World Wide Words -- 07 Mar 09

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 629          Saturday 7 March 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. Topical Words: Cricket.
3. Weird Words: Carwichet.
4. Q&A: Importantly.
5. 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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MELD  It's been a quiet week for comments, with the most common one 
being slight surprise that in discussing one sense of "meld", I 
should have omitted to include Mr Spock's Vulcan mind meld from 
Star Trek. It would have been a relevant reference, since "mind 
meld" appeared in a programme from the first season, broadcast in 
November 1966, whereas the noun is recorded in the Oxford English 
Dictionary only from 1973.

UPDATES Jan Freeman, who writes the Sunday Word column in the 
Boston Globe, has pointed out an appearance of "carrot and stick" 
in a letter of 1938 by Sir Winston Churchill, which changes the 
conclusions to my piece last month about the idiom. So it has, yet 
again, been updated (http://wwwords.org?CRST). Robert Geuljans 
spotted an error in the piece on "antimacassar"; having corrected 
it, I've taken the opportunity to update the whole piece 
(http://wwwords.org?ATMR).

LSOFT CONTEST  We got put in our place last month: second, after 
the ICORS list, which consists of a large number of determined 
people. If we're to have a chance of winning the overall contest, 
we must come top in this final month. I urge every one of you to 
vote every day during March - don't wait for my weekly reminder. 
You have one vote from each IP address each day. The link to the 
voting form is http://wwwords.org?LCAS. One last heave, please!


2. Topical Words: Cricket
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Two academics claimed this week that the archetypal English game of 
cricket is really Flemish not - as traditionally believed - based 
on English children's games that date from Anglo-Saxon times. As 
the Ashes test matches between Australia and England will be played 
this summer in England, this challenge to England's claim to be the 
homeland of cricket has provoked much uncritical newspaper comment 
in cricket-playing nations.

Paul Campbell, in the department of English and theatre at the 
Australian National University in Canberra, and the German linguist 
Heiner Gillmeister, professor in the department of English at the 
University of Bonn, claim to have discovered an Elizabethan poem 
that proves the matter.

Press reports in varying detail say that Mr Campbell uncovered a 
poem by the sixteenth-century poet and playwright John Skelton, 
dated 1533 and entitled The Images of Ipocrisie (we would spell 
this last word "hypocrisy") which includes these four lines: 

    O lorde of ipocrites,
    Nowe shut vpp your wickettes,
    And clape to your clickettes, --
    A farewell, kinge of crekettes!

Combining various incomplete newspaper reports, it appears that Mr 
Campbell is arguing that the poem shows the game of cricket was 
imported from the Low Countries by Flemish weavers, who settled in 
parts of the south-east of England and played it on fields close to 
where they tended their sheep, using shepherd's crooks - or curved 
sticks - as bats to strike a ball.

There are several insuperable objections to this extraordinary 
theory. The poem is hardly unknown: it has been included in at 
least three collections of Skelton's works I know about. Though its 
date is accepted, Skelton can't have written it, as he died in 
1529, and it must have been penned by another poet in Skelton's 
style. The four lines were misquoted in all the reports they 
appeared in - in particular, in the last line "kinge" appears as 
"kings", a subtle but significant error, since Campbell argues that 
this stanza is a call by Skelton for all these cricket-playing 
Flemish immigrants to leave the country. But the major problem is 
that the poem is a long diatribe, composed of satire and bitter 
invective, against the hypocrisy of every level of churchman - the 
Pope, cardinals, bishops, monks, friars, down to churchwardens and 
bell-ringers - and contains no reference to weavers or of their 
bringing cricket to England. Something very odd is going on here, 
which I hope for the reputations of the academics is the result of 
press misunderstandings.

The quoted lines don't support a reference to cricket. The word 
"clickettes" that ends the third line was a common way at the time 
in which to write "clickets", the plural of an obsolete word for 
the latch of a gate or door. That suggests that "wickettes" at the 
end of the previous line is the modern "wickets" for small gates or 
doors, often within larger ones, not the cricket type of wickets, 
which aren't recorded before the eighteenth century. "Clape to" 
meant to slam a door. The poet is saying, in essence, "go away and 
shut the door firmly behind you". This pulls the rug out from under 
the suggestion that the final word in the stanza, "crekettes", 
means the game of cricket. The lines are in a part of the poem that 
castigates the Pope in powerful terms as a liar and "the devil's 
vicar" as well as "lord of hypocrites" (in the first line of the 
stanza); how the Pope might in addition be excoriated as a king of 
cricket is hard to imagine. It could be the other sort of cricket, 
of course, for which "crekette" is a known contemporary spelling, 
and the poet might be saying that the Pope is a noisy chattering 
insect.

The first known reference to the game of cricket that we have at 
the moment is from a court case in Guildford in Surrey in 1598, in 
which a local man swore that as a child, fifty years before, he had 
played "creckett" and other games on a disputed piece of land. The 
similarity of that word with the one in the poem is intriguing, but 
hardly firm evidence of anything.

Lacking the supposed evidence from the poem, the link with Flemish 
rests on a comment from Professor Gillmister, who is quoted as 
saying, "I immediately thought of the Flemish phrase 'met de krik 
ketsen' which means to 'chase a ball with a curved stick'." This 
might, of course, be a description of any number of games, from 
hockey to golf, though cricket was indeed initially played with a 
curved bat. Professor Gillmister's suggestion is not new, since a 
link with "krik" has been suggested before and is mentioned in the 
entry in the Oxford English Dictionary. But no firm evidence exists 
for it, let alone for importation of the game to England by Flemish 
settlers.

There still isn't.


3. Weird Words: Carwichet  /'kA(r)wItSIt/
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A pun; a hoaxing question or conundrum.

This pops up first in Ben Jonson's play Bartholomew Fayre of 1614 
and appears a few times afterwards, but is effectively extinct by 
the middle of the nineteenth century.

    Notwithstanding the advantage which this age claims over 
    the last we find Mr. Dryden himself, as well as Mr. 
    Jonson, not only given to Clinches, but sometimes a 
    Carwichet, a Quarter-quibble, or a bare Pun.
    [London Magazine, August 1824. The writer is paraphrasing 
    a line in John Dryden's comedy The Wild Gallant of 1662 
    in which these forms are given as examples of dubious 
    wit. A clinch was a type of sharp repartee or word-play; 
    a quarter-quibble was a poor or weak quibble, a quibble 
    at the time being a pun or a play on words. Dryden's use 
    of "pun" was among the earliest in the language.]

The origin of "carwichet" is obscure, though it has been suggested 
that it comes from "colifichet", a French word of the time for a 
fantastic small object of no great value, but which now means any 
knick-knack or trinket (it's said to be from the older French word 
"coeffichier", an ornament that was fixed to and formed part of 
one's coiffure).


4. Q&A: Importantly
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Q. I just subscribed and am delighted by the site. The epidemic of 
"importantly", with or without "most' or "more" has bothered me for 
some time. It has been well over 70 years since I studied grammar 
here in New York City, so forgive me if I err in terminology. Is 
"importantly" a real word; can something be termed as such? It 
seems that you haven't used the term since 2007. If so, I am happy 
for your recovery and, more important, I look forward to your 
newsletters. [Jerry Miller]

A. Thank you. But the cessation of "importantly" is both temporary 
and unpremeditated. No doubt I shall use it again sometime soon.

"Importantly" is a real word all right. It entered the language in 
the early seventeenth century (the first recorded user is our good 
friend William Shakespeare, in Cymbeline, 1611) and has long since 
become standard in the meaning "in an important manner". To take 
one example out of about a million pretty much at random:

    "It certainly does need a chimney," said John 
    importantly.
    [Peter Pan, by J M Barrie, 1904.]

The big change in the way it's used has been more recent than your 
studies of grammar. From the 1930s, some adverbs have increasingly 
been used at or near the start of a sentence to modify the whole of 
the sentence that follows. These are called sentence adverbs and 
have been heavily criticised in the past - the case of "hopefully" 
is notorious. "Importantly" appears six times on the World Wide 
Words site, always as part of a sentence adverb, which is perhaps 
why you were particularly struck and dismayed by it.

As "importantly" used in this way became more popular, people came 
almost exclusively to put "more" or "most" in front, which is the 
way it remains:

    More importantly, they require hard currency from 
    customers flowing into their corporate bank accounts.
    [Daily Telegraph, 15 Dec. 2008.]

Objections to sentence adverbs have now largely subsided. In the 
third edition of Fowler's Modern English Usage, dated 1996, Robert 
Burchfield says of "more importantly" and "most importantly" that 
both "must now be considered standard and useful additions to the 
language". Even Bryan Garner, usually a conservative in matters of 
style, says in his Modern American Usage that writers need not fear 
criticism in employing them and that if any is made, "it's easily 
dismissed as picayunish pedantry", though you shouldn't take that 
dollop of clever wordsmithery personally.

However, we remain allowed to wince at examples like this:

    More importantly to McBride is this afternoon´s 
    Premiership game at home to Bangor. 
    [Belfast Telegraph, 23 January 2009. "Importantly" should 
    be "important", because the word in that position has to 
    be an adjective, not an adverb.]


5. Sic!
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Victor Dewsbery e-mailed from Berlin, having encountered a comment 
on the BBC's online football pages by the Middlesborough manager 
Gareth Southgate: "This win should give the players an unbelievable 
amount of belief." It made Mr Dewsbery wonder how much belief is 
actually believable.

"My somewhat overweight banker called me to recommend an investment 
with a relatively low guaranteed interest rate," reports Bram Amsel 
from Antwerp in the Netherlands, "claiming that interest rates on 
bank accounts were dropping gastronomically."

Bill Waggoner commented sadly "I guess guys are completely obsolete 
now". He had just read a bullet point on a Web page of the British 
National Gamete Donation Trust: "Sperm donors should be healthy 
women between the age of 18 and 45 years." All lovers of splendid 
inaccuracies must regret that it has since been corrected.


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