World Wide Words -- 31 Jul 04
Michael Quinion
editor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jul 30 17:32:12 UTC 2004
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 403 Saturday 31 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. Turns of Phrase: Grime.
2. Weird Words: Collyrium.
3. Sic!
4. Q&A: Plonk.
5. Noted this week.
6. Q&A: Tarred with the same brush.
A. FAQ of the week.
B. Subscription commands.
C. Supporting World Wide Words.
1. Turns of Phrase: Grime
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What unenticing names music enthusiasts do give their genres. This
is a black British dance genre which is emerging from the London
club scene and raves via pirate radio and bootleg vinyl discs. The
US magazine Entertainment Weekly described it last January like
this: "Also called sublow or 8-bar, grime mashes dancehall, rap,
and jungle into a menacing mix of stuttering drums, woofer-blowing
bass, PlayStation blips, and MCs spitting stories of life in
London's rougher hoods." The Guardian said of it in early July:
"Combining the ear-crashing instrumentation of garage with the
crime-riddled rhymes of rap, the sound creeping cautiously from the
bowels of the underground is refreshingly and uniquely British."
Its better-known performers include the Nasty Crew, Dizzee Rascal
and Shystie.
>>> From the Independent, 2 July 2004: Following the achievements
of artists as diverse as Dizzee Rascal and Ms Dynamite, the 21-
year-old Shystie (aka Chanelle Scott) is the first star of grime,
the new underground dance genre descended from UK garage, to sign
directly to a major label; she is also the first female British MC
to have success.
>>> From the Evening Standard, 25 June 2004: Dizzee Rascal's
Mercury Music Prize-winning breakthrough last year has led record
companies to check out a scene labelled "grime" - a tougher,
dirtier strand of garage that rejects the pseudo-American,
designer-label stance of Craig David.
2. Weird Words: Collyrium /k@'lIrI at m/
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A medicated salve for the eyes.
"Great men," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, "are a collyrium to clear
our eyes from egotism, and enable us to see other people and their
works." At the time, 150 years ago, his educated readers would have
been familiar with the word (and with its plural "collyria"),
though it's now much less common. In fact, it's all Greek to most
of us, which is only reasonable since it's originally Greek, from
"kollurion", a poultice, a word taken from "kollura", a type of
coarse bread roll. The Greek writer Lucian used it in the first
century BC to explain how a trickster was able to remove seals from
documents and replace them undetected afterwards. One method was to
make a mould of the seal using "the substance called collyrium;
this is a preparation of Bruttian pitch, bitumen, pounded glass,
wax, and mastic". Not the sort of thing you'd want near your eyes.
The shift in sense came about in part because the Romans and their
successors gave the name to a variety of solid medicines that were
made up into cakes held together by gum; these were dissolved in
some suitable liquid before being applied to the body, especially
the eyes. It's also a name given to a dark eye shadow or kohl used
in some Eastern countries.
3. Sic!
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Barbara Plakans found an intriguing statement in the July/August
issue of a publication from the Smithsonian Institution's Woodrow
Wilson International Center for Scholars: "For much of the 20th
century, Albania remained trapped under its own hardline communist
yolk, closed off from the world." Left with egg on its face?
Department of Sloppy Syntax (Lynne Truss division): Nigel Lindsey-
Renton visited London last week and was charmed to read on the menu
for food service in the garden of the Royal Over-Seas League a
request to members that they should "settle their accounts, before
leaving the garden with a member of the staff."
Laurie Camion found the Sacramento Bee last Thursday making a good
case for using sunscreen: "Under the hard glare of summer's sun,
Kyleen Cornell hiked up a bluff, yellowed and crisped by July
heat."
Heard on the BBC Radio 4 six o'clock news on Friday evening, in a
report on the gas explosion in Belgium: "Ath is a small town that
found itself in the wrong place at the wrong time." What was it
supposed to do, step smartly out of the way?
4. Q&A
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Q. At work today the question was raised why cheap wine is referred
to as "plonk". Can you help? [Chris in the UK]
A. "Plonk", as a disparaging term for cheap wine, especially cheap
red wine, is now widely known in the UK and also to a lesser extent
in the USA. It's so fixed a part of British English that many
people are surprised to hear that it's originally Australian.
In that country you may also find references to "plonk bar" and
"plonk shop" for a wine bar or shop, especially a cheap and
cheerful one, "plonk-up" for a party, and "plonked-up" for
intoxicated. There's also "plink", which seems to be a joking
variation, which has led some writers to guess that "plonk" is an
imitative invention from the sound of a cork being pulled from a
bottle.
However, the evidence indicates instead an origin in the fighting
in Europe in the First World War, when troops from various British
Empire countries who spoke only English came into contact with the
French language. The result was weirdly transmogrified expressions,
such as "napoo" from "il n'y en a plus", or "san fairy ann" from
"ça ne fait rien".
"Plonk" is a tortured version of "blanc", as in "vin blanc", white
wine. Several humorous or mangled versions of that phrase are
recorded in Australia in the decades after the end of the War, such
as "vin blank", "von blink", "point blank", and "plinketty plonk".
By the 1930s the word had begun to settle down into our modern
form, though to judge from a comment in The Bulletin in Sydney,
dated 1933, it was then referring to some sort of rotgut or
moonshine: "The man who drinks illicit brews or 'plonk' (otherwise
known as 'madman's soup') by the quart does it in quiet spots or at
home."
The Tommies in France certainly drank local wine; lexicographer
Jonathon Green told me about the memoirs of Frank Richards, Old
Soldiers Never Die, published in 1964, which says about that
period: "Ving blong was very cheap ... a man could get a decent
pint and a half bottle for a franc." It's easy to see why the term
didn't thrive in the UK after the War, since no wine was then made
in Britain and there was no tradition of wine drinking except among
upper-class or cosmopolitan people. Australia produced some wine at
this period, nearly all of it consumed in the country, and so I
would guess there was more opportunity for the term to be taken up.
"Plonk" started to become known in the UK only in the 1950s, partly
because ordinary Brits started to drink wine, and in part perhaps
as a result of Nevil Shute's novel about Australia, A Town Like
Alice of 1950, in which it appears.
5. Noted this week
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YORKIPOO This weird invented term for a cross between a poodle and
a Yorkshire terrier has just come my way in a newspaper item about
cross-bred dogs being the latest fashion accessory for film stars.
There are a number of these designer dogs around, I learn, most
based on the poodle. The oldest is the "labradoodle", a cross
between a poodle and a labrador, created in Australia in the 1980s
as a breed suitable for owners with allergies. Other breeds include
"cockapoo" (poodle crossed with cocker spaniel), "goldendoodle"
(poodle and golden retriever), "schnoodle" (poodle and schnauzer),
"maltipoo" (poodle and Maltese terrier), "bichonpoo" (poodle and
Bichon Frise), and even the terminally twee "peekaboo" (poodle and
pekinese). One that doesn't involve the poodle is the "volcano", a
cross between a boxer and a doberman, no doubt well named.
6. Q&A
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Q. I used the phrase, "tarred with the same brush" recently,
meaning, guilty of the same behavior, or acting in the same manner
as someone else, or likely to be considered the same as someone
else because of similar behavior. I was speaking to a black
colleague at the time. I suddenly stopped and asked if she
considered the term racist. She did. I have heard it all my life
(as the 60-year-old child of parents who grew up in the south) and
am pretty sure that it comes from the practice of tarring and
feathering. I am not aware, however, of the full history of that
lamentable practice, if it was primarily practiced against blacks
or if the act had broader targets. So the question is, can "tarred
with the same brush" be used universally, or does it have a racist
history? [David Fosse]
A. There's nothing directly racist in its history, though there are
such huge sensitivities in the United States and elsewhere over any
expression that sounds as though it might be (as, for example, with
words and phrases such as "niggardly", "call a spade a spade", and
so on), that the reaction of your colleague is understandable.
As it happens, it doesn't have anything directly to do with tarring
and feathering, either, which is an American vigilante punishment
known from the eighteenth century (it's first recorded in Boston,
as it happens) and which my reading suggests wasn't usually a
punishment of blacks by whites but of whites by other whites.
The origin is the verb "to tar", meaning to defile or dirty, known
from the early years of the seventeenth century. The idiom appears
in print first in 1818, in one of Sir Walter Scott's novels, Rob
Roy: "They are a' tarr'd wi' the same stick - rank Jacobites and
Papists." Our modern form appears in William Cobbett's Rural Rides
in 1823: "'You are all tarred with the same brush', said the
sensible people of Maidstone."
The idea behind it is that two individuals who have been liberally
daubed or painted with the same tar brush look much the same and so
appear to have the same characteristics. The links of the colour
black with matters that were detestable, dishonourable or evil also
added to the negative sense.
A. FAQ of the week
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Q. What's the meaning of these strange sets of symbols that appear
sometimes in pieces, like /k@'lIrI at m/?
A. They are a way of showing pronunciation. As is usually the case
with British publications, in my Web pages I use the symbols of
the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to show how words are
said. Most IPA symbols do not appear in standard character sets,
so for the newsletter I translate them into SAMPA codes (Speech
Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet), a newish European system
that uses letters of the alphabet plus punctuation. See my page
at http://www.worldwidewords.org/pronguide.htm for a listing of
the symbols in both IPA and SAMPA with notes and links.
B. Subscription commands
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Michael Quinion
Editor, World Wide Words
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Web: <http://www.worldwidewords.org/>
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