World Wide Words -- 06 Nov 10

Fri Nov 5 17:40:34 UTC 2010

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 711         Saturday 6 November 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: Staddle.
3. Topical Words: Shellacking.
4. 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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RUDE WORDS  The nanny filters on a large number of e-mail systems 
drew back their electronic skirts in horror at several perfectly 
good English words that appeared in the last issue. If you were 
prevented from reading that issue, you will find it online via the 
link http://wwwords.org?PMIX .

CRINKUM-CRANKUM  Numerous readers reminded me of the former garden 
feature, a "crinkle-crankle wall". This was a sinuous wall that was 
decorative, provided good shelter for growing plants and was cheap 
to construct, because the bends gave it sufficient support that it 
need only be one brick wide. The Oxford Companion to the Garden 
says it dated from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in 
East Anglia in particular, as it was brought from the Netherlands 
(where it was called a "slange muur", or snaking wall) by Dutch 
engineers who came to drain the fens. Another of similar form to 
"crinkum-crankum" is "cringle-crangle". "Crankle" and "crangle" are 
frequentive forms that derive, like "crankum", from "crank".

As an aside, Rod Webb mentioned a former pub in Sevenoaks in Kent 
(now a private house), with the strange name Rorty Crankle. There 
are one or two others, I am told, around the country. "Rorty" is 
nineteenth-century London slang, meaning boisterous, high-spirited 
or risqué (from which Australians derived "rort", meaning both a 
fraudulent or dishonest practice and a wild party). But quite where 
"crankle" fits in I'm unsure.

GROCKLE  Paul Fletcher wrote from York about my updated piece on 
this word: "It is commonly used by birders [birdwatchers] to mean 
someone who turns up to watch birds with all the kit but none of 
the knowledge and a telling lack of fieldcraft. I have been aware 
of it for a good twenty years. It is, needless to say, pejorative. 
When I first came across it, grockles tended to have expensive bins 
[binoculars], green wellies and a Volvo; they would talk loudly, 
probably flush the bird, and quite often depart having ticked the 
wrong bird." To tick a bird in birding slang is to add it to one's 
personal list of sightings; he also introduced me to "tart's tick", 
a relatively common species that is added to one's list later than 
might be expected.

Jodie Robson pointed me to a book of 1966, Osborne's Army by John 
Anthony West, which includes not only the word but many variations, 
such as "grockledom", "grockle coops" (presumably hotels) and 
"grockle-bait" (tacky souvenirs). She asks how it could be that a 
word still tightly linked to Devon should appear in a work by an 
American, a former Manhattan copywriter turned astrologer, who in 
age was a member of the beat generation. He might, of course, have 
seen the film, The System, which came out in the US in 1962 and 
which included the word. But the clue is in the book, in which West 
says it had been "written over six years on Ibiza". The island was 
even then popular with English tourists and he probably picked it 
up there. He may have invented the compounds ("grockle-bait" is 
first recorded in the OED in 1986). His book came out in the UK in 
the Penguin New Writers series and may in turn have contributed to 
disseminating the word beyond Devon.

Colin Burt says that in the state of Queensland in Australia, the 
tourists are called Mexicans, because they come from South of the 
Border, Down Mexico Way. To get the allusion, you need to be old 
enough to remember the Gene Autry song from a film of 1939; a 
reference book of Australian slang says the same term is used by 
those living in New South Wales of tourists coming north from 
Victoria.

MY NEW(ISH) BOOK  I was in such a scramble to get last week's issue 
out that I completely forgot to mention that the paperback of my 
most recent book, "Why is Q Always Followed by U?" was published on 
28 October in the UK and will be out in the USA and Canada later in 
November. ISBN 978-0-141-03924-4. It sells at GBP9.99 but you can 
get it cheaper from Amazon (follow the link in the final section of 
this issue to learn how to help World Wide Words by doing so).

PUNDITRY  I wrote last time that "my pun ration for the month has 
already been exceeded". As we are now in a fresh month, I am able 
to quote a comment from Randall Bart, "Exceeding your pun ration is 
bad. Exceeding your sausage ration is wurst."

2. Weird Words: Staddle  /stad(@)l/
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Readers of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy may recognise this 
as the name of one of the villages of the Bree Land. It suggests 
the strength and stoutheartedness of a people who for him meant all 
that was solid and dependable about traditional England. Like most 
of Tolkien's words, it's no accident. He was borrowing an Old 
English word that meant variously a foundation or support.

We've almost entirely lost it today, though it survived for some 
centuries in English dialect, most commonly in the south of the 
country. One sense was of a stump of a tree that was left in the 
ground after felling so that a clump of thin stems could grow from 
it, a technique called coppicing. It could also refer to a tree 
left in place when all around had been felled, so that it would 
grow to full size, called a standard, unencumbered by neighbours. 
The connection between these senses is that one form of woodland 
management was called "coppice with standards", which combined the 
two methods. "Staddle" seems to have been used indiscriminately for 
both components.

The sense you're most likely to encounter, however, especially if 
you visit a museum of historic buildings, is of a stone carved in 
the shape of a mushroom, with a conical stem and a wide rounded 
top. This isn't a staddle, strictly speaking, but a staddle stone. 
It was one of the supports that kept the actual staddle, the wood 
or stone base of a hay rick or granary, clear of the ground. The 
staddle stones were that shape to keep the rats out.

    On the east side, in front of the house, a barn stands 
    clear of the ground on staddle stones; and opposite is 
    the cow byre. 
    [Watership Down, by Richard Adams, 1972.]

3. Topical Words: Shellacking
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A wave of puzzlement encircled the globe after President Obama said 
in his press conference last Wednesday, "I'm not recommending for 
every future President that they take a shellacking like I did last 
night". As the word is mostly known in the US, queries principally 
came from outside the country. However, many Americans, familiar 
with the expression though they are, came to wonder for the first 
time how the word came to mean a beating or serious defeat.

Shellac was once the most common form of varnish, used everywhere. 
Its name comes from French "laque en écailles", lac in thin plates. 
Lac, a protective resin secreted by the lac insect, was prepared by 
drying, melting and pouring it to form thin flakes. "Lac" is from 
the Hindi lakh, a hundred thousand, though I've not been able to 
find out why. It's also the origin of "lacquer" - in its original 
form this was shellac dissolved in alcohol. Lac was used in its 
homeland as a scarlet dye for silk.

The terms "shellacking" and "shellacked" were extremely common in 
American newspapers in the late nineteenth century. To judge from 
these reports, almost anything could be improved by coating it with 
shellac, not just furniture or floors. Gramophone records were 
manufactured from materials impregnated with shellac. Straw hats, 
fabrics and canvas tents were waterproofed with it. And it was used 
as a form of hair lacquer. That was a fashion of the bright young 
things of the early 1920s (especially the boys), when the slang 
term first turns up:

    Daughter - "A friend of Harry's we met there was the 
    darbs, and after that we drifted to a couple of the 
    clubs, and both the boys got beautifully shellacked." 
    Mother - "Shellacked! I don't understand." Daughter - 
    "Jammed, both of them."
    [Ogden Standard Examiner, 12 Apr. 1922, in an article 
    reproduced from the New York Sunday Herald under the 
    headline, "English Language as Spoken by the Younger 
    Generation". The piece mostly consists of a glossary, 
    which explains "jammed" as "intoxicated, bolognied, pie-
    eyed, piffled, shot, shellacked, canned, out like a 
    light, stewed to the hat, potted, jiggered, tanked". A 
    "darb" was "a person with money, who can be relied upon 
    to pay the check".]

We can only guess how "shellacked" took on the idea of being drunk. 
Might it have been one stage on from being plastered, a term known 
from a little earlier? Might the shiny, red face of a drunk look 
shellacked? Could the fashion among young men for shellacked hair 
have been part of the stimulus for its creation?  

Within a couple of years, "shellacked" had evolved from being drunk 
to being soundly beaten in various sports, including baseball and 
boxing:

    Giants beat Reds in ninth; Cubs shellac Boston 
    Braves
    [A headline in the Hartford Courant, 26 May 1924.]

    The smart Mr. Shevlin was biding his time, however, 
    and when the opportunity came in the third he took full 
    advantage of it and shellacked Norton plenty, ripping 
    both hands to the mid-section with much power behind each 
    drive. 
    [Evening Tribune (Providence, RI), 3 Jun. 1924.]

How that second shift happened is once again guesswork. If the only 
sport involved were boxing, we might try to make a link through 
"punch-drunk", but that doesn't work for baseball. Several writers 
have plausibly suggested that the word, with its strong consonants, 
suggests some sort of violent action, perhaps a combined "shelling" 
and "whacking". 

Whatever the exact chain of development, any mental link with the 
varnish is now tenuous at best.

4. Sic!
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A report in the Guardian last Saturday on the British government's 
plans to sell off its forests quoted this comment from Malcolm 
Currie, a negotiator for the union Prospect: "Three thousand 
employees' jobs and futures will be under threat as the land is 
pulled from under their feet."

Still with the Guardian, in another article the day before about 
the forest sell-off, John Pearson and I dead-heated in spotting 
this: "Bridal and cycle paths are increasingly popular." Better a 
bridal path, I suppose, than the primrose sort.

Kenneth Huey reports an odd phrasing in the New Yorker magazine of 
4 October: "In 1682, a government minister hid the death of the 
Dalai Lama for fifteen years." Did he, asks Mr Huey, take the whole 
year over it?

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