World Wide Words -- 13 Jun 09

Thu Jun 11 04:27:08 UTC 2009

WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 643          Saturday 13 June 2009
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Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK      ISSN 1470-1448
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Apozem.
3. Q and A: Baldfaced, boldfaced or barefaced?
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.

1. Feedback, notes and comments
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HOLIDAYS  I'm still away. By all means send your questions and Sic! 
items as well as commenting on the items in this issue, but don't 
expect to get an answer until the end of next week at the earliest.

2. Weird Words: Apozem  /'ap at zIm/
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A founding principle of old-time doctoring was never to call a 
thing by an ordinary name when a highfalutin one would impress the 
patients more. This satire on such medical obfuscations appeared 
some 250 years ago and is worth quoting at length for the variety 
of obscure terms trotted out by a quack apothecary:

    Upon a more particular inquiry about the symptoms, he 
    was told that the blood was seemingly viscous, and salt 
    upon the tongue; the urine remarkably acrosaline; and the 
    faeces atrabilious and foetid. When the doctor said he 
    would engage to find the same phenomena in every healthy 
    man of the three kingdoms, the apothecary added, that the 
    patient was manifestly comatous, and moreover afflicted 
    with griping pains and borborygmata. "A f--t for your 
    borborygmata," cried the physician; "what has been done?" 
    To this question, he replied, that venesection had been 
    three times performed; that a vesicatory had been applied 
    inter scapulas; that the patient had taken occasionally 
    of a cathartic apozem, and between whiles, alexipharmic 
    boluses and neutral draughts.
    [The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves, by 
    Tobias Smollett, 1762. "Atrabilious" - affected by black 
    bile, melancholy; "comatous" - comatose; "borborygmata" - 
    rumblings in the guts; "venesection" - opening or cutting 
    a vein, phlebotomy; "vesicatory" - an irritating ointment 
    or plaster designed to raise blisters on the skin; "inter 
    scapulas" - between the shoulder blades; "alexipharmic" -  
    a substance intended to ward off poisons. I am puzzled by 
    the missing letters in the imprecation "f--t".]

Any ordinary person would describe an apozem as an infusion, or 
perhaps a decoction. It comes via French from the late Latin 
"apozema", which in turn derives from Greek words meaning to boil 
off completely. The term is obsolete.

4. Q and A: Bald-faced, boldfaced or barefaced?
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Q. A friend of mine recently posed the question as to whether the 
proper form was "bald-faced lie" or "boldfaced lie". Naturally, I 
thought of looking to your site for the answer, but having found 
none, I figure it's the perfect opportunity to ask. Which is the 
proper phrase? [Michael Benson]

A. This one confuses people a lot. To increase your own confusion, 
the original is actually neither of the two versions you quote, but 
is instead "barefaced lie". The first example I've come across is 
this:

    How dare you try to falsify my person? You are 
    discovered in a barefaced lie, and now want to bully it 
    out. 
    [Life; or, The adventures of William Ramble Esq., by 
    John Trusler, 1793.]

This is still the usual form in Britain and to a lesser extent in 
Canada. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, Americans 
started to use "bald-faced lie" instead, which has become the most 
common form in today's US newspapers. An early example:

    No one of ordinary intelligence is, of course, 
    expected to believe the statement, and every one who is 
    capable of putting it into readable English knows it to 
    be a bald-faced lie.
    [The Newark Daily Advocate (Ohio), 12 Jul. 1883.]

Both forms are based on colloquial uses from the seventeenth century. 
Someone bare-faced originally had the face uncovered, and hence was 
figuratively acting in an unconcealed or open way (Shakespeare is the 
first known user of both literal and figurative senses). From the 
latter part of the seventeenth century onwards, it took on a sense of 
something or someone who was audacious, shameless or impudent, so that 
a barefaced lie was one in which the speaker made no attempt to 
disguise it as truth.

An animal that is bald-faced has a white face or a white mark on the 
head. (Today "bald" refers to someone or something that lacks hair, 
but that's a medieval extension on the basis that a bald pate looks 
whitish.) Examples of the white sense include "bald coot" (from the 
white flash on the forehead of this water bird, a phrase which was 
changed by a bit of folk etymology into the slang insult "bald as a 
coot", totally bald); "bald-faced stag" (one likewise with a white 
flash on the head), "bald eagle" (which has a white head), and "bald-
faced cattle" (Herefords, which have white faces). A "bald mountain" 
has a summit that's either bare or covered in snow. In mid-nineteenth-
century America a "bald-faced shirt" was a dress shirt with a starched 
white front. It seems that "bald-faced" was common enough in the US 
compared with "barefaced" that it modified the expression.

The third version is your "boldfaced lie". A story one sometimes hears 
in support of it falls firmly into the area of folk etymology - that 
it comes from a lie knowingly told in print because it was printed for 
emphasis in bold type. But "bold-faced" goes back to Shakespeare in 
the sense of a shameless or impudent appearance, so it's reasonable 
that a boldfaced lie is one told with a shamelessly bold face. It's 
sometimes regarded as an error, though it's actually to be found 
almost as early as "barefaced lie":

    The sneer, the sarcasm, the one-sided statement, the 
    perplexing reference, the qualified concession, the bold-
    faced lie, - all these we could well illustrate by 
    samples of the current crop.
    [Eclectic Review, Sept. 1832.]

Having gone around the houses, detailed the history of the three forms 
and delved into every aspect of the story, perhaps I ought to think of 
actually answering your question. But I don't need to, since good 
advice has already been given:

    When we call a lie baldfaced or boldfaced ... either 
    one is just fine, though baldfaced is a bit more common. 
    But we could save ourselves trouble by following the rest 
    of the Anglophone world, which avoids the issue simply by 
    using barefaced for most kinds of openly shocking 
    behavior.
    [Jan Freeman, writing in the Boston Globe in June 
    2002.]

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B. E-mail contact addresses
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C. Ways to support World Wide Words
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