World Wide Words -- 03 Sep 05
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Sep 2 18:18:52 UTC 2005
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 457 Saturday 3 September 2005
-------------------------------------------------------------------
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
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Contents
-------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Weird Words: Skillygalee.
2. Q&A: Goldbricking.
3. Q&A: Heath Robinson.
4. Sic!
A. E-mail contact addresses.
B. Subscription information.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Weird Words: Skillygalee
-------------------------------------------------------------------
A thin, watery gruel made of oatmeal.
The name of "skillygalee" (often instead as "skilligalee") seems to
have originally been Irish, though fancifully extended in the early
nineteenth century and then abbreviated once more in the 1830s to
"skilly", a word which was often used as a dismissive term for any
insipid beverage.
In 1820 James Hardy Vaux disparaged skillygalee in his Memoirs:
"Tolerable flour, of which the cook composed a certain food for
breakfast, known among sailors by the name of skilligolee, being in
plain English, paste." (Other writers of that century and the next
compared skillygalee to bill-sticker's paste, presumably because of
its consistency rather than its taste.) If you were very lucky,
sugar and butter were added, though common sailors were rarely so
fortunate.
Nor were workhouse inmates, for which this was standard fare. Jack
London found this out at the start of the twentieth century when he
researched his book The People of the Abyss about conditions in
London's East End: "I would be given for supper six ounces of bread
and 'three parts of skilly.' 'Three parts' means three-quarters of
a pint, and 'skilly' is a fluid concoction of three quarts of
oatmeal stirred into three buckets and a half of hot water."
An American frontier version was more substantial, being made of
hardtack biscuits mashed up with salt pork and stewed.
2. Q&A
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. Can you tell me the origin of the term "goldbricking" to refer
to goofing off, or avoiding work? [Bill Spencer]
A. The term has come a long way from its roots in the nineteenth
century; along the way it got progressively further and further
away from gold, or indeed bricks.
Back in the 1850s, a gold brick was just that - a brick-shaped
block of gold that had been cast at a mine for easy transport away.
A writer in Harper's New Monthly Magazine in 1888 described a gold
brick cast in Montana as being "a trifle larger than the common
clay brick", but weighing 509 ounces or nearly 32 pounds (roughly
14.5 kg). But as a result of what the newspapers at the time called
"the celebrated gold brick swindle" of October 1879, the term took
on a different meaning.
What happened was that Mr N D Clark, the president of the First
National Bank of Ravenna, Ohio, was visiting a mine he owned at
Leadville in Colorado. He was approached by five miners, who asked
him to advance money on a 52-pound gold brick, which for some
reason they weren't able to ship at the time. The owner told a
hard-luck story about having lost all his property and urgently
needing money. Mr Clark had the brick taken to a blacksmith, who
cut off one corner. An assayer pronounced the gold to be genuine
and Mr Clark advanced the miner $10,000 on condition the brick, and
the miner, accompanied him to Chicago to get the balance. The
miner, of course, vanished off the train on the way; Mr Clark found
to his chagrin that the gold brick was like the curate's egg - good
in parts. The corners were gold right enough but the body of the
brick was worthless. The ringleader, a man named Peter Lavin, was
later caught, though the record is silent on what happened to him.
This wasn't the first attempt at this style of fraud, but since
confidence tricksters aren't that imaginative, a number of copycat
attempts at selling people fake gold bricks followed. The phrase
"to sell someone a gold brick" went into the language meaning to
swindle and "to gold brick" came to mean perpetrating a fraud. (It
killed the old literal sense stone dead; everyone began to call
them ingots instead.)
Your sense was originally US Army slang, which clearly grew out of
this. In the early 1900s, "gold brick" was used for an unattractive
young woman (in 1903, midshipmen went on record that a "gold brick"
was a girl who could neither talk, dance, nor look pretty). This is
presumably from the idea of a gold brick being a fraud. Incompetent
officers appointed from civilian life at the start of the First
World War with only minimal training were likewise called gold
bricks by enlisted men.
At some point during that War, the term was extended to refer to
anybody not pulling his weight, a malingerer or loafer. This would
seem to have grown up not so much from the idea of a person being a
fraud (though that presumably contributed) but from that of a
criminal who would do anything, including sell fake gold bricks,
rather than do an honest day's work.
3. Q&A
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. In my office someone said they had a "Heath Robinson" solution
to a problem, to the complete confusion of the international
members of the team. Can you tell me who was Heath Robinson, and
was everything he did makeshift and temporary? [Sarah Wylie]
A. Never. No drawing William Heath Robinson created was ever either
of those things. He was a wonderful illustrator, who seemed to be
able to ease himself into the spirit of a work in a magical way: as
just one example, those for an edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream
in 1914 were superb.
His enduring fame, and the reason why his name entered the language
during his lifetime, was a result of the other side of his work -
comic drawings. The typical Heath Robinson creation was of some
machine for carrying out a whimsical purpose, such as one to train
cat burglars, or stretch spaghetti, or put square pegs into round
holes. These meticulously conceived and magnificently executed
drawings were miracles of ineffective ingenuity. Every participant
was clearly intent on serious purposes while managing some aspect
of an absurdly over-complicated construction of magnets, pulley
wheels and conveyor belts, all linked and controlled by lengths of
knotted string. Nothing in his creations was pristine. Every part
of his daft machines told of regular use over a long period, often
patched or amateurishly repaired. He said that a large part of the
joke came from the style that showed the artist had complete belief
in what he was drawing.
Something Heath Robinson, meaning a device that was simultaneously
absurdly ingenious and impracticable, became services slang during
the First World War, as a result of a series of cartoons in which
he mocked the enemy (such as harnessing the German army to a goose
to teach it to goose-step). The Dictionary of National Biography
remarks of these cartoons: "The Germans (wearing the uniforms of
the Franco-Prussian War) invented 'frightful' means of teasing,
discomfiting or embarrassing our troops who (looking scarcely less
ridiculous) confounded them."
In the USA, the equivalent is a Rube Goldberg device, a term that
dates from the 1950s. Goldberg created essentially the same kind of
unnecessarily complicated device for carrying out some simple task,
though - as befits a trained engineer - his were practical, albeit
weirdly convoluted. However, his draughtsmanship doesn't begin to
compare with that of the classically trained Heath Robinson.
4. Sic!
-------------------------------------------------------------------
"Recently," e-mailed Kathy Smith from California, "I was browsing
items for sale on eBay. I was amused to read that an item offered
for sale was 'in tack'. I did a search and found that there were
811 listings for items that were 'in tack'!"
Leela Pienaar clearly reads her local paper in Grahamstown, South
Africa, with great care: "Listed amongst the TV programmes was the
movie 'Nothing Hill' starring Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant, perhaps
appropriately for a town that was dismissed in an early settler
diary thus: 'Graham's Town is not worth describing' (Harriet Ward,
1848). Yet in the same newspaper appeared: 'Gregorian House' for
sale. Where else in the world could you find a property of such
note in a town that is not worth describing?"
"Although it's not recent," says Craig Welch, "I've just read the
following in Robert Ludlum's novel The Tristan Betrayal: 'They met
in the hotel lobby. He was an obese middle-aged man with plucked
eyebrows and a shiny bald head named Ernst Gerlach.' Whilst I have
the utmost respect for my own head, I've never taken it upon myself
to give it its own name ..."
An advertisement for a research scientist appeared in last week's
New Scientist from Danisco, a firm that produces food ingredients.
"You will be working in a modern laboratory with a multi-functional
team of Chemists', analyst's, Flavourists', Sensory Scientists and
Bio-Chemists'." In that plethora of misplaced apostrophes, why the
discrimination against "scientists"?
A. E-mail contact addresses
-------------------------------------------------------------------
If you want to respond to something in a newsletter, ask a question
for the Q&A section, or otherwise contact Michael Quinion, please
send it to one of the following addresses:
* Comments on newsletter mailings are always welcome. They should
be sent to wordseditor at worldwidewords.org
* Questions intended to be answered in the Q&A section should be
addressed to wordsquestions at worldwidewords.org (please don't
use this to respond to published answers to questions - e-mail
the comment address instead)
* Problems with subscriptions that cannot be handled by the list
server should be addressed to wordssubs at worldwidewords.org
Please do not send attachments with messages.
B. Subscription information
-------------------------------------------------------------------
To leave the list, change your subscription address, or subscribe,
please visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/index.htm .
You can also maintain your subscription by e-mail. For a full list
of commands, send a message containing the following two lines to
listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org:
INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS
END
The "END" ensures that the list server doesn't get confused by your
signature or other text added to the outgoing message.
This newsletter is also available as an RSS feed. The address is
http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/newsletter.xml .
Recent back issues are archived at
http://www.worldwidewords.org/backissues/
C. Ways to support World Wide Words
-------------------------------------------------------------------
The World Wide Words newsletter and Web site are free, but if you
would like to help with their costs, here are some ways to do so.
If you order any goods from any of these online stores (not just
new books), you can use one of these links, which gets World Wide
Words a small commission at no extra cost to you:
Amazon USA: http://quinion.com?QA
Amazon UK: http://quinion.com?JZ
Amazon Canada: http://quinion.com?MG
Amazon Germany: http://quinion.com?DX
If you would like to contribute a sum to the upkeep of World Wide
Words through PayPal, enter this link into your browser:
http://quinion.com?PP
You could also buy one of my books, of course. See
http://www.worldwidewords.org/posh.htm and
http://www.worldwidewords.org/ologies.htm .
-------------------------------------------------------------------
World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2005. All rights
reserved. The Words Web site is at http://www.worldwidewords.org .
-------------------------------------------------------------------
You may reproduce this newsletter in whole or part in free online
newsletters, newsgroups or mailing lists provided that you include
this note and the copyright notice above. Reproduction in printed
publications or on Web sites requires prior permission, for which
you should contact wordseditor at worldwidewords.org .
-------------------------------------------------------------------
More information about the WorldWideWords
mailing list