World Wide Words -- 26 Jul 03
Michael Quinion
DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jul 25 18:54:07 UTC 2003
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 351 Saturday 26 July 2003
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Sent each Saturday to 17,000+ subscribers in at least 120 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
<http://www.worldwidewords.org> <TheEditor at worldwidewords.org>
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Snickersnee.
3. Sic!
4. Q&A: Butter won't melt in his mouth; Rush the
growler; Pulling one's leg.
5. Endnote.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.
C. FAQ of the week.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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HOLIDAY SLOWDOWN Though World Wide Words will not close entirely
during August, I'm going to take a semi-break by reducing its size
substantially for the next five issues, between 2 August and 30
August inclusive. Each issue will consist of the Weird Words item
plus possibly one other piece. Normal service will be restored on
Saturday 6 September.
COOTIES I made a bit of a pig's ear of last week's piece about
this word, since I got hung up on the figurative meaning of the
word to the detriment of the literal one. As many elderly Americans
were able to tell me, this dates back to the 1920s as a schoolyard
insult. I've also now been told about cootie catchers, which came
along rather later. Many others mentioned the game called Cootie,
marketed in the 1950s (and still around), which required insects to
be assembled. It has been suggested the word came into English
through American soldiers based in the Philippines, who borrowed it
from Malay or Tagalog and took it back to the US (as they did with
terms like "boondocks"), then transporting it to Europe in the
First World War, which is presumably why it first appears in print
in 1917 in a War context.
AMAZON I've now added Amazon Germany to the list of partner sites
from which I gain a small commission if you buy items. See the end
of this mailing for the URL.
2. Weird Words: Snickersnee
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A large knife.
If we ever come across this word now, it's most probably in the
lyrics of Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera The Mikado: "As he
squirmed and struggled, / And gurgled and guggled, / I drew my
snickersnee!" A couple of centuries earlier it was not a single
word but a phrase, "steake or snye", which was also written as
"stick or snee", "snick or snee", "snick-a-snee", or in other ways.
All these versions go back to a couple of Dutch words, "steken", to
thrust or stick, and "snijden", to cut. We have exactly the same
phrase in English, though back to front: cut and thrust. The phrase
referred to a type of hand-to-hand fighting with pointed knives, or
- by the end of the eighteenth century - to the knife one did it
with. It was fairly common in Victorian Britain, and appeared
several times in works by William Makepeace Thackeray, for example
in his Burlesques: "Otto, indeed, had convulsively grasped his
snickersnee, with intent to plunge it into the heart of Rowski; but
his politer feelings overcame him. 'The count need not fear, my
lord,' said he: 'a lady is present.'"
3. Sic!
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Graham Legge spotted this link on the BBC Scotland Web site last
Tuesday: "Football-mad mother gives birth to son wearing soccer
strip". Can't start some lads too early.
4. Q&A
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Q. This is probably desperately simple but perhaps you could please
tell me from where the phrase "butter wouldn't melt in his mouth"
originates? [An AOL subscriber]
A. It's one of those sayings that are so old their origins are lost
in the proverbial mists of time. It refers dismissively to somebody
who appears gentle or innocent while typically being the opposite.
It appeared in print first in John Palsgrove's book about the
French language, Lesclarcissement de la Langue Françoyse of 1530,
but it's more than likely he was borrowing a saying that was
already proverbial.
Since putting butter in one's mouth, even straight from the fridge,
is certain to cause it to melt, the saying is not altogether easy
to understand. It must surely be tied up with the idea of coolness,
of a nonchalant ease that is unaffected by passion or emotion (a
sense of "cool" that goes back at least a century before the first
recorded appearance of the butter saying). If you are that cool,
the idea seems to be, butter really won't melt in your mouth.
While looking into the phrase, several examples showed that people
sometimes misunderstand it. For example, this appeared in the
Independent newspaper on 28 September 2001: "'You'd think butter
wouldn't melt in his mouth,' said a neighbour. 'It's hard to
imagine he would be involved with the things he has been accused
of.'" The speaker thinks it refers to a sweet temperament, not the
misleadingly demure appearance of a person who is a lot less
harmless than he looks. There's nothing new about this, since the
same associations are in Thomas Chandler Haliburton's Nature and
Human Nature of 1855: "He looks so good, all the women that see him
say, 'Ain't he a dear man?' He is meekness itself. Butter wouldn't
melt in his mouth. He has no pride in him".
For the usual meaning, one can find lots of examples in literature,
such as in William Makepeace Thackeray's Pendennis: "When a visitor
comes in, she smiles and languishes, you'd think that butter
wouldn't melt in her mouth: and the minute he is gone, very likely,
she flares up like a little demon, and says things fit to send you
wild".
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Q. There's an old drinking song that goes like this: "There was a
little man who had a little can, and he used to rush the growler.
He stuck his head in the barroom door, and he heard somebody
holler, 'No beer today! No beer today! You can't get beer on
Sunday. No beer today! No beer today! Just bring around the can on
Monday.'" I have long wondered what "rush the growler" means. I
suspect it may be a Prohibition reference, but I don't know what it
means. Can you help? [Mia Shinbrot]
A. I can help to some extent. To "rush the growler" (sometimes to
"roll the growler" and other forms) was to take a container to the
local bar to buy beer. The growler was the container, usually a tin
can. Brander Matthews wrote about it in Harper's Magazine in July
1893: "In New York a can brought in filled with beer at a bar-room
is called a "growler", and the act of sending this can from the
private house to the public-house and back is called "working the
growler"". The job of rushing the growler was often given to
children.
It's certainly older than the Prohibition era: the first reference
to it appeared in print around 1885. By 1900 it had started to be
used in newspapers and had clearly moved away from being slang.
However, James Greenough and George Kittredge wrote in Words and
Their Ways in English Speech in 1901 that, "A score of such
references might make the reader forget that this most
objectionable expression ever was slang, or had any offensive
associations". What offensive associations? A clue is in the
Atlantic Monthly for February 1899: "It sometimes seems unfortunate
to break down the second standard, which holds that people who
'rush the growler' are not worthy of charity, and that there is a
certain justice attained when they go to the poorhouse". The very
first recorded example, from the magazine Puck in May 1885,
reinforces this, "The old, old story. The happy home, loving
parents, the growler, the fall and ruin". So people who indulged in
"growler-rushing" were thought to be on the slippery slope towards
destitution and self-destruction.
You're waiting, of course, for me to tell you where "growler" came
from. The noise you hear is me shuffling my feet in embarrassment.
Nobody knows.
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Q. Why do we say "pulling your leg" when we are teasing or having a
joke with someone? [Gill]
A. Oh, dear, I wish we knew. People keep asking me this, but
there's very little evidence on which to base a sensible reply.
It's usually said that the term arose in the 1880s in Britain,
since the first known reference appeared in W B Churchward's
Blackbirding in that year: "Then I shall be able to pull the leg of
that chap Mike. He is always trying to do me". But Jonathan
Lighter, in the Random House Historical Dictionary of American
Slang, has found an example from 1821, suggesting that it might
both be much older and also known in America as well as Britain
(although American sources usually suggest that it is indeed
British in origin). There's also a Scots version "to draw the leg"
that might indicate its homeland is north of the border.
Some writers suggest it may have had something to do with tripping
a person up as a joke, or figuratively tripping him by catching him
out in some error to make him seem foolish. Others prefer to link
it to street thieves, who might trip their mark up to make it
easier to steal from him. But why either activity should be likened
to pulling a person's leg is unclear. It's often ghoulishly said
that it derives from the days of public hangings, in which friends
of the condemned person would pull on his legs to speed the process
of asphyxiation and so ensure a quicker death; but it's hardly
possible to equate that with a jape or deception.
None of these have any appeal except as stories. The truth is out
there, but it's keeping itself well hidden.
5. Endnote
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While slang may be condemned by purists and schoolteachers, it
should be remembered that it is a monument to the language's force
of growth by creative innovation, a living example of the
democratic, normally anonymous process of language change, and the
chief means whereby all the languages spoken today have evolved
from earlier tongues. [Mario Pei, The Story of Language (1949)]
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