World Wide Words -- 19 Jun 10
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jun 18 16:11:41 UTC 2010
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 691 Saturday 19 June 2010
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Editor: Michael Quinion US advisory editor: Julane Marx
Website: http://www.worldwidewords.org ISSN 1470-1448
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Richard Snary.
3. Turns of Phrase: Taqwacore.
4. Wordface.
5. Q and A: Up the creek.
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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RETURN Now back, refreshed, from my break. My thanks to you all
for your forbearance while the batteries were being recharged!
CHANGES If you've visited the website recently, you will know that
I've made some small alterations to simplify navigation and improve
the look of the pages. It won't be noticed by anyone visiting, but
the main reason for the changes was to clear out the many old pages
and images that were cluttering the place up and to rationalise the
page structure in a few instances.
I've decided to make some other changes to leave me more time for
the interesting stuff, like researching and writing pieces. I've
closed my Facebook and Twitter accounts because I didn't have the
time to interact with people as I should. Though I shall naturally
continue to read messages with my usual interest and attention, and
incorporate some of them in issues, I shall respond only to those
that require an answer. All messages will, of course, receive an
acknowledgement of receipt. My apologies if this seems impersonal.
As a final change, I have decided to go with the majority view and
will spell the words as "website" and "internet" from now on. But I
baulk at "email".
FIDDLESTICKS I heard a delightful story about the origin of this
expression while on holiday. I've updated the existing piece to
include it and my refutation. See http://wwwords.org?FDST.
2. Weird Words: Richard Snary
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This was a seventeenth-century pun, even more convoluted than most
of its kind, that had a surprisingly long run. I encountered it as
one of the entries in this month's revisions to the Oxford English
Dictionary online, which its editors seem to have added in a
skittish spirit one might not expect from so sober a publication.
A Richard Snary is a dictionary. This is the canonical joke:
A country lad, having been reproved for calling
persons by their Christian names, being sent by his
master to borrow a dictionary, thought to show his
breeding by asking for a Richard Snary.
[A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, by
Francis Grose, 1796.]
This inadequate witticism is linguistically interesting because it
suggests that "dictionary" was said at the time with only three
syllables, with the middle part elided away. It appears thus in the
first known example:
Talke not to me of Dick snary, nor Richard-snary; I
care not how little I come neare them.
[Apollo Shroving, Composed for the Schollars of the
Free-schoole of Hadleigh in Suffolke, by William Hawkins,
1627.]
A variant form turns up surprisingly recently:
I still didn't see anything in it but the meaningless
sort of humor that used to make richardsnary the thieves'
word for dictionary.
[Red Harvest, By Dashiell Hammett, 1929. The author
was misled by its appearance in Grose's Dictionary, which
mostly featured underworld slang.]
Katherine Martin, a senior editor at the OED, commented: "Much of
the evidence found by OED researchers seems self-consciously
humorous; one suspects that those who used the term would have
delighted to be asked what it meant, so as to have the excuse to
deliver what is essentially a joke with an etymological punchline."
3. Turns of Phrase: Taqwacore
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Taqwacore is a recent musical genre. The name combines the Arabic
"taqwá", which may be translated as piety or the quality of being
God-fearing, with the music term "hardcore". Its inspiration is a
fictional work of 2003 by a white American Islamic convert, Michael
Muhammad Knight, which featured a fictitious Muslim punk scene in
the US. This led to real-life imitations, with punk bands rebelling
against what they see as the stultifying convention and religious
dogma of Islam while maintaining their faith. It's variously seem
as a backlash against hate and fundamentalism, as a protest against
Islamophobia in the US (9/11 is mentioned a lot), as a way to find
an identity as a child of immigrants or as a rebellion against the
attitudes of their parents. The genre has received public attention
through a Canadian documentary, Taqwacore, and a feature film, The
Taqwacores, screened at the Sundance Festival earlier this year.
There are probably as many definitions of taqwacore as
there are people connected to taqwacore, and that is a
great thing because to me, it is about an openness. It is
somewhat ironic that taqwacore is becoming a label, just
by the nature of it being a name assigned to a group of
people, but at its essence, it is about removing
labels.
[Newstex Blogs (USA), 4 Feb. 2010.]
Mixing punk sounds and attitude with Hindi lyrics,
doses of bhangra and other south Asian beats, the Kominas
are part of an emerging musical scene known as
Taqwacore.
[Guardian, 11 Jun. 2010.]
4. Wordface
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ACADEMIC? A delightful British body, the Queen's English Society,
was founded in 1972. Its website asserts that "English is becoming
corrupted in the age of mass communications, the text message, e-
mail and the like" and it aims to become "the recognised guardian
of proper English". It announced in early June that it intends to
establish an Academy of English, presumably on the model of bodies
such as the L'Académie Française, the Real Academia Española or the
Accademia della Crusca. We have had such proposals before, notably
one by Jonathon Swift, who in 1712 wrote a Proposal for Correcting,
Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue. The principal issue
for any body trying to maintain standards of proper English is to
work out what those standards are or what is considered proper. As
any linguist will tell you, English is as English does. Thankfully,
despite the stated objectives, the QES and the Academy seem to be
taking a pragmatic attitude and want to improve the quality of the
teaching of English in UK schools rather than establish a standard.
PEDANTIC? A minor skirmish in the language wars erupted last week,
when Phil Corbett, the Standards Editor at the New York Times, was
reported as having issued a ruling that journalists were not to use
any colloquial term derived from Twitter in news stories. "Tweet",
"tweeting", "retweet" and others were banned, reports claimed. He
wrote that "outside of ornithological contexts, 'tweet' has not yet
achieved the status of standard English. And standard English is
what we should use in news articles." He suggested using "deft,
English alternatives", such as "write something on Twitter" or
"post a Twitter update". The Twitterati waxed sarcastic about this
and the story was widely reported worldwide. A couple of blogs
bothered to contact Mr Corbett, who explained that his e-mail was
guidance, not a ban. He argued that he doesn't actually have the
power to issue such decrees. "I can't even convince people to use
'who' and 'whom' correctly," he said.
5. Q and A: Up the creek
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Q. In a Channel 4 Time Team archaeology special about the Royal
Naval Hospital in Gosport, Tony Robinson asserted that the phrase
"up the creek" comes from the route to the hospital that wounded
naval personnel took along Haslar Creek. Is this true, or is there
an earlier and different origin for the phrase? [Mark Sinden]
A. I saw that, too, and was struck by the supposed connection. The
hospital was on a promontory overlooking the harbour and dockyard
of Portsmouth, on the south coast of England. It was opened in 1753
to care for the sick and wounded of the Royal Navy and closed in
2009. As you say, it was approached by boat from the harbour up
Haslar Creek. The TV programme reported on the excavation of bodies
that had been interred in the graveyard at the hospital in the age
of sail and implied that "up the creek" - to be in severe trouble
or difficulty - had appeared no later than the early nineteenth
century. Behind it lay the melancholy fact that a large proportion
of those who were taken to the hospital up Haslar Creek at that
period were so seriously sick or wounded that they ended up being
buried there. This is how one website puts it:
In the early days of Haslar Royal Naval Hospital
patients had to be transferred to the hospital by [boat]
from the harbour because there was no bridge. It is
thought that the phrase "up the creek" may have
originated from sailors who knew that if you were rowed
to Haslar you were in trouble.
[http://www.qaranc.co.uk/haslarroyalnavalhospital.php]
Other references also suggest this is the origin. Peter Viggers, MP
for Gosport, mentioned it as fact in an adjournment debate in the
House of Commons about the closure of the hospital in March 2009.
Checking the entry in the Oxford English Dictionary might seem to
refute this whole idea, since the earliest example recorded there
is dated 1941, in an American radio play written by Arthur Miller.
By the wonders of modern searches, it is possible to improve on
that, though you'll appreciate that there are far too many literal
references to people being up creeks for it to be easy to search
for. The earliest explicit reference I've so far found is this:
On the third of January we received an awful jolt. The
British gave us notice to get out of their Bowhuts, as
they were going to tear them down. We were up the creek
without a paddle.
[Heaven, Hell, or Hoboken, by Ray Neil Johnson, 1919.
This recounts the war experiences of a US machine gun
company in France. A Bowhut would seem to be a kind of
temporary prefabricated shelter, perhaps a precursor to
the Nissen hut.]
There are mildly tantalising earlier appearances in US newspapers.
In 1915, a report quoted a local councillor: "there is something
rotten up the creek"; a letter in 1901 argued "there was something
dead up the creek"; one from 1896 scathingly referred to "the boys
up the creek". These and others, like the one that follows, are all
from Texas newspapers. Might it even have originated in that state?
Question everything, try everything and hold fast to
that democracy which is sound and good. The fact that you
are advised not to question this scheme or that trick is
of itself enough to arouse your suspicion and to lead to
the belief that there is rascality up the creek.
[The Galveston Daily News, Texas, 24 Feb. 1896.]
I suspect that this form of the expression actually had a slightly
different idea behind it: that rural backwaters - and those who
lived up them - were the source of infamy and skulduggery.
Some writers, including the late William Safire, have suggested
that "up the creek" might be from the older "to be up Salt River",
which sometimes appeared as "up Salt Creek". From the 1820s this
was a way to mock the inhabitants of the backwoods of the US for
their uncouth manners and uncultivated speech (the Salt River, if
it ever had a literal association, is sometimes said to have been
the one in Kentucky). Later, if you sent somebody - in particular a
political opponent - up Salt Creek, you thoroughly defeated him.
As Jonathon Green suggests in Chambers Slang Dictionary, "up the
creek" was more probably a euphemism for "up shit creek". Again,
the OED's first entry for this is comparatively recent, from 1937,
but recording of rude slang is notoriously poor. A rare example
takes it back well into the previous century:
He, Parker, then said, "well, our men put old Lincoln
up Shit creek, and we'll put old Dill up."
[Report of the US Secretary of War, 1868. This is from
the sworn testimony of the freeman Augustus Lorins about
the murder of Solomon G W Dill in South Carolina on 4
June 1868, only three years after President Lincoln's
assassination. Mr Dill had deeply offended his neighbours
by espousing the Republican cause in the reconstruction
period following the Civil War.]
There can be no doubt that "up shit creek" and "up the creek" are
both American in origin. As confirmation, neither can be found in
British sources of the nineteenth century, not even in verbatim
transcripts such as those of trials at the Old Bailey in London. So
the origins of "up the creek" can't be linked to Haslar.
6. Sic!
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Great questions of our time (an occasional series): the Telegraph
website asked on 2 June, "Should men avoid child birth?"
Rebecca Eschliman came across a headline in a newsletter from the
upmarket US gourmet grocery chain, Dorothy Lane Market: "Eating
Local Rocks". Sedimentary or igneous, she wondered?
Yet another puzzling headline, reports Gill Teicher, appeared in
the Daily Telegraph on 26 May: "Woman's recipes for father after
death of his wife turned into cookbook". Read the full story here:
http://wwwords.org?WRFD.
On 10 June, the Guardian published a photograph of prime minister
David Cameron and former PM Margaret Thatcher sitting either side
of a fireplace in 10 Downing Street. The caption read, "Margaret
Thatcher began the first phase of savage cuts. Now David Cameron
has taken up the mantel." It looked OK in the picture.
The Daily Herald of Arlington Heights, Illinois, had a story on 10
June about road construction: "Typical concerns have centered on
trees and motorists using local roads as a detour." Edward Floden
remarked, "As everyone knows, trees are poor drivers and move too
slowly."
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