World Wide Words -- 12 May 07
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri May 11 17:14:17 UTC 2007
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 539 Saturday 12 May 2007
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Sent each Saturday to at least 48,000 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/leyb.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Topical words: Larval therapy.
3. Weird Words: Pillaloo.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: Shyster.
6. 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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LOLLAPALOOSA Several readers wondered whether the creation of this
word had been influenced by the name of the appaloosa horse, while
others had been told this as fact. The appaloosa, which has dark
spots on a light background, is the traditional breed associated
with native Americans. Its name comes either from an Indian tribal
name or the Louisiana place name Opelousa, or just possibly from
the Palouse River in Idaho. "Opelousa" was recorded in 1849 in a
German book about Texas but the word appears for the first time in
a form near to its current spelling only in 1924 (and thereafter in
many variant spellings that strongly suggest a recent oral origin)
so it is probably too recent to have influenced "lollapaloosa".
SAY UNCLE Following the discovery by Dan Norder of this American
idiom in newspaper jokes, George H Goebel, Assistant Editor of the
Dictionary of American Regional English, points out that the joke
was British in origin and that the idiom therefore almost certainly
derives from it, not the other way around. For the full details,
see the Web page http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-say1.htm .
BOUGHT AND BROUGHT The item about this shift in last week's issue
brought forth several comments. Michael Shannon e-mailed, "As I've
mentioned before, here in Australia the reverse is true. All too
often you'll hear someone say they have 'brought' something at the
shops instead of 'bought'. I've been hearing this ever since I
arrived in Australia back in 1989 so I can only assume that it was
prevalent before then. It's the most irritating mispronunciation
I've ever heard." James Brunskill confirmed its popularity in the
region: "In New Zealand, we almost exclusively use 'brought' - 'I
brought a new car today'." Perhaps the author Sebastian Faulks, the
writer of the item, has a lot of antipodean friends? And many of
you pointed out that "thought" changing to "taught" is exemplified
by Tweetie Pie in the Warner Bros cartoons ("I Taut I Taw A Puddy
Tat"). I should have thought of that.
BRAVE NEW WORDS Andrew Pearce commented, following my review last
time of this dictionary of science fiction, that "Your example of a
Big Dumb Object (the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey) is not big
enough. While I don't think there's a formal lower size limit, they
tend to be much bigger - astronomical in size. Examples are Dyson
spheres and Niven's Ringworld, both of which have millions or more
times Earth's surface and occupy whole 'planetary' orbits. Lindig
Harris objected to my description of the book as pioneering, as she
has a copy of Futurespeak: A Fan's Guide to the Language of Science
Fiction, published in 1991. This was new to me, but a copy is even
now on its way from a US bookseller.
2. Topical words: Larval therapy
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This is not a subject for the squeamish, but the term is currently
appearing on news pages as well as in research publications. Larval
therapy involves introducing larvae or maggots of the bluebottle or
greenbottle to wounds to clean them and encourage healing.
There's nothing new about either the idea or the name. Experience
on battlefields in the American Civil War and the First World War
showed that wounds healed quicker among casualties who had been
left untreated long enough to be infected by maggots hatched from
fly eggs. The maggots of these flies remove dead tissue and secrete
chemicals that inhibit bacteria, but avoid live flesh, so giving
healthy tissue the chance to regrow. The technique was used during
the 1930s and 1940s to treat burns, abscesses, leg ulcers and
gangrene. It went out of fashion when antibiotics came in after
World War Two, though I've read it is still taught to army surgeons
in some countries.
It's coming back into use, not least because it can successfully
treat wounds infected with bacteria resistant to antibiotics. It
has been reported this month that a team at Manchester University
has found maggots can heal foot ulcers infected with the superbug
MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus). The team has
been awarded a grant to carry out a controlled trial.
Early doctors called it "maggot therapy", employing a medieval word
that might be a variation on the old Germanic "maddock" or "mathe",
now known only in dialect, or which the Oxford English Dictionary
thinks might have been influenced by Magot or Maggot, pet-names of
Margery or Margaret. But there's nothing in the least affectionate
about "maggot" itself and doctors came to realise that calling it
"maggot therapy" was a public-relations no-no, though the term is
still around in the literature. In the early 1930s "larval therapy"
began to appear instead, based on a rather more recent and specific
scientific term that had been borrowed from Latin "larva", a ghost,
spectre, or hobgoblin, which figuratively took a grub to be a ghost
of the final adult form of an insect. However, "larval therapy" was
not so much better that it entirely extinguished shudders from
fastidious potential patients.
Around a decade ago, "biosurgery" became popular as a euphemistic
alternative. But this has come much more common in surgery to mean
the employment of biological replacement materials ("biomaterials")
to reconstruct or seal tissues within the body. So the unambiguous
term "larval therapy" continues in use. It's also sometimes called
maggot debridement therapy or biodebridement, in which debridement
is the cleansing of a wound, a nineteenth-century borrowing from
French, literally meaning "unbridling", though the link with
saddlery is obscure.
3. Weird Words: Pillaloo
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A cry of lamentation or distress.
This is an Irish word and one not known outside Ireland, or even
much within it these days, the word having dropped out of ordinary
speech. You may find it spelled "pililiú", or "pililoo" or in other
ways. It's a close relative of "whillaloo" and "ululu", two other
Irish words with similar senses.
The Oxford English Dictionary tells us "pillaloo" began its life
centuries ago as a hunting cry. Among its appearances was that in
1888 in The Astonishing History of Troy Town by Q (Sir Arthur
Quiller-Couch), though you might have some difficulty picking the
sense out of his representation of the local speech:
An' the wust was, that what wi' the rumpus an' her singin'
out "Pillaloo!" an' how the devil was amongst mun, havin'
great wrath, the Lawyer's sarmon about a "wecked an'
'dulterous generation seekin' arter a sign" was clean
sp'iled.
Henry Murray's usage in Lands of the Slave and the Free of 1857 is
very much easier on the modern eye and ear:
The dialogue was brought to a sudden stop by the frantic
yell of the juvenile pledge of their affections, whose
years had not yet reached two figures; a compact little
iron-bound box had fallen on his toe, and the poor little
urchin's pilliloo, pilliloo, was pitiful.
4. Recently noted
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SPELT VERSUS SPELLED A puzzled American reader queried my use of
"spelt" last week, wondering if perhaps I had misspelled "spelled".
I must confess to uninhibited inconsistency. In the 539 newsletters
to date, "spelled" has appeared 126 times and "spelt" just 35 (but
"misspelled" - used 12 times - has never been spelt as "misspelt").
"Spelt" is the traditional British participle and past tense but is
unknown in American English. The style is still the standard over
here, though it is shifting towards the other form, in part under
US influence. There has never been any doubt in Britain, however,
that when we have spelled out the facts of a matter, we do so in
that spelling. We might also these days borrow a US meaning of the
verb and say that we have spelled a person in a task, never spelt
them. But then, the whole matter of strong versus weak verbs is a
minor hazard for cross-Atlantic writers and editors. I'm reading a
book by an American author in which one character "shined a light".
I might on infrequent occasions have shined my shoes, but never a
light, as I would always prefer to have shone one. The tendency has
been for strong verbs to change into weak ones over time, only the
most common ones surviving. But in an interesting reversal, about a
century ago North Americans created (strictly re-created) a strong
past tense "dove" ("he dove into the water") to replace "dived". It
is common in some places, though it is very regional in acceptance.
5. Q&A: Shyster
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Q. In a recent online discussion about singing masters and hymn-
book salesmen of the 19th century, the word "shyster" was used to
describe certain members of that fraternity. Someone objected to
the term as anti-Semitic. And now, of course, all sorts of opinions
and etymologies are popping up. Would you be so kind as to clarify
the term's history for us? [Annie Grieshop; a related question came
from Morandir Armson]
A. The supposed anti-Semitic origin links the word to the name of
the vengeful money lender Shylock in Shakespeare's Merchant of
Venice, with the occupational ending "-ster" added. This is untrue.
It is also often claimed to come from the name of a New York lawyer
named Scheuster; in the 1840s, his unscrupulous ways are said to
have so annoyed Barnabas Osborn, the judge who presided over the
Essex Market police court in that city, that he supposedly began to
refer to "Sheuster practices". No such lawyer has been traced and
it's clearly just a folk tale. Unsuccessful attempts have also been
made to link it to a Scots Gaelic word and to bits of English
slang.
Whatever its origin, we use "shyster" to mean a person who uses
unscrupulous, fraudulent, or deceptive methods in business.
Historically, it has mainly been applied to lawyers. There's good
reason for that, as Gerald Cohen discovered when he traced its true
origin some 25 ago. Professor Cohen found that "shyster" appeared
first in the New York newspaper The Subterranean in July 1843, at
first in spellings such as "shyseter" and "shiseter" but almost
immediately settling down to the form we use now.
The background is the notorious New York prison known as the Tombs.
In the 1840s it was infested by a group of ignorant and unqualified
charlatans, who pretended to be lawyers and officers of the court.
Before "shyster" came into being, "pettifogger" was the usual term
for them, a word of obscure origin for lawyers of little scruple or
conscience that dates from the sixteenth century. Mike Walsh, the
editor of The Subterranean and the first user of "shyster", summed
up these plaguers of the Tombs in this passage:
Ignorant blackguards, illiterate blockheads, besotted
drunkards, drivelling simpletons, ci-devant mountebanks,
vagabonds, swindlers and thieves make up, with but few
exceptions, the disgraceful gang of pettifoggers who
swarm about its halls.
Mike Walsh described "shyster" as both obscene and libellous. The
circumstances surrounding its first appearance suggest that in New
York underworld slang it was a term for somebody incompetent, so a
potentially libellous description, and that only later - largely
through the publicity that Walsh gave it in his newspaper in the
years 1843-1846 - did it come to refer specifically to a crooked
lawyer.
Professor Cohen concluded the word derives from German "Scheisser"
for an incompetent person, a term known in New York through the
many German immigrants there. Mike Walsh considered it obscene
because it derives from "Scheisse", shit, through the image of an
incontinent old man. This is plausible, because British slang at
the same period included the same word, meaning a worthless person;
the usual spelling was "shicer", though it appeared also as
"sheisser", "shiser" and "shycer". It's recorded first in print in
Britain in 1846, but must be significantly older in the spoken
language. (It was taken to Australia and from the 1850s was used
there for an unproductive gold mine.) It may have been exported to
New York by London low-lifers.
6. Sic!
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As a coda to comments last week that mentioned canola, do you feel
there's perhaps something slightly inappropriate about a report in
last Saturday's Guardian which referred in all seriousness to some
British farmers producing "extra-virgin rapeseed oil"?
A nice eggcorn appeared in Parade Magazine last week, Laurie Graham
notes from San Francisco, in an article about how to sell your home
more quickly. In a section suggesting that pot plants would help to
entice people to enter, it says "I'd rather see one really good-
sized plant in a beefy pot than three wishy-washy plantings in
mishmashed pots."
Following the quite splendid example of bad translation last week,
James Pendlay sent a copy of the safety instructions for a radio-
controlled toy car, of which item 6 is almost poetic: "Don't let
the wet water of car, and not want under the rainy day is open-air
usage". That's pretty clear in its meaning, though the advice to
avoid the "mightiness of sunlight bottom" is puzzling, as is item
9, which advised that "if the car dash to piecesed, and should pass
by the per son check or profession personnel maintain the rear can
continue to use." The native-language text of this last item is
pictured in the online version of the newsletter, so somebody will
be able to tell me what the devil that was all about.
"This is an old classic of a mistake," e-mailed David McKeegan,
"which makes it all the more surprising that I saw it just this
morning in my local leisure club. A poster advertising their 'St
Tropez' tanning system announced, in large white letters on a black
background 'NOTHING LOOKS BETTER'. Nothing to boast about, I'd have
thought."
Elizabeth Cowan reports that last Saturday's Ottawa Citizen ran a
story on a traffic accident involving a local sports celebrity, who
"got out of the car donning sunglasses and a fresh white suit." Ms
Cowan hopes that was the newspaper's error.
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