World Wide Words -- 22 Oct 05
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Oct 21 17:35:25 UTC 2005
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 464 Saturday 22 October 2005
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Sent each Saturday to at least 25,000 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: Namby-pamby.
3. Q&A: Gone for a Burton.
4. Noted this week.
5. Book notices: New editions and sequels.
6. Sic!
A. E-mail contact addresses.
B. Subscription information.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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TECHNICAL TROUBLES All has been at sixes and sevens for some days
after my main office computer died on me at the weekend. (I've not
had a computer lose *both* hard drives simultaneously before this.)
Thank heavens for regular backups and a standby computer - nothing
was lost except a few e-mails that came in on Saturday evening. If
around that time you sent me the answer to life, the universe and
everything, but haven't had a reply, it might be worth sending the
message again.
MYSELF, ME AND I Heavens, what trouble I got into last week when I
wrote "You can hear an item with Adam Jacot de Boinod and myself".
The chorus of condemnation was loud and sustained. The trouble is
that the "rule" about not using "myself" in this situation has been
drummed into generations of school children without much to justify
it except a vague feeling on the part of grammarians and educators
that it seemed somehow wrong. Modern style guides point to the body
of historical use of the construction as a justification for using
it. In the Third Edition of Fowler, Robert Burchfield remarks that
such forms are "beyond reproach" and quotes a sentence parallel to
mine from a booklet of his own. But Bryan Garner, in his Modern
American Usage, is against it, marking a stylistic difference that
seems to exist between American and British English.
2. Weird Words: Namby-pamby
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Feeble or effeminate in behaviour or expression.
We owe this word to a very public literary spat between the poets
Alexander Pope and Ambrose Philips at the start of the eighteenth
century. Pope hated Philips because political opponents such as
Joseph Addison praised the latter's rustic verses above his own.
It has to be said, from today's perspective, that Pope had a point.
Philips is now virtually unknown and rarely read, and even his best
known lines, from a poem called A Winter-Piece, describing the
rigours of the Danish winter, which was printed in The Tatler in
1709 ("There solid billows of enormous size, / Alps of green ice,
in wild disorder rise"), are merely competent. What his critics
hated most was a series of dreadful sentimental and sycophantic
poems, written in little short lines, that eulogised the children
of friends. The most-quoted example is the opening of one with the
title of Miss Charlotte Pulteney, in Her Mother's Arms: "Timely
blossom, infant fair, / Fondling of a happy pair, / Every morn and
every night / Their solicitous delight". I can't bear to reproduce
any more; even the Victorians never surpassed it for ickiness.
In 1725, a friend of Pope's named Henry Carey wrote a scabrous
lampoon about these poems in which he invented a mocking nickname,
"Namby-Pamby", based on Philips's given name, and used it in the
title, Namby-Pamby: Or, A Panegyric on the New Versification. An
extract will give you the tone: "Namby-Pamby, pilly-piss, / Rhimy-
pim'd on Missy Miss / Tartaretta Tartaree / From the navel to the
knee; / That her father's gracy grace / Might give him a placy
place." Pope liked the name and included it in the 1733 edition of
The Dunciad, his denunciation of popular authors of the day.
It's odd to think it was largely because of the poetic diatribes
against Philips by Carey and Pope that Philips is remembered today.
But the most significant result was that "namby-pamby" permanently
entered the language.
3. Q&A
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Q. What's the origin of the phrase "gone for a Burton", please?
[Nick Carrington]
A. We wish we knew.
In informal British English, something or someone who has "gone for
a Burton" is missing; a thing so described might be permanently
broken, missing, ruined or destroyed. The original sense was to
meet one's death, a slang term in the RAF in World War Two for
pilots who were killed in action (its first recorded appearance in
print was in the New Statesman on 30 August 1941).
The list of supposed origins is extremely long, but the stories are
so inventive and wide-ranging that you may find them intriguing:
<ul>
<li>"Spanish Burton" was the Royal Navy name for a pulley
arrangement that was so complex and rarely used that hardly anyone
could remember what it was or what to do with it. Someone in
authority who asked about a member of a working party might be told
that he'd gone for a burton.</li>
<li>The name of "burton" was given to a method of stowing wooden
barrels across the ship's hold rather than fore and aft. Though
they took up less space this way, it was dangerous because the
entire stowage might collapse and kill somebody.</li>
<li>The term "burnt 'un" referred to an aircraft going down in
flames.</li>
<li>It refers to the inflatable "Brethon" life jacket at one time
issued by the RAF.</li>
<li>It was a figurative reference to getting a suit made at the
tailors Montague Burton, as one might say a person who had died had
been fitted for a wooden overcoat, a coffin (compare "the full
Monty", see http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/monty.htm).</li>
<li>The RAF was said to have used a number of billiard halls,
always over Burton shops, for various purposes, such as medical
centres or Morse aptitude tests (one in Blackpool is especially
mentioned in the latter context). To "go for a Burton" was then to
have gone for a test of some sort, but to have failed.</li>
<li>It was rhyming slang: "Burton-on-Trent" (a famous British
brewing town in the Midlands), meaning "went", as in "went
West".</li>
<li>A pilot who crashed in the sea was said to have ended up "in
the drink"; to "go for a Burton" was to get a drink of beer, in
reference to Burton-on-Trent. So the phrase was an allusive
reference to crashing in the sea, later extended to all
crashes.</li>
<li>It is said that there was a series of advertisements for beer
in the inter-war years, each of which featured a group of people
with one obviously missing (a football team with a gap in the line-
up, a dinner party with one chair empty). The tagline suggested the
missing person had just popped out for a beer - had "gone for a
Burton". The slogan was then taken up by RAF pilots for one of
their number missing in action as a typical example of wartime sick
humour.</li>
</ul>
There's little we can do to choose one of these over the others. If
the advertisements really did run before the War they would be the
obvious source, though none have been traced and the most probable
candidate, the Burton Brewery Co Ltd, closed in 1935 and was hardly
well-known even before then.
Whatever the truth, knowing a little about wartime pilots, my bet
would be on some association with beer.
[A version of this piece appears in my book Port Out, Starboard
Home, which has just come out in a paperback edition in the UK from
Penguin Books. See http://www.worldwidewords.org/posh.htm ]
4. Noted this week
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OFFICIALESE Anthony Massey of BBC News spotted a Reuters report on
Tuesday about the risk that a dam might give way and flood Taunton
in Massachusetts. A breach would have led to a wall of water 6 feet
(1.8 metres) high flooding low-lying neighbourhoods, so police had
to evacuate 2,000 people and close much of the city. Reuters quoted
State Governor Mitt Romney: "There is every prospect that it will
give way and we'll have a very significant water event." "Water
event" - so much more cuddly than "devastating flood".
DEPARTMENT OF BRUTALLY ACCURATE NOMENCLATURE On Wednesday, in the
journal Proceedings of the Royal Society, researchers revealed that
they had found a weird-looking new species of worm feeding on the
bones of a minke whale carcass in the North Sea. The formal name
they have given the new worm is Osedax mucofloris; they helpfully
translate this into English as bone-eating snot-flower worm.
5. Book notices: New editions and sequels
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DICTIONARY OF CONTEMPORARY SLANG This work by Tony Thorne, which
aims to give a comprehensive overview of principally British slang
from the 1950s to the present day, has been substantially revised
for its third edition. It claims to be different from other slang
dictionaries in that much of the collecting of terms has been done
in the field by contributors who have listened to and recorded the
speech of their peer groups. The book is linked to the archive of
slang and new language at King's College, London, where Tony Thorne
is based. See http://quinion.com?DOCS for a review of the previous
edition.
[Tony Thorne, Dictionary of Contemporary Slang, published by A & C
Black; hardback, pp494; ISBN 0713675047; list price GBP19.99.]
NEW HART'S RULES Hart's Rules is a famous handbook, first produced
in 1893 by Horace Hart, the Printer to the University of Oxford, as
a guide for compositors and proofreaders at the University Press.
The most recent edition, the 39th, came out in 1983 and is still in
print. Despite the title, this book isn't those Hart's Rules in
anything but name, "Hart" now having become a brand, like "Fowler".
It is instead an adaptation and reduction to smaller physical size
of the Oxford Guide to Style, compiled by R M Ritter, which came
out as recently as 2002. Despite its confusing publishing history,
this is a useful little style guide, much more wide-ranging than
the current edition of the original Hart's Rules.
[New Hart's Rules; published by Oxford University Press; hardback,
pp417; ISBN 0198610416; list price GBP12.99.]
ANOTHER WORD A DAY Anu Garg's "A Word A Day" mailing list and Web
site are justly famous and popular. This is another quirky set of
words, a sequel to his first work (unsurprisingly called "A Word A
Day"), reviewed here three years ago. You may not be too surprised
to hear that it is much like the first, in its essence a printed
version of his daily mailings, organised in 52 chapters on themes
such as words from chess or placenames, or some that have changed
their meaning over time. Comments from subscribers have been added
throughout the text. See http://quinion.com?AWAD for the review of
the earlier work.
[Anu Garg, Another Word A Day; paperback, pp226; published in the
USA by Wiley; ISBN 0471718459; list price $14.95.]
WORD ORIGINS The first edition of this useful work by John Ayto
came out in 1990; this is a revised version, which updates some
entries in the light of new knowledge (the one on "marzipan" now
attributes its origin to the Burmese port of Martapan), adds some
100 new entries, and deletes a few that have dropped out of public
notice. The 8000 entries are written in plain language without
annoying abbreviations or technical terms and give context and
background as well as the essential etymological information.
[John Ayto, Word Origins; Second edition, published by A & C Black,
London; paperback pp554; ISBN 0713674989; list price GBP12.99.]
BUY ONLINE VIA AMAZON To get these books, please use the following
codes to reach the sites and then search for the ones you want:
Amazon USA: http://quinion.com?QA
Amazon UK: http://quinion.com?JZ
Amazon Canada: http://quinion.com?MG
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Buying in this way gets World Wide Words a small commission that
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6. Sic!
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"One type of dropped letter I have been observing recently," writes
Robert Sharp from Pasadena, "is the dropped 'ed', such as 'handicap
parking' instead of 'handicapped' and the opportunity to buy a 'box
set' of books or records, instead of 'boxed', this seeming to me to
be a set of boxes instead of a set in a box. My latest sighting is
a notice at San Francisco International Airport which says, 'Please
do not exit without a uniform escort', which insists that you wait
for an escort that matches all the others, as opposed to one that
wears a certain type of clothing."
"Dangerous days Down Under," reports Neil Houston. "Outside a local
butcher's shop in McLaren Vale, South Australia, a passing wit has
erased the F from today's chalked Specials board which earlier had
read FARMED RABBITS".
"Have you seen the latest recipe suggestion from Jamie Oliver in
Sainsbury's?", e-mailed Chris Coolbear. "The poster reads 'Pears -
try slicing them with chunks of Gorgonzola.' Personally I find that
a knife is a lot easier."
Margaret Joachim found a delightful image embedded in an item on a
serious subject in a misprint on the BBC News Web site: "The quake
devastated a cluster of 42 villages nestling in the pine and fur-
capped mountains of Tangdar." John Gray and Colin Burt both noted a
sentence in a BBC email to subscribers: "A rat swims across 400m of
open sea as it evades capture by chasing New Zealand scientists."
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