World Wide Words -- 28 Mar 09

Fri Mar 27 16:29:36 UTC 2009

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 632          Saturday 28 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: Infandous.
3. Weird Words: Pigwidgeon.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: Ditto.
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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COPPER-FASTENED  Following my little item last week on this idiom, 
subscribers pointed out "copper-bottomed". This is also from the 
age of sail, since it referred to a wooden-hulled vessel that had 
been sheathed with copper to stop toredo damage. The technique was 
first applied to ships of the Royal Navy in 1761; its first example 
of the figurative sense, "thoroughly sound, authentic, trustworthy, 
genuine" is dated 1807. Some readers argued that "copper-fastened" 
probably derives from the copper rivets on Levi jeans. However, in 
a literal sense, it's almost as old as the other term - the Oxford 
English Dictionary's first example is from the appropriately titled 
Hull Advertiser of July 1796: "She is copper-fastened and copper-
bottomed, and a remarkable fine ship." The copper sheets had to be 
copper-fastened, attached to the hull with copper nails rather than 
with iron ones, or electrochemical action in seawater would soon 
have corroded away both metals where they touched. To correct one 
small error: The Irish Voice, the newspaper that I mentioned in the 
item, is an Irish-American journal published in New York, not in 
Ireland. I've now put a much extended version of the piece online: 
http://wwwords.org?CPFS.

2. Topical Words: Infandous  /In'fand at s/
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The headline in the New York Times blog called The Lede on 20 March 
summed up the lexical situation: "Canada Bars 'Infandous' British 
Politician, Journalists Reach for Dictionaries". They would have 
had to heave down a really big one from the shelf. So far as I can 
discover the only one that contains the word is the mammoth Oxford 
English Dictionary, which reports that it's long obsolete. 

The politician who has been stopped from entering Canada is George 
Galloway, a firebrand left-wing British MP for a minority party, 
Respect. Though Mr Galloway is a figure about whom controversies 
swirl, not least because he supports the Palestinian cause, Hamas 
in particular (a banned terrorist organisation in Canada), we have 
to wonder if it's appropriate to brand him with an epithet that the 
OED records being last used in 1708.

Alykhan Velshi, a spokesman for Canada's immigration minister, said 
Mr Galloway was an "infandous street-corner Cromwell". "Infandous" 
means "unspeakable" or "too odious to be expressed or mentioned" 
and comes from Latin "infandus", abominable. If he mined the waste 
tips of English for a year, it would be hard to uncover a stronger 
word with which to express disgust.

"Infandous" has never been popular. The first known user is another 
figure of controversy, James Howell. His accomplishments included 
acting as a Royalist spy in the 1630s; appropriately, in view of Mr 
Velshi's comment, Cromwell imprisoned him during the English Civil 
War. Howell wrote a letter to a friend from York in 1628: "This 
infandous custom of Swearing, I observe, reigns in England lately 
more than any where else." The word appeared in 1693 in a work by 
Cotton Mather about the Salem Witch trials but after that it went 
into permanent decline. It was briefly resurrected in Dreams in The 
Witch-House, a story by H P Lovecraft that was published in Weird 
Tales in 1933: "He found himself swaying to infandous rhythms said 
to pertain to the blackest ceremonies of the Sabbat." Nobody now is 
sure even how to say it (if it tempts you, the OED suggests the 
stress should be on the second syllable). 

Mr Velshi might instead have unearthed another cast-off term with 
similar sense that also ultimately derives from Latin "fari", to 
speak - "nefandous", unmentionable, abominable, or atrocious, which 
was likewise first used by Howell. Several other English words can 
be traced to the same verb, if indirectly. He might have gone for 
"infamous" (could this have been what he was groping for?) since 
for the Romans, as for us, fame meant you were being spoken about. 
To be fated signified that the sentence of the gods had been said 
over you; if you were affable in its original sense you were easy 
to speak to, while something ineffable is too great or extreme to 
be expressed or described in words.

Mr Velshi may be set for fame himself. His comment is a candidate 
to appear in future editions of books of modern quotations. His 
extraordinarily rare choice of word may even be enshrined in the 
next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.

3. Pigwidgeon  /'pIg,wIdZ(I)n/
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A fairy, dwarf, imp, or elf.

Avid readers of the Harry Potter stories will know that Ron Weasley 
had an tiny owl he named Pigwidgeon. It was appropriate because the 
word has often meant a small or insignificant person or thing. It 
has also been used for a stupid or contemptible person:

    "Think?" I queried, "do I ever really think? Is there 
    anything inside my head but cotton-wool? How can I call 
    myself a Thinker? What am I anyhow?" I pursued the sad 
    inquiry: "A noodle, a pigwidgeon, a ninnyhammer, a  
    bubble on the wave, a leaf in the wind, Madame!" 
    [More Trivia, by Logan Pearsall Smith, 1921.]

The fairies of the original sense were also small, though lacking 
the deep cunning and capriciousness of many other little people. 
They were often considered to be more mischievous than nasty:

    In Malvina, side by side with much that is commendable, 
    there appears to have existed a most reprehensible spirit 
    of mischief, displaying itself in pranks that, excusable, 
    or at all events understandable, in, say, a pixy or a 
    pigwidgeon, strike one as altogether unworthy of a well-
    principled White Lady, posing as the friend and 
    benefactress of mankind.
    [Malvina of Brittany, by Jerome K. Jerome, 1916.]

The experts guess that the first part of the word may be connected 
with "pug", another old name for a fairy, which may be a variation 
on "puck". The second part was once "wiggen", an unknown word that 
was said with a hard "g"; later it shifted to "widgeon" with a soft 
"j" sound because in the seventeenth century the duck that went by 
that name was a byword for being stupid.

4. Recently noted
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ANOTHER CONTEST  Thirty years ago, to assuage the boredom of the 
Frankfurt Book Fair, Bruce Robertson of the Diagram Group invented 
a contest to choose the oddest book title of the year. Ever since, 
it has been run by Horace Bent of The Bookseller. Some wonderful 
titles have been featured, including the first winner, "Proceedings 
of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice", and last year's 
"If You Want Closure In Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs". 
Others of note have been "Bombproof Your Horse", "Highlights in the 
History of Concrete", "The Joy of Sex: Pocket Edition", "The Big 
Book of Lesbian Horse Stories", and "Living With Crazy Buttocks". 
Last autumn the best winner of the last 30 years was chosen: "Greek 
Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers" with the runners-up 
"People Who Don't Know They're Dead: How They Attach Themselves to 
Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It" and "How to Avoid 
Huge Ships".

The shortlist is said to have been particularly difficult to create 
this year. It must have been, to exclude the title "Excrement in 
the Late Middle Ages", which should have replaced "Techniques for 
Corrosion Monitoring", an utterly mundane and sensible title. The 
others on the list were "Curbside Consultation of the Colon", "The 
Large Sieve and its Applications" (a mathematics treatise), "Baboon 
Metaphysics", "Strip and Knit with Style", and "The 2009-2014 World 
Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais" (since the 
usual size is 60g, I'm betting that the market is as minuscule as 
the pots).

The winner was announced on Friday as the result of voting by the 
public. By a significant margin it was the last title. It turns out 
that it's not a real book, being the product of a patented method 
of automatic production of print-on-demand works from databases. It 
won't actually exist until a tragic soul desperate to learn about 
the subject forks out $795 for a copy. Professor Philip Parker, who 
invented the production method that avoids the tedious part of the 
publishing business called authorship (and, it seems, the bit that 
sanity-checks numbers), has some 200,000 titles on tap, including - 
or so Horace Bent swears - marketing advice for toilet brush makers 
thinking of emigrating to Kyrgyzstan.

5. Q&A: Ditto
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Q. I was rereading Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll, as I 
do about once every year, but for the first time thought about this 
bit of dialogue: "'If I'm only a sort of thing in his dream, what 
are you, I should like to know?' 'Ditto' said Tweedledum. 'Ditto, 
ditto' cried Tweedledee." It's an odd word, 'ditto'. Where did it 
come from? [Pat Thomas]

A. This commercial term was originally Italian. Merchants from that 
country, you may recall, were versed in bookkeeping and accountancy 
very early. Double-entry bookkeeping, for example, was invented in 
that country and was popularised in a famous book of 1494 by Luca 
Bartolomes Pacioli, a monk and friend of Leonardo da Vinci, though 
there are known examples of the method going back to the thirteenth 
century.

It was in the early seventeenth century - about a century after 
Frater Pacioli's work appeared - that "ditto" is first recorded in 
an English book. It had been borrowed from the Tuscan dialect, in 
which "ditto" was a variant of "detto", the Italian word meaning 
"said". In turn, this derives from Latin "dictus" with the same 
meaning.

At first, English used it like Italian, to avoid having to repeat 
the name of a month already mentioned: 

    Anno 1577. Decemb. 13. Mr Francis Drake with five Ships 
    and Barks and 165 men, set out from Plymouth, 27 ditto he 
    came to Madagor, where the Natives treacherously got one 
    of his men.
    [An Introduction to Astronomy, by William Leybourn and 
    Robert Morden, 1702.]

Late in the seventeenth century its meaning widened to refer to 
anything at all that had gone before. It became common in lists and 
in accounts, frequently in abbreviated form as "do".

As an aside, "ditto" could at one time appear in the verbal phrase 
"say ditto to", meaning to endorse or agree with something said by 
somebody else:

    Mr Cruger, being called upon to follow him after one of 
    these harangues, was so lost in admiration that he could 
    only cry out, with the genuine enthusiasm of the 
    counting-house, "I say ditto to Mr. Burke! I say ditto to 
    Mr. Burke!"
    [Quoted in Select British Eloquence, by Chauncey Allen 
    Goodrich, 1853. The Burke in question is the celebrated 
    orator Edmund Burke, at election hustings in 1774. The 
    anecdote became sufficiently famous that "I say ditto to 
    Mr Burke!" was a catchphrase in the nineteenth century 
    meaning "I agree!"

6. Sic!
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An article at physorg.com about a laser mosquito-killing device has 
this sentence in it: "The anti-mosquito laser is just one of many 
novel ways to kill the disease-carrying insects, in addition to the 
conventional strategy of vaccinating humans." Wilson Fowlie wishes 
he'd known before now that getting a vaccination was sufficient to 
kill mosquitoes.

While we're on the subject of eradicating troublesome insects, Ian 
Whiting came across an article on the Daily Telegraph site from 
last August that begins, "The top five tips on how to kill flies 
have been unveiled by a professor who has spent decades studying 
the pests" and goes on, "In the light of his investigations, he 
shares his top tips on how to swat them with Telegraph readers." 
Topmost tip: use a newspaper instead.

"A local bakery," wrote D L Warnick, "recently displayed a hand-
made sign on a self-serve bin admonishing customers: 'Please do not 
use your fingers to take cookies. Use the tongues.'"

Remaining with food, last Tuesday Reuters reported, "A top quality 
Sydney bistro is combating the recession with a menu ranging from 
Wagyu beef pie to fresh lobster that lets diners decide the price." 
Adrian Cook, who sent this in, wonders how you would communicate 
with a lobster, fresh or otherwise.

While reading the online summary of an episode of The Roommate on 
his cable network, AT&T U-Verse, Laurence Horn encountered this 
delicious dangling participle: "Hours before giving birth, a 
woman's boyfriend leaves her for her best friend."

The following, John Samphier reports, was the heading for an 
article in the Sydney Sun-Herald of 22 March: "One in four anorexic 
kids is a boy, and one in 10 adults is a man."

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