World Wide Words -- 10 Jul 04
Michael Quinion
TheEditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jul 9 18:12:30 UTC 2004
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 400 Saturday 10 July 2004
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Sent each Saturday to 19,000+ subscribers in at least 120 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
<http://www.worldwidewords.org> <TheEditor at worldwidewords.org>
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Swazzle.
3. Sic!
4. Review: Port Out, Starboard Home.
5. Q&A: Joystick.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Useful URLs.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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MILESTONE It seems appropriate that Dr Patrick Hanks' review of my
new book should appear in the 400th issue of this newsletter, a
landmark that was inconceivable when I started writing it all those
years ago.
ALTERNATE VERSUS ALTERNATIVE Several careful users of the language
among subscribers pointed aghast at my inclusion of "alternate" in
Weird Words last week: "A modified version of his game immediately
became hugely popular under his alternate name". I can only plead
temporary insanity on grounds of swollen-headedness. Things that
alternate occur in turn repeatedly; this was not, of course, what I
meant, rather that it was a name available as another possibility,
an alternative.
WEB SITE The World Wide Words Web site is now installed in its new
location. The backlog of messages in my in-box has been cleared. It
seems life is almost back to normal ...
2. Weird Words: Swazzle
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The call or sounding device of the Punch-and-Judy man.
In the traditional Punch-and-Judy show, Mr Punch speaks with a high
squeaky, rasping voice, interspersed with ear-splitting cries when
he perpetrates some piece of devilry or is thwarted. The showman
makes these noises by means of a device in his mouth, these days
usually called a "swazzle".
This has taken various forms but in essence is a small pair of
bowed plates with tape across the middle. The Punch-and-Judy man
holds it near the back of his mouth and blows through it, much as a
clarinet player does with the reeds in his instrument. It takes a
lot of practice to make recognisable words and to swap between
Punch's swazzled rasp and the unswazzled voices of the other
characters.
"Swazzle" is a modified form of the older "swatchel"; this might be
a variant of "swatch" but is more probably from German
"schwätzeln", taken in turn from "schwatzen", to chatter or tattle.
One reason that experts think this is the source is that the very
earliest example, dated 1854, spells the word "schwassle". In the
latter part of that century, the "swatchel-cove" was the Punch-and-
Judy man or his assistant who did the supporting patter and who
interpreted Punch's less intelligible squawks, and the "swatchel-
box" was the booth in which the Punchman stood.
Incidentally, there are some risks attached to using the swazzle:
tradition requires that the performer shall swallow it at least
twice before he can call himself a Punch-and-Judy man.
3. Sic!
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Christine Aikenhead e-mails from Halifax, Nova Scotia: "I have just
finished reading Secret Smile by Nicci French. I was amused by the
following: 'The weather was so good that Dad had lit a barbecue. I
could see him at the end of the garden, standing over it, poking at
the coals with - yes, there was no doubt about it - with Brendan.'"
Guests do so help to stir things!
Department of muddled metaphors: The front page of last Saturday's
Times contained this comment: "He added: 'With a drug like warfarin
the therapeutic window is very narrow. Underdosing you can have a
blood clot, and overdosing can lead to extensive bleeding and, in
worst-case scenarios, brain haemorrhages. You are dead as a church
mouse.'" Spotted by Jerry Whitmarsh, who used to think that church
mice were just poor.
Janet Healey found a review of the Cambridge Guide to English Usage
in Limelight, an Australian listings magazine. It said, in part:
"Language pedants will be eager to hear that their particular joy,
the spilt infinitive, has an interesting entry." But it's no use
crying over spilt infinitives.
4. Review: Port Out, Starboard Home
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Reviewed by Dr Patrick Hanks, Editor of the Digital Dictionary of
the German Language, and formerly editor of - among other works -
the Collins Dictionary of the English Language and the New Oxford
Dictionary of English.
------
*OK* is one of the most useful terms in the English language and
has passed into pretty well every language in the world. Possibly,
there are a few remote peoples in the New Guinea Highlands who do
not say "OK" to each other, but even that seems unlikely. Everyday
conversation in German, Greek, Czech, and Chinese is peppered with
interjections of "OK". How ever did languages manage without it?
Surely, the origins of such a common expression must be well known?
In fact, the historical record shows that it has only been in use
for just over 160 years, and until recently the etymology was much
disputed. People in different countries and different decades have
proposed various origins with more or less scholarly ingenuity.
Choctaw-Chickasaw "okah", it is indeed, Greek "olla kalla", all
good, Scots "och aye", and other possibilities in Finnish, French,
and West African languages, have successively been proposed as the
source.
Michael Quinion summarizes these competing hypotheses clearly and
elegantly and then goes on to give an account of Allen Walker
Read's magisterial investigation which showed conclusively that the
term originated in the north-eastern United States, where it was
used as a cabalistic catch phrase among supporters of Martin Van
Buren for the presidency of the United States in 1840 - on the
rather surprising basis of the initials of Van Buren's birthplace
in the Hudson Valley, Old Kinderhook. The speculative etymologies,
some of which seemed plausible enough at the time, are all wrong.
There could be no clearer illustration of the Rev. Smythe Palmer's
dictum (cited as an epigraph by Quinion): "Man is an etymologizing
animal". The etymology of a word is like Voltaire's concept of God:
if one does not exist, we feel compelled to invent one.
This delightful book debunks over 200 common "etymythologies" (as
Laurence Horn called them). They range from the palpably absurd to
the overwhelmingly plausible. Has anyone really ever believed that
the origin of the word *golf* is an acronym for "Gentlemen Only,
Ladies Forbidden"? Though widely circulated, this absurd story is
redolent of heavy Victorian or Edwardian humour and was probably
never intended to be taken seriously except by the gullible. (The
true etymon is probably a Dutch word, "kolf", meaning a club.)
On the other hand, what could be more plausible than the belief
that *belfry* is somehow connected etymologically with "bell"? A
belfry is, after all, a place for hanging bells. In fact, though,
belfry is from "berfrei", an Old French word of Germanic origin,
which originally denoted a siege tower, a wooden construction built
to shelter attackers as they assaulted the walls of a city. The
word acquired its -l- by folk etymology.
That strange phrase *at sixes and sevens*, meaning "in a state of
confusion", almost certainly derives from the technical terminology
of hazard, a dice game that was popular in late medieval times.
Quinion gives fair consideration to other hypotheses, but argues
convincingly for this origin, adducing a citation from Chaucer to
show that it was already well established in the 14th century. It
could not therefore have originated in a 15th-century dispute
between London trade guilds (another "etymythology").
Quinion's judgements are cautious and (no doubt wisely!) a little
too conservative for my taste. For example, the expression *beg the
question* was originally used as a translation of Latin "petitio
principii", a term in medieval logic denoting the fallacy of
assuming as a given the very conclusion that one is trying to reach
by logical argument. In modern English, it is normally used in a
rather different way, meaning "to make a statement that invites an
obvious question about the underlying assumptions". Quinion argues
that "Because the phrase can be used in several different ways, and
because it's often used in a way that the purists among us consider
to be wrong, it's probably safest to avoid the phrase altogether."
I beg to differ. Why should ordinary people give up a useful phrase
with a reasonably transparent meaning, just because purists know
that, as a technical term, it means something else?
After dispatching various absurd hypotheses about the origin of the
term *Yankee*, Quinion concludes, "It seems most likely that it
came from a nickname, "Janke", a diminutive form of "Jan", the
Dutch equivalent to "John"." The cautious hedge, "seems most
likely", is unnecessary. "Janke" is not only a nickname, but also a
surname. In New Netherland, the 17th-century Dutch settlement
stretching up the Hudson Valley from New Amsterdam (New York) to
Beverwijck (Albany), "Janke", alongside "Jan", "Janneke", "Jankin",
and several other variants, was a common surname. After the British
ousted the Dutch administration in 1664, Dutch families began to
spell their names with Y- instead of J- in English-speaking
contexts. Even today, families spelling their name "Yanke" are
found in the Hudson Valley alongside others using the more
traditional spelling "Janke". This was used as a nickname for a
Dutch-speaking American in colonial times.
Quinion's scholarship is impeccable, but borne lightly. He strikes
a fine balance between erudition and entertainment. The origin of
some of the words and phrases in this book are not discussed at all
in dictionaries, or discussed perfunctorily because of space
constraints. Nowhere else are false hypotheses so convincingly
dealt with. Anyone with a genuine interest in the English language
will want to own a copy of this book. It is grist to the mill of
those who study the language, but also a rich pasture for the idle
browser.
[Michael Quinion, Port Out, Starboard Home: And Other Language
Myths, was published by Penguin Books on 1 July 2004. ISBN 0-14-
051534-8, hardcover, pp304; UK publisher's price GBP12.99.
Currently available worldwide except in the USA, where it is to be
published in October 2004 under the title Ballyhoo, Buckaroo, and
Spuds by the Smithsonian Institution Press; hardcover, pp224; ISBN
1-58834-219-0; publisher's price US$19.95.]
AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
UK: GBP9.09 ( http://quinion.com?POSH )
Canada: CDN$24.50 ( http://quinion.com?PCAH )
Germany: EUR21,61 ( http://quinion.com?PDEH )
5. Q&A
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A. I've just replaced the mouse of a colleague's computer with what
the suppliers called an ergonomic mouse, that is, a joystick. I
thought how silly they were to invent a long name instead of the
well-known one that gamers have used for many years. And that was
obviously derived from the steering mechanism that's been used in
aeroplanes for most of the last century. But who named the thing
"joystick"? I strongly suspect wild-living WWI pilots, who used a
slang term from their interests in the carnal lusts of the flesh.
And it sounds American too. Can you elucidate? [Jonathan McColl]
A. It sounds highly probable, but the evidence rather points away
from that answer, though we can't be absolutely sure there was no
X-rated implication. We do know that the term actually predates
World War One and is first recorded from a British source.
In a search for its source some etymologists have been led up a
blind alley. Several works on aviation history cite a man named
Joyce as the inventor, so that the first form was presumably "Joyce
stick", later slurred and compressed into "joystick". However,
nobody who has looked into the matter has been able to find any
evidence for the existence of this person (he is sometimes given as
James Joyce, but that must be an unconscious transfer of his first
name from the author).
The first example known of "joystick" is in an 1910 entry in the
diary of the pioneering British aeronaut Robert Loraine (in that
year he made the first radio transmission from an aeroplane and -
less significantly, but as an example of the still primitive state
of the art - became the first man to land an aeroplane on the Isle
of Wight). He wrote: "In order that he shall not blunder
inadvertently into the air, the central lever - otherwise the
'cloche', or joy-stick is tied well forward". ("Cloche" was the
then usual French name for the same device, from the bell shape of
the base of some early types, especially in the Bleriot monoplane,
to which all the control wires were fixed.)
I wonder if the insubstantial Mr Joyce was an attempt by writers to
remove any suspicion that there was indeed a sexual element in the
choice of term. Some writers on word history have certainly claimed
that the shape of the stick and its position between the (always
male) pilot's legs led to the term. But as Mr Loraine's diary entry
shows, the early joysticks were a different shape that may well not
have suggested such a link. "Joystick" is indeed recorded as a
slang term for the penis, but it appears in writing for the first
time in 1916; this might suggest it was borrowed from the aviation
term, not the other way round, though the dates of slang terms are
notoriously unreliable.
On balance, it seems more likely that "joystick" derives from
another sense of "joy" that was around at the time. The closest in
time and space was "joyride", which appeared in Britain around 1908
for an unauthorised trip in a vehicle; however, the early examples
referred to motor vehicles, not aircraft (the latter were so rare
and so hard to fly that the opportunity for an outsider to take one
for a joyride, or the skill to do so, just didn't exist). The
implication may have been that the aircraft's control column was
the means to the exhilaration felt by an early pilot's journey into
the air, which was always an adventurous undertaking, not to say a
hazardous one.
A. Subscription commands
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B. Useful URLs
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Michael Quinion
Editor, World Wide Words
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Web: <http://www.worldwidewords.org/>
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