World Wide Words -- 03 May 08
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri May 2 17:06:57 UTC 2008
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 586 Saturday 3 May 2008
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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: Pilcrow.
3. Recently noted.
4. Q&A: Hairy at the heel.
5. Q&A: Chickens coming home to roost.
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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WISEACRE Many readers, particularly in the US, queried whether
last week's Weird Word really meant a person with an "unjustified
appearance of wisdom", as I put it at one point. The most common
terms readers used to explain it were "smart alec", "smart-arse",
"smarty-pants" and "wise guy", in other words someone regarded with
irritation because he's a know-all or makes sarcastic comments. For
most British people the wisecracking element is absent: a wiseacre
pontificates on a subject despite being ignorant about it.
2. Weird Words: Pilcrow /'pIlkr at U/
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The paragraph sign.
The word is delightful, not least because it gives no clue at all
to what it means or where it might come from. The recently revised
entry for it in the Oxford English Dictionary says that it is "now
chiefly historic", which I rather dispute, since it's easy to find
examples in current books on typography and it continues to be used
in standards documents that list character sets.
What makes it truly weird is that the experts are sure it's a much
bashed-about transformation of "paragraph". This can be traced back
to ancient Greek "paragraphos", a short stroke that marked a break
in sense (from "para-", beside + "graphein", write). The changes
began with people amending the first "r" to "l" (it appeared in Old
French in the thirteenth century as "pelagraphe" and "pelagreffe").
Then the folk etymologists got at it, altering the first part to
"pill" and the second to "craft" and then to "crow". The earliest
recorded version was "pylcrafte", in 1440; over the next century it
settled down to its modern form.
The paragraph symbol, by the way, isn't a reversed "P" as you might
guess. It's actually a script "C" that was crossed by one or two
vertical lines. The letter stood for Latin "capitulum", chapter.
3. Recently noted
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MALLERCISE An article in the Guardian on Tuesday said mallercise
"is a craze sweeping the US and catching on here". You may perhaps
not recognise it under that name - a newspaper search found only a
few examples, all from the UK, the earliest being from the Scotsman
in 2002. The US name is "mall-walking", a term that can be found in
newspapers from the early 1980s. As it appeared in a guide, Safety
& Health, issued by the US National Safety Council in 1988: "Mall-
walking is growing by leaps and bounds. And lots of shopping malls
want to get involved with it", it's wide of the mark to say it's a
newly fashionable craze. It's obviously enough walking in shopping
malls, a form of exercise especially suitable for older people or
those with heart problems, since the malls are climate-controlled
and free of wheeled traffic.
4. Q&A: Hairy at the heel
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Q. I'm a fan of Agatha Christie, and I have seen her use the phrase
"hairy at the heel" several times. It sounds so terribly English,
yet I am unsure what it means, or its derivation. Any reflections
would be welcome. [Loretta O'Donnell, Australia]
A. An example is in a story about Ms Christie's Belgian detective
Hercule Poirot: "The Colonel delivered himself of the opinion that
Godfrey Burrows was slightly hairy at the heel, a pronouncement
which baffled Poirot completely." His understandable bewilderment
is a state he shares, I suspect, with most readers. Walter James
Macqueen-Pope made its meaning clearer in Back Numbers in 1954, in
which he described someone as "a cad, a bounder, an outsider, hairy
at the heel." Putting it simply, such a person was ill-bred.
You're right to say it's characteristically English, but it was a
term more of clubland, the upper middle classes and the landed
gentry than of English people at large. It placed the speaker as
much as the person being spoken about. This appearance in John
Buchan's Huntingtower of 1922 sets the social and linguistic
background beautifully:
I can't say I ever liked him, and I've once or twice had a
row with him, for he used to bring his pals to shoot over
Dalquharter and he didn't quite play the game by me. But I
know dashed little about him, for I've been a lot away. Bit
hairy about the heels, of course. A great figure at local
race-meetin's, and used to toady old Carforth and the huntin'
crowd. He has a pretty big reputation as a sharp lawyer and
some of the thick-headed lairds swear by him, but Quentin
never could stick him. It's quite likely he's been gettin'
into Queer Street, for he was always speculatin' in horse
flesh, and I fancy he plunged a bit on the Turf.
The reference to horse racing is spot on, because the term came out
of bloodstock breeding. It used to be said that it was a sign of
poor breeding if a horse had too much hair about the fetlocks. It
didn't take much to shift the saying, figuratively, to humans. Of
course, it applied only to thoroughbred racehorses and to humans
who aspired to belong to society's equivalent: working horses such
as shires have very hairy feet, but then they're common as muck.
The expression was rather variable, also appearing as "hairy in the
fetlocks", "hairy round the heels", "hairy-heeled", even at times
simply "hairy", though it doesn't seem to be connected to any of
the many other senses of that word. Dating-wise, its heyday was of
the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. You can
still find it on occasion, but it's now outmoded, a term solely of
elderly upper-class men remembering their youth.
5. Q&A: Chickens coming home to roost
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Q. Can you explain the genesis of the phrase "chickens coming home
to roost"? [Judge George H Foster, Jr, Phoenix, Arizona]
A. As a proverbial expression it's half a millennium old.
The older fuller form was "curses are like chickens; they always
come home to roost", meaning that your offensive words or actions
are likely at some point to rebound on you. The idea goes back to
Chaucer, though he expressed it rather differently in The Parson's
Tale, around 1390, writing that curses are like "a bird that
returns again to his own nest".
Various versions are recorded down the years, but chickens appeared
on the scene only in the nineteenth century, in Robert Southey's
oriental epic poem The Curse of Kehama of 1810. The image of farm
chickens going out to forage during the day but coming back to the
safety of the hen-house at dusk would have been familiar to his
readers. It's easy to find examples from then on, such as the one
in Roughing it in the Bush, Or, Life in Canada, by Susanna Moodie,
dated 1852: "The next time the old woman commences her reprobate
conduct, tell her to hold her tongue, and mind her own business,
for curses, like chickens, come home to roost." That form is still
common, mainly in North America.
During the nineteenth century, the proverb was abbreviated to its
modern form. An early example was in the Wisconsin Patriot on 10
November 1855: "Barstow has always been a belter, and he need not
complain to find his chickens coming home to roost."
You can tell the expression had become widely known by the middle
of the nineteenth century because it was abbreviated still further
into the elliptical "home to roost". James Russell Lowell wrote in
1870, "All our mistakes sooner or later surely come home to roost."
Sometimes this could lead to weird images, as in Mr Punch's History
of the Great War of 1919, in which a character claims that a man's
"wild oats are coming home to roost". Other forms are known, such
as "curses come home to roost", which is in Margaret Mitchell's
Gone With the Wind.
6. Sic!
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Priscilla Jensen was rather surprised to see a handwritten sign in
the doorway of a newstand cum bookshop in a large mall in northern
Virginia: "No Unintended Children, Please!" The sentiment is fine,
of course, but why put it there?
Also from Virginia, Walter Sheppard wrote in about an advertisement
he came across addressed to government employees. It concerned a
book with the title Understanding the Federal Government's Survivor
Benefits. The ad says that the first thing a reader will learn is
"What the requirements are for both the deceased employee and the
surviving spouse". Apparently government employees can't escape job
demands even by dying.
John McNeil e-mails with news that The Press of Christchurch, New
Zealand, on 30 April put a figure on the weight of public opinion:
"Squid experts yesterday had a taste of one of the colossal squid
found in Antarctic waters. It is the smaller of the two beasts; the
other has drawn global attention weighing nearly half a tonne."
David Ashton spotted a sign on a take-away food shop in Melbourne
that was advertising "home-maid soup". He feels it would certainly
be nice to have a maid at home to make some soup - not to mention
doing other chores around the house.
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