World Wide Words -- 31 Dec 05
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Dec 30 17:30:46 UTC 2005
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 474 Saturday 31 December 2005
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Sent each Saturday to at least 32,000 subscribers by e-mail and RSS
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
http://www.worldwidewords.org US advisory editor: Julane Marx
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Handsel Monday.
3. Noted this week.
4. Review: The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang.
5. Q&A: Soup and fish.
6. Sic!
A. E-mail contact addresses.
B. Subscription information.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
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A prettily formatted version of this newsletter may be read
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1. Feedback, notes and comments
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HOOKEY WALKER Many subscribers asked after my piece last week if
"hookey" in the sense of playing truant from school is related. It
isn't, being definitely American rather than British. The origin is
uncertain, but one suggestion is that it came from Dutch "hoekje
(spelen)", to play hide-and-seek. Another slang sense of "hookey",
the British one for something stolen, illegal, or counterfeit, is
actually a pun on "bent".
ORGANLEGGER Jean Rossner pointed out that an earlier Larry Niven
story contains this word than Death By Ecstasy (1969), cited last
week. It appeared in The Jigsaw Man, which was included in Harlan
Ellison's Dangerous Visions anthology in 1967.
2. Weird Words: Handsel Monday
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The first Monday in the New Year.
This is an old Scottish festival, before the nineteenth century the
main midwinter celebration - Christmas was considered by Calvinists
to be heathen and Hogmanay hadn't come into fashion.
In The Eskdale Herd-boy ("a Scottish tale for the instruction and
amusement of young persons") by Martha Blackford, published in
1819, appears: "'Sir,' said John, as he walked along, 'do you think
Mr Laurie will give me a holiday on Handsel Monday?' (the first
Monday in the year, and the only holiday the Scottish peasantry
ever allow themselves, except, perhaps, in the case of a wedding)."
It was in particular a day for giving presents and that's where the
name comes from. "Handsel" (or "hansel", or even "handsell") is a
Middle English word for luck or a good omen that comes from Old
Norse. It became the name for a gift given on any special occasion,
such as taking on a new job or beginning some enterprise, or for
earnest money - a down payment or a first instalment.
It could also be the first money taken by a trader on any given
day, which explains the comment of the flower girl in James Joyce's
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: "The first handsel today,
gentleman. Buy that lovely bunch. Will you, gentleman?"
3. Noted this week
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WORDS OF THE YEAR Next week, the American Dialect Society will be
adding to the gaiety of nations by announcing the result of voting
for the Words of the Year at its annual meeting in Albuquerque. As
a preview, here are some nominations already made: "exopolitics",
dealings with space aliens; "nuclear option", an extreme course of
action in the U.S. Senate; "refugee", a newly controversial term
for a displaced person; "Cyber Monday", the one after Thanksgiving
(for online shopping); "rendition", the transfer of a person for
interrogation by a foreign power; "spim", instant-messaging spam;
"dirka dirka", a mimicry of spoken Arabic; "jump the couch", the
Tom Cruise-inspired slang meaning to exhibit frenetic or bizarre
behaviour; and "whale tail", the appearance of thong or g-string
underwear over the waistband of clothing. I hope to bring you the
results in the next issue.
MIXOLOGY My personal word of the week, which you may feel is a
suitably seasonal term, turned up the other day in a recipe book
for cocktails that the OED has asked me to search for interesting
words. It's obvious enough how some unknown American created it for
the art or skill of creating cocktails and other mixed drinks, but
on a whim I looked into its history and was surprised to discover
how old it is - both "mixology" and "mixologist" are nineteenth
century words, the latter being the older. In 1882, the Fresno Bee
of California remarked: "The art of 'mixology' has been reduced to
a science". A modern mixologist may feel that the science has moved
on a bit since then.
4. Review: The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang
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Eric Partridge was a pioneer. He spent most of his life working in
that most intractable of lexicographical specialisms, slang. It is
inconceivable to us today, when dictionaries are produced by teams
of professionals supported by massive electronic archives, that his
Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English was created in 1937
as a solo effort. Like some similarly placed predecessors, such as
Johnson and Webster, he became an eponym.
His work went through seven editions, plus an additional posthumous
one edited by Paul Beale in 1984. But his idiosyncratic approach
has since been shown to have resulted at times in errors of dating
and etymology based on extravagant extrapolation. Not for him the
cautious conservatism of the Oxford English Dictionary, with its
mantra of "origin unknown". He was much more a philologist, a lover
of words, than a scholarly lexicographer and he was always prepared
to step beyond the evidence to say something about a word, even if
his comments bordered on guesswork. In later years, he wasn't at
ease with the slang of the post-war generations, for which he had
poor cultural appreciation.
So anybody who takes on the task of revising his dictionary has the
enormous and unenviable task of weeding out the master's mistakes
while updating it and maintaining the reputation of the brand. Tom
Dalzell and Terry Victor, respectively American and British, have
taken on the job, in the process continuing an essentially amateur
approach (in the best sense), since Mr Dalzell's day job is as a
lawyer and Mr Victor is an actor, broadcaster and writer.
At first glance, the work is a substantial improvement. It's now in
two large volumes (with, one has to regret, a whopping great price
to match). The typography is easily the best of any current slang
dictionary and gives a clean and authoritative feel. A bibliography
rounds off the second volume.
Most entries include citations or references to sources, but a
heavy price has been paid for their inclusion, even given the great
increase in size. The work is much less comprehensive than either
its previous incarnation or the current edition of Jonathon Green's
work (which continues to rely quite heavily in places on Partridge)
and the loss is largely in the historical slang that so fascinated
Eric Partridge. The editors have chosen to concentrate on slang
recorded in use after 1945 and this has transformed the style and
coverage of the work, to my mind ripping the heart out of it. In
many cases it has had an unfortunate side-effect of divorcing slang
terms from their historical hinterlands.
One of the failings of the original work was its over-emphasis on
British slang, excluding in particular much vocabulary from the US.
The new edition has reversed this and has a considerable American
contribution, perhaps excessively so, with British entries seeming
weak by comparison. It is now very strong on Caribbean, Australian
and New Zealand English, through the efforts of a group of
collaborators.
Many individual entries raise questions. It's good to see that the
computer slang senses of "hack" are carefully distinguished (the
editors are generally excellent on the current jargon of the Net
and computing), but where are the US slang senses of an old,
dilapidated vehicle, or the military punishment of being confined
to quarters, both of which Jonathan Lighter documents in the
Historical Dictionary of American Slang as being in use post-1945?
The editors give "nadgers", British slang for the testicles, a date
of 1998, though it is most definitely older - they mention the all-
purpose (and well documented) Goon Show expletive use in the 1950s
but ignore evidence that the word had even then taken on its modern
sense (if, as they say, it is from "gonads", no other conclusion is
possible). Their etymologies for the origin of "naff" (unappealing,
in poor taste) are unconvincingly folk etymological and leave out
the probable origin from Polari (even though it appears in a quote
under that word).
They say "peep show" is American, from 1947, but their sense of a
place where one could view pornographic images is much older in
British English. It was certainly known in 1900 when H G Wells
wrote Love and Mr Lewisham: "Try as we may to stay those delightful
moments, they fade and pass remorselessly; there is no returning,
no recovering, only - for the foolish - the vilest peep-shows and
imitations in dens and darkened rooms." They define "goombah" as
meaning "a loyal male friend; an Italian-American", which is fine
as far as it goes, but why no mention of the senses of a member of
a criminal gang, a Mafia boss, or a stupid person? Or indeed where
it comes from (Italian "compare").
The "bob's your uncle" entry uncritically tells the Arthur Balfour
nepotism story with the cop-out introduction "most commentators
offer ...". Readers don't want to know what most commentators say;
they want to learn what the editors have concluded on the basis of
their own research.
Their country of origin and dating - as with "nadgers" - is always
based on the first recorded use. This can mislead in the case of
slang; it is often only committed to print when the fashion for a
word is already waning, and its first appearance can be divorced
from its true locale by an accident of recording. "Piece of cake"
has a date of "US, 1936", but the entry says it was originally RAF
slang, so necessarily British; in one sense they are right, as the
first known example is from an Ogden Nash work of 1936, but putting
the two bits of data together without further explanation causes
confusion. Likewise with "sugar daddy", whose dating ("UK, 1926")
is from the OED's first citation; however, a search in a newspaper
archive throws up earlier examples from the USA, supporting the
view that its true provenance is on that side of the Atlantic.
Was "Palace of Varieties" ever slang for the House of Commons
beyond the 1966 joking diary reference by Gyles Brandreth that's
cited in the entry? The work includes other entries that similarly
look like nonce forms. For example, was "palintoshed" ever a real-
life slang term meaning drunk, beyond some joker's submission of it
to a BBC1 TV programme in 2002? It seems that the editors have at
times relied on the appearance of terms in glossaries and books
without confirming by further research that they ever had a real
circulation.
The revision is a brave try and there's a great deal that's worth
having in it. But it's sad to see so much historical material has
been lost and that some entries raise queries or could be improved.
Like the proverbial bad apple in a barrel, such entries contaminate
the whole. I cannot recommend it.
[Tom Dalzell and Terry Victor (eds), The New Partridge Dictionary
of Slang and Unconventional English, published by Routledge in
December 2005; hardback, two vols, pp 2189; ISBN 0415212588;
publisher's initial price GBP99.00, rising to GBP140.00 next
Spring.]
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[Please use these links to buy. More information at C below.]
5. Q&A
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Q. I am baffled by an expression from P G Wodehouse. Bertie puts on
his "soup and fish". Can you explain this? [Lee-Ann Nelson]
A. I can. A soup and fish is a man's evening dress, dinner suit, or
dress suit, though I should really instead refer to it as a tuxedo,
since - despite Bertie Wooster's mainly London milieu - the phrase
seems to be natively American.
Until I went delving in old US newspapers, I thought that Wodehouse
had invented it. Indeed, the OED gives him the credit for its first
use, in Piccadilly Jim in 1918: "He took me to supper at some swell
joint where they all had the soup-and-fish on but me. I felt like a
dirty deuce in a clean deck." But there are earlier examples, such
as this from The Atlanta Constitution of November 1914, in a report
about local kids being given a slap-up meal by the Rotary Club:
"There's going to be no 'fess up' business; no 'soup and fish'
outfits. It'll be just a good dinner."
But why "soup and fish"? Well, one dons these duds for a special
occasion such as a formal meal. This is likely to be a heavyweight
event, with many courses, starting with soup and followed by fish
before one gets to the main event of the meat course. So the soup-
and-fish is what one wears to consume the soup and fish.
Incidentally, one of the more delightful aspects of hunting down
this kind of language is that sometimes you get more than you were
expecting. The Grand Rapids Tribune in February 1915 included this:
"After donning the complete Soup and Fish known in swozzey circles
as Thirteen and the Odd, he didn't look as much like a waiter as
one might have supposed." Thirteen and the Odd? There are other
examples to be found, though only a few. Jonathon Green notes in
the Cassell's Dictionary of Slang that it is long-obsolete slang
for a tail-coat, as worn with the full fig of white tie and tails,
but says that its origin is unknown. Well, did you ever?
6. Sic!
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On 23 December, Gloria Bryant noted a headline on the Web site of
the Buffalo News: "Couple Finds Rare Pear in Clam". Fruits of the
sea, indeed ...
Keith Warren, based in Maputo, found a nicely mixed metaphor in a
piece on spiked-online.com: "He spent huge sums sending his plans
to France's main men but his visions fell on deaf ears."
"Our household," communicates Paul Birch from North Vancouver, BC,
"recently received a printed notice from an enterprising young lady
who was available for 'house cleaning, dusting, and moping'. It
seems that everything can be outsourced now."
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