World Wide Words -- 11 Nov 00
Michael Quinion
editor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Sat Nov 11 08:10:28 UTC 2000
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 212 Saturday 11 November 2000
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sent weekly to more than 9,750 subscribers in at least 99 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion ISSN 1470-1448 Thornbury, Bristol, UK
<http://www.worldwidewords.org> Mail: <editor at worldwidewords.org>
-------------------------------------------------------------------
If you want to leave the list, please do not reply to this message.
Instead see the instructions at the very end of this newsletter.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Contents
--------
1. Feedback.
2. Turns of Phrase: Datacasting.
3. Weird Words: Codswallop.
4. Topical Words: Vote.
5. Q & A: One fell swoop.
6. Beyond Words.
7. Administration: How to join and leave the list, Copyright.
1. Feedback
-------------------------------------------------------------------
PASSENGER It seems that 'passenger' in the sense of a pedestrian
was not archaic when Walter Scott used it in 1828, as I said in the
Topical Words piece last week; Robert Greaves wrote from Indonesia
to point out several examples in the works of Charles Dickens, of
which this one from _David Copperfield_, published 1849-50, is
typical: "Greatly to the astonishment of the passengers in the
street ... the good soul was obliged to stop and embrace me on the
spot, with many protestations of her unalterable love". But in the
same book, Dickens also uses the word to mean a person travelling
by stage-coach. Clearly the transition was later than I thought.
POP ONE'S CLOGS Last week's Q&A piece immediately produced a
rebuttal from Desmond Quirke, who clearly remembers it being used
in his youth 50 years ago in Boston Spa: "It was not jokey or arch,
but a normal way of referring to death without emotional overtones
- especially one's own death".
WHOPPER-JAWED An anonymous AOL subscriber wrote following last
week's Q&A piece: "One place that the term 'whopper-jawed' is used
is in the cat fancy, because this is a fairly common defect in
Persian cats. It refers to one whose jaw is askew or projects so
that the lower teeth are visible when the mouth is closed". Hugh
Yeats wrote: "I had always heard the phrase as 'whomper-jawed',
meaning out of kilter or crooked or out of line. I am from Oklahoma
and have not heard the expression since about the 30's or 40's".
Dick Kovar said: "My late Texas father-in-law, born around the turn
of the last century, used 'whompey-jawed' (my phonetic; he never
wrote it down) to mean anything ill-made or out of order, not just
a person". Gary Mason wrote: The term was a well known expression
when I grew up in the '40s and 50's in a rural town on the edge of
the Missouri Ozarks. The most common way I remember it being used
was: "I'll knock you 'whopper-jawed' if you don't...". Pete Saussy
adds: "'whoppyjawed' (never seen it written) is still in use here
in the south-east US (South Carolina; more common in the upstate
amongst descendants of Scots-Irish settlers) referring to something
being out of alignment or crooked, such as a picture on a wall".
NITTY-GRITTY Following last week's Q&A piece on this phrase, J D
Hamilton wrote: "I am 81 years old and I have been hearing the
words 'nitty gritty' since early childhood in western Canada. It
was always 'down to the nitty gritty' or close to bedrock and meant
facing reality and coping with it". This is interesting, since it
contradicts the usual view that it derives from 1950s black usage.
In 1974, a writer in _American Speech_, the journal of the American
Dialect Society, also claimed memory of the term from the 1920s,
but in the southern states of the US. I've added some more
information to the archived copy of the piece, which is on the
Words site at <http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-nit2.htm>.
2. Turns of Phrase: Datacasting
-------------------------------------------------------------------
This term has been visible in the technical literature since about
1995, but is only now starting to become known to non-specialists
(_The New York Times_ on 2 November had a headline "Silicon Valley
says datacasting is hot") and as yet seems not to have been listed
in any general dictionary. It's an obvious enough blend of 'data'
and 'broadcasting', and it's a cover-all term for the transmission
of various kinds of data as a secondary service on digital
broadcasting networks. The networks can be terrestrial, satellite
or cable, and the data can be information, interactive multimedia
(including video), or Internet downloads. Although European
broadcasters have been active in digital television and radio
broadcasting for some years, it is doubtful whether the term is any
better known in Europe than in the US.
The new venture will expand WorldSpace broadcasts to include
datacasting, bringing Internet downloads to millions of people in
Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America.
[_Edupage_, Oct. 2000]
For other elements, such as movie clips, it might mean getting
users' permission to datacast video automatically into their hard
drive caches - a variant on the old PointCast 'push' model.
[_Telephony_, Mar. 2000]
3. Weird Words: Codswallop
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Nonsense.
This mainly British colloquial expression is recorded only from the
1960s, but is certainly older. Its origin is uncertain. Some argue
it may be from 'cods', a nineteenth-century term for the testicles.
It is also suggested that 'wallop' may be connected with the
dialect term meaning to chatter or scold (not with the word meaning
a heavy blow).
One explanation has it that it refers to the late Hiram Codd, who -
despite his archetypally American first name - was British, born in
Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk in 1838. He spent his life working in
the soft drinks business. In the 1870s, he designed and patented a
method of sealing a glass bottle by means of a ball in its neck,
which the pressure of the gas in the fizzy drink forced against a
rubber washer. Making the bottle was a technical challenge, since
the ball necessarily had to be larger than the diameter of the
neck. It was only in 1876, when he teamed up with a Yorkshire glass
blower named Ben Rylands, that the answer was found. The Codd
bottle was an immediate success; surviving examples are now highly
collectable. You opened them by pushing the ball into the neck, and
openers in the shape of short, thin cylinders were supplied for the
purpose. One unexpected problem was that children smashed the
bottles to use the glass balls as marbles.
The suggestion is that drinkers who preferred their tipple to have
alcohol in it were dismissive of Mr Codd's soft drinks. As beer was
often called 'wallop', they referred sneeringly to the fizzy drink
as 'Codd's wallop', and the resulting word later spread its meaning
to refer to anything considered to be rubbish.
This story reeks of the anecdotal and fanciful approach to word
history that has been called folk etymology. As one writer has put
it, it seems rather too neat an explanation to be true. But
nobody's come up with anything better.
4. Topical Words: Vote
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Each to their own priorities. While the thoughts of others on the
unprecedented events in the American presidential election turn to
matters of democratic representation, electoral colleges, and the
like, mine sent me to the dictionary to look up 'vote'.
If you look at its history, a 'vote' is an expression of a wish or
desire, since it derives from Latin 'votum' that comes from the
verb 'vovere' with that sense. It could also mean to promise
something faithfully, and so is the origin also of our 'vow'. The
first recorded use of 'vote' in English - in the sixteenth century
- definitely had the latter sense: a solemn promise or undertaking.
Only a little later it could also mean a prayer or intercession,
which must be echo the feelings of a lot of people in the US this
weekend, not least Messrs Gore and Bush.
In this sense, it's closely allied to another English word from the
same Latin source: 'votive'. A votive offering was one made to the
gods in fulfilment of a vow. The word survives in the 'votive Mass'
of the Catholic Church, one celebrated for a special purpose or
occasion by request of the celebrant.
A 'votary' is a person dedicated to a cause, such as a monk or nun
who has made vows of dedication to religious service. By the time
of Shakespeare, this had weakened in sense merely to describe a
devoted follower or adherent, so that in _Two Gentlemen of Verona_
the Duke of Milan is able to tell Proteus "You are already Love's
firm votary". Its female equivalent was 'votaress', sometimes
'voteress', which turns up in _A Midsummer Night's Dream_. (In this
infinitely more gender-sensitive age, I'd like to be a spectator if
someone ever tried to introduce 'voteress' for a female voter.)
It was a century and a half before those plays were written, about
1460, that 'vote' had shifted its sense to mean an expression of
one's opinion or choice on a matter under discussion; the verb 'to
vote' in its modern sense was introduced as late as 1552.
It was rather later that the word took on pejorative overtones as a
result of underhand electoral practices. Tennyson wrote that "When
the rotten hustings shake / In another month to his brazen lies, A
wretched vote may be gain'd". By the time we get to W S Gilbert's
"I always voted at my party's call, and I never thought of thinking
for myself at all" and Ambrose Bierce's definition of it as "The
instrument and symbol of a freeman's power to make a fool of
himself and a wreck of his country", the penumbra of cynicism
around everything political had reached its full modern extent.
5. Q&A
-------------------------------------------------------------------
[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.]
-----------
Q. I have always wondered about the expression 'one fell swoop'.
What can you tell me about it? [Joe Davis; Myrna Finnell]
A. The phrase is one of those fixed expressions that we hardly
think about most of the time. It means all at once, suddenly. It's
been around in the language for at least 400 years. Shakespeare is
recorded as using it first, in _Macbeth_: when Macduff hears that
his family has been murdered, he says in disbelief: "All my pretty
ones? / Did you say all? O hell-kite! All? / What, all my pretty
chickens and their dam / At one fell swoop?"
The image that Shakespeare's audience would have brought to mind at
once was a falcon plummeting out of the sky to snatch its prey
(like the kite for example, which was a bird of prey long before it
became an aerial device). You might guess that 'fell' has something
to do with 'fall', but it hasn't. It actually means some thing of
terrible evil or deadly ferocity. We now never see it outside this
fixed phrase (or perhaps only occasionally in poetic use) but once
it was a common word in its own right. One of its relatives is
still about: 'felon', which comes from the same Old French source,
'fel', evil. Originally a felon was a cruel or wicked person; only
later did the word mean a person who commits a serious crime.
This often gets Spoonerised to 'one swell foop'; these days, it
makes almost as much sense.
5. Beyond Words
-------------------------------------------------------------------
This month's _Ansible_ science-fiction newsletter from the totally
inimitable David Langford (see http://www.ansible.co.uk/) has this
gem: "Dept of Upelevatoring Insights. Andrew Wheeler of the (US) SF
Book Club confides: 'When we saw the manuscript of Neil Gaiman's
_Neverwhere_, it had obviously been the victim of a perfunctory
search-and-replace Americanization, since characters were always
saying things "apartmently".'"
6 Administration
-------------------------------------------------------------------
* To leave the list, send the message SIGNOFF WORLDWIDEWORDS to
the list server address <listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org>.
The subject line of your message will be ignored. To join the
list, instead send the message SUBSCRIBE WORLDWIDEWORDS. For a
complete list of commands, send INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS.
* WORLD WIDE WORDS is copyright (c) Michael B Quinion 2000. You
may reproduce this mailing in whole or in part in other free
media provided that you acknowledge the source and quote the
Web address of <http://www.worldwidewords.org>.
===================================================================
More information about the WorldWideWords
mailing list