World Wide Words -- 23 May 09

Fri May 22 05:55:08 UTC 2009

WORLD WIDE WORDS            ISSUE 640          Saturday 23 May 2009
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Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK      ISSN 1470-1448
http://www.worldwidewords.org       US advisory editor: Julane Marx
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Heiligenschein.
3. Recently noted.
4. Q and A: Beggar-my-neighbour.
5. Q and A: Cardigan.
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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HOLIDAYS  My wife and I are about to leave on a trip to national 
parks in the American Rockies. I'm taking my netbook with me and 
will try to post short issues while we're away. But the Web site 
won't be updated - apart from posting the HTML and RSS versions of 
each issue - because too much work is involved.

PARLIAMENTARY SLANG  Dozens of football fans put me right about my 
"hair dryer" item last time. On the day that Manchester United won 
their 11th Premier League title, under the management of Sir Alex 
Ferguson, they told me that the term comes from that club and from 
him. Bernard Cross commented: "It looks as though your researches 
do not cover the sports pages in as much detail as other parts of 
the newspapers." I can't dispute that.

The reporter who quoted "hair-dryer" to the government's official 
spokesman as a Downing Street insiders term for a reprimand got it 
slightly wrong. This is perhaps why neither he nor the spokesman 
seemed to know it. The phrase is properly "hairdryer treatment". 
It's a forceful reprimand by a manager to a poorly-performing or 
badly-behaving player (David Milsted described it as a "gale-force 
bollocking"). Simon Rowlands explained: "It describes the act of 
bellowing at someone face to face - so the recipient presumably 
feels as though a hairdryer is directed at them full blast - and is 
a colourful and useful idiom." Ana Scott commented, "While not the 
most elegant of phrases, it does evoke the breathy intensity of 
being screamed at by a red-faced Scotsman."

Anthony Massey gave me the details. "It derives from the battles at 
Manchester United between Alex Ferguson and Mark 'Sparky' Hughes in 
the late 1980s and early 1990s. Hughes said the bawlings-out were 
so loud that 'you would end up with your hair behind your head.' 
This became known as giving someone 'the hairdryer treatment'. It 
isn't clear whether Hughes himself originated the phrase or if it 
arose in the tabloids' sports pages after Hughes' description."

Once I knew what to look for, the earliest examples in newspaper 
archives prove to be more than a decade old, though after the 
period of the Hughes confrontations. An early example:

    He has an amazing memory for detail and command of 
    tactics. But he's tough when he has to be. Have I had the 
    hair-dryer treatment (the famous blast from the manager 
    at close range)? A few times, yes.
    [Sunday Mirror, 31 May 1998. David Beckham is 
    discussing his relationship with Alex Ferguson. That, of 
    course, was before he needed two stitches in a head wound 
    after the manager kicked a football boot at him during a 
    dressing-room row in early 2003.]

FLIP  Many readers pointed out that the meaning of "flip" that I 
mentioned in passing, for buying an item in order to sell it again 
at once for a profit, has meant this for many years. "Flip is a 
term that I have been familiar with for nearly 30 years from when I 
began a career in real estate sales," wrote Sheila Eskenazi. "It is 
understood to mean the purchase of a property for a quick turnover 
at a profit. Agents have been known to buy an underpriced house or 
piece of land and resell it immediately to someone who didn't know 
the original asking price." The term seems to have evolved to mean 
buying a house, renovating it and reselling it at a profit (a TV 
programme on the Arts & Entertainment channel in the US, Flip This 
House, uses it this way). It is also widely used in the financial 
world, I am told, in a derogatory sense, for buying any asset and 
immediately selling it at a profit.

2. Weird Words: Heiligenschein  /'haIlig at nSaIn/
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It's a German word - literally "holy light" - for an aureole or 
circle of light around an object. Applied to people it's a halo.

The word has been borrowed in a particular and specialist sense for 
a sheen that, if you're very lucky, you may see around the shadow 
of your head. The sun must be low in the sky and your shadow must 
be cast on grass that's damp with dew, so you have to be an early 
bird to stand much chance of seeing it. 

It's caused by internal reflection within the drops of water on the 
blades of grass (a related process in other circumstances makes a 
rainbow). The rays of the sun are reflected most strongly at or 
near the point that's exactly opposite the sun. As your head's in 
the way, the brightness is visible around the edges of its shadow. 
You can see it best if you move your head a little, because the 
increased brightness moves with you. Only you can see it; other 
people with you will each have one of their own which, likewise, 
you can't see.

The word first appears in this sense in German in 1834, in a book 
with the title Abhandlung über der Heiligenschein (Treatise on the 
Halo), in which Dr C Garthe wrote on the phenomenon. When writers 
in English followed it up, they naturally borrowed his name for it.

This is a rare appearance outside books on optics:

    With the sun behind him, the shadows were flattened, 
    or disappeared altogether, as if he was looking down at 
    the bleached floor of some dead ocean. In fact, when the 
    sun was right behind him, the lunar landscape seemed to 
    brighten suddenly. _Heiligenschein_, the lunar scientists 
    called it. The saint's halo: some obscure effect of the 
    dust.
    [Moonseed, by Stephen Baxter, 1998. The effect here, a 
    real one noticed by astronauts, is caused by glassy 
    volcanic beads within the lunar dust.]

A related optical effect, but like a circular rainbow, is called a 
glory. You can sometimes spot it if you're looking out of a plane's 
window at its shadow cast on a cloud. Natural phenomena like the 
famous Spectre of the Brocken, an extended shadow of a person cast 
on fog or cloud from a high place when the sun is low in the sky, 
often have a glory around the person's head.

3. Recently noted
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ANOTHER WORD FOR SCANDAL  Andrew Maywood tells me that a headline 
in the Sydney Morning Herald on 17 May, about the financial scandal 
that's shaking the UK's political foundations, was "Expenses rort 
shakes Labour". It's a neat Australian term of British origin that 
might with profit be borrowed back. "Rort" has several meanings, 
but commonly it's a fraudulent or dishonest practice. G A Wilkes's 
dictionary of Australian colloquialisms, Stunned Mullets & Two-pot 
Screamers, quotes this example:

    Rorting, in Labor jargon, is a charmingly flexible 
    term to cover such practices as stacking branch 
    membership, rigging elections, cooking branch records 
    and, as a last resort, losing all branch records to 
    frustrate a head office enquiry.
    [Sydney Morning Herald, 10 June 1981.]

Its origin is the nineteenth-century British slang term "rorty", 
with a variety of meanings, such as boisterous or rowdy, saucy, 
dissipated, or risqué. Its origin is unknown.

4. Q and A: Beggar-my-neighbour
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Q. I would like to know the origin or first common use of "beggar-
thy-neighbour". I understand the contemporary meaning, but I think 
the phrase is often used in the wrong way. [Reginald Delwiche]

A. It may well be misused, though I've not found examples. The ones 
I've looked at all employ it in the sense of an advantage gained by 
one person or group at the expense of another. It's used especially 
of a nation that selfishly profits at the expense of others.

    One of the reasons the crisis of the 1930s was so 
    severe was that nations in the inter-war years resorted 
    to beggar-thy-neighbour policies rather than working 
    together against the common enemies of deflation and mass 
    unemployment.
    [The Independent, 3 Mar. 2009.]

"Beggar-thy-neighbour" is a relatively modern version, which I've 
not found before about 1900 and which seems to be a mock archaism. 
The original was "beggar-my-neighbour", which is the way it appears 
in all the dictionaries I've consulted, and which dates from the 
early eighteenth century.

It started out as a children's card game, still popular, whose aim 
is to capture all the cards of one's opponent. Players lay down 
cards alternately onto a stack until one lays a court card or an 
ace, which forces the other player to pay a forfeit of cards. Lots 
of variations are known. Some old books talk about its being a 
gambling game and of taking tricks, which suggests that they're 
referring to something completely different. Other sources describe 
a game like snap but in which matching cards have to be of the same 
suit. Many names for it are known, including Beat Your Neighbour 
Out Of Doors, Strip-Jack-naked, Draw the Well Dry, and the Scots 
Birkie. More complicated versions have names like Egyptian Ratscrew 
and Slap.

But the essence of the most common version involves enriching one 
player in cards at the expense of his opponents until the winner 
takes all. It's easy to see how this became a metaphor for selfish 
national behaviour.

5. Q and A: Cardigan
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Q. Could you give me any information on the origins of the word 
cardigan? [Jenny Beadnell]

A. No problem. It's an eponym, a thing named after a person.

The person in this case was James Thomas Brudenell, seventh earl of 
Cardigan, a notable figure of the nineteenth century. That he was 
ultra-conservative, intolerant, bad-tempered, made enemies easily 
to the extent of provoking duels, and a seducer of young women was 
enough by itself to make him notorious. But his continuing fame 
rests on his actions as a major general during the Crimean War. In 
October 1854, at the age of 57, he led the disastrous charge of the 
Light Brigade up the valley towards the Russian guns.

The weather was appalling in the Crimea, bitterly cold and damp. 
Some officers wore a long-sleeved knitted worsted military jacket 
as a way to keep warm. This was the original cardigan, though it 
wasn't much like modern examples. It soon took on Lord Cardigan's 
name, though why is obscure. Though he was a stickler for sartorial 
elegance among his officers, he didn't invent the item (despite 
some writers claiming he did). It would seem that his name became 
attached to it because he was the most famous figure of the Crimean 
War, who was fêted on his return to Britain and lived 
extravagantly.

The earliest references, from 1857, are to "cardigan jackets" and 
later to "cardigan waistcoats". His lordship's name started to be 
used by itself about a decade later:

    He wore, I remember very well, a knitted sort of 
    waistcoat, or Jersey - an article called, in the cheap 
    linen-drapers' shops, a Cardigan. I recollect thinking 
    that this was the first garment of the kind I had ever 
    seen.
    [All the Year Round, by Charles Dickens, 20 July 
    1867.]

Two other items of clothing have links with the Crimean war. To 
protect them against the bitter cold, some soldiers persuaded wives 
or relatives at home to knit them head coverings that left only 
small holes for eyes and mouth. These became known as balaclavas, 
after the Crimean port that was the British operational base. 
Another item whose name appeared at the time was the raglan, a type 
of overcoat named for Lord Raglan, the British general in the 
Crimea. The garment was unusual in that the sleeves continued in 
one piece up to the neck, producing a larger, looser armhole that 
suited the one-armed general, hence our term "raglan sleeve".

6. Sic!
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The back of a current Quaker Oats box, reports Kenneth Huey from 
Texas, contains this blurb: "Eating a good-sized bowl of Quaker 
Oatmeal for 30 days will actually help remove cholesterol from your 
body." By the end of that month, Mr Huey suggests, the oatmeal is 
likely to have become awfully chewy.

A video about Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps on NBC Sports online 
included a line from the commentator, repeated several times, that 
struck Edward and Benita Campbell as remarkable: "Michael Phelps is 
going to be a little rusty, being out of the water for so long."

A resident of Lancaster, Ohio, found this in the local paper, the 
Eagle-Gazette, on 16 May: "'A semi cut through the parking lot and 
clipped the front of a building trying to turn,' said Scott Hite, 
assistant Thurston-Walnut fire chief." Unanswered question: did the 
building signal the turn?

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