World Wide Words -- 24 May 08
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Thu May 22 13:58:46 UTC 2008
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 589 Saturday 24 May 2008
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Sent each Saturday to at least 50,000 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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For a key to phonetic symbols, see http://wwwords.org?PRON
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Jiggery-pokery.
3. Recently noted.
4. Q&A: Queer Street.
5. Review: Stunned Mullets and Two-pot Screamers.
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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ABIGAIL I mentioned in this piece last week that "Andrew" was also
the nickname of the Royal Navy. Following up subscribers' e-mails,
I've learned that the source is claimed to be one Lieutenant Andrew
Millar. The tale is that he was in charge of a press-gang during
the Napoleonic Wars and was so zealous and impressed so many men
that the pressed men thought the Navy must belong to him. However,
the National Maritime Museum says that no such officer has been
traced. Another theory is that the name is from St Andrew, the
patron saint of fishermen and hence of all seafarers.
BREAK IN PUBLICATION A reminder that there will be no issue next
week because my wife and I are on holiday. Normal service should be
restored the following Saturday, 7 June.
2. Weird Words: Jiggery-pokery /'dZIg at rI'p at Uk@rI/
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Deceitful or dishonest manipulation; hocus-pocus or humbug.
It's not so much found these days, though it is a delightful word
for describing underhand practices. People also mean by it some
form of trickery, especially the arcane manipulation required to
make an item of technical equipment work the way you want ("most
handsets need some jiggery-pokery to be Apple compatible"; "it may
lead to copied games running straight from the DVD without the need
for any further jiggery pokery").
The charm of "jiggery-pokery" lies partly in its bouncing rhythm, a
classic example of what's called a double dactyl, a dactyl being a
stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables; it's named
after the Greek word for finger, whose joints represent the three
syllables. Other examples of double dactyls are "higgledy-piggledy"
and "idiosyncrasy".
The word appears at the end of the nineteenth century and is first
recorded in Wiltshire and Oxfordshire dialect. The English Dialect
Dictionary quotes an Oxford example, "I was fair took in with that
fellow's jiggery-pokery over that pony." The experts are sure that
it actually comes from a Scots phrase of the seventeenth century,
"joukery-pawkery".
The first bit of it means underhand dealing, from a verb of obscure
origin, "jouk", that means to dodge or skulk; this might be linked
to "jink" and to the American football term "juke", to make a move
that's intended to deceive an opponent (the other "juke", as in
"jukebox", has a different origin). The second bit is from "pawky",
a Scottish and Northern English word that can mean artful, sly, or
shrewd, though it often turns up in the sense of a sardonic sense
of humour.
3. Recently noted
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POTWALLOPING A curious example of this ancient term appeared in a
report in the Times on Tuesday. It concerned the erosion of a golf
course built on the sand dunes at Northam Burrows near Westward Ho!
on the north Devon coast. Natural England, a government agency, has
stopped the traditional practice, locally called "potwalloping", of
annually rebuilding the offshore pebble ridge that limits erosion
of the dunes. A member of the club, David Lloyd, was quoted: "'I
remember potwalloping as a child to protect the golfing green,' he
said. 'Twice a year, thousands of people would get together and
potwallop on the beach.'" This weekend, Westward Ho! holds its
annual Potwalloping Festival, traditionally the time when locals
repaired the ridge after the winter storms. A "potwalloper" was
once a householder or lodger who had a fireplace on which a pot
could be boiled; this gave him the vote in some parliamentary
constituencies before the Reform Act of 1832. An older form was
"potwaller", which derives from the obsolete verb "wall", to boil.
The practice of communal repair of the ridge dates back at least
two centuries to protect the grazing on the dunes - and it was the
householders of the parish, the potwallopers, who did it.
By the way, since I know you're dying to ask, Westward Ho! was
created as a watering place, a sea resort, by a commercial company
that built a hotel and the golf course and named it after Charles
Kingsley´s 1855 book of the same name. "Westward Ho!" is an ancient
boatman's cry to attract potential passengers by shouting out the
direction in which he will be travelling. Another famous literary
link is the United Services College for the sons of officers that
was opened in Westward Ho! in 1874; it's the setting of Rudyard
Kipling's Stalky & Co.
VOG We're familiar with smog, the mixture of smoke and fog once so
typical of London, a word coined as far back as 1905. This week I
learned a related blend, "vog". This is "volcano" plus "smog" and
is an even nastier mixture of sulphur dioxide and other pollutants
that's emitted from volcanoes. It seems to be used most often of
Kilauea Volcano in Hawaii, where there is a vog index to measure
the level of pollution.
NICE In his report on the state of the economy last week, Mervyn
King, the governor of the Bank of England, said that "For the time
being at least, the nice decade is behind us." A suitably gloomy
opinion and one that was widely reported. But then it was realised
it wasn't a "nice" but a "NICE" decade - the word was an acronym,
dammit, for "Non-Inflationary Constant Expansion". With the Labour
party predicted to lose the next election, its supporters worry we
might be in for some Non-Acquisitive Suffering Tory Years instead.
4. Q&A: Queer Street
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Q. In a recent issue you quoted John Buchan's Huntingtower, "It's
quite likely he's been gettin' into Queer Street". Surely you are
going to define "into Queer Street". From context it looks like
being in debt, possibly to a loan shark. [Randall Bart]
A. Glad to help.
You're almost there with your definition. It's a rather dated
British phrase; Queer Street is an imaginary place where people in
difficulties, in particular financial ones, are supposed to live.
That seems not to have been its first meaning. It appeared in print
initially in the 1811 edition of Captain Francis Grose's Dictionary
of the Vulgar Tongue: "QUEER STREET. Wrong. Improper. Contrary to
one's wish. It is queer street, a cant phrase, to signify that it
is wrong or different to our wish." A decade later, it was used in
a different sense in Pierce Egan's Real Life in London, "Limping
Billy was also evidently in queer-street", in which it meant that
he was feeling sick. It was not until some decades later that it
became restricted to financial embarrassment.
Where it comes from is open to much doubt. It used to be claimed
that it was a variation on "Carey Street", this being the location
of the London Bankruptcy Court. But, as the OED points out, the
court was only established there in 1840, so couldn't have been its
source. As "Carey Street" isn't itself recorded figuratively until
much later, the parallels between the two forms can't have been the
cause of "Queer Street" taking on its specific financial overtones.
5. Review: Stunned Mullets and Two-pot Screamers
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The title will be unfamiliar, because in the current fashion it is
a catchpennyish borrowing of two of the more outré entries featured
within to attract the attention of bookshop browsers. It's actually
the new fifth edition of Gerald Wilkes's well-known Dictionary of
Australian Colloquialisms.
Australian English, as Professor Wilkes notes in his introduction,
has been influenced by the cant and slang of criminal transportees,
by the dialect of immigrants' home areas, and through contact with
many Aboriginal languages. If you add to that a characteristically
sardonic sense of humour and an enviable ability to turn a phrase
in a moment, you have a colloquial language unlike any other.
Those last two abilities are combined in the ability endlessly to
riff on a theme. If Australians want to indicate that someone is
incompetent, they might say that he couldn't find a grand piano in
a one-roomed house, couldn't blow the froth off a glass of beer,
couldn't knock the skin off a rice pudding, couldn't tell the time
if the town hall clock fell on top of him or couldn't train a choko
vine over a country dunny (a dunny is a toilet, from a Scots word
meaning "dung"). They might indicate something is totally useless
by comparing it to an ashtray on a motorbike or a glass door on a
dunny. They might suggest some person has limited mental abilities
by saying that he wasn't the full quid (still around long after the
dollar became the currency), a few flagstones short of a patio, a
paling short of a fence, or a chop short of a barbecue.
This edition is as up-to-the-minute as publishing schedules allow,
with many examples from recent years. Some 300 new entries have
been added and 900 existing ones updated. Among the new ones are
"alert but not alarmed", the message on a card that gave advice on
safeguarding against terrorism issued by the Australian government
after 9/11 and which has become something of a catchphrase (as it
had a magnet to attach it to a fridge door, the card became known
as the fridge magnet). "Lollybag" is new, a recent alternative to
"budgie smugglers" for over-tight male swimwear; the verb "lunch
cutter" is from the phrase "to cut somebody's lunch", to betray a
friend, especially by having sex with his wife. To the long list of
Australianisms formed by adding "-o" to a truncated word (such as
"smoko", a break from work for a smoke and something to eat, "arvo"
for afternoon, "dermo" for dermatologist, "ambo" for ambulance man,
"servo" for a service station, "Salvo" for Salvation army officer
and "gyno" for gynaecologist) is added "reno", the renovation of a
home. Among the recent Australian terms to have been imported to
the UK is "dog whistle politics", for comments on a political issue
that contain a hidden message to attract a different group of
voters. Australians have escaped the cultural cringe only to have
fallen prey to the "black armband", a guilty or apologetic attitude
to their past; they may alternatively put on a "white blindfold" to
deny such a view.
To be the two-pot screamer of the title, by the way, means you're
very susceptible to alcohol; it might lead to your being like a
stunned mullet, to be so dazed as to be almost unconscious.
[Wilkes, G A, Stunned Mullets and Two-pot Screamers: A Dictionary
of Australian Colloquialisms; paperback, pp412; Oxford University
Press Australia & New Zealand; 1 May 2008; ISBN-13: 978-0-19-
556316-0; list price AUS$45.00.]
NOTE ON AVAILABILITY
The book is currently available from bookshops in Australia and New
Zealand. Elsewhere it is due to be published in September 2008; you
can pre-order it from the publishers (http://www.oup.com) or from
booksellers. The Amazon online stores are currently still listing
the fourth edition of 1995 under the old title.
6. Sic!
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Kathy Ross-Waugh read an obituary in the Toronto Star for 12 May,
describing the life of a beloved mother who had just passed away:
"Losing her mother at only 3 months of age she quickly learned to
be a homemaker to a father and three brothers who were all coal
miners." Just imagine having to wash, iron, cook and keep house at
such a tender age.
Sherry Garfio of Denver found this in her local elementary school
newsletter: "If you have any children or adult books you would like
to donate, we would greatly appreciate it." Her son does often try
her patience, but she feels that donating him to the school would
be going a bit far.
Larry Nordell was reading Henry Petroski's history of the pencil,
in which he quotes the 1897 Sears, Roebuck catalogue listings for
triangular pencils: "This shape prevents the fingers from becoming
cramped while writing and also the possibility of their rolling
from the desk."
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