World Wide Words -- 10 Apr 04
Michael Quinion
TheEditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Apr 9 18:49:26 UTC 2004
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 387 Saturday 10 April 2004
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Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Fusion inhibitor.
3. Sic!
4. Weird Words: Folderol.
5. Noted this week.
6. Q&A: Kitty.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Useful URLs.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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PINING AWAY It may be some sort of commentary on the nature of
popular culture on both sides of the Atlantic that, following the
piece last week on "pining away", many subscribers e-mailed me to
point out (or remonstrate with me for not mentioning) the infamous
dead parrot sketch from Monty Python's Flying Circus. At one point,
you will probably recall, the shopkeeper said that the parrot was
not dead, he was just pining for the Norwegian fjords.
2. Turns of Phrase: Fusion inhibitor
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Fusion inhibitors are a new class of drugs that act against HIV;
they got that name because they prevent the virus from fusing with
the inside of a cell and so stop it from replicating. Though this
term has been used in the pharmaceutical industry since the mid-
1990s, it has only very recently started to be seen in the non-
specialist press because the first example, Fuzeon (generic name
enfuvirtide), was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration
only in 2003. Such drugs are members of a broader class, the entry
inhibitors, which stop the virus from entering the cell in the
first place. These are classed as antiretroviral drugs, like other
HIV agents, since HIV is a retrovirus, one that works by generating
a DNA copy of its RNA genome inside the cell, the reverse of normal
genetic replication, which goes from DNA to RNA.
3. Sic!
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Alice Sarah found this in Along the Grapevine, which is a community
newspaper in South Australia: "20% of Australians will suffer from
some form of mental health at some stage in their life."
David Ashton e-mailed last Wednesday: "I went to a big garden show
in Melbourne today, in which a greenhouse manufacturer was running
a competition, with a prize of, what else, a greenhouse. The bottom
of the entry form had a list of conditions of entry, the first one
of which read: 'Participants must fully complete the entry form.
Incomplete and incomprehensible entries will be illegible.'"
Derek Stevens found an advertisement in the current issue of The
Philosophy Magazine for a series of educational conferences on
philosophical subjects - such as free will and the problem of evil
- which are to be held in various cities in England. One is headed
"Life After Death [Not in Leeds]". Sorry about that, Leeds.
New Scientist informs us this week that jungle birds are not always
brightly coloured: "Canopy birds tend to be green, while understudy
species are generally brown." That's the trouble with understudies:
rarely able to parade in the limelight in all their finery. The
writer meant "understory", of course.
4. Weird Words: Folderol
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Trivia or nonsense; a showy but useless item.
>From before Shakespeare's "There was a lover and his lass, / With a
hey, and a ho, and a hey nonny no" down to and beyond Pogo's "Deck
the halls with Boston Charlie, / Walla Walla Wash, and Kalamazoo",
nonsense words have a regular feature of song lyrics. You might
think that it's a stretch to suggest another meaningless la-la
lyric filler is the origin of this usefully dismissive word.
However, that indeed seems to be its origin, although the usual
form until relatively recently was "falderal" rather than
"folderol".
There are many traditional rhymes and songs with variants of "fal-
de-ral" in them somewhere. For example, Robert Bell noted these
words of an old Yorkshire mummer's play in his Ancient Poems,
Ballads and Songs of the Peasantry Of England of 1857: "I hope
you'll prove kind with your money and beer, / We shall come no more
near you until the next year. /Fal de ral, lal de lal, etc." And
Sir Walter Scott included a few lines of an old Scottish ballad in
The Bride of Lammermoor (1819): "There was a haggis in Dunbar, /
Fal de ral, etc. / Mony better and few waur, / Fal de ral, etc."
Charles Dickens had gentle fun with this habit in his Sketches By
Boz of 1836-7: "Smuggins, after a considerable quantity of coughing
by way of symphony, and a most facetious sniff or two, which afford
general delight, sings a comic song, with a fal-de-ral - tol-de-ral
chorus at the end of every verse, much longer than the verse
itself."
It was around 1820 that this traditional chorus is first recorded
as a term for a gewgaw or flimsy thing that was showy but of no
value, though it had to wait until the 1870s before it started to
be widely used.
5. Noted this week
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BODY SUSHI This began in California last Summer and has since been
reported in Israel and China. In "body sushi", one eats Japanese
food off the body of a naked woman. The technique is said to be an
ancient Japanese method of serving food, known as "nyotai mori",
which is still sometimes available today, though not usually listed
on menus. Body sushi was imported to Hollywood by the celebrity
chef Gary Arabia, who also seems to have supplied the English name.
It brings a whole new meaning to the phrase "Naked Lunch".
CHESS BOXING Is this some perverse joke? No, it's meant seriously,
even though it is led by a Dutch performance artist named Iepe the
Joker, who is for the moment the world champion. It's a contest in
which the participants alternate six rounds in the ring with five
on the chess board. Iepe's next match is in Tokyo on 17 April. As
to where the idea comes from, wasn't there an old kung-fu movie
called Mystery of Chess Boxing?
GRANNY LEAVE We've had paternity leave (the father's equivalent of
maternity leave), gardening leave (used euphemistically to refer to
an employee's suspension from work on full pay for some reason) and
even calamity leave (emergency leave to deal with family crises).
This latest one was put forward last Monday by Patricia Hewitt, the
British Government's Trade and Industry Secretary. It would allow
carers to opt for working fewer hours so that they can look after
aged relatives.
6. Q&A
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Q. Why is the money in the middle of a poker game (or any other
card game) called the "kitty"? [Steve Moore]
A. Just to get it out of the way, it has no connection with the pet
name for a cat. Having said that, if I told you the word came from
an old North Country English term for a prison, would you believe
me? That's the explanation put forward, rather cautiously, in the
various Oxford dictionaries. I'm unconvinced myself, since one of
the links in the chain of evidence is extremely weak. But there is
another possibility.
The most frequent usage of "kitty" is that of some fund of money
for communal use made up of individual contributions. You might,
for example, go to the pub with a group of friends and have a whip
round for contributions to a kitty to pay for the first rounds of
drinks. Or a club might pay for the tea and biscuits at meetings by
arranging to have a kitty. This sense is first recorded in the
1880s. Though it had close associations with poker games in its
earliest recorded examples, it seems not to have been the name for
the prize pot itself, but instead for a sum taken out of the pot to
pay for the expenses of the game, such as buying drinks or a house
percentage. For example, in 1935, Alvin Pollock wrote in a book
called The Underworld Speaks that the kitty was the "money taken
from virtually every gambling pot for purpose of profits or
expenses".
Going back in time half a century, we know that "kitty" was a term
in various northern English dialects for a prison or house of
correction. It's a modified form of "kidcote" (a word which has had
several spellings), once known from English counties such as
Yorkshire and Lincolnshire - prisons of this name once existed in
Wakefield, York, Lincoln, Gainsborough and Lancaster among other
places. "Kidcote" is recorded from the sixteenth century, but had
become obsolete by the time the English Dialect Dictionary was
compiled at the end of the nineteenth century. That work quotes
several sources to show that a kidcote was usually a temporary
lock-up or holding cell in which prisoners were put overnight to
await their appearance before magistrates. It seems to have been a
facetious term, since it probably literally meant a pen for a young
goat ("kid" plus "cote", a little cottage, so a close relative of
"dovecote").
So far so good. Oxford Dictionaries say tentatively that the money
sense of "kitty" comes from the prison sense. This looks very much
like a bunch of researchers pushing words around and doing the
lexicographical equivalent of making two and two equal five, as no
direct evidence seems to exist to show that the one evolved out of
the other, and the concepts are far apart. One writer, not from
Oxford Dictionaries, has suggested that the money in the kitty was
so called because it was taken out of general circulation and, as
it were, locked up or imprisoned until it was needed. This is
stretching matters a bit too far to be readily credible.
Let us turn to another suggestion, which makes rather more sense,
though there's no more evidence for it than for the other one. It's
asserted, especially in some American dictionaries and also in the
Collins dictionary, that it's from the much older "kit" for a set
of articles needed for a particular purpose, such as a soldier's
kit, so that a "kitty" would be a diminutive form, a small kit. If
so, it would be a relative of the American "whole kit and
caboodle"; that might be relevant, as the first known example of
the word is from a little book on the rules of draw poker written
by John Keller and published in New York in 1887.
A. Subscription commands
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