World Wide Words -- 4 Nov 00
Michael Quinion
editor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Sat Nov 4 08:06:45 UTC 2000
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 212 Saturday 4 November 2000
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Contents
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1. Notes and comments.
2. Topical Words: Passenger.
3. Weird Words: Sarcophagus.
4. Q & A: Whopper-jawed, Pop one's clogs, Nitty-gritty.
5. Administration: How to join and leave the list, Copyright.
1. Notes and comments
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TUB-THUMPING Many thanks to everybody who replied to my query last
week about the meaning of the phrase in the US. Consensus was not
achieved, however, with many claiming never to have hear it, and
others finding it to be neutral if not actually positive. It seems
to be in a in much the same situation as 'Bible-thumping', which
some dictionaries regard as pejorative, others not.
HARK THE HERALD ANGELS SING In the Weird Words piece on 'welkin'
last week I should have mentioned that the author of this famous
carol was Charles Wesley.
2. Topical Words: Passenger
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The headline in the _Daily Telegraph_ summed up the troubles on
British railways: "Passengers face months of delays". This came the
day after Railtrack closed the West Coast main line south of
Glasgow for three days to check for faults following a fatal crash,
and only three days before virtually the whole system was shut down
for a complete day for repairs.
The railways have suffered much opprobrium since the winter day in
1991 when an unwise employee of the then British Rail named Terry
Worrall blamed delays on the fact that "the wrong kind of snow" had
fallen. I need not add to their troubles. But the headline did lead
to momentary musings on the etymological collision between 'delay'
and 'passenger'.
That's because the essence of the word, so far as its history is
concerned, is its temporariness. A 'passenger' is somebody who
passes, from the Old French adjective 'passager', fleeting or
transitory. This sense survives in the name of the passenger-
pigeon, that archetypal bird of passage that flew great distances
in search of food; it even survives the bird itself, driven into
extinction nearly a century ago.
The first sense of the word in English was that of a traveller on
foot, a wayfarer. As recently as 1828, Sir Walter Scott wrote, in
_The Fair Maid of Perth_: "She ... reached the wynd by the narrow
lanes... Even these comparatively lonely passages were now astir
with passengers". But the word had moved on by then - Walter
Scott's use was archaic and outside historical novels you had to
make clear what you meant by amending it to 'foot-passenger'. The
standard sense was by that date the one we use now: somebody who
had paid money to be conveyed by ship, later also by road; very
soon travel by train would be added to the list.
The word often has a passive connotation - a passenger "is carried
in some vessel or vehicle", as one of my dictionaries puts it - so
it's hardly surprising that it began to be applied to somebody who
contributes nothing to an enterprise. This usage is actually quite
old: it was first recorded only 24 years after Sir Walter Scott
perpetuated its archaic sense. It derives from the sport of rowing
at the ancient English universities: a passenger was a man who did
little or nothing to help the boat along, who had to be carried by
the efforts of the other rowers. (And if you define a passenger as
somebody who "doesn't pull his weight", as I was about to before
looking it up, you are making two references to rowing, as that
idiom comes from the same source.)
Perhaps it was this negative aspect to the word that caused the
newly-privatised rail companies some five years ago to ordain that
their passengers would in future be called customers. Or perhaps it
was a bit of subtle human-resources psychology aimed at the staff,
in the hope that customers might gain more respect than passengers
ever did. That the _Telegraph_ used 'passenger' in its headline
confirms this was one railway usage that didn't stick.
3. Weird Words: Sarcophagus
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A stone coffin, typically adorned with a sculpture or inscription.
This sounds innocuous enough until you start to explore its word
origins, when it takes on the aspect of a third-rate horror story.
It is from Greek 'sark-', flesh, plus '-phagos', eating. Flesh-
eating stone? The first reference in English to the word is from a
translation of the works of the Roman writer Pliny the Elder, who
said that the Greeks believed that a type of limestone quarried
from an area near Troy would dissolve flesh and so was suitable for
making coffins. Pliny is not the most reliable of reporters (he
also mentioned dog-headed people and elephants who wrote Greek) and
it's more probable that the Greek name was a figurative reference
to the speed by which the bodies of those interred in porous
limestone coffins decayed to bones.
4. Q&A
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[Send your queries to <qa at worldwidewords.org>. All messages will be
acknowledged, but I can't guarantee to reply, as time is limited.
If I can, a response will appear here and on the Words Web site.]
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Q. A co-worker is driving me nuts. He insists there is a word,
'whopper-jawed', and it means askew. I have heard of the term, but
when I looked in a dictionary, found nothing. We've looked in about
14 or 15 dictionaries (on line and traditional books), yet nothing!
Am I nuts? Is this a regional term? Slang? [Michael Owens, USA]
A. You are not going crazy, and it's not slang, though it is an
informal US term that's not that widely known and certainly doesn't
appear in many reference works. One problem in finding it is that
it often goes around under an alias, appearing as 'wapper-jawed' or
'whompsey-jawed', and also seems to be related to the even rarer
'lopper-jawed', which the _Dictionary of American Regional English_
records from 1916.
But neither of the two dictionaries in which it appears agree with
your friend's meaning, one giving no clear definition, the other,
which records it as 'wapperjawed', saying it means having a
projecting lower jaw. So I turned to the experts on the American
Dialect Society mailing list, who confirmed that the term is known
and still occasionally used in the US and does indeed usually mean
askew.
Its origin seems to be in the English dialect verb 'wapper',
meaning to blink the eyes, or perhaps to move tremulously, which
may come from the Dutch 'wapperen', to swing, oscillate, or waver.
A more common usage at one time was in 'wapper-eyed', which meant
to have sore eyes, or eyes that continually shifted from side to
side, or were unsteady or blinked a lot.
There's an example from the East Anglian dialect in the _Oxford
English Dictionary_ from 1825 that suggests it once meant a wry
mouth or a warped jaw. A similar idea is in a sentence recorded
from 1848: "Fancy an heir that a father had seen born well featured
and fair, turning suddenly ... squint-eyed, hair-lipped, wapper-
jawed" ('hair' here may be a misprint for 'hare'). Taking these
with all the other early examples, it seems that 'wapper' meant
something that was deformed or distorted, for which 'askew' is as
good a word as any. Quite how the more specific term 'wapper-jawed'
took on the broader sense of 'wapper' is unknown, as there are very
few examples of its use in print at any time.
It's easy to see that one of these usages could over time have
evolved into the sense of having a projecting jaw; that sense is
first recorded - in the Century Dictionary - in 1891, but it has
also been found in a letter of Mark Twain's dated December 1863:
"He is a long-legged, bull-headed, whopper-jawed, constructionary
monomaniac", where it seems to have the meaning of somebody
pugnacious, who sticks his jaw out spoiling for a fight. No doubt
it was helped along by a mental association with 'whopper',
something especially large (whose origin is not known, but which
seems to be linked with 'wap' or 'whop', meaning to strike a heavy
blow). The 'lopper-jawed' spelling seems to be a corruption.
Altogether, an interesting phrase, one that has survived in the
spoken language for generations without ever attracting much
attention from dictionary makers.
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Q. Where does the phrase 'to pop one's clogs' come from? And why
does it mean 'to die'! [James Morrison]
A. It is mainly a British English slang expression, dating, so far
as I can gather, only from the 1970s. It seems to have either
originated in - or been popularised by - television presenters and
disc jockeys who were looking for street cred.
The verb 'to pop' here is pretty certainly the old term for pawning
goods. Clogs were the traditional workers' footwear in several
trades in the industrial towns and cities of midlands and northern
Britain, for women as well as men, now rarely seen but at one time
almost an icon of working class life. The sound of workers' clogs
on cobbled streets at the end of a shift has been likened to
thunder. The implication is that someone would only want to pawn
his clogs when he had no further need for them, that is, when he
was about to die.
But, as I say, it seems to be pseudo-archaic form, unrecorded from
times when workers did usually wear clogs to work and did often
pawn small items each week to tide them over cash shortages. It
belongs in that large group of euphemisms for dying that includes
'kick the bucket' and 'buy the farm'. But the difference is that it
appeared without any link to its ostensible origins.
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Q. Any ideas on the origins of the expression 'nitty-gritty'? I
heard today a rather horrible suggestion that it referred to the
debris left in the bottom of slave ships after their voyages, once
the slaves remaining alive had been removed. [Helen Norris]
A. This belongs in the same line of folklore which holds that a
'picnic' was a slave lynching party. There is a very slight link,
in that 'nitty-gritty' was indeed originally a Black American
English expression. However, it dates only from the 1950s.
John Lighter, in the _Random House Historical Dictionary of
American Slang_, records the first example from 1956: "You'll find
nobody comes down to the nitty-gritty when it calls for namin'
things for what they are". As it is here fully formed, and has the
now customary sense of the fundamental issues or most important
aspects of some situation, it had by then probably already been in
use for some while. But it is inconceivable that it should have
been around since slave-ship days without somebody writing it down.
Its origins are elusive. The most usual explanation is that it is a
reduplication - using the same mechanism that has given us 'willy-
nilly', 'namby-pamby' and 'itsy-bitsy' - of the standard English
word 'gritty'. This has the literal sense of containing or being
covered with grit, but figuratively means showing courage and
resolve, so the link is plausible.
5. Administration
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