World Wide Words -- 23 Dec 06
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Dec 22 16:52:02 UTC 2006
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 519 Saturday 23 December 2006
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Sent each Saturday to at least 45,000 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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A formatted version of this newsletter is available
online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/yule.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Yuletide.
3. Recently noted.
4. Q&A: Slip someone a Mickey.
5. Sic!
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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THE STRAINS OF REWRITE James Thurber once used this term, by which
he meant the awkward language that can appear when a piece has been
reworked once too often. Last week, those strains led to the phrase
"excessive gain in weight caused by overeating emotional problems",
which generated a few gently sarcastic comments.
GRUNTLED Following last week's piece, many subscribers reminded me
of the famous piece by Jack Winter about missing opposites - such
as "chalant", "kempt", and "gainly" - in the New Yorker in 1994.
This can be read online via http://quinion.com?GRUN, among other
places.
Ray Carlyle e-mailed from Australia to mention "peel" and "unpeel".
The latter is often used in the same sense as the former, though
many dictionaries don't include it, and it mostly evokes the image
of taking the skin off a banana. The OED calls this use of "un-"
redundant, since it doesn't change the meaning of the word. Another
example, which Harold Beck forwarded from a friend, appears in a
quotation from a James Joyce poem: "This very next Lent I will
unbare / My penitent buttocks to the air." "Unbare" has quite a
respectable history going back to the sixteenth century, though it
is now rare and literary.
TRIG AND TRIM Andreas Stockinger resolved the whole matter of the
origin of this term, following my item about it last week, through
some creative consultation of the Oxford English Dictionary. The
OED records an earlier version of it, "trick and trim", in which
the first word was probably a southern English modification of the
Scots and northern English "trig" and not our usual word of that
spelling. I've rewritten the piece; it appears online with other
regular updates to the Web site; you can also reach it via
http://quinion.com?TRIG .
COURT SPORT I left the "n" out of "lawn" in the title of William
Tilden's book The Art of Lawn Tennis. Wrong sort of court. However,
law tennis sounds like a fun game. I'm working on the rules for it:
"Serves must strike the witness box and dock before being returned;
a juror catching the ball shall be permitted to keep it; the judge
may enter play at any time by using his gavel to strike the ball
(British judges may employ an usher for this purpose) ...".
BROADCAST If you want to hear my dulcet tones, they will feature
in the BBC Radio 4 programme Word of Mouth that goes out on Boxing
Day at 4pm GMT. You will be able to hear it online a little later
by going to the BBC site via http://quinion.com?WOMQ and clicking
on the "Listen to the latest edition" link. It being radio, at
least nobody will be able to spot the typing errors.
2. Weird Words: Yuletide
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Christmas.
My dictionaries of British origin firmly mark this as archaic or
dialectal, which will come as a surprise to all the journalists,
advertisers and Christmas card scribes who have cheerily borrowed
it in recent weeks as a useful alternative name for the Christmas
season. Traditionally, it's true, it has been more a Northern
English and Scots word than a common southern English one, and you
will be very unlikely to hear it casually used at the supermarket
checkout.
Yule and Yuletide don't refer only to Christmas day but to all the
traditional festive twelve days of Christmas. That goes back to a
time before the Christian festival had been thought of. It derives
from the Old Norse "jol", which was the name of a pagan festival at
the winter solstice (and which survives in the modern Scandinavian
greeting "god jul", Good Yule or Merry Christmas). The beginning of
that festival was marked with the ceremonial lighting of the Yule
clog or Yule log, a big log laid across the hearth and lit with a
piece of wood from the previous year's log.
A traditional Scots dish was Yule brose, the seasonal version of a
kind of porridge made from oats on which was poured the juices from
boiled meat. The Edinburgh Magazine reported in 1821 that it was
usual to put a ring in the communal bowl of Yule brose; the person
who got it in their spoon was taken to be the member of the company
to be first married.
3. Recently noted
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SIDELONGNESS An article in the Guardian last Saturday (online via
http://quinion.com?SLNS) featured John Simpson, Managing Editor of
the Oxford English Dictionary. As a confirmed - even incorrigible -
word hunter, I pounced on one sentence: "There is a sidelongness
about Simpson; he doesn't make eye contact often, except in shy
flashes that illuminate the even fluency of his speech, rather as
his humour does." Sidelongness is not (yet) in the OED; indeed the
only other example I can find appeared in George Orwell's Burmese
Days of 1935: "At all times, when he was not alone, there was a
sidelongness about his movements, as he manoeuvred constantly to
keep the birthmark out of sight."
SCHINFING Chris Greaves told me about a Guardian blog entry (read
via http://quinion.com?SCNF) by Audrey Gillam, dated 8 December, in
which she reported on the poor quality of the equipment currently
being supplied to British soldiers. "In Kuwait and Iraq," she
wrote, "a paucity of clothing, desert boots and spare parts was not
the only thing soldiers felt sore about. They call it 'schinfing'
in the army and it basically means moaning or complaining. They say
once a soldier stops schinfing, his commanding officer should start
worrying." The only other place I've found it is on an online
discussion forum called The Army Rumour Service or ARRSE. Tony
Thorne, the editor of The Dictionary of Contemporary Slang, tells
me that SCHINF is the Army's usual abbreviation for its School of
Infantry, which seems pretty clearly to be the source of the slang
term. The ordinary Tommy has long delighted in grousing about his
lot, but do SCHINF graduates have a special reputation for
complaining?
MONGO In the issue of 11 November, I mentioned this term, in use
in the New York Department of Sanitation to mean items scavenged
from rubbish and put back into use. Grant Barrett, who among other
activities runs the Double-Tongued Word Wrester slang site (which
you can reach via http://quinion.com?DTWW), tells me that there's a
clue to its origin in the unpublished papers of the Lexicon of
Trade Jargon, started by the Federal Writers' Project of the Works
Progress Administration (later called the Works Projects
Administration) in the years before 1939 but never finished. In a
section of jargon and slang taken from New York City sanitation
workers, "mungo" is defined as a person who salvages such discarded
items, rather than the things being salvaged. So the term has a
longer history than the previously recorded evidence indicates. The
spelling may suggest that my theory about its origin is right. See
http://quinion.com?MONG for more on this puzzling term.
4. Q&A: Slip someone a Mickey
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Q. I was wondering what the origin is of "slipping someone a
mickey", as in spiking a drink? [Chris Cone]
A. The original and fuller form of the phrase is "slip someone a
Mickey Finn" and does indeed refer to drugging a drink for some
nefarious purpose.
The drug has varied. These days, a Mickey Finn is usually taken to
be knockout drops to render someone insensible so that they can be
robbed. The drug most commonly mentioned is chloral hydrate, though
American Speech in 1936 claimed that it was actually cigar ashes in
a carbonated drink, a surprising concoction we can hardly believe
was effective. But the drug has sometimes been said to have been a
purgative or emetic, this being a quick way for staff to get an
obnoxious drunk or violent patron out of a bar.
Another reason for slipping someone an emetic became a notorious
case in Chicago in 1918. This is from the Washington Post of June
in that year:
State's Attorney Hoyne, acting on information as to coercive
measures used by waiters to compel the giving of tips, arrested
100 waiters, members of Waiters' Union, Local No. 7, today. Mr.
Hoyne had a report that waiters used a certain powder in the
dishes of known opponents to the system. The powders, according
to Mr. Hoyne, produced nausea and were known as "Mickey Finns."
It is thought that many cases of supposed ptomaine poisoning
reported after meals in downtown cafes and hotels may have been
caused by the "Mickey Finns."
The "certain powder" was later reported to be tartar emetic. So far
as I know, this scandal is the first time that a Mickey Finn is
mentioned in print. The case was widely reported and it seems to
have been the stimulus for the term's becoming widely known.
So who was Mickey Finn? There's some doubt over the matter but he
may have been the man of that name who ran the Lone Star Saloon and
Palm Garden in Chicago from 1896 to December 1903, when the local
paper reported that his saloon had been closed by the authorities
because of the many robberies carried out on the premises. Most of
what we know, or think we know, about Mr Finn's activities comes
from a 1940 book by Herbert Asbury, Gem of the Prairie (Mr Asbury
also wrote The Gangs of New York, from which the Martin Scorsese
film was adapted). The establishment seems to have been a dive of
the lowest kind, in which Finn fenced stolen goods, supervised
pickpockets and ran prostitutes. He had a sideline, as Mr Asbury
tells it, by which he drugged patrons with chloral hydrate, robbed
them, and dumped them in an alley.
This is all rather circumstantial, not least because of the big gap
between Finn's supposed activities and the first recorded use of
the term in 1918, not to mention the further 20 year gap before Mr
Asbury wrote his account. However, the Chicago locale for the first
two might suggest that the term had been circulating in the city
underworld in the intervening years.
Mickey Finn, of course, is a common Irish name and in the 1890s an
author named Ernest Jarrold had written stories about a character
of that name. They had become extremely popular; a book of them was
published in 1899 under the title Mickey Finn Idylls, which was
turned into a comic play in 1903. So the name would have been in
the air at the time the real Mickey Finn was running his illegal
business and the combination of the two might have caused it to
stick in people's minds.
5. Sic!
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>From last Saturday's Daily Mail weekend supplement, advertising a
BBC radio programme, The Things We Forgot To Remember: "Still
regarded as the foundation of English justice and liberty, Michael
Portillo discovers the truth about the Magna Carta." David Sutton
commented, "I'm sure we all agree that the man is a national
treasure, but steady on!"
A splendidly misleading headline appeared in the Sydney Morning
Herald on 17 December: "Club rejects spray bouncers". Leon Hides
sent this in, together with the story underneath. It turns out that
the bouncers had been hit with a pepper spray by a small group who
had been thrown out of the club.
An article on renewable energy the Guardian's technology supplement
on Thursday reported that domestic wind turbines weren't value for
money. "By comparison," the report went on, "large wind farms are
flying". I know what he means, but the image is unsettling.
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