From DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG  Fri Mar  7 09:54:29 2003
From: DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG (Michael Quinion)
Date: Fri, 7 Mar 2003 14:54:29 -0000
Subject: World Wide Words -- 08 Mar 03
Message-ID: <FRI.7.MAR.2003.145429.0000.>

WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 331          Saturday 8 March 2003
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Sent each Saturday to 16,000+ subscribers in at least 119 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK      ISSN 1470-1448
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Contents
-------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Book Review: Coined by God.
2. Weird Words: Spanghew.
3. Q&A: John Doe.
4. Endnote.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.


1. Book Review: Coined by God
-------------------------------------------------------------------
The title is modelled on that of Coined by Shakespeare, an earlier
work by the same authors. But while the Bard may really have coined
the words attributed to him, the English translations of the Bible
are without doubt the work of Man. The authors try to pre-empt
possible criticism of the title in their introduction: "It is this
seemingly unstoppable tradition of Biblical translation and
interpretation that we are calling 'God' in our title".

Whatever your faith, in knowing English you will have been deeply
influenced by the language of translations of the Bible by men such
as Wycliffe, Tyndall, and Coverdale. The editors of the Authorised
Version started with a revised version of Coverdale's Great Bible
of 1539, which itself was partly based on a translation by Tyndall.
All the early translators wrote in the vernacular, in spite of
great opposition from Church authorities, as they wanted the words
of Scripture to be understood by ordinary people. They were writing
at a time when English was going through great changes from what
scholars call its "Middle" period to its "Modern" one, when
printing and increased literacy were standardising it. Because the
Bible was so widely read and heard, the style and vocabulary of the
translators influenced generations of writers and influenced the
way the language developed.

Quotations from the Authorised Version are common even now, often
without people realising they are referring to it. A quick count in
the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations finds Shakespeare in front by a
good margin (71 pages against 39) but in the three centuries
following its completion the Authorised Version became intimately
familiar to many people who never heard Shakespeare.

After all this, Coined by Shakespeare is a disappointment, mainly
because it feels such a slight volume. There are only about 130
entries, a mixture of original words that first appear in one of
the major translations with some of the phrases that are often
still used as quotations.

Among the words are everyday forms like "beautiful", "civility",
"blab", "dishonour", "excellent", "female", "horror", "liberty",
"needlework", "persuasion", "plague", "scapegoat", "seashore",
"treasure", "uproar" and "wordy". Among the phrases are "all things
to all men", "am I my brother's keeper", "the blind leading the
blind" (a slight misquotation), "eat, drink and be merry", "no man
can serve two masters", "you cannot live by bread alone", "ivory
tower", "the quick and the dead", "the love of money is the root of
all evil", "stranger in a strange land", and "through a glass
darkly".

The treatment is strictly alphabetical, with about a page of notes
for each word or phrase. There are indexes of terms by editions of
the Bible and by the book in which they appear, together with a
bibliography and a short introduction.

[Malless, Stanley & McQuain, Jeffrey, Coined by God, hardback,
pp221; ISBN0-393-02045-2, published by Norton, New York, on 24
February 2003; publisher's recommended price US$23.95.]

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2. Weird Words: Spanghew
-------------------------------------------------------------------
To throw or jerk violently into the air.

"Especially a frog, etc, as a game," says my Concise Scots
Dictionary. The Oxford English Dictionary concurs. Sadly, I have
turned up no details to support this description of what sounds
like an especially cruel and primitive sport. The only sporting
connection I can find refers to a horse, not a frog, and it's the
horse that's doing the throwing: "Hercules had 'spang-hewed' so
many triers, and the hideous contraction of his resolute back had
deterred so many from mounting, that Buckram had began to fear he
would have to place him in the only remaining school for
incurables, the 'Bus". This is from Robert Surtees' Mr Sponge's
Sporting Tour of 1853.

The origin of second part is obscure - there's no evidence to link
it to any of our usual senses of "hew". The first part is the Scots
and Northern English dialect "spang", originally a verb meaning to
spring, leap or bound. The Reverend M C F Morris wrote about it, in
his Yorkshire Folk Talk in 1892: "It is probably now obsolete,
though its disappearance is regrettable, being very expressive in
such a phrase as "spang thi gaits", i.e. put your best leg
foremost. It is, however, still in use in such a phrase as "he
spang'd him doon", i.e. he threw him violently to the ground".


3. Q&A
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. I have spent two hours searching the Net for information about
the expressions "John Doe" and "Jane Doe" that American authorities
use for people who cannot be identified. US courts also allow the
names to be used by people who do not want to provide their real
names in certain cases. Was there a real original "John Doe" and
what was famous enough about him? [Kevin Webster]

A. There's a lot we don't know about the origins of these names -
and others that are sometimes used - but it seems certain that
there never was a real John Doe.

The name is known from the eighteenth century - the best-known
early example is in Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the
laws of England of 1765-69, but it is certainly older - the Oxford
English Dictionary editors tell me that they've recently found it
in a work of 1659: "To prosecute the suit, to witt John Doe And
Richard Roe". Suggestions I've seen that it dates back to Edward
III's reign in the fourteenth century seem wide of the mark,
though.

It was used in a rather complicated and long since obsolete legal
process called an action of ejectment, which would be brought by a
wrongfully dispossessed owner who was trying to get his land back.
For arcane legal reasons, landowners who wanted to establish their
rightful titles would use fictitious tenants in the ejectment
action. In order to find whether this imaginary tenant had a right
to be in possession, the court had first to establish that the
supposed landlord was actually the owner, which settled the true
reason for the action. This highly technical procedure was done
away with in Britain by an Act of Parliament in 1852.

We know that it became standard by the time of Blackstone to use
the name of John Doe for the fictitious plaintiff and Richard Roe
for the equally unreal defendant in such cases. We have no idea
where these names came from. However, it does seem likely that the
first names were chosen from the most common personal names then in
use (John as a generic name also appeared in "John Company", a
nickname for the East India Company; much more recently, "John
Citizen" and "John Q Public" are American names for the man in the
street, based on the same idea). The surnames were both associated
with deer (a doe being a female deer, as you will remember from The
Sound of Music, and roe is a European deer species), but how they
came to be used isn't known.

These weren't the only names. John Stiles and Richard Miles were -
and still can be - used for the third and fourth participants in an
action. Another, long since obsolete, was John Nokes (originally
John-a-nokes, a medieval name meaning John of the oak). Jane Doe
(or Jane Roe) is a much more recent introduction, for a woman whose
real name is unknown or withheld for some reason; these are obvious
enough extensions from their male equivalents. (The most famous
example is in the abortion-rights case of Roe v Wade in 1973.) She
can also be called Mary Major in American federal cases, but the
origin of this is totally obscure.


4. Endnote
-------------------------------------------------------------------
When we see men grow old and die at a certain time one after
another, from century to century, we laugh at the elixir that
promises to prolong life to a thousand years; and with equal
justice may the lexicographer be derided, who being able to produce
no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases
from mutability, shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his
language, and secure it from corruption and decay, that it is in
his power to change sublunary nature, or clear the world at once
from folly, vanity, and affectation. [Samuel Johnson, Preface to
his Dictionary of the English Language (1755)]


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From DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG  Fri Mar 14 12:20:56 2003
From: DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG (Michael Quinion)
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2003 17:20:56 -0000
Subject: World Wide Words -- 15 Mar 03
Message-ID: <FRI.14.MAR.2003.172056.0000.>

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 332          Saturday 15 March 2003
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sent each Saturday to 16,000+ subscribers in at least 119 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK      ISSN 1470-1448
<http://www.worldwidewords.org>      <TheEditor at worldwidewords.org>
-------------------------------------------------------------------
 IF YOU RESPOND TO THIS MAILING, REMEMBER TO CHANGE THE OUTGOING
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Contents
-------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Book Review: Dog Days and Dandelions.
3. Weird Words: Lipogrammatist.
4. Sic!
5. Q&A: Mummer; Pins and needles.
6. Endnote.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
-------------------------------------------------------------------
COINED BY GOD  Apologies for the error in last week's book review.
The reference in one paragraph to "Coined by Shakespeare" should,
of course, have been to "Coined by God". Put it down to old age.

REPLYING TO THIS NEWSLETTER  May I impress on you all once again
that if you respond to this newsletter without changing the default
reply address your e-mail will be sent to oblivion? I've installed
a new e-mail filtering system to catch the 50% of all messages that
are spam (about 500 of them a week, currently) and any message sent
to DoNotUse at worldwidewords.org (or other old addresses) gets dumped
automatically. Similar comments apply to requests to leave the list
or change subscription address: special e-mail addresses exist for
these purposes. See the final two sections. If you have my e-mail
details in your address book, please check and change if need be.


2. Book Review: Dog Days and Dandelions
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Martha Barnette's third work on oddities of word etymology follows
her intriguingly titled Ladyfingers and Nun's Tummies, a light-
hearted look at how foods got their names. In this book, she turns
her attention to the animal meanings behind everyday words.

She points out that the Canary Islands were indeed named after an
animal, not the obvious one but a dog; that if somebody "capers"
about, they resemble a goat (and that "chevron" also has caprine
links); but if they are instead "feisty", they are being described
by a name that comes from an old American dialect word for a
mongrel dog.

"Gossamer", perhaps surprisingly, turns out to have a link with
geese; "hearse" with an ancient Oscan word for a wolf; "Hobson's
choice" referred to a horse (the one nearest the stable door that a
hirer from Mr Hobson's livery stables in Cambridge was obliged to
choose). There are horsy connections with "constable" and "marshal",
and also with "jaded", since a jade was once a name for a worn-out
horse. A "niche" was originally a nest and "porcelain" does indeed
have the porcine associations that its name might suggest, although
in a disguised way.

If you need any unusual adjectives, try "limacine", snail-like,
"jumentous", resembling horse urine, "ornithophilous", of flowers
that attract birds to pollinate them, or "peristeronic", suggestive
of pigeons (though you might have trouble wedging any of them into
your everyday conversation).

One story I have to dispute: we now know that "jinx" is almost
certainly not from an old name for the bird called the wryneck (see
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-jin1.htm).

Apart from that small quibble, it's a pleasant and undemanding romp
through an interesting aspect of English word history.

[Martha Barnette, Dog Days and Dandelions, published by St Martin's
Press, New York, in February 2003; ISBN 0-312-28072-6; hardback,
pp194; publisher's price US$24.95.]

AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
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 US: US$17.47 (http://www.quinion.com/cgi-bin/r.pl?FM)
 CA: CDN$23.77 (http://www.quinion.com/cgi-bin/r.pl?KM)
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you do so you will supply World Wide Words with a small commission
that helps to pay for the Web site and general operating expenses.]


3. Weird Words: Lipogrammatist
-------------------------------------------------------------------
A writer of lipograms.

As opposed to pangrammatists, who strive to crowd all the letters
of the alphabet into a composition of the very briefest scope, a
lipogrammatist systematically leaves one of them out. This ditty
from the nineteenth century avoids a certain vowel:

  A jovial swain may rack his brain,
    and tax his fancy's might,
  To quiz in vain, for 'tis most plain,
    That what I say is right.

A lipogram without an "e" is the most difficult kind to write,
since that's the most common letter in English. There have been
some celebrated modern examples. In 1939 Ernest Vincent Wright
published a 50,000-word novel called Gadsby without a single "e" in
it. The French author Georges Perec produced a 300-page tour-de-
force in 1969, similarly without an "e" in sight, under the title
La Disparation. It was translated into e-less English by Gilbert
Adair in 1995 as A Void. We might ask ourselves why anyone would
attempt such feats, but that question might take us too far into
the murkier realms of human psychology.

Such unusual constructions can fatally limit an author, as crucial
grammatical forms must not play a part in any composition. Though a
good author might find avoiding a particular symbol is not always
too much of a handicap, it's hard to maintain such an approach for
long without producing writing that is a thoroughgoing oddity, as
this part of my discussion plainly shows. Writing in this way for
fifty thousand words would task anybody's brain, and could bring
about a long-lasting loss of authorial ability in a wordsmith!

The word "lipogram" is from the Greek "lipogrammatos", lacking a
letter, which derives from "leipein", to leave out, plus "gramma",
a letter. The first part has nothing to do with the modern prefix
"lipo-", fat, which is from a different Greek stem.


4. Sic!
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Chuck Wuest was reading the New Yorker last month and found a piece
referred to "a pleasant young woman with a nose ring named Rebecca,
who sits at the front desk".

The New Scientist this week reports a notice from the department of
"helpful" advice. On the bottom of a box of Celebrations chocolates
is clearly inscribed: "Do not read while box is open".


5. Q&A
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. In your Weird Words section of a recent newsletter you used
"mummer" as a synonym for "guiser".  Having lived near Philadelphia
for a number of years I always wondered where the term mummer came
from. They have a "Mummer's Parade" on New Year's Day and it's
quite a spectacular event. Any chance of a quick update on the term
mummer? [Kirk Jones]

A. No problem. Strictly speaking, if you're a mummer you're keeping
mum, that is, you're staying silent. Traditional mummers acted in
dumb-show or mime.

The word was used in Britain from the sixteenth century onwards for
groups of local people who went from door to door on high days and
holidays through the year - especially at Christmas - performing
traditional plays that are often called mummer's plays. There are
many local names for the performers in Britain, such as Christmas
rhymers, plough bullocks, plough jags, and tipteerers, as well as
guisers. The plays featured characters such as St George and the
Dragon, Robin Hood, the Turkish Knight (an echo of the Crusades)
and Beelzebub. A key character is a comical quack doctor who at the
end of the play brings back to life the loser of a sword fight
between a hero and his opponent. Despite the name, most mummer's
plays are actually spoken, usually in rhyme, and can also include
singing. For that reason, the more formal term is "folk plays". The
tradition still exists in a few places in Britain and other
countries.

The word "mum" comes from an old Germanic root and seems to be
echoic. If you make inarticulate noises with your mouth closed, it
comes out sounding like "mmmmm". Some scholars argue that the word
for the performers comes instead from a French source meaning a
mask, since the characters in such plays often wore fantastic
costumes that included masks. This seems not to be the case.

In the nineteenth century "mummer" became a contemptuous term for a
ham actor, because the objective of the traditional local mummer's
play was humour, not the quality of the performance, and the
standard was often atrocious.

                        -----------

Q. When I jokingly told a co-worker I would be "on pins and
needles" until she provided me some information I'd requested, she
immediately asked, "Where did that expression come from, anyway?"
The expression seems to imply the same uncomfortable anxiety as "on
tenterhooks" (I just read your explanation of that one), but
otherwise doesn't appear to be related. So just where did it come
from, anyway? [Meg Laycock]

A. I'm sure you're right in suggesting this origin for the saying.
The implication is that you're restless and anxious, as though you
were sitting on a bed of nails.

There are actually two expressions involving pins and needles. The
other describes the tingling sensation in arm or leg that appears
when the circulation is restored. The entries in the Oxford English
Dictionary suggest that both are of similar date: yours is recorded
slightly earlier, turning up first in 1810, but the other is known
from 1813, which is a dead heat in etymological terms.

I was going to suggest that your version is North American and mine
British, largely because I only know the tingling sensation one and
not the one implying anxiety. However, I see that it also appears
in one of my Australian dictionaries and at least one of my British
ones as well, so it has obviously just passed me by.


6. Endnote
-------------------------------------------------------------------
"I've been in Who's Who, and I know what's what, but it'll be the
first time I ever made the dictionary." [Mae West, in a letter to
the RAF in the early 1940s on hearing that an inflatable life
jacket had been named after her; quoted in the Oxford Dictionary of
Thematic Quotations (2000)]


A. Subscription commands
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  For general comments, especially responses to Q&A pieces:
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From DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG  Fri Mar 21 15:11:15 2003
From: DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG (Michael Quinion)
Date: Fri, 21 Mar 2003 20:11:15 -0000
Subject: World Wide Words -- 22 Mar 03
Message-ID: <FRI.21.MAR.2003.201115.0000.>

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 333          Saturday 22 March 2003
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sent each Saturday to 16,000+ subscribers in at least 119 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK      ISSN 1470-1448
<http://www.worldwidewords.org>      <TheEditor at worldwidewords.org>
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 IF YOU RESPOND TO THIS MAILING, REMEMBER TO CHANGE THE OUTGOING
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Contents
-------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Book Review: The Grouchy Grammarian.
3. Weird Words: Maritorious.
4. Sic!
5. Q&A: Lynch law; Molly-dooker.
6. Endnote.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
-------------------------------------------------------------------
LIPOGRAMMATIST  The title of the work by Georges Perec mentioned in
this piece last week is correctly La Disparition.


2. Book Review: The Grouchy Grammarian
-------------------------------------------------------------------
If the title isn't enough to give you the idea, the wordy subtitle
certainly will: "A How-Not-To Guide to the 47 Most Common Mistakes
in English Made by Journalists, Broadcasters, and Others Who Should
Know Better". Though humorously written and very readable, the book
seems at times to consist of an extended catalogue of the errors of
writing and speech that have offended author Thomas Parrish (or, to
accept the book's conceit, his alter ego, the eponymous Grouchy
Grammarian).

He has rounded up the usual suspects: confusion between "it's" and
"its", "among" and "between", and "may" and "might"; between "lie"
and "lay", and between homophone pairs such as "lead" and "led". He
illustrates the dreadful things that people do with apostrophes,
problems with subject and verb agreement, the misuse of "former",
the incorrect use of "whom", dangling participles, malapropisms,
and more.

As his subtitle makes clear, his examples are mostly taken from the
media, which I feel sometimes shines the spotlight too brightly on
errors made by broadcasters and journalists. Theirs is a stressful
occupation with constantly looming deadlines in which it is all too
easy to make a slip that cannot be recalled and corrected. Mr
Parrish would, I suspect, argue that a more thorough knowledge of
the basics would prevent the most egregious errors. Perhaps so.

I disagree with a few things: "straight and narrow" is not just a
mistake for "strait and narrow" but is of independent formation
with a respectable ancestry (I've found examples going back into
the 1840s); "chaise lounge", though a folk etymology for the French
"chaise longue", is now too well established in the US for a book
on style to claim it as an error (it is, for example, included in
several current American dictionaries without comment); "ice tea"
for "iced tea" is not simply an error but a regional form that
parallels "ice cream" (nineteenth-century prescriptivists were
equally hard on this, arguing similarly that it ought to be "iced
cream"); "cut and dry" isn't necessarily a mistaken form of "cut
and dried" but a variant that's known from the eighteenth century
(Swift used it in 1730, for example).

But Thomas Parrish is no knee-jerk pedant. He is happy to dismiss
the old canard that "none" must always take a singular verb; he is
relaxed about the use of "like" to mean "as" (though not the
intrusive "like" that forms a meaningless sentence break in so many
conversations); he's very aware that language is not static. His
greatest concern is that whatever we write, we should say clearly
what we mean to say. This is summed up by his opening section,
which urges all writers to "Think!" - not, as the late Thomas J
Watson of IBM meant it, to exercise the little grey cells in the
direction of innovation and invention, but just to stop a moment
and reflect on what it is one is actually trying to communicate.

My largest concern about his efforts is that I'm not at all sure
what audience he is writing for. Most people who ought to read it
probably won't, or realise that they need to. It will be picked up
by some who know that their English could be improved (perhaps even
by some in the media), but I suspect that a sizeable proportion of
its readers will know most of the answers already and will read it
largely to have their prejudices about the degraded state of media
English confirmed.

[Thomas Parrish, "The Grouchy Grammarian", published by Wiley in
October 2002; ISBN 0-471-22383-2; hardback, pp186; publisher's
price US$19.95.]

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3. Weird Words: Maritorious
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Being fond of one's husband.

This is the partner to "uxorious", of a man who is fond of his wife
to the point of doting excess. It is much less well known, to the
extent that I have had no success in finding a modern example of
its use outside the books on words that cite it.

A Google search turned up what looked at first sight like a number
of examples, such as the surprising statement from a school that
"Medals and prizes are given to maritorious students". It took a
moment to realise that should have been "meritorious". As it
happens, that's oddly relevant, since the only example of the word
on record is in Bussy D'Ambois, a tragedy by George Chapman of
1607, in which he coins the word to make a bad pun: "Dames
maritorious ne're were meritorious".

(As asides: John Keats' poem, On First Looking into Chapman's
Homer, refers to the same man, who made a famous translation of the
Greek work. Dryden thought little of Chapman's play, finding in it
"a dwarfish thought dressed up in gigantic words, repetition in
abundance, looseness of expression, and gross hyperboles; the sense
of one line expanded prodigiously into ten; and, to sum up all,
incorrect English, and a hideous mingle of false poetry and true
nonsense". However, the Oxford English Dictionary has 116 citations
from it, and it has provided modern writers on words such as myself
some small subject matter, so it hasn't proved entirely valueless.)

The word is from Latin "maritus", husband.


4. Sic!
-------------------------------------------------------------------
>From The Age, Melbourne, 14 March, seen by Jim Hart: "De Stefano,
54, showed no reaction when [the judge] ordered him to serve a
minimum of seven years in a courtroom packed with family and
supporters, but a daughter burst into tears and sobbed loudly".
That's a cruel and unusual punishment, especially for the family
and supporters.


5. Q&A
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. According to Peter McCarthy in his hugely entertaining travel
book McCarthy's Bar, the word "lynch" may be derived from an event
in 1493 when James Lynch FitzStephen, the mayor of Galway, strung
up his own son from an upstairs window of his house for murdering a
young Spanish house guest, who the young Lynch FitzStephen feared
might become a rival for the attention of his girlfriend. Should we
give any credence to this story? [Michael Gould]

A. At the risk of offending the citizens of Galway, I have to say
the tradition is quite certainly false. Though the window is said
still to exist and to have a plaque that commemorates the event,
linguistic evidence alone is enough to scupper it. The tale seems
to have been invented by an enterprising local with an eye to the
tourist trade sometime in the nineteenth century, after the word
had become widely known.

"Lynch" is short for "lynch law", the punishment of a person for
some supposed crime without bothering with the niceties of a legal
trial. All the evidence points to its being an archetypal American
expression. For its origin we must look to Virginia in the 1780s,
during the American Revolution. There is some doubt about which
Lynch gave his name to the expression, since there were two:
Captain William Lynch of Pittsylvania County and Colonel James
Lynch of Bedford County. However, both were trying to bring order
and justice to an area notoriously lacking both. It's William Lynch
who is usually mentioned in scholarly discussions, mainly - it
seems - because documentary evidence survives of his efforts.

It was only later that the term took on its associations with mob
rule. And though it is now taken to refer to execution, usually by
hanging, and most commonly in the twentieth century to the killing
of black Americans in the South by whites, early examples suggest
it referred to punishments that were less terminal. The compact
drawn up with his neighbours by William Lynch in 1780 said of the
actions of the lawless men troubling the area: "if they will not
desist from their evil practices, we will inflict such corporeal
punishment on him or them, as to us shall seem adequate to the
crime committed or the damage sustained". "Corporeal punishment"
(an older form of "corporal punishment") suggests a good hiding
rather than capital punishment.

The first appearance in print of the term that I know of is in a
humorous article in The New-England Magazine of October 1835 under
the title The Inconveniences of Being Lynched; the storyteller
suffers being tarred and feathered on suspicion of being an
abolitionist. Similarly, a news item in the New York Daily Express
in 1843 refers to a man "lately taken from his house at night by
some of his neighbors and severely lynched", which sounds as though
a harsh punishment was inflicted, but one falling short of death,
since logic demands that it's difficult to severely execute
somebody.

Interestingly, some recent examples of the term in print have
returned to this older sense.

                        -----------

Q. A "molly-dooker" is an Australian expression for a left-handed
person. I'm curious to know the origin. [Mark Roome]

A. The answer divides neatly into two halves, one for each part of
the word.

One's "dukes" or "dooks" are one's hands, of course, as in the
American "to duke it out", to fight with the fists. There are two
stories about its origin, both of which take it back to London
slang of the early to middle part of the nineteenth century. One
theory is that an older slang term for the hand was "fork", in
reference to using the fingers like a pair of tweezers to slip
something surreptitiously out of a person's pocket without them
knowing about it. Cockney rhyming slang then converted "fork" into
"Duke of York" and so, by the usual process of abbreviation, to
"duke". (The spelling "dook" presumably reflects the way the word
was said in Australia, rather than the standard British English
"djook".) Some authorities regard this as an over-complex evolution
(and who can blame them?), and suggest that the word's actually
from Romany, the language of the Rom, or gypsies, in which "dukker"
means to tell fortunes, presumably by palmistry. This theory is
itself less than totally convincing.

The other half of your term, "molly", seems to be yet another
example of the use of that word to mean an effeminate male, as in
"mollycoddle", which was featured here some time ago. (See
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-mol1.htm). The implication
seems to have been that anybody left-handed was a bit queer in at
least one respect.

There are various spellings for the slang term, including "molly-
duker", and there's also a related form, "molly-hander". It's first
recorded in Australia in the 1920s.


5. Endnote
-------------------------------------------------------------------
"It was one of the dullest speeches I ever heard. The Agee woman
told us for three quarters of an hour how she came to write her
beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required."
[P G Wodehouse, The Girl in Blue (1960)]


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From DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG  Fri Mar 28 09:49:14 2003
From: DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG (Michael Quinion)
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2003 14:49:14 -0000
Subject: World Wide Words -- 29 Mar 03
Message-ID: <FRI.28.MAR.2003.144914.0000.>

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 334          Saturday 29 March 2003
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sent each Saturday to 16,000+ subscribers in at least 119 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK      ISSN 1470-1448
<http://www.worldwidewords.org>      <TheEditor at worldwidewords.org>
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 IF YOU RESPOND TO THIS MAILING, REMEMBER TO CHANGE THE OUTGOING
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Contents
-------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: SARS.
3. Turns of Phrase: Shock and Awe.
4. Weird Words: Metoposcopist.
5. Q&A: Green ink letter; Chook.
6. Endnote.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
-------------------------------------------------------------------
UNANSWERED MAIL  I'm fighting deadlines for the next few weeks, so
please do not be offended that e-mail is not always answered. And
newsletters might become a little shorter!

SMALL CRIES OF JOY  Oxford University Press tell me that the first
US printing of my book "Ologies and Isms" has sold out already. I
was going to make promotional noises to American subscribers this
week about its being available, but now I'll hold off until new
stock arrives, probably in late April.


2. Turns of Phrase: SARS
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Much medical and media attention has focused on this mysterious new
disease in the fortnight since Gro Harlem Brundtland, the director
of the World Health Organisation, took the unusual step of issuing
a warning. However, press coverage has been muted in recent days
because of the war with Iraq. The acronym is short for "Severe
Acute Respiratory Syndrome".

So far several hundred people have been infected and some 50 have
died. The disease - also named "super pneumonia" because a life-
threatening pneumonia is a major symptom - is causing concern
because of the ease with which it can spread at close quarters. Its
cause is as yet unknown, although a virus is strongly suspected;
despite some press reports, it isn't a form of influenza. It's
thought the illness may have began in Guangdong Province in China
some months ago, and the greatest impact on the public has been in
South-East Asia countries such as Singapore and Hong Kong. As a
result, another name that has emerged for it this week is "Asian
pneumonia".

SARS is believed to be the first new, often life-threatening
disease to emerge in decades that can be spread from one person to
another.
                                       [Washington Post, Mar. 2003]

SARS has been tentatively identified as a virus similar to those
which cause measles, mumps and canine distemper.
                                          [The Scotsman, Mar. 2003]


3. Turns of Phrase: Shock and Awe
-------------------------------------------------------------------
This looks set to be the Second Gulf War's signature phrase, much
as "mother of all ..." was of the first. It's all over the press
reportage of the conflict, it being the Pentagon's term for the
process of instilling fear and doubt in the minds of Iraqis.

The phrase first appeared publicly in the book of the same title by
Harlan Ullman and James Wade in 1996, which came out of a report by
the Rapid Dominance Study Group, an informal association of mainly
ex-military men. The concept they put forward was, as Harlan Ullman
explains it, one that involved "inflicting minimum casualties and
doing minimum damage using minimum force". Shock and Awe is not
about destruction but about power. By demonstrating such might that
an opponent is stunned into surrender, and by concentrating on
matters that reduced the ability to resist, it combines military
force with psychological warfare. Their book said, "The ability to
shock and awe rests ultimately in the ability to frighten, scare,
intimidate and disarm".

Mr Ullman is reported as saying that the way the Pentagon has used
it "has not been helpful" because it has put too much emphasis on a
Doomsday approach, though this could itself, of course, be just
another application of Shock and Awe.

It is all part of the administration's basic approach toward
foreign policy, which is best described by the phrase used for its
war plan - "shock and awe." The notion is that the United States
needs to intimidate countries with its power and assertiveness,
always threatening, always denouncing, never showing weakness.
                                              [Newsweek, Mar. 2003]

Washington's assessment that a "shock and awe" bombing campaign
would crumble the Iraqi regime's morale, or even kill its leaders
in the first round, has not so far proved correct.
                                          [Toronto Star, Mar. 2003]


4. Weird Words: Metoposcopist
-------------------------------------------------------------------
A person who practices metoposcopy.

Metoposcopy is the art of judging a person's character and fortune
from his face, principally his forehead. This is not so strange an
idea, since the forehead is a prominent and expressive part of the
face. Persons with high foreheads are considered brainy; those with
short ones are sometimes thought to be almost Neanderthal. The play
of the muscles on the forehead in concentration or contemplation is
an expressive reflection of the mind working beneath the skin.

Metoposcopy was a medieval method of assessment, together with such
related techniques as "chiromancy" (divination using the hand) and
"podomancy" (prognostication from the condition of one's feet). The
more general term that refers to the whole face is "physiognomy".
Metoposcopy is said to have been invented in the sixteenth century
by Gerolomo Cardano, a man better known for his pioneering work in
medicine and mathematics. His book, Metoposcopia Libri Tredecim,
contained more than 800 woodcuts illustrating facial positions he
suggested were associated with temperament and destiny.

The word comes via Late Latin from Greek and derives from the Greek
word "metopon", forehead.


5. Q&A
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. Although the meaning is quite clear to us and examples of use
are readily available on the Web, so far we have not been able to
locate the expression in any dictionary, let alone discover how it
came about! Why "green ink letter"? [Anna Beria, University of
Bath, UK]

A. I know immediately what you mean by a "green-ink letter", or one
written by a member of the "green-ink brigade". Since they are
terms largely restricted to Britain (though I have come across a
couple of isolated references in American publications) some
background would seem to be a good idea.

The term refers to a particular kind of letter writer - most often
to newspapers - who claims that he is the victim of some injustice,
or who composes long and vehement complaints against a person or an
organisation, or who believes that a numerical calculation based on
the name of the Prime Minister shows he's an agent of the devil, or
who is sure that invisible rays are being beamed into his house by
his next-door neighbour to cause him injury, or who puts forward a
thesis which, if adopted, will lead inevitably to world peace.

In 1998, the newly appointed Readers' Editor of the Guardian, Ian
Mayes, wrote: "Even before I began I had numerous warnings from
colleagues to 'beware of the green-ink brigade', conjuring the
spectre of obsessive correspondents who would write at great length
and persistently, typically covering their copious sheets in
longhand scrawled in green ink".

In 1999, this appeared in the Independent newspaper: "All of which
might be dismissed as a bad joke - a green-ink letter written by a
malicious eccentric - were it an isolated case"; the New Statesman
of January 1995 had: "So is Busby a paid-up member of the green-ink
brigade or does he actually have a point? And is his phone really
tapped?"

The earliest example I know of (many thanks to Fred Shapiro of Yale
Law School for his help in finding it; he would like me to mention
that he's Editor of the forthcoming Yale Dictionary of Quotations)
is dated 8 March 1985 and is once again from the "Guardian": "Our
elected legislature was taken over lock, stock and barrel by the
green ink brigade". In this case MPs weren't actually writing
letters, but debating fluoridation in the House of Commons in a way
that the article's writer, Ian Aitkin, felt was unbalanced. He
thought it necessary to add this note to his comment:

  The expression is the more-or-less affectionate description
  given by journalists and politicians to the people who write
  them eccentric letters, often in block capitals and frequently
  underlined in multicoloured inks. For some reason I have never
  heard satisfactorily explained, the most obsessive of these
  correspondents seem to prefer green.

In recent examples, the key characteristic is the eccentricity or
disturbed reasoning of the individuals, not their actual use of
green ink. Or indeed their writing of letters - as Ian Aitkin's
piece demonstrates, the term had even by then become figurative.

I'm sure that the term arose in journalism, though - like you - I
can find no good information about exactly when. I've asked several
senior journalists of my acquaintance about it. They all know the
expressions. Some claim to remember receiving letters of the type
in their younger days, while others deny literal green-ink letters
ever existed. But they all think the phrases were coined relatively
recently to reflect journalistic experience or folklore.

                        -----------

Q. I have found a term that appears to be completely Australian in
usage, if not origin. The word is "chook" which is slang for a
chicken. Is this native to Australia or did it originate elsewhere
and then take root here better than anywhere else? Any ideas on the
origin of the word would be helpful. [Mark Hansen]

A. Not solely Australian, since New Zealanders make a claim to it
as well. And I'm not sure that it's actually slang: I'd prefer to
describe it as colloquial regional English.

In one sense it's natively Antipodean, since that form of the word
certainly grew up there - it's recorded in various pronunciations
and spellings in Australia from the 1850s on (in New Zealand
somewhat later), at first as "chookie" or "chucky". The "chook"
form emerged about 1900 and has outlasted the others.

In another sense, it's actually an English word, one that was taken
to Australia and New Zealand by emigrants. Back in the sixteenth
century "chuck" was a familiar endearment. Shakespeare is first
recorded as using it, appropriately enough in Love's Labour's Lost.
It survives as an endearment in some parts of Britain today, such
as Yorkshire and Liverpool, the latter having the vowel pronounced
to my ear part-way towards "chook". And, of course, there's the
American nickname (even sometimes the given name) of "Chuck", often
used as a pet form of "Charles", which comes from the same term of
affection (the sense "to give a gentle blow under the chin" is
probably from a different source).

All these except the given name could, and indeed still can, refer
to literal chickens. The name seems to have been an attempt at
imitating the clucking of farmyard fowls, so it's a close relative
of "cluck", which was similarly invented.

There are other forms, too, principally the "chucky" one that seems
to have been the first Australian version. Those of us who were
young in the 1980s, or who like me had a misspent middle age, will
remember the arcade game "Chuckie Egg"; in Britain there's a
supplier of table birds whose name is Chuckie Chicken. I'm told
that in Liverpool a "chucky egg" can be a soft-boiled egg mashed up
with butter, and "chook" can be a general word for food and also a
mildly insulting term for an old woman.


6. Endnote
-------------------------------------------------------------------
"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the
range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally
impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it."
[George Orwell, "Nineteen Eighty-four" (1949)]


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From DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG  Fri Mar  7 14:54:29 2003
From: DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG (Michael Quinion)
Date: Fri, 7 Mar 2003 14:54:29 -0000
Subject: World Wide Words -- 08 Mar 03
Message-ID: <FRI.7.MAR.2003.145429.0000.>

WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 331          Saturday 8 March 2003
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sent each Saturday to 16,000+ subscribers in at least 119 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK      ISSN 1470-1448
<http://www.worldwidewords.org>      <TheEditor at worldwidewords.org>
-------------------------------------------------------------------
 IF YOU RESPOND TO THIS MAILING, REMEMBER TO CHANGE THE OUTGOING
   ADDRESS TO ONE OF THOSE IN THE 'CONTACT ADDRESSES' SECTION.


Contents
-------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Book Review: Coined by God.
2. Weird Words: Spanghew.
3. Q&A: John Doe.
4. Endnote.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.


1. Book Review: Coined by God
-------------------------------------------------------------------
The title is modelled on that of Coined by Shakespeare, an earlier
work by the same authors. But while the Bard may really have coined
the words attributed to him, the English translations of the Bible
are without doubt the work of Man. The authors try to pre-empt
possible criticism of the title in their introduction: "It is this
seemingly unstoppable tradition of Biblical translation and
interpretation that we are calling 'God' in our title".

Whatever your faith, in knowing English you will have been deeply
influenced by the language of translations of the Bible by men such
as Wycliffe, Tyndall, and Coverdale. The editors of the Authorised
Version started with a revised version of Coverdale's Great Bible
of 1539, which itself was partly based on a translation by Tyndall.
All the early translators wrote in the vernacular, in spite of
great opposition from Church authorities, as they wanted the words
of Scripture to be understood by ordinary people. They were writing
at a time when English was going through great changes from what
scholars call its "Middle" period to its "Modern" one, when
printing and increased literacy were standardising it. Because the
Bible was so widely read and heard, the style and vocabulary of the
translators influenced generations of writers and influenced the
way the language developed.

Quotations from the Authorised Version are common even now, often
without people realising they are referring to it. A quick count in
the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations finds Shakespeare in front by a
good margin (71 pages against 39) but in the three centuries
following its completion the Authorised Version became intimately
familiar to many people who never heard Shakespeare.

After all this, Coined by Shakespeare is a disappointment, mainly
because it feels such a slight volume. There are only about 130
entries, a mixture of original words that first appear in one of
the major translations with some of the phrases that are often
still used as quotations.

Among the words are everyday forms like "beautiful", "civility",
"blab", "dishonour", "excellent", "female", "horror", "liberty",
"needlework", "persuasion", "plague", "scapegoat", "seashore",
"treasure", "uproar" and "wordy". Among the phrases are "all things
to all men", "am I my brother's keeper", "the blind leading the
blind" (a slight misquotation), "eat, drink and be merry", "no man
can serve two masters", "you cannot live by bread alone", "ivory
tower", "the quick and the dead", "the love of money is the root of
all evil", "stranger in a strange land", and "through a glass
darkly".

The treatment is strictly alphabetical, with about a page of notes
for each word or phrase. There are indexes of terms by editions of
the Bible and by the book in which they appear, together with a
bibliography and a short introduction.

[Malless, Stanley & McQuain, Jeffrey, Coined by God, hardback,
pp221; ISBN0-393-02045-2, published by Norton, New York, on 24
February 2003; publisher's recommended price US$23.95.]

AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
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[Click on a link or paste it into your browser to order online. If
you do so you get World Wide Words a small commission that helps to
pay for the Web site and general operating expenses.]


2. Weird Words: Spanghew
-------------------------------------------------------------------
To throw or jerk violently into the air.

"Especially a frog, etc, as a game," says my Concise Scots
Dictionary. The Oxford English Dictionary concurs. Sadly, I have
turned up no details to support this description of what sounds
like an especially cruel and primitive sport. The only sporting
connection I can find refers to a horse, not a frog, and it's the
horse that's doing the throwing: "Hercules had 'spang-hewed' so
many triers, and the hideous contraction of his resolute back had
deterred so many from mounting, that Buckram had began to fear he
would have to place him in the only remaining school for
incurables, the 'Bus". This is from Robert Surtees' Mr Sponge's
Sporting Tour of 1853.

The origin of second part is obscure - there's no evidence to link
it to any of our usual senses of "hew". The first part is the Scots
and Northern English dialect "spang", originally a verb meaning to
spring, leap or bound. The Reverend M C F Morris wrote about it, in
his Yorkshire Folk Talk in 1892: "It is probably now obsolete,
though its disappearance is regrettable, being very expressive in
such a phrase as "spang thi gaits", i.e. put your best leg
foremost. It is, however, still in use in such a phrase as "he
spang'd him doon", i.e. he threw him violently to the ground".


3. Q&A
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. I have spent two hours searching the Net for information about
the expressions "John Doe" and "Jane Doe" that American authorities
use for people who cannot be identified. US courts also allow the
names to be used by people who do not want to provide their real
names in certain cases. Was there a real original "John Doe" and
what was famous enough about him? [Kevin Webster]

A. There's a lot we don't know about the origins of these names -
and others that are sometimes used - but it seems certain that
there never was a real John Doe.

The name is known from the eighteenth century - the best-known
early example is in Sir William Blackstone's Commentaries on the
laws of England of 1765-69, but it is certainly older - the Oxford
English Dictionary editors tell me that they've recently found it
in a work of 1659: "To prosecute the suit, to witt John Doe And
Richard Roe". Suggestions I've seen that it dates back to Edward
III's reign in the fourteenth century seem wide of the mark,
though.

It was used in a rather complicated and long since obsolete legal
process called an action of ejectment, which would be brought by a
wrongfully dispossessed owner who was trying to get his land back.
For arcane legal reasons, landowners who wanted to establish their
rightful titles would use fictitious tenants in the ejectment
action. In order to find whether this imaginary tenant had a right
to be in possession, the court had first to establish that the
supposed landlord was actually the owner, which settled the true
reason for the action. This highly technical procedure was done
away with in Britain by an Act of Parliament in 1852.

We know that it became standard by the time of Blackstone to use
the name of John Doe for the fictitious plaintiff and Richard Roe
for the equally unreal defendant in such cases. We have no idea
where these names came from. However, it does seem likely that the
first names were chosen from the most common personal names then in
use (John as a generic name also appeared in "John Company", a
nickname for the East India Company; much more recently, "John
Citizen" and "John Q Public" are American names for the man in the
street, based on the same idea). The surnames were both associated
with deer (a doe being a female deer, as you will remember from The
Sound of Music, and roe is a European deer species), but how they
came to be used isn't known.

These weren't the only names. John Stiles and Richard Miles were -
and still can be - used for the third and fourth participants in an
action. Another, long since obsolete, was John Nokes (originally
John-a-nokes, a medieval name meaning John of the oak). Jane Doe
(or Jane Roe) is a much more recent introduction, for a woman whose
real name is unknown or withheld for some reason; these are obvious
enough extensions from their male equivalents. (The most famous
example is in the abortion-rights case of Roe v Wade in 1973.) She
can also be called Mary Major in American federal cases, but the
origin of this is totally obscure.


4. Endnote
-------------------------------------------------------------------
When we see men grow old and die at a certain time one after
another, from century to century, we laugh at the elixir that
promises to prolong life to a thousand years; and with equal
justice may the lexicographer be derided, who being able to produce
no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases
from mutability, shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his
language, and secure it from corruption and decay, that it is in
his power to change sublunary nature, or clear the world at once
from folly, vanity, and affectation. [Samuel Johnson, Preface to
his Dictionary of the English Language (1755)]


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From DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG  Fri Mar 14 17:20:56 2003
From: DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG (Michael Quinion)
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2003 17:20:56 -0000
Subject: World Wide Words -- 15 Mar 03
Message-ID: <FRI.14.MAR.2003.172056.0000.>

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 332          Saturday 15 March 2003
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Sent each Saturday to 16,000+ subscribers in at least 119 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK      ISSN 1470-1448
<http://www.worldwidewords.org>      <TheEditor at worldwidewords.org>
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Contents
-------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Book Review: Dog Days and Dandelions.
3. Weird Words: Lipogrammatist.
4. Sic!
5. Q&A: Mummer; Pins and needles.
6. Endnote.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
-------------------------------------------------------------------
COINED BY GOD  Apologies for the error in last week's book review.
The reference in one paragraph to "Coined by Shakespeare" should,
of course, have been to "Coined by God". Put it down to old age.

REPLYING TO THIS NEWSLETTER  May I impress on you all once again
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2. Book Review: Dog Days and Dandelions
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Martha Barnette's third work on oddities of word etymology follows
her intriguingly titled Ladyfingers and Nun's Tummies, a light-
hearted look at how foods got their names. In this book, she turns
her attention to the animal meanings behind everyday words.

She points out that the Canary Islands were indeed named after an
animal, not the obvious one but a dog; that if somebody "capers"
about, they resemble a goat (and that "chevron" also has caprine
links); but if they are instead "feisty", they are being described
by a name that comes from an old American dialect word for a
mongrel dog.

"Gossamer", perhaps surprisingly, turns out to have a link with
geese; "hearse" with an ancient Oscan word for a wolf; "Hobson's
choice" referred to a horse (the one nearest the stable door that a
hirer from Mr Hobson's livery stables in Cambridge was obliged to
choose). There are horsy connections with "constable" and "marshal",
and also with "jaded", since a jade was once a name for a worn-out
horse. A "niche" was originally a nest and "porcelain" does indeed
have the porcine associations that its name might suggest, although
in a disguised way.

If you need any unusual adjectives, try "limacine", snail-like,
"jumentous", resembling horse urine, "ornithophilous", of flowers
that attract birds to pollinate them, or "peristeronic", suggestive
of pigeons (though you might have trouble wedging any of them into
your everyday conversation).

One story I have to dispute: we now know that "jinx" is almost
certainly not from an old name for the bird called the wryneck (see
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-jin1.htm).

Apart from that small quibble, it's a pleasant and undemanding romp
through an interesting aspect of English word history.

[Martha Barnette, Dog Days and Dandelions, published by St Martin's
Press, New York, in February 2003; ISBN 0-312-28072-6; hardback,
pp194; publisher's price US$24.95.]

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3. Weird Words: Lipogrammatist
-------------------------------------------------------------------
A writer of lipograms.

As opposed to pangrammatists, who strive to crowd all the letters
of the alphabet into a composition of the very briefest scope, a
lipogrammatist systematically leaves one of them out. This ditty
from the nineteenth century avoids a certain vowel:

  A jovial swain may rack his brain,
    and tax his fancy's might,
  To quiz in vain, for 'tis most plain,
    That what I say is right.

A lipogram without an "e" is the most difficult kind to write,
since that's the most common letter in English. There have been
some celebrated modern examples. In 1939 Ernest Vincent Wright
published a 50,000-word novel called Gadsby without a single "e" in
it. The French author Georges Perec produced a 300-page tour-de-
force in 1969, similarly without an "e" in sight, under the title
La Disparation. It was translated into e-less English by Gilbert
Adair in 1995 as A Void. We might ask ourselves why anyone would
attempt such feats, but that question might take us too far into
the murkier realms of human psychology.

Such unusual constructions can fatally limit an author, as crucial
grammatical forms must not play a part in any composition. Though a
good author might find avoiding a particular symbol is not always
too much of a handicap, it's hard to maintain such an approach for
long without producing writing that is a thoroughgoing oddity, as
this part of my discussion plainly shows. Writing in this way for
fifty thousand words would task anybody's brain, and could bring
about a long-lasting loss of authorial ability in a wordsmith!

The word "lipogram" is from the Greek "lipogrammatos", lacking a
letter, which derives from "leipein", to leave out, plus "gramma",
a letter. The first part has nothing to do with the modern prefix
"lipo-", fat, which is from a different Greek stem.


4. Sic!
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Chuck Wuest was reading the New Yorker last month and found a piece
referred to "a pleasant young woman with a nose ring named Rebecca,
who sits at the front desk".

The New Scientist this week reports a notice from the department of
"helpful" advice. On the bottom of a box of Celebrations chocolates
is clearly inscribed: "Do not read while box is open".


5. Q&A
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. In your Weird Words section of a recent newsletter you used
"mummer" as a synonym for "guiser".  Having lived near Philadelphia
for a number of years I always wondered where the term mummer came
from. They have a "Mummer's Parade" on New Year's Day and it's
quite a spectacular event. Any chance of a quick update on the term
mummer? [Kirk Jones]

A. No problem. Strictly speaking, if you're a mummer you're keeping
mum, that is, you're staying silent. Traditional mummers acted in
dumb-show or mime.

The word was used in Britain from the sixteenth century onwards for
groups of local people who went from door to door on high days and
holidays through the year - especially at Christmas - performing
traditional plays that are often called mummer's plays. There are
many local names for the performers in Britain, such as Christmas
rhymers, plough bullocks, plough jags, and tipteerers, as well as
guisers. The plays featured characters such as St George and the
Dragon, Robin Hood, the Turkish Knight (an echo of the Crusades)
and Beelzebub. A key character is a comical quack doctor who at the
end of the play brings back to life the loser of a sword fight
between a hero and his opponent. Despite the name, most mummer's
plays are actually spoken, usually in rhyme, and can also include
singing. For that reason, the more formal term is "folk plays". The
tradition still exists in a few places in Britain and other
countries.

The word "mum" comes from an old Germanic root and seems to be
echoic. If you make inarticulate noises with your mouth closed, it
comes out sounding like "mmmmm". Some scholars argue that the word
for the performers comes instead from a French source meaning a
mask, since the characters in such plays often wore fantastic
costumes that included masks. This seems not to be the case.

In the nineteenth century "mummer" became a contemptuous term for a
ham actor, because the objective of the traditional local mummer's
play was humour, not the quality of the performance, and the
standard was often atrocious.

                        -----------

Q. When I jokingly told a co-worker I would be "on pins and
needles" until she provided me some information I'd requested, she
immediately asked, "Where did that expression come from, anyway?"
The expression seems to imply the same uncomfortable anxiety as "on
tenterhooks" (I just read your explanation of that one), but
otherwise doesn't appear to be related. So just where did it come
from, anyway? [Meg Laycock]

A. I'm sure you're right in suggesting this origin for the saying.
The implication is that you're restless and anxious, as though you
were sitting on a bed of nails.

There are actually two expressions involving pins and needles. The
other describes the tingling sensation in arm or leg that appears
when the circulation is restored. The entries in the Oxford English
Dictionary suggest that both are of similar date: yours is recorded
slightly earlier, turning up first in 1810, but the other is known
from 1813, which is a dead heat in etymological terms.

I was going to suggest that your version is North American and mine
British, largely because I only know the tingling sensation one and
not the one implying anxiety. However, I see that it also appears
in one of my Australian dictionaries and at least one of my British
ones as well, so it has obviously just passed me by.


6. Endnote
-------------------------------------------------------------------
"I've been in Who's Who, and I know what's what, but it'll be the
first time I ever made the dictionary." [Mae West, in a letter to
the RAF in the early 1940s on hearing that an inflatable life
jacket had been named after her; quoted in the Oxford Dictionary of
Thematic Quotations (2000)]


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From DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG  Fri Mar 21 20:11:15 2003
From: DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG (Michael Quinion)
Date: Fri, 21 Mar 2003 20:11:15 -0000
Subject: World Wide Words -- 22 Mar 03
Message-ID: <FRI.21.MAR.2003.201115.0000.>

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 333          Saturday 22 March 2003
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sent each Saturday to 16,000+ subscribers in at least 119 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK      ISSN 1470-1448
<http://www.worldwidewords.org>      <TheEditor at worldwidewords.org>
-------------------------------------------------------------------
 IF YOU RESPOND TO THIS MAILING, REMEMBER TO CHANGE THE OUTGOING
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Contents
-------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Book Review: The Grouchy Grammarian.
3. Weird Words: Maritorious.
4. Sic!
5. Q&A: Lynch law; Molly-dooker.
6. Endnote.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
-------------------------------------------------------------------
LIPOGRAMMATIST  The title of the work by Georges Perec mentioned in
this piece last week is correctly La Disparition.


2. Book Review: The Grouchy Grammarian
-------------------------------------------------------------------
If the title isn't enough to give you the idea, the wordy subtitle
certainly will: "A How-Not-To Guide to the 47 Most Common Mistakes
in English Made by Journalists, Broadcasters, and Others Who Should
Know Better". Though humorously written and very readable, the book
seems at times to consist of an extended catalogue of the errors of
writing and speech that have offended author Thomas Parrish (or, to
accept the book's conceit, his alter ego, the eponymous Grouchy
Grammarian).

He has rounded up the usual suspects: confusion between "it's" and
"its", "among" and "between", and "may" and "might"; between "lie"
and "lay", and between homophone pairs such as "lead" and "led". He
illustrates the dreadful things that people do with apostrophes,
problems with subject and verb agreement, the misuse of "former",
the incorrect use of "whom", dangling participles, malapropisms,
and more.

As his subtitle makes clear, his examples are mostly taken from the
media, which I feel sometimes shines the spotlight too brightly on
errors made by broadcasters and journalists. Theirs is a stressful
occupation with constantly looming deadlines in which it is all too
easy to make a slip that cannot be recalled and corrected. Mr
Parrish would, I suspect, argue that a more thorough knowledge of
the basics would prevent the most egregious errors. Perhaps so.

I disagree with a few things: "straight and narrow" is not just a
mistake for "strait and narrow" but is of independent formation
with a respectable ancestry (I've found examples going back into
the 1840s); "chaise lounge", though a folk etymology for the French
"chaise longue", is now too well established in the US for a book
on style to claim it as an error (it is, for example, included in
several current American dictionaries without comment); "ice tea"
for "iced tea" is not simply an error but a regional form that
parallels "ice cream" (nineteenth-century prescriptivists were
equally hard on this, arguing similarly that it ought to be "iced
cream"); "cut and dry" isn't necessarily a mistaken form of "cut
and dried" but a variant that's known from the eighteenth century
(Swift used it in 1730, for example).

But Thomas Parrish is no knee-jerk pedant. He is happy to dismiss
the old canard that "none" must always take a singular verb; he is
relaxed about the use of "like" to mean "as" (though not the
intrusive "like" that forms a meaningless sentence break in so many
conversations); he's very aware that language is not static. His
greatest concern is that whatever we write, we should say clearly
what we mean to say. This is summed up by his opening section,
which urges all writers to "Think!" - not, as the late Thomas J
Watson of IBM meant it, to exercise the little grey cells in the
direction of innovation and invention, but just to stop a moment
and reflect on what it is one is actually trying to communicate.

My largest concern about his efforts is that I'm not at all sure
what audience he is writing for. Most people who ought to read it
probably won't, or realise that they need to. It will be picked up
by some who know that their English could be improved (perhaps even
by some in the media), but I suspect that a sizeable proportion of
its readers will know most of the answers already and will read it
largely to have their prejudices about the degraded state of media
English confirmed.

[Thomas Parrish, "The Grouchy Grammarian", published by Wiley in
October 2002; ISBN 0-471-22383-2; hardback, pp186; publisher's
price US$19.95.]

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3. Weird Words: Maritorious
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Being fond of one's husband.

This is the partner to "uxorious", of a man who is fond of his wife
to the point of doting excess. It is much less well known, to the
extent that I have had no success in finding a modern example of
its use outside the books on words that cite it.

A Google search turned up what looked at first sight like a number
of examples, such as the surprising statement from a school that
"Medals and prizes are given to maritorious students". It took a
moment to realise that should have been "meritorious". As it
happens, that's oddly relevant, since the only example of the word
on record is in Bussy D'Ambois, a tragedy by George Chapman of
1607, in which he coins the word to make a bad pun: "Dames
maritorious ne're were meritorious".

(As asides: John Keats' poem, On First Looking into Chapman's
Homer, refers to the same man, who made a famous translation of the
Greek work. Dryden thought little of Chapman's play, finding in it
"a dwarfish thought dressed up in gigantic words, repetition in
abundance, looseness of expression, and gross hyperboles; the sense
of one line expanded prodigiously into ten; and, to sum up all,
incorrect English, and a hideous mingle of false poetry and true
nonsense". However, the Oxford English Dictionary has 116 citations
from it, and it has provided modern writers on words such as myself
some small subject matter, so it hasn't proved entirely valueless.)

The word is from Latin "maritus", husband.


4. Sic!
-------------------------------------------------------------------
>From The Age, Melbourne, 14 March, seen by Jim Hart: "De Stefano,
54, showed no reaction when [the judge] ordered him to serve a
minimum of seven years in a courtroom packed with family and
supporters, but a daughter burst into tears and sobbed loudly".
That's a cruel and unusual punishment, especially for the family
and supporters.


5. Q&A
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. According to Peter McCarthy in his hugely entertaining travel
book McCarthy's Bar, the word "lynch" may be derived from an event
in 1493 when James Lynch FitzStephen, the mayor of Galway, strung
up his own son from an upstairs window of his house for murdering a
young Spanish house guest, who the young Lynch FitzStephen feared
might become a rival for the attention of his girlfriend. Should we
give any credence to this story? [Michael Gould]

A. At the risk of offending the citizens of Galway, I have to say
the tradition is quite certainly false. Though the window is said
still to exist and to have a plaque that commemorates the event,
linguistic evidence alone is enough to scupper it. The tale seems
to have been invented by an enterprising local with an eye to the
tourist trade sometime in the nineteenth century, after the word
had become widely known.

"Lynch" is short for "lynch law", the punishment of a person for
some supposed crime without bothering with the niceties of a legal
trial. All the evidence points to its being an archetypal American
expression. For its origin we must look to Virginia in the 1780s,
during the American Revolution. There is some doubt about which
Lynch gave his name to the expression, since there were two:
Captain William Lynch of Pittsylvania County and Colonel James
Lynch of Bedford County. However, both were trying to bring order
and justice to an area notoriously lacking both. It's William Lynch
who is usually mentioned in scholarly discussions, mainly - it
seems - because documentary evidence survives of his efforts.

It was only later that the term took on its associations with mob
rule. And though it is now taken to refer to execution, usually by
hanging, and most commonly in the twentieth century to the killing
of black Americans in the South by whites, early examples suggest
it referred to punishments that were less terminal. The compact
drawn up with his neighbours by William Lynch in 1780 said of the
actions of the lawless men troubling the area: "if they will not
desist from their evil practices, we will inflict such corporeal
punishment on him or them, as to us shall seem adequate to the
crime committed or the damage sustained". "Corporeal punishment"
(an older form of "corporal punishment") suggests a good hiding
rather than capital punishment.

The first appearance in print of the term that I know of is in a
humorous article in The New-England Magazine of October 1835 under
the title The Inconveniences of Being Lynched; the storyteller
suffers being tarred and feathered on suspicion of being an
abolitionist. Similarly, a news item in the New York Daily Express
in 1843 refers to a man "lately taken from his house at night by
some of his neighbors and severely lynched", which sounds as though
a harsh punishment was inflicted, but one falling short of death,
since logic demands that it's difficult to severely execute
somebody.

Interestingly, some recent examples of the term in print have
returned to this older sense.

                        -----------

Q. A "molly-dooker" is an Australian expression for a left-handed
person. I'm curious to know the origin. [Mark Roome]

A. The answer divides neatly into two halves, one for each part of
the word.

One's "dukes" or "dooks" are one's hands, of course, as in the
American "to duke it out", to fight with the fists. There are two
stories about its origin, both of which take it back to London
slang of the early to middle part of the nineteenth century. One
theory is that an older slang term for the hand was "fork", in
reference to using the fingers like a pair of tweezers to slip
something surreptitiously out of a person's pocket without them
knowing about it. Cockney rhyming slang then converted "fork" into
"Duke of York" and so, by the usual process of abbreviation, to
"duke". (The spelling "dook" presumably reflects the way the word
was said in Australia, rather than the standard British English
"djook".) Some authorities regard this as an over-complex evolution
(and who can blame them?), and suggest that the word's actually
from Romany, the language of the Rom, or gypsies, in which "dukker"
means to tell fortunes, presumably by palmistry. This theory is
itself less than totally convincing.

The other half of your term, "molly", seems to be yet another
example of the use of that word to mean an effeminate male, as in
"mollycoddle", which was featured here some time ago. (See
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-mol1.htm). The implication
seems to have been that anybody left-handed was a bit queer in at
least one respect.

There are various spellings for the slang term, including "molly-
duker", and there's also a related form, "molly-hander". It's first
recorded in Australia in the 1920s.


5. Endnote
-------------------------------------------------------------------
"It was one of the dullest speeches I ever heard. The Agee woman
told us for three quarters of an hour how she came to write her
beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required."
[P G Wodehouse, The Girl in Blue (1960)]


A. Subscription commands
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From DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG  Fri Mar 28 14:49:14 2003
From: DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG (Michael Quinion)
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2003 14:49:14 -0000
Subject: World Wide Words -- 29 Mar 03
Message-ID: <FRI.28.MAR.2003.144914.0000.>

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 334          Saturday 29 March 2003
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sent each Saturday to 16,000+ subscribers in at least 119 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK      ISSN 1470-1448
<http://www.worldwidewords.org>      <TheEditor at worldwidewords.org>
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 IF YOU RESPOND TO THIS MAILING, REMEMBER TO CHANGE THE OUTGOING
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Contents
-------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: SARS.
3. Turns of Phrase: Shock and Awe.
4. Weird Words: Metoposcopist.
5. Q&A: Green ink letter; Chook.
6. Endnote.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
-------------------------------------------------------------------
UNANSWERED MAIL  I'm fighting deadlines for the next few weeks, so
please do not be offended that e-mail is not always answered. And
newsletters might become a little shorter!

SMALL CRIES OF JOY  Oxford University Press tell me that the first
US printing of my book "Ologies and Isms" has sold out already. I
was going to make promotional noises to American subscribers this
week about its being available, but now I'll hold off until new
stock arrives, probably in late April.


2. Turns of Phrase: SARS
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Much medical and media attention has focused on this mysterious new
disease in the fortnight since Gro Harlem Brundtland, the director
of the World Health Organisation, took the unusual step of issuing
a warning. However, press coverage has been muted in recent days
because of the war with Iraq. The acronym is short for "Severe
Acute Respiratory Syndrome".

So far several hundred people have been infected and some 50 have
died. The disease - also named "super pneumonia" because a life-
threatening pneumonia is a major symptom - is causing concern
because of the ease with which it can spread at close quarters. Its
cause is as yet unknown, although a virus is strongly suspected;
despite some press reports, it isn't a form of influenza. It's
thought the illness may have began in Guangdong Province in China
some months ago, and the greatest impact on the public has been in
South-East Asia countries such as Singapore and Hong Kong. As a
result, another name that has emerged for it this week is "Asian
pneumonia".

SARS is believed to be the first new, often life-threatening
disease to emerge in decades that can be spread from one person to
another.
                                       [Washington Post, Mar. 2003]

SARS has been tentatively identified as a virus similar to those
which cause measles, mumps and canine distemper.
                                          [The Scotsman, Mar. 2003]


3. Turns of Phrase: Shock and Awe
-------------------------------------------------------------------
This looks set to be the Second Gulf War's signature phrase, much
as "mother of all ..." was of the first. It's all over the press
reportage of the conflict, it being the Pentagon's term for the
process of instilling fear and doubt in the minds of Iraqis.

The phrase first appeared publicly in the book of the same title by
Harlan Ullman and James Wade in 1996, which came out of a report by
the Rapid Dominance Study Group, an informal association of mainly
ex-military men. The concept they put forward was, as Harlan Ullman
explains it, one that involved "inflicting minimum casualties and
doing minimum damage using minimum force". Shock and Awe is not
about destruction but about power. By demonstrating such might that
an opponent is stunned into surrender, and by concentrating on
matters that reduced the ability to resist, it combines military
force with psychological warfare. Their book said, "The ability to
shock and awe rests ultimately in the ability to frighten, scare,
intimidate and disarm".

Mr Ullman is reported as saying that the way the Pentagon has used
it "has not been helpful" because it has put too much emphasis on a
Doomsday approach, though this could itself, of course, be just
another application of Shock and Awe.

It is all part of the administration's basic approach toward
foreign policy, which is best described by the phrase used for its
war plan - "shock and awe." The notion is that the United States
needs to intimidate countries with its power and assertiveness,
always threatening, always denouncing, never showing weakness.
                                              [Newsweek, Mar. 2003]

Washington's assessment that a "shock and awe" bombing campaign
would crumble the Iraqi regime's morale, or even kill its leaders
in the first round, has not so far proved correct.
                                          [Toronto Star, Mar. 2003]


4. Weird Words: Metoposcopist
-------------------------------------------------------------------
A person who practices metoposcopy.

Metoposcopy is the art of judging a person's character and fortune
from his face, principally his forehead. This is not so strange an
idea, since the forehead is a prominent and expressive part of the
face. Persons with high foreheads are considered brainy; those with
short ones are sometimes thought to be almost Neanderthal. The play
of the muscles on the forehead in concentration or contemplation is
an expressive reflection of the mind working beneath the skin.

Metoposcopy was a medieval method of assessment, together with such
related techniques as "chiromancy" (divination using the hand) and
"podomancy" (prognostication from the condition of one's feet). The
more general term that refers to the whole face is "physiognomy".
Metoposcopy is said to have been invented in the sixteenth century
by Gerolomo Cardano, a man better known for his pioneering work in
medicine and mathematics. His book, Metoposcopia Libri Tredecim,
contained more than 800 woodcuts illustrating facial positions he
suggested were associated with temperament and destiny.

The word comes via Late Latin from Greek and derives from the Greek
word "metopon", forehead.


5. Q&A
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. Although the meaning is quite clear to us and examples of use
are readily available on the Web, so far we have not been able to
locate the expression in any dictionary, let alone discover how it
came about! Why "green ink letter"? [Anna Beria, University of
Bath, UK]

A. I know immediately what you mean by a "green-ink letter", or one
written by a member of the "green-ink brigade". Since they are
terms largely restricted to Britain (though I have come across a
couple of isolated references in American publications) some
background would seem to be a good idea.

The term refers to a particular kind of letter writer - most often
to newspapers - who claims that he is the victim of some injustice,
or who composes long and vehement complaints against a person or an
organisation, or who believes that a numerical calculation based on
the name of the Prime Minister shows he's an agent of the devil, or
who is sure that invisible rays are being beamed into his house by
his next-door neighbour to cause him injury, or who puts forward a
thesis which, if adopted, will lead inevitably to world peace.

In 1998, the newly appointed Readers' Editor of the Guardian, Ian
Mayes, wrote: "Even before I began I had numerous warnings from
colleagues to 'beware of the green-ink brigade', conjuring the
spectre of obsessive correspondents who would write at great length
and persistently, typically covering their copious sheets in
longhand scrawled in green ink".

In 1999, this appeared in the Independent newspaper: "All of which
might be dismissed as a bad joke - a green-ink letter written by a
malicious eccentric - were it an isolated case"; the New Statesman
of January 1995 had: "So is Busby a paid-up member of the green-ink
brigade or does he actually have a point? And is his phone really
tapped?"

The earliest example I know of (many thanks to Fred Shapiro of Yale
Law School for his help in finding it; he would like me to mention
that he's Editor of the forthcoming Yale Dictionary of Quotations)
is dated 8 March 1985 and is once again from the "Guardian": "Our
elected legislature was taken over lock, stock and barrel by the
green ink brigade". In this case MPs weren't actually writing
letters, but debating fluoridation in the House of Commons in a way
that the article's writer, Ian Aitkin, felt was unbalanced. He
thought it necessary to add this note to his comment:

  The expression is the more-or-less affectionate description
  given by journalists and politicians to the people who write
  them eccentric letters, often in block capitals and frequently
  underlined in multicoloured inks. For some reason I have never
  heard satisfactorily explained, the most obsessive of these
  correspondents seem to prefer green.

In recent examples, the key characteristic is the eccentricity or
disturbed reasoning of the individuals, not their actual use of
green ink. Or indeed their writing of letters - as Ian Aitkin's
piece demonstrates, the term had even by then become figurative.

I'm sure that the term arose in journalism, though - like you - I
can find no good information about exactly when. I've asked several
senior journalists of my acquaintance about it. They all know the
expressions. Some claim to remember receiving letters of the type
in their younger days, while others deny literal green-ink letters
ever existed. But they all think the phrases were coined relatively
recently to reflect journalistic experience or folklore.

                        -----------

Q. I have found a term that appears to be completely Australian in
usage, if not origin. The word is "chook" which is slang for a
chicken. Is this native to Australia or did it originate elsewhere
and then take root here better than anywhere else? Any ideas on the
origin of the word would be helpful. [Mark Hansen]

A. Not solely Australian, since New Zealanders make a claim to it
as well. And I'm not sure that it's actually slang: I'd prefer to
describe it as colloquial regional English.

In one sense it's natively Antipodean, since that form of the word
certainly grew up there - it's recorded in various pronunciations
and spellings in Australia from the 1850s on (in New Zealand
somewhat later), at first as "chookie" or "chucky". The "chook"
form emerged about 1900 and has outlasted the others.

In another sense, it's actually an English word, one that was taken
to Australia and New Zealand by emigrants. Back in the sixteenth
century "chuck" was a familiar endearment. Shakespeare is first
recorded as using it, appropriately enough in Love's Labour's Lost.
It survives as an endearment in some parts of Britain today, such
as Yorkshire and Liverpool, the latter having the vowel pronounced
to my ear part-way towards "chook". And, of course, there's the
American nickname (even sometimes the given name) of "Chuck", often
used as a pet form of "Charles", which comes from the same term of
affection (the sense "to give a gentle blow under the chin" is
probably from a different source).

All these except the given name could, and indeed still can, refer
to literal chickens. The name seems to have been an attempt at
imitating the clucking of farmyard fowls, so it's a close relative
of "cluck", which was similarly invented.

There are other forms, too, principally the "chucky" one that seems
to have been the first Australian version. Those of us who were
young in the 1980s, or who like me had a misspent middle age, will
remember the arcade game "Chuckie Egg"; in Britain there's a
supplier of table birds whose name is Chuckie Chicken. I'm told
that in Liverpool a "chucky egg" can be a soft-boiled egg mashed up
with butter, and "chook" can be a general word for food and also a
mildly insulting term for an old woman.


6. Endnote
-------------------------------------------------------------------
"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the
range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally
impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it."
[George Orwell, "Nineteen Eighty-four" (1949)]


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