World Wide Words -- 18 Aug 00

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 249          Saturday 18 August 2001
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Contents
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1. Weird Words: Vaccary.
2. Q & A: For appearance's sake, Heat.
3. Subscription commands and copyright notice.


1. Weird Words: Vaccary  /'vak at rI/
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A cow pasture.

You won't find this in any modern dictionary except the largest, as
it has quite gone out of use except when speaking of historical
matters. The word didn't describe some peasant's patch where one
cow was kept for her milk, but larger-scale pasturage where cattle
were kept and bred and as a source of working oxen.

The word is usually linked to grazing land in the moors and valleys
of the Pennines in Yorkshire and Lancashire. In the thirteenth
century numbers of vaccaries were carved out of the old private
hunting chases of the nobility, who created them in an attempt to
get some revenue back from their holdings. Vaccaries were small-
scale commercial cattle farms - in places, as around Pendle (more
famous for its witches), you can still see the big stone-slab walls
that kept the cattle enclosed.

The word comes from the mediaeval Latin 'vaccaria', derived from
'vacca', a cow. 'Vaccinate' is closely linked, since that derives
from the Latin 'vaccinus', of or from a cow, as cow-pox serum was
used to protect people against smallpox. Among other related words
is 'vaquero', a cowboy, from Spanish 'vaca', a cow.


2. Q&A
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Q. I am currently reading _Double Whammy_ by Carl Hiaasen, and he
uses the phrase 'for appearance' sake'. He seems to be trying to
write as he speaks by missing the final 's' off 'appearance's', but
I am not happy with a word which ends with an apostrophe. I can't
think of any others, except with a plural possessive or another
possessive where the possessor ends with an 's'. What would you do?
[Rob Barnes, Warwickshire, UK]

A. This is a tricky one. I'm not surprised you're puzzled.

Expressions like this are indeed possessives. The formal rule in
such cases, as always, is to mark the possessive with an apostrophe
plus 's' (or 's' plus apostrophe if plural, or just an apostrophe
alone if the word already ends with an 's'). So the phrase strictly
ought to be 'for appearance's sake' (or 'for appearances' sake').
That's the way a lot of people say it and write it - I do, for
example, and so do you, it would seem.

However, possessives before 'sake' are a special case for two
reasons. One is the initial letter 's' on 'sake', which influences
the possessive ending of the preceding word. The other is that
there are a lot of fixed phrases using the word that have settled
on a certain form out of habit. Some of them, like 'for God's sake'
or 'for Pete's sake' cause no difficulty - the usual possessive
ending is used. The problems arise when longer words appear,
especially in idioms (for example, 'conscience' or 'convenience'),
and doubly so when such words already end in 's', as with
'goodness'.

In phrases like this, it has become common to modify the strict
rule. It is most usual to leave off the 's', because of the
collision between it and the initial letter of 'sake', especially
if the 's' of the possessive is usually not sounded in speech - so
you may see 'for conscience' sake', for example. It's not correct
according to the rules, but it is considered to be a conventional
usage. On this basis, Carl Hiaasen was correct to write 'for
appearance' sake', even though it looks a little weird.

The apostrophe is frequently left off as well: 'for convenience
sake', 'for goodness sake'. Here, though, I have to enter a
cautionary note. The evidence suggests that the rules are slightly
different in British and American English. In British English, we
are ready to leave off both 's' and the apostrophe in these
idiomatic phrases. This is regarded as not quite the thing in
American English, where the presence of at least an apostrophe is
usually required. Another, way to handle the problem is to finesse
it altogether by inverting your phrase, so saying it as 'for the
sake of appearance', where the 'of' is the marker for the
possessive.

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Q. Wandered to your wonderful site while looking for the derivation
of the word 'heat', as it applies to racing terminology (as in
"the third heat"). [Steve Waclo]

A. We're so familiar with the use of 'heat' in that way that few
people ever stop, as you have done, to wonder where it comes from.
I didn't know either, and had to look it up.

It seems, from the historical record laid out in the big _Oxford
English Dictionary_ (without which few such questions could ever
reach a resolution), that it is a special application of the word
'heat' that refers to the result of physical exertion.

>From the fourteenth century on, it could be applied to a single
burst of intense physical activity of any sort, often in the phrase
'at a heat', at one go, in one continuous operation (as late as
1855, John Lothrop Motley wrote in his book _The Rise of the Dutch
Republic_: "On one occasion he hanged twenty heretics, including a
minister, at a single heat"). By the seventeenth century, it was
used specifically for what we would now call a warm-up, especially
a brief canter by a horse just before a race: the diarist John
Evelyn used it that way in 1670: "The jockeys breathing their fine
barbs and racers, and giving them their heats".

It seems that the two ideas came together so that 'heat' started to
refer to a horse race, particularly to one episode of a larger
contest. The first examples we known about date from the middle of
the seventeenth century. In 1676, for example, the _London Gazette_
announced that "The second Plate will be Run for on the same Moor,
by three Heats".

Later the meaning was extended to refer to a single part of many
types of contest. In broadening the sense, and with the passage of
time, a direct mental link to the heat of exertion has been lost.


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