World Wide Words -- 20 Jun 09

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 644          Saturday 20 June 2009
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Contents
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1. Notes from a tired traveller.
2. Weird Words: Cucking-stool.
3. Q and A: Wine bottle sizes.
4. Book Review: I'm Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears.
5. Sic!
6. Feedback, notes and comments.
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.


1. Notes from a tired traveller
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Holiday over. It went well, thanks for asking, though a coach tour 
that covered 3158 miles airport to airport through seven US states 
in 16 days was tiring. We visited many fascinating sites including 
the Rocky Mountains, Yellowstone, Bryce Canyon, Zion and Grand 
Canyon national parks and the Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse 
monuments. Unforgettable.

Staggering blearily down to breakfast at 7am in a different hotel 
every day required our muzzy brains to puzzle out the odd logic of 
the current establishment's arrangements (why were the plates for 
one's toast so often at the other end of the room from the machine 
to make it? why was milk for the cereal rarely anywhere near it?). 
As a result, I have become the founding and so far the sole member 
of the SSABB, the Society for the Standardisation of American 
Breakfast Buffets.

After so long an absence, a number of points have arisen relating 
to recent issues. To let you get to the new stuff without having to 
read through comments on the old, I've put them at the end.


2. Weird Words: Cucking-stool  /'kVkIN-stu:l/
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Is the image that comes to mind of a woman in a seat on a pivoted 
plank being ducked in the local pond? If so, you're nearly right. 
Two punishment devices are known in medieval and post-medieval 
England with closely similar names, the one having evolved from the 
other. Much confusion among writers has resulted. The one that I've 
described is properly called a ducking-stool, a name that needs no 
explanation.

The cucking-stool was rather different, as you may judge from the 
genteel comment by Robert Chambers in his Book of Days in 1863: 
"The cucking-stool was a seat of a kind which delicacy forbids us 
particularly to describe." You can appreciate why he said that when 
you realise that "cucking" is from "cack", faeces, which is also to 
be found in "cack-handed". A cucking-stool was a commode, called at 
the time a close-stool - a covered chamber pot in a wooden seat. 

The offender was placed on the stool as a punishment designed to 
subject her to embarrassment and ignominy. (The device was used for 
women only: men had the pillory.) The stool was often fitted with 
wheels so that she could be paraded about the town. The stool later 
became a chair for ducking the offender in a pond, but the old name 
was sometimes preserved.

The main offence punished by both devices was of being a scold, a 
woman who nags or grumbles constantly. This was thought to be not 
just a problem for her immediate family but for the community at 
large and required firm action to quieten her down. The punishment 
was also for brewers who sold bad ale or bakers who gave short 
measure, because most brewers and bakers in medieval times were 
women.


3. Q and A: Wine bottle sizes
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Q. How did bottles of wine get names such as Jeroboam, Rehoboam, 
Methuselah and others? The ancient references of most of the names 
are obvious; the "how?" and "why?" are not. How was the hierarchy 
by volume and name determined? For how long does wine have to age 
for it to be called a Methuselah? [Belinda Hardman]

A. I'm glad to be able to report that the age of the wine has no 
connection with these curious names, otherwise a methuselah would 
have to be aged for 969 years. It's one of a large set of names for 
sizes of wine bottle. It's now illegal to put any of them except 
one on a bottle and they've become curiosities that mainly come up 
in pub quizzes.

The only term of the set that's still allowed is "magnum", which 
refers to a bottle containing two standard bottles or 1.5 litres. 
It's also the oldest of all the terms, having appeared in English 
in one of the prose works of the Scots poet Robert Burns, back in 
1788. It's an abbreviation of Latin "magnum bonum", a large good 
thing. It was in Scotland that it acquired the sense of a size of 
wine bottle and became abbreviated to "magnum". It has also been 
given to a variety of potato, various varieties of cooking plums, a 
gun, and even a large-barrelled steel pen. 

The remainder of the set, as usually quoted in reference books, are 
jeroboam (4 bottles/3 litres), rehoboam (6/4.5), methuselah (8/6), 
salmanazar (12/9), balthazar (16/12), nebuchadnezzar (20/15), 
melchior (24/18), solomon (28/21), sovereign (33.3/25), and primat 
(36/27). Some lists include the melchizedek, holding 40 standard 
bottles or 30 litres. The largest sizes refer only to champagne and 
are extremely rare, not least because it would be almost impossible 
to lift the bottles.

As you say, most of these are ancient, deriving from the names of 
kings mentioned in the Bible. Jeroboam, for example, was a king of 
Israel. His name was first applied to a size of wine bottle in a 
work by Sir Walter Scott (another Scotsman, you will notice) and 
seems to have been a joke derived from the description of Jeroboam 
in the first book of Kings as "a mighty man of valour" who "made 
Israel to sin".

The remainder date from much later. "Rehoboam" (a king of Judah and 
son of Solomon, also from the first book of Kings) appears in 1895. 
"Nebuchadnezzar" (ruler of the Babylonian empire, the man with the 
famous hanging gardens), turns up in a letter written by Aldous 
Huxley in 1916. "Methuselah", "salmanazar" and "balthazar" are all 
listed for the first time in André Simon's Dictionary of Wine in 
1935. Methuselah is the Old Testament patriarch; Salmanazar is more 
properly Shalmaneser, a King of Assyria mentioned in the second 
book of Kings; and Balthazar is assumed in dictionaries to be the 
king of Babylon whom we know better as Belshazzar, the one who saw 
the writing on the wall at his feast. However, he might instead be 
one of the three wise man who with Melchior and Caspar in medieval 
legend attended the birth of Jesus. I prefer the latter, because 
Melchior is another in the list.

Apart from magnum and jeroboam, few of these names have ever been 
used seriously. (The Oxford English Dictionary's recent revision of 
its entry for "melchior" doesn't even include the wine sense.) They 
seem to have been fanciful creations, dreamed up by a person or 
persons unknown on the basis of the Biblical associations of 
"jeroboam". My most diligent search has been unable to find out 
anything at all about who named them. We're not even sure in some 
cases which language they first appeared in. My French dictionaries 
say jeroboam and rehoboam were imported from English into French at 
the end of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth 
century respectively. They also say that "methuselah" (as 
"mathusalem") is not known in French as a name for a wine bottle 
size before the middle of the twentieth century and "salmanazar" 
not before 1964, which suggests that these, too, appeared first in 
English. But "nebuchadnezzar" is known as a bottle size in French 
(as "nabuchodonosor") in 1897, before it appeared in English.

In summary, we know a very little about the "how" and the "why", 
and nothing at all about the "who"; just a hint to explain why the 
various names were chosen for the different sizes.


4. Book Review: I'm Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears
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With that title, what other adjective could one use to describe the 
book than "quirky"? It's a compilation by Jag Bhalla, who describes 
himself as an amateur idiologist, or student of idioms. He presents 
a thousand or so amusingly odd examples from around the world. Many 
have been illustrated by the New Yorker's cartoonist Julia Suits.

An idiom is an expression whose meaning can't be deduced from those 
of the individual words. If you say that you've nipped a problem in 
the bud, put a spoke in someone's wheel or hauled a worker over the 
coals, complain that a relative is the black sheep of the family or 
that your ears are burning, you will be understood by other native 
English speakers, but run a severe risk of confusing foreigners.

Similarly, Jag Bhalla claims that in Colombia, a Spanish speaker 
might say that he has been swallowed like a postman's sock, by 
which he means he is hopelessly in love. This might be because the 
object of his love has thighs like mango tree trunks, in Hindi a 
compliment to an attractive woman. But if the tomatoes have faded, 
as a Russian might put it, love has gone; Arabic speakers are said 
to express the same idea through commenting that you're getting on 
each other's heads. You may indeed be like a dog and a monkey, a 
Japanese way of saying you're on bad terms. Trying to comprehend 
the reasons for such idiomatic constructions is like climbing a 
tree to catch a fish, a Chinese way of voicing the idea that a 
thing is impossible, or trying to seize the moon by the teeth, a 
French equivalent.

The author is frank in his introduction. He says that he has relied 
on the translators of his reference books for all his examples and 
accepts that native speakers in some cases might not recognise the 
references because the idioms are obsolete or the translator got it 
wrong. He also says, "This horde of plundered international idioms 
is intended for low-commitment sampling and easy reading." It's 
definitely for dipping into, not for reading all the way through at 
once. 

The title, by the way, is said to be a Russian idiom. Its English 
equivalent is "I'm not pulling your leg". Seriously.

[Jag Bhalla, I'm Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears, and Other 
Intriguing Idioms from Around the World; National Geographic Books; 
published on 16 June; paperback, 256pp; list price $12.95; ISBN 13: 
978-1-4262-0552-1; ISBN 10: 1-4262-0458-2.]

AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK 
Amazon UK:      GBP7.19     http://wwwords.org?INHN0
Amazon US:      US$9.52     http://wwwords.org?INHN3
Amazon Canada:  CDN$11.32   http://wwwords.org?INHN8
Amazon Germany: EUR9,99     http://wwwords.org?INHN4
[Please use these links to buy. They get World Wide Words a small 
commission at no extra cost to you.] 


5. Sic!
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John R Cray received a catalogue from the US clothing company Eddie 
Bauer. The words "Ultimate Sale" were in a red shield on the cover, 
under which was written, "Only happens twice a year".

Over on the American Dialect Society list, Michael J Sheehan told 
members that on Monday the CNN news anchor introduced a report from 
its chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour in Tehran 
by announcing, "I'm sure she'll be able to fill in the holes we've 
been raising."

Department of Muddled Metaphors, Australian edition: Laurie Malone 
heard a commentator point out on ABC radio on 11 June that "bird 
flu and swine flu are two different kettles of fish".

An article on the New York Times site dated 9 June includes this 
sentence: "Then come ... a grab-bag of performers and media types 
whose common threat might simply be that they are interesting to 
know." For Peter Strauss this was a threat too far.

An intriguing sidelight on mammalian reproduction appears on the 
Web site of the Handmade Scotch Egg Company, which Bonnie Scott 
Edwards visited recently: "These are not simply Scotch Eggs, these 
are lovingly prepared meals in their own right - made with eggs 
from free to roam happy chickens and pigs."


6. Feedback, notes and comments
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F--T  In last week's issue I professed myself to be baffled by two 
decorously omitted letters in the doctor's expletive quoted from 
Tobias Smollett's book The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot 
Greaves. As dozens of readers pointed out, they must be A and R, a 
witty riposte to the apothecary's reference to the patient's 
borborygmata, rumblings in the guts. Others noted that at the time 
the phrase "a fart for your ..." was a way to rudely dismiss 
something as useless or unimportant. Donald Le Messurier responded: 
"I must say that your being puzzled by the missing letters has me 
wondering if in fact you are puzzled by their meaning or by their 
being omitted. On the other hand you might be pulling our chain, 
knowing full well what was meant." Quite so.

BALD  Also from last week's issue, several readers suggested that 
in some of the instances I cited of animals with names that include 
the adjective "bald", meaning "white" - especially "bald eagle" - 
it is really a shortened form of "piebald". My references don't 
agree, and historical databases show that the bird was named "bald 
eagle" before the rather rare "piebald eagle" ever appeared; the 
latter name is usually introduced to try to explain the origin of 
the more usual form.

CAGMAG  Alison Hill responded to my piece about this word in the 6 
June issue: "It was used by my grandmother (brought up in Bath, in 
the 19th century) and handed on to me by my mother (brought up in 
Cirencester, Gloucestershire, in the early 20th). They both said it 
as 'keg-meg' (both halves rhyming with 'peg'). They would have 
recognised your enquirer's association with 'cheap, sugary foods': 
my mother associated it with the kind of cheap sweets sold in my 
childhood by the local newsagent for (then) a halfpenny, a penny or 
(at most) twopence, while I understand that my grandmother used it 
of shop-bought cakes (which she regarded with contempt). The word 
was definitely pejorative, not to say insulting. They would have 
used it of any food not (in their opinion) worth buying, such as we 
now use the term 'junk food' for; but I have never heard it used of 
any description of meat."

David Bracey e-mailed from Indiana with memories of a different and 
non-pejorative use: "In the 1940s and 1950s in Essex (the UK one), 
my dear old Auntie Alice used to serve up delicious little items 
she called 'cagmags', which she confected out of breakfast cereal 
and chocolate. In my 70 years I've never heard or seen it anywhere 
else. Years later, after I checked out 'cagmag' in the OED, I asked 
her where she got it from. 'Mother used to use it,' was the reply. 
So that puts my 'cagmag' in Essex in the mid to late 1800s. I told 
her, 'You're probably the last living person to use that word'. 
'That's nice, dear,' was the unimpressed reply."

YOGURT  In my item on this word in the issue of 30 May, I said that 
a letter in the Turkish original was a g with a hacek accent above 
it; several readers told me that it's actually the rather similar 
breve. Brian Hudson noted, "There are a few Turkish dialects where 
the letter is voiced but, for most speakers, it's a silent letter 
which stresses the preceding vowel." Alain Gottcheiner pointed out 
that this explains why the most common French spelling is "yaourt", 
without the consonant.


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