World Wide Words -- 08 Dec 01
Michael Quinion
editor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Sat Dec 8 08:50:33 UTC 2001
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 266 Saturday 8 December 2001
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Sent each Saturday to 13,000+ subscribers in at least 113 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
<http://www.worldwidewords.org> Mail: <editor at worldwidewords.org>
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This newsletter is best viewed in a monospaced font.
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Mulligrubs.
3. Out There: Common Errors in English.
4. Turns of Phrase: Convivium.
5. Q&A: Sugar, Windy City.
6. Over To You.
7. Subscription commands.
8. Contact addresses.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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GUSSIED UP Many subscribers pointed out that the American tennis
player "Gorgeous Gussie" Moran is best remembered for appearing at
Wimbledon in 1949 wearing frilly panties, which caused considerable
interest and controversy. Could she possibly have been the source
of the phrase? It sounds possible, but alas, it seems to be a false
trail, an example of folk etymology (though she may have been an
influence on the development or popularity of the phrase).
MISPLACED MODIFIERS And still they come in. Some are new, while
some are so old they have whiskers on them. Tim Nott, however, has
beaten everyone in the historical stakes, having found this speech
by a milk-woman from Isaak Walton's The Compleat Angler of 1653:
"And my Maudlin shall sing you one of her best ballads; for she and
I both love all anglers, they be such honest, civil, quiet men. In
the meantime will you drink a draught of red cow's milk?"
2. Weird Words: Mulligrubs /'mVlIgrVbz/
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A state of depression or low spirits.
It's not altogether certain where this strange-looking word comes
from. The first spelling, which appears at the end of the sixteenth
century, is "mulliegrums". That may be a fanciful form of the older
"megrims" for a headache, an English contortion of the French
"migraine". By the sixteenth century "megrims" could refer to
somebody suffering from low spirits, the same sense as "mulligrubs"
then had. Later, "mulligrubs" could be used humorously for an
attack of colic or stomach-ache. You will find it only in the most
comprehensive of modern dictionaries, as it is now almost defunct
outside some British dialects. That's a pity. Here's a late example,
dated 1898, from Brann The Iconoclast by William Cowper Brann: "It
is easy enough to say that a pessimist is a person afflicted with
an incurable case of mulligrubs - one whom nothing in all earth or
Heaven or Hades pleases; one who usually deserves nothing, yet
grumbles if he gets it".
3. Out There: Common Errors in English
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This site has been developed by Paul Brians, a professor of English
at Washington State University. His site contains several hundred
notes on common errors and confusions in the language. One may
dispute some (to write "eighteen hundreds" rather than "nineteenth
century" is not necessarily an indication that you are "weak in
math and history alike", more that you have recognised that readers
do get confused about the difference between, say, "seventeenth
century" and "seventeen hundreds"), but the site contains a lot of
interesting information, including a section on non-errors ("Those
usages people keep telling you are wrong but which are actually
standard in English"). Follow the link to the errors section from
the home page at <http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/index.html>.
4. Turns of Phrase: Convivium
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Though English has "convivial", which is based on the Latin
"convivium" for a feast, the latter word has not itself been in the
language until recently. It started to appear in the late 1990s in
Britain and other parts of the English-speaking world to refer to
local groups or chapters - usually named in the plural as
"convivia" - set up by the Slow Food movement. This was formed in
1989 - as a result of an Italian initiative - as a reaction against
the increasing globalisation and standardisation of food,
especially fast food (hence its name). One of its aims is the
preservation, encouragement, and promotion of local specialities,
for example in cheeses, traditional ales, breeds of animals, and
varieties of fruits and vegetables. A key theme is to link together
those who enjoy good food with the environmentalists who want to
preserve and support local, small-scale producers, especially those
using organic farming methods. Its emblem is the snail, seen as a
symbol both of gastronomic delight and of 'slowness'.
Each convivium has a leader who is responsible for organising food
and wine events, tasting workshops and who generally raises the
awareness of small local producers.
[Independent, July 2001]
Funding and support for these projects comes from local convivia
and producers as well as the regional authorities - the ideal of
community lies at the heart of the Slow movement.
[Observer Food Monthly, Nov. 2001]
5. Q&A
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Q. Why do we pronounce the words "sugar" and "sure" as though they
began with the letters "sh"? [Libby Hall, temporarily of Stuttgart,
Germany]
A. The early history of "sugar" is obscure, especially the way it
was pronounced. But variations in the way it was spelled in old
documents suggest strongly that the "u" was said as a diphthong,
/ju:/, very much the way we now say the word "you", and that the
initial "s" was said like that, not as "sh". Sometime in the Middle
English period the initial letters "su" move to the pronunciation
they now have.
If you relax the mouth and tongue somewhat when you are saying the
older form, your pronunciation shifts to the modern one, as you'll
realise if you try out the two sounds in turn; the modern version
is actually rather easier for slack-jawed English speakers to say.
The same change happened with other words, such as "sure", and also
to those in which the sound occurred in the middle, such as
"pressure" and "nation". By the time this shift in pronunciation
was taking place, the spelling of the words had already become
fixed, so the way they're now written conflicts with the way
they're said. But that's only too common in modern English!
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Q. I've heard three explanations for the term "Windy City" as an
epithet for Chicago, Illinois: the common assumption that it refers
to the winds gusting through the city (understandable to anyone
who's been there); the boasting of Chicagoans to the rest of
America about the glories of their rebuilt city after the Great
Fire; and the blustering of Chicago politicians to the city's
inhabitants. My guess is that the first could easily be invention
after the fact, while the last is too local to account for the
term's familiarity elsewhere. What do your sources tell you? [John
Branch]
A. It is indeed often said that the word "windy" in the name refers
to the long-winded and boastful speech of Chicago politicians.
The story you will commonly find is that it dates to shortly before
the great World's Columbian Exhibition of 1893. Chicago was putting
forward its claim with great verve and bombast. This really got up
the nose of people in New York, the city competing with Chicago to
host the exhibition. Animosity got so bad that Charles A Dana,
editor of the New York Sun, wrote an editorial telling New Yorkers
to pay no attention to the "nonsensical claims of that windy city.
Its people could not hold a world's fair even if they won it". The
history books tell us that Chicago did win it and did hold it (and
even made a profit from it). Books also tell us that the nickname
of "Windy City" dates from that editorial.
This story is wrong. There are several recorded instances of
Chicago being called the Windy City before Mr Dana put his pen to
paper. That we now have what looks like the real story is owed, as
so often with American expressions, to Barry Popik, part-time
parking judge and expert amateur word sleuth.
For example, he found this in the Chicago Tribune for 11 September
1886: "The name of 'Windy City,' which is sometimes used by village
papers in New York and Michigan to designate Chicago, is intended
as a tribute to the refreshing lake breezes of the great summer
resort of the West, but is an awkward and rather ill-chosen
expression and is doubtless misunderstood".
It has only recently been discovered that the term appears even
earlier, in a headline on the front page of the Cleveland Gazette
for 19 September 1885, reporting several items of news from
Chicago, particularly a judicial decision: "From the Windy City:
Judge Foote's Civil Right decision". For the nickname to be well
enough known in Cleveland that it appeared in a headline without
explanation indicates that it was by 1885 getting to be an
established term.
Mr Popik has suggested that the name actually originated in a
scheme by the Chicago Tribune about that date to promote the city
as a summer resort, using the cool breeze off the lake as the basis
of its attraction. Before then, Chicago was usually nicknamed
"Garden City" (its Latin motto was and is "Urbs in Horto", "city in
a garden"). There seems to have been a shift from the old name to
the new in the middle 1880s.
6. Over to You
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LAST WEEK, Martha Brummett from Denver, Colorado, wrote: "If I woke
up with messy hair, my late grandmother would say, "You look like a
mallyhooch". That is a phonetic spelling, of course, but I think
anyone would be able to pronounce it as she did from the spelling.
I recall her saying this very vividly, but in later years she did
not remember it, and did not know what it meant. Has anyone other
than my late grandmother ever used this word?"
This word was clearly quite unfamiliar to most subscribers. Though
a few put forward various ideas about its origin, the only one who
recognised anything resembling it was Colm Flannery. He wrote:
"This expression is often used in my family in the west of Ireland
as 'You look like a Molly Hick' for anyone with messed-up hair or
very uncoordinated appearance. 'Molach' is Irish for hairy or
shaggy. This is also recorded as 'mothlach' or 'muthaloch', which
could sound almost identical to 'molly hick', depending on which
Irish regional accent one has". This may take us a little further,
but as we have no clear evidence linking 'mallyhooch' and 'molly
hick' apart from some similarities in form, we have to leave the
matter undecided.
6. Subscription commands
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7. Contact addresses
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