World Wide Words -- 15 May 04
Michael Quinion
TheEditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri May 14 18:54:36 UTC 2004
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 392 Saturday 15 May 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
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Molecular gastronomy.
3. Weird Words: Gadzooks.
4. Noted this week.
5. Q&A: Whistle-stop tour.
6. Sic!
7. Q&A: Jump the shark.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Useful URLs.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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CONTUMELY Many subscribers better versed than me in Shakespeare
have pointed out that the scansion of Hamlet's "To be or not to be"
speech requires "contumely" to be said as three syllables with the
stress on the first. If it was good enough for the Bard ...
2. Turns of Phrase: Molecular gastronomy
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Would you eat cockles coated with white chocolate? Or garlic and
coffee creme brulée? Or egg and bacon ice cream with tomato jam? Or
dark chocolate petit fours infused with pipe tobacco? These are
among the odd-sounding food combinations that have been tried by
chefs experimenting with a scientific approach to cooking and food
preparation called "molecular gastronomy". It's based on modern
knowledge of the way that the brain interprets smell and taste and
challenges traditional perceptions and customs about what makes a
dish worth eating. The term is best known in the UK, since it's
closely linked with chef Heston Blumenthal at his restaurant The
Fat Duck in Berkshire. He works with specialists such as the
physicist Peter Barham to test various factors in food preparation,
for example, how changes in technique alter the texture of a food
or what happens when you cook meat at a much lower temperature than
usual. The term, for which a more appetising alternative could
surely have been found, actually goes back to the 1980s, having
been coined by the French scientist Hervé This. The Fat Duck must
be doing something right, since it has recently been awarded three
Michelin stars, one of only two restaurants in Britain to have
them.
>>> From the Independent, 21 Apr. 2004: But the Fat Duck's second
place also represents a personal victory for Blumenthal, 37, who is
credited with turning cooking into a subject of interest as much to
physicists as gastronomes by dint of his trademark technique, known
as "molecular gastronomy".
>>> From the Toronto Star, 7 Apr. 2004: The late Nicholas Kurti, a
physicist in an elite field called molecular gastronomy, argued
that the best way to cook a perfect three-minute egg is to cook it
for one hour at 140F.
3. Weird Words: Gadzooks
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An exclamation of surprise or annoyance.
We owe this week's word to HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. He
has been widely reported recently as uttering this imprecation upon
seeing a new portrait of himself by Stuart Pearson Wright in which
he is bare-chested, with a bug on his shoulder and a plant growing
out of his finger. "Gadzooks!", he commented. "As long as I don't
have to have it on my wall." (The organisation that commissioned
the portrait, the Royal Society of Arts, clearly felt similarly,
since they rejected it outright.)
How very eighteenth-century of HRH to choose this word to express
his feelings, since nobody but he these days utters this word other
than as a conscious attempt at humorous archaism or as a cheap way
to invoke a period. This latter trick is so derided that historical
novelists who introduce words like "prithee", "zounds", "gramercy"
and "gadzooks" into their dialogue are sometimes accused by British
literary critics of indulging in "gadzookery".
Not only modern authors, since by 1869, when R D Blackmore wrote
Lorna Doone, set in the previous century, the word was already out
of fashion: "'Gadzooks, Master Pooke,' said I, having learned fine
words at Tiverton; 'do you suppose that I know not then the way to
carry firearms?" But we must excuse Tobias Smollett, for he
published The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle in 1751, when the word
was at the height of its popularity: "'What!' cried the painter, in
despair, 'become a singer? Gadzooks! and the devil and all that!
I'll rather be still where I am, and let myself be devoured by
vermin.'"
"Gadzooks" is usually said to be an alteration of "God's hooks",
that is, the nails by which Christ was fastened to the cross. It's
one of a set of late seventeenth and early eighteenth century
euphemistic oaths that used "gad" as a thinly disguised version of
"God", often attached to a second element of uncertain parentage.
Other examples are "Gadsbobs", "Gadsnigs", "Gadsbudlikins",
"Gadsokers", "Gadsprecious", and "Gadswookers".
4. Noted this week
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DIRGER One might guess that a dirger is a person who dirges - who
sings a mournful song - but it's a word notable by its absence from
major dictionaries. It has come to public notice through an attempt
to resurrect a famous Yorkshire rambling club associated with the
Lyke Wake walk, a 42-mile footpath along the Cleveland Hills. The
path was named in 1955 by Bill Cowley, a local farmer, after
"wake", a watch on the dead, plus "lyke", a local name for a
corpse. The name echoed the frequent need in medieval times to
carry coffins many miles across country on the shoulders of the
mourners to reach consecrated ground (though the walk itself, from
Osmotherly to Ravenscar via such evocative placenames as Scugdale,
Chop Yat, Botton Head, Flat Howe, Tom Cross Rigg, Snod Hill, Fat
Betty and the Blue Man-i'-th'-Moss, was never a coffin road of this
sort). The Club's officers had names like Cheerless Chaplain,
Melancholy Macebearer and Doctor of Dolefulness (from which you may
judge that solemnity was not a prime characteristic). Those who try
the walk are Lyke Wakers and anyone who completes the walk within
one period of 24 hours may call himself a dirger and wear a coffin-
shaped badge.
SEVENTEEN-YEAR ITCH Newspapers in the USA and elsewhere reported
this week on the emergence in the eastern US of "Brood X", vast
numbers of a species of periodical cicada that only appears every
17 years. (In between the young feed underground on roots.) The
life cycle of these insects, with 13- or 17-year periods, has
fascinated entomologists for 300 years. This emergence has been
widely reported because its territory covers a much wider area -
some 15 states - than any of its cousins (and, no doubt, because it
includes Washington DC, where the concentration of media folk is
higher than anywhere else in the known universe). Why "Brood X",
though? It has nothing to do with Generation X or the X-Files. Its
name is due to Charles L Marlatt, a nineteenth-century employee of
the US Department of Agriculture. In 1887, he mapped thirty
distinct groups (he called them broods) of the two sorts of cicadas
and designated them by Roman numerals according to the year they
were to emerge, the 17-year sort having numbers 1-17 (I-XVII), the
13-year ones 18-30 (XVIII-XXX). Brood I was taken to be the one
that appeared in 1893. As you would expect, Brood X was last
reported in 1987 and before that in 1970.
5. Q&A
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Q. A BBC news item stated that "civic dignitaries and local leaders
will lead the group on a whistle-stop tour of the city over the
weekend." What is the origin of the term "whistle-stop"? [Jon
Whiting, UK]
A. It's common to see this expression in the UK and other countries
as well as its homeland of the USA. This example keeps the original
idea of a tour in a political campaign that makes many brief stops
in small communities, though it's now also commonly used for any
travel that's done very quickly and with only brief pauses.
We're out in the mid-western United States, in the interwar years
when small communities were still served by railways. It was common
practice for trains not to stop at such places unless a passenger
wanted to alight. (The passenger told the conductor, who signalled
the engineer by pulling on the signal cord; the engineer sounded
the whistle twice to acknowledge the request.) As a result, the
original meaning of "whistle stop" was some small place out on the
plains that nobody had ever heard of except those who lived there.
This idea starts to appear in print in the 1920s, as here in the
Nevada State Journal of February 1928: "He is the sort you fear
will ask you where you are from and you will have to tell him some
outlandish whistle stop with the conventional red depot."
The term was first applied to a fast-moving political campaign tour
just after World War Two. President Truman organised an extensive
railway trip during his re-election campaign of 1948, which visited
Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, Utah, Nevada and California. He
travelled in a special train called Magellan and made up to eight
speeches a day from the observation platform at the rear. The first
reference I can find is on the front page of the Bradford Era for 6
September 1948, announcing the start of Truman's election campaign
(in those days, they were mercifully short): "Smiling, President
Truman headed toward Michigan today on the first lap of a whistle
stop campaign in which he will criss-cross the nation before
election day." "Whistle-stop tour" itself isn't recorded until the
following year.
6. Sic!
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Harry Campbell found what we both hope was an unconscious pun in
the Guardian last Saturday; it reported that a committee of MPs
were to investigate allegations that firms which rent out public
houses were abusing their position: "The move comes after pressure
from the Federation of Small Businesses, whose members include more
than 2,000 'tied tenants', many of whom believe the rents and beer
prices charged by the pub companies have become oppressive. 'They
feel the pub companies have them over a barrel,' a spokesman for
the federation said."
Scott Swanson e-mailed thus from Montana: "Last week I received a
letter from my son's school enclosing the results of this year's
'standardized tests'. Perusing them, I noticed that his weakest
area appeared to be in punctuation. Turning then to the letter, I
noticed that it began: 'Dear Parent's: ...'."
7. Q&A
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Q. A term that I've only come across in the past few months is
"jump the shark" or "jumped the shark", but now I can't seem to get
away from it. It seems to mean that someone acted hastily with
negative results or that a plan of action was doomed from the
outset. Could you shed some light on where this came from and the
proper usage of it? [Matthew Cutter]
A. You're ahead of me, since I'd never encountered it at all, but
then I'm not well informed about American slang. Through the
wonders of the Internet, the phrase now makes more sense.
It seems to have first appeared around May 1998 in a Web site, also
called Jump the Shark ( http://www.jumptheshark.com ). The phrase
came from the idea that there was often a point at which a
television series hit a peak and then started to go irreversibly
downhill. The site's creator, Jon Hein, says he took it from the
episode in Happy Days, an ABC television show in the USA which ran
from 1974 to 1984, in which Fonzie, played by Henry Winkler, took a
daredevil motorcycle jump over a shark tank.
Jon Hein said that other "jump the shark" moments were caused by a
cast member reaching puberty or a new actor starting to play an
existing character. The phrase might seem to resonate with the
image of network bosses circling in the water waiting to pull a
failing show, though the real problem is that the bosses let long-
running and once-successful shows continue well past their sell-by
date in order to milk a little more revenue from them, or to reach
the magic episode count at which syndication becomes practicable.
The site proved very successful and there are now spin-off books,
audio books and calendars featuring the name and the ideas. The
phrase is commonly used by television critics: for example, Caryn
James said in the New York Times on 23 October 2002 that The West
Wing had jumped the shark after September 11 (though some viewers
instead point to the end of the fourth series when Aaron Sorkin
left, and others think it hasn't jumped yet - don't ask me for an
opinion, as the fifth series hasn't aired in the UK yet, and the
fourth has been broadcast on a subscription channel only).
>From what you say, it seems that the phrase has already become
modified in the spoken language to refer to any serious error, not
specifically a TV downturn. Would subscribers agree with that?
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