World Wide Words -- 25 Jun 05

Michael Quinion wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jun 24 21:50:53 UTC 2005


WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 446           Saturday 25 June 2005
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Sent each Saturday to 23,000+ subscribers in at least 120 countries
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. Weird Words: Simoleon.
2. Recently noted.
3. Q&A: Spatchcock.
4. Review: Collins English Dictionary.
A. E-mail contact addresses.
B. Subscription information.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.


1. Weird Words: Simoleon
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One dollar.

This bit of US slang now sounds very dated, though it still turns 
up from time to time, especially in humorous journalistic writing. 
An example appeared in Fortune in 2003: "Today I make a respectable 
mound of simoleons at my business job, but they pale, evaporate, 
and dribble down the side of the countertop when compared with the 
simoleons Mr. Grasso has accrued in his years of faithful service." 
The word was given a boost when it was chosen as the name for the 
currency in the simulation computer games featuring the Sims. 

But it goes back a long way. What follows is a bit speculative, but 
fits what evidence we have. In early eighteenth-century Britain, 
the coin whose proper name was sixpence was often slangily called a 
simon, for no very good reason that we know of. (A reference in the 
New Testament about Peter "lodging with one Simon a tanner", led to 
its later being called a tanner instead.) This term "simon" seems 
to have been taken to the USA and transferred to the dollar coin 
(the name is said to have been recorded in the 1850s). Having in 
mind the much more valuable French gold coins called Napoleons, 
some wit bundled "simon" and "Napoleon" together and made from it 
"simoleon".

The first example I know of is from the Davenport Daily Gazette of 
Iowa in 1883, in a piece of mock-Biblical whimsy about the local 
journalists losing their press club to an upstart incoming dentist 
who offered their landlord more money: "The doctor spoke unto Mr. 
Thede, and did offer to him many fat simoleons and talents of gold 
and shekels of goodly silver, and Mr. Thede hearkened unto his 
voice, and the tones thereof were too canny for him."


2. Recently noted
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ALTERPRENEUR  This slangy invention based on "entrepreneur" refers 
to people who leave their jobs to start a business of their own, 
not so much to make money as to improve their standard of living, 
get more control over their lives and generally to be happier. The 
word has appeared in many newspapers in the UK recently. A report, 
based on research into a thousand microbusinesses (one-man firms) 
by the insurance company More Than, used the term - indeed may have 
invented it - to refer to this breed of "alternative entrepreneur". 
It seems unlikely that the term will find a permanent place in the 
language.


3. Q&A
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Q. We are indeed separated by a common language! A report on the 
BBC Web site on 31 May about the European Community included this: 
"With 25 countries and 455 million people to govern, it simply 
isn't enough to spatchcock together a bunch of rules at short 
notice." Could you enlighten me about spatchcock? [Bob Arnold, USA]

A. To spatchcock in this figurative sense is indeed mainly British. 
It means to stuff things together inappropriately, to interpolate 
or insert something in a forced or incongruous manner. Another 
example, from the Independent newspaper in 2003, will help to give 
the idea: "But far from being some grand, thoughtful programme, it 
was only a spatchcock of improvisation and platitude."

Even in Britain, the word is more likely to turn up in its much 
older meaning of a chicken split open down the middle, the backbone 
removed, then dressed and roasted or grilled. Traditionally, the 
bird was flattened, with wings outstretched - "butterflied" is 
another term sometimes used. The Oxford Companion to Food says that 
it was "met with in cookery books of the 18th and 19th centuries, 
and revived towards the end of the 20th century". In modern use the 
term has been applied more widely by cooks to a pigeon, quail or 
other bird as well as to a chicken. But online references to the 
term, from Australia especially, suggest that for some people a 
spatchcock is just a young chicken, with no implication of cooking 
it any special way.

One advantage of spatchcocking is that the bird can be prepared and 
cooked quickly. In 1895, a newspaper in Ohio wrote about travelling 
in Egypt: "When the natives in charge of a caravansary spied an 
approaching caravan, they instantly rushed out, caught some fowls, 
wrung their necks, and an hour later served them, scarce dead, to 
the travelers; hence the name spatchcock." The writer is referring 
to the old idea that the term is an abbreviation of "dispatch 
cock", a method of cooking a chicken quickly, with dispatch. 
Captain Francis Grose described it like that in his Dictionary of 
the Vulgar Tongue of 1785: "Spatch cock, abbreviation of a dispatch 
cock, an Irish dish upon any sudden occasion. It is a hen just 
killed from the roost, or yard, and immediately skinned, split, and 
broiled."

But this is now not believed by the experts. There's an older term, 
"spitchcock", to prepare an eel by cutting it into short pieces, 
dressing it with bread-crumbs and chopped herbs, and broiling or 
frying it. This is too close in form to be an accident, which 
suggests that the "cock" ending in "spatchcock" might not refer to 
a chicken. But nobody has been able to delve any deeper into the 
origin of either word and it's one of those head-scratching terms 
that has to await some discovery in an old book to make sense of 
it.

What is also mysterious is how the culinary term came to refer to a 
forced or inappropriate insertion. The oldest case I can find is 
one also mentioned by Eric Partridge. It was in the Times of 11 
October 1901, reporting a speech by Sir Redvers Buller about an 
incident in the South African War: "I therefore spatchcocked into 
the middle of that telegram a sentence in which I suggested it 
would be necessary to surrender." Partridge says it was originally 
military jargon. In 1910, in A Handbook of the Boer War, Wyndham 
Tufnell added a footnote to his report of Buller's speech: "He 
probably meant 'sandwiched'". He might have done, but he may 
instead have been thinking of doing something quickly or in haste, 
perhaps linked with the fact that the telegram was indeed a 
dispatch (in the sense of a report) and so linking it to "dispatch 
cock". We just don't know.


4. Review: Collins English Dictionary (Seventh Edition)
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One notable addition this time is a set of 25 of the words used by 
British people of Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi descent, who are 
generically and misleadingly called Asians. These words are tagged 
in the dictionary as "Hinglish", a linguistic fusion of Hindi and 
English, though many of the terms are really from Punjabi and other 
languages. Few of these are unique to Britain, since Hinglish is a 
long-established feature of English in the sub-continent. However, 
"freshie", for an immigrant freshly arrived from there, is one 
that's specifically British. One term that has become widely known 
is "chuddies" (underwear), because it was made famous in the phrase 
"kiss my chuddies", from the television comedy Goodness Gracious Me 
in the 1990s. Other mainstream Asian-themed British TV programmes 
such as The Kumars at Number 42 have led to more terms becoming 
known outside the Asian communities. Among the examples of Hinglish 
in the new edition are "uncle-ji" and "auntie-ji" (for a man or 
woman from the generation older than oneself), "badmash" (for a bad 
or naughty child, from the Urdu word for a hooligan), "gora" (a 
white or fair-skinned male, from Hindi), "besti" (shame or 
embarrassment, from Hindi "be-izzat", dishonour), and "haramzada" 
(a derogatory term either for a man who has been born of unmarried 
parents or one who is obnoxious or despicable, from Urdu "haraam", 
forbidden).

Another group of words describe what one newspaper has called the 
new tribes of Britain: "chavs", "yarcos", "millies", "neds" and 
"skangers". (See http://quinion.com?CHAV for more on "chav" and 
similar terms). All refer to what the dictionary defines as young 
working-class persons who dress in casual sports clothes, though 
this is an over-simplification of their nature and significance in 
contemporary British culture. "Yarcos" come from Great Yarmouth in 
East Anglia and "skangers" from Ireland; their Northern Irish 
equivalents are "spides" (origin unknown) and "millies" (from "mill 
worker") for males and females respectively.

A related term added to the dictionary is "Asbo" (Anti-Social 
Behaviour Order), a recently introduced way to control bad 
behaviour by restricting a person's activities or movements. Asbos 
have become notorious for the heavy-handed and inappropriate way 
they are sometimes applied by magistrates (it's too new for the 
dictionary, but "asbomania" is the term used for it by Alvaro Gil-
Robles, the Council of Europe's human rights commissioner, in a 
highly critical report on Britain's human-rights record; another is 
"Asbo Nation").

Other interesting terms included for the first time are "smirting", 
flirting among smokers outside a no-smoking office or pub; "western 
alienation", a feeling of resentment by some inhabitants of western 
Canada against perceived favouritism by the national government 
towards the eastern provinces; "YABA", Yet Another Bloody Acronym; 
and "mitumba", used clothes imported for sale in African countries 
from more developed western countries (from the Swahili word 
literally meaning a bale).

The last edition, two years ago, was criticised for including new-
minted words that had only minimal circulation. First on the list 
of new words this time is "abandonware" (computer software which is 
no longer sold or supported by its publisher). Now that's not a 
commonly used word, I thought. Are they going down the same path 
again? Google, however, finds 935,000 examples. Where have I been 
all these years that it has passed me by so utterly? And "drag 
king" (a female who dresses as a man and impersonates male 
characteristics for public entertainment) seems a niche term, but 
Google claims to find 79,800 instances. Can't fault the selection 
this time ...

[The Collins English Dictionary, Seventh Edition; 6 June 2005; 
hardback, pp1888; ISBN: 0007191537; publisher's price GBP30.00.]

ONLINE BOOKSTORE PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
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[Please use these links to order. See C below for more details.]


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