlative, exciting or enjoyable (or less strongly,
something merely satisfactory or acceptable). The older English
meaning was sometimes rather negative, since to be unemotional and
in control might imply you were also withdrawn or depressed,
lacking warmth, or unenthusiastic (as in someone getting "a cool
reception"). Black American English, it is suggested, could have
turned this on its head to make something 'cool' its very opposite.
If this is true, it would be the first example of a type of slang
construction common in modern American Black English - for example
'bad' or 'wicked'. This use of 'cool' only really caught on in the
1930s, but is still common (and is well known, for example, among
young people in Britain as well as America, even though a few now
insist on spelling it 'kewl').
This overlaps somewhat with another slang sense, recorded from the
beginning of the nineteenth century, that referred to somebody who
was assured, audacious or impudent. This turned up in phrases like
'a cool customer' or 'a cool fish' and is also recorded in American
English from the 1840s onwards. Yet a fourth sense, of something
sophisticated or fashionable, is first recorded from the middle
1940s but is probably rather older. (There are other senses, but
let's not make an already complicated story even more difficult to
understand.)
Elements of all these ideas came together in the jazz world in the
1940s, especially in 'cool jazz' - for example Charlie Parker's
_Cool Blues_ of 1947; jazz aficionados used the term to distinguish
this style from the 'hot jazz' then in vogue, but also with
undertones of at least some of these earlier meanings. It's with
jazz that the slang term was most closely associated and out of
which it became more widely known throughout the English-speaking
world. In the fifties 'cool' could variously mean restrained,
relaxed, laid-back, detached, cerebral, stylish, excellent, or
other affirmative things. It became the keyword of the Beat
generation and in the 1960s it moved into teen slang - where it has
largely stayed.
What is surprising about 'cool' is how long it has been around.
Even if you ignore its pre-history, it has stayed in fashion for 50
years or more, a long time for a slang term. And it has remained
slang, and not moved into the mainstream. Today it's just as
commonly encountered as it was in the fifties and sixties. Now
that's cool ...
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Q. I thought the question was an easy one - where does the term
'holy smoke' come from? It may be an Americanism because I have
heard it all my life. Any ideas? [Lee Daniel Quinn, USA]
A. A good question, but - as it turns out - one difficult to
answer. The expression, as a exclamation, dates from the latter
part of the nineteenth century. The first reference in the _Oxford
English Dictionary_ is in a book by Rudyard Kipling and his
American agent Charles Balestier, _The Naulahka_, published in
1892. I've found several other references at about the same period,
all from American works, so it does seem to be of American origin.
I have come across a couple of earlier references, one in a poem by
Jean Ingelow from the 1860s:
She never loved me since I went with thee
To sacrifice among the hills; she smelt
The holy smoke, and could no more divine
Till the new moon.
and the OED has this from Sir John Beaumont, dated about 1627: "Who
lift to God for us the holy smoke / Of fervent prayers". Each seems
to have been created out of whole cloth for the immediate purpose
and I can't trace any continuity of usage between them, nor to the
later exclamation.
It seems more likely that 'holy smoke' was invented anew as a mock-
religious exclamation and mild oath on the model of the older 'holy
Moses' (from the 1850s), and 'holy terror' and 'Holy Joe' (both
from the 1880s). In turn these probably served as the model for
others of similar type that came later, such as 'holy cow' from the
early 1940s.
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Q. Where did the truckers' term, running 'deadhead', with no load,
come from? [John Richardson]
A. Back in the early part of the nineteenth century the term 'dead
head' (at first two words) was a theatrical term for a person who
had been admitted without charge, perhaps because they had
performed some service such as putting up a poster advertising the
event. It was an obvious enough formation, as they were a dead
weight, not contributing to the expenses of the production (and, as
I can attest from experience, such patrons are often less
responsive than the paying customers; a house full of 'paper' can
be very hard to play to).
The first example known is from a publication called 'The Spirit of
the Times' of January 1841: "The house on Tuesday was filled as far
as $300 could fill, barring 'the dead heads'". The same idea turns
up in the usual term of the time for a sponger or loafer, for
example, somebody who sat by the stove in a tavern, enjoying the
warmth without buying a drink. The verb 'to dead head' followed
soon afterwards.
>From the 1850s, the usage was extended to the idea of a person who
travelled on some vehicle - a train or steamboat, say - without
paying, either on a complimentary basis or just free-loading. It
could also refer to somebody accompanying a military unit who was a
non-combatant or a camp-follower.
This idea had been extended by the end of the nineteenth century to
refer to a vehicle (at first usually a train) that was travelling
without cargo or passengers, a trip that - like a non-paying member
of an audience - was making no contribution to revenue. Later still
it shifted slightly to refer to a road vehicle similarly making a
journey without any load.
You might think that the theatrical term had come from the idea of
a dead flower head, or the action of 'deadheading' one. But this is
- perhaps surprisingly - a very modern form, not recorded before
the 1950s. Similarly, the term was applied to a dull or lazy
person, one who contributes nothing to an enterprise, only in the
early years of the twentieth century, well after the theatrical and
transport senses had become well established.
'Deadhead', for a loyal fan of the long-running musical group _The
Grateful Dead_ is a self-deprecating term reflecting this last
usage; it would be nice to think there was a conscious link between
it and the original theatrical sense.
5. Beyond Words
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On the subject of missing apostrophes, have you seen the porno spam
e-mail message that has been going around, with the subject line of
"BRITNEY SPEARS BREASTS!"? Truly painful, in at least two senses.
6. Administration
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