World Wide Words -- 09 Jul 11

Fri Jul 8 16:23:18 UTC 2011

WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 744           Saturday 9 July 2011
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Author/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: Grangerise.
3. Turns of Phrase: Precariat
4. Q and A: Put a sock in it.
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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THE WANDERER RETURNS  Holiday over and back to work. No more Arctic 
sun shining on icy mountains, no more sea eagles, pods of whales, 
huskies, and delightful Norwegians - not least Queen Sonya, who 
paid a visit to Vardø on 23 June while we were in port there. I 
returned to a mountain of mail, not icy but somewhat daunting.

YOUR CARRIAGE AWAITS  Brian Ashurst wrote of the type of carriage, 
"Can I remind readers that 'brougham' should be pronounced 'broom', 
though I'm sure it isn't in most cases." John Orford argued that 
"growler" for the cab referred as much to the alleged evil temper 
of the drivers as to the noise the wheels made.

Michael Hornsby told me a story. On a foggy evening a man came 
rushing out of the Savoy Theatre in London after the first night of 
HMS Pinafore. He saw a figure in a long coat pacing about on the 
pavement, whom he took to be the doorman, but who was actually W S 
Gilbert of Arthur Sullivan fame. "Call me a cab," he shouted, "and 
be quick about it!" Gilbert took his cigar out of his mouth and 
eyed the man critically: "Certainly. You are a four-wheeler". The 
man responded in infuriation, "You impudent fellow! What the devil 
do you mean?" Replied Gilbert: "Well, you asked me to call you a 
cab, and I can hardly call you hansom". [The first appearance of 
this story I've found was in the New York Times in December 1899.]

Dick Bentley noted that I might have added "limousine" to my list 
of motor car terms, though it was never the name of a horse-drawn 
carriage. It's from the feminine form of a French adjective that 
relates to the Limousin region around Limoges; it referred to a 
caped cloak worn thereabouts. The term was applied to an early 
motor car because the driver's seat had a roof over it.

OF MESSES IN POTS  Several British readers were surprised that I 
made no mention of the West Sussex village, halfway between London 
and Brighton, with the intriguing name Pease Pottage. There have 
been many theories about the origin of the name, one suggesting 
that it referred to the muddy nature of the locality before modern 
roads.

Peter Weinrich recalled an anecdote about a family who went to a 
restaurant which was striving to move up-market. The menu included 
"potage du jour" and the father called the waiter to ask about it. 
He went off to inquire, returning to say that "The potage du jour 
today, sir, is soup."

GET AHEAD, GET A HAT  Martin Underwood wrote of one now vanished 
hat name, "I heard my grandfather use the name in another context; 
'doing the Dolly Varden' was a euphemism for emptying the night 
soil, the sewage from an outside privy. This usage was apparently 
common in West Yorkshire in the early 1900s. I wonder how that 
arose?" I have found that a system of collecting night soil in 
carts was established in Manchester in 1872 at the urging of the 
local Medical Officer of Health, who wanted to do away with 
unhealthy back-yard cesspits. This was during the craze for things 
Dolly Varden and a business was trying to take advantage of the 
fashion by naming a scent after her. Mancunians, appalled at the 
stench from the carts, referred to the new waste-removal system as 
the Dolly Varden method.

OOPS!  The issue of 11 June was incorrectly marked in its subject 
line as being of 11 July. Last Saturday's issue gave the wrong 
title to Henry Mayhew's famous work of 1851; it should of course 
have been London Labour and the London Poor. In the same issue, 
"joculator", a jester, should have been derived from the Latin word 
of the same spelling. The Latin source for "porray" in Of Messes in 
Pots should have been given as "porrum". 

2. Weird Words: Grangerise
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A work has been grangerised if illustrations have been added from 
other sources, usually other books. In a transferred sense, the 
verb can refer to the mutilation of books by removing their 
illustrations for this purpose.

    He wore an ill-fitting frock-coat and a paper collar, 
    and he showed me, as his great treasure and interest, a 
    large Bible which he had grangerised with photographs of 
    pictures.
    [Tono-Bungay, by H G Wells, 1909.]

It's an eponym. It commemorates James Granger, who would have lived 
and died as an obscure parish priest (he was vicar of Shiplake in 
Oxfordshire from 1747 until his death in 1776), had he not been an 
early and avid collector of portrait prints, amassing in his 
lifetime some 14,000 of them. In 1769 he published A Biographical 
History of England from Egbert the Great to the Revolution, which 
combined a chronological catalogue of prints with biographical 
information. This was a huge success, even among people who didn't 
collect portrait prints, and went through several editions. 

"Grangerisation" is also known as "extra-illustration". It was a 
popular pursuit during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The 
method was to mount illustrations on sheets of the same size as the 
book you were grangerising, remove the binding, interpolate the 
extra sheets and rebind the book. Granger never grangerised - he 
kept his prints loose in portfolios - and it's unfair to his memory 
that his name became attached a century after his death to this 
scrapbookish hobby.

The most extraordinary example of the type is known inaccurately as 
the Kitto Bible, actually a copy of John Kitto's Pictorial Bible of 
1838. This was originally in three volumes but had been extended by 
James Gibbs, a London bookbinder and print-seller, to 60 large 
volumes that contained 30,000 engravings, woodcuts, drawings, 
watercolours and printed pages from early bibles.

3. Turns of Phrase: Precariat
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This socio-economic term has become more visible in recent months 
as a result of a book, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, by 
Guy Standing, Professor of Economic Security at the University of 
Bath.

He describes the precariat as a newly emerging social class, in 
part created by trends towards creating a flexible workforce, which 
has access only to poorly paid short-term or part-time jobs, with 
no security of employment, support of a trade union or protection 
by legislation. Wages are often so little better than social 
security and marginal tax rates so penal that there's little 
motivation to look for work. People in this situation see no 
prospect of change for the better and are becoming dispirited and 
disaffected. This is leading, he argues, to a group open to 
exploitation by far-right political parties.

The term is a blend of "precarious" and "proletariat". The press 
attention given to Professor Standing's book may have given the 
impression that he coined it. Reports in recent years have linked 
it with the rise of a similar class in Japan and suggested it was 
invented there. It has in fact been a term of left-wing writers in 
English at least since its appearance in the January-March 1990 
issue of Socialist Review. But it was actually coined in French in 
the 1980s (as "précariat"). The abstract noun "precarity" for the 
concept is also on record; Noam Chomsky wrote in an article in the 
June 2011 issue of In These Times that it was coined in the 1990s 
by Italian labour activists.

    Part of the precariat, the youthful educated part, is 
    looking for what the book calls a politics of paradise. 
    It is beginning to identify it in the squares of major 
    cities, as the book did predict. Listen to the precariat 
    in Athens, Madrid and in various parts of the Middle 
    East.
    [Financial Times, 25 Jun. 2011.]

    In Britain, as elsewhere, labour market flexibility 
    led to a fall in 'unskilled' wages and a proliferation of 
    temporary and part-time labour. This expanded the ranks 
    of the precariat - the emerging class of people who 
    experience multiple forms of insecurity and see little 
    prospect of escape.
    [Soundings, 1 Apr. 2011.]

4. Q and A: Put a sock in it
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Q. I've heard a rumour, meaning I was unable to verify the source, 
that the phrase "to put a sock in it" referred to early gramophones 
that had no volume control. It is said that people who were annoyed 
by the high decibels produced by these machines would suggest that 
the person operating the player put a sock, rolled up into a ball, 
inside the horn producing the sound. Seems like a good fit to me. 
Any way this can be researched or verified? [Lou Jandera]

A. I can't give a copper-bottomed, guaranteed, incontrovertible 
answer, but there's enough evidence to give a good pointer to the 
real source.

The story about putting a sock in the horn of a gramophone has been 
so widely reproduced in books that it's unsurprising people believe 
it. It's a delightfully unexpected and convincing tale. The image 
comes to mind instantly of some grumpy parent stuffing hosiery into 
the horn to muffle the noise of the kids' records.

The difficulty, as so often with such stories, is the evidence. The 
first examples appear in 1919, virtually simultaneously in the UK 
and Australia:

    The expression "Put a sock in it", meaning "Leave off 
    talking, singing or shouting".
    [The Athenaeum (London), 8 Aug. 1919.]

    "But if you want to see a racecourse - a real full-
    sized dinkum top-hole racecourse I'm speaking of, mind 
    you - come along with me to Tasmania," chimed in the 
    small voice of a lad who was very fond of apples, "and I 
    will show you -" "Oh. dry up, Tassie; put a sock in 
    it."
    [Western Mail (Perth, Australia), 23 Oct. 1919. In 
    number 5 of a series of articles entitled War-Time 
    Sketches, by Louis F Cox.]

The need in the first of these to define the expression suggests it 
was then new in the UK. Both are rather late for it to be connected 
to gramophones, which had by then been around for some time. I'd 
also question whether pre-electric machines produced enough noise 
to make it necessary to quieten them.

Another example provides a further pointer:

    "I'm not miserable, corporal," said little Martlow: 
    "We're not dead yet. On'y I'm not fightin' for any ---- 
    Beljums, see. One o' them ---- wanted to charge me five 
    frong for a loaf o' bread." "Well, put a sock in it. 
    We've 'ad enough bloody talk now." 
    [The Middle Parts of Fortune, by Frederic Manning, 
    1929. The novel is set on the Western Front in France in 
    1916, during the First World War, which Manning - an 
    Australian - experienced during his service with the 
    King's Shropshire Light Infantry. The text as he wrote it 
    could not be published in his lifetime because of the 
    authentic bad language it contained. I've expunged the 
    obscenities so this e-mail will not be trapped by spam 
    filters; the online and RSS versions are 
    unexpurgated.]

This and the previous citation strongly suggest that an origin 
among servicemen in the First World War is most probable, and 
explains how the expression got into Civvy Street simultaneously in 
both Britain and Australia - it was carried to both by homecoming 
soldiers.

There were several similar expressions around at the time. Eric 
Partridge pointed to the slightly earlier "put a bung in it". The 
similar "put a cork in it" existed, too. "It" in all three cases is 
clearly the mouth.

As I said, it's impossible to be sure, but I'd put my money on its 
having originally been First World War slang.

5. Sic!
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The biter bit: lots of readers wrote in about my etymology of the 
word "cab", which I described as "a contraction of cabriolet, a 
light two-wheeled vehicle drawn by one horse that had been around 
since the middle of the seventeenth century in France, but which 
had first appeared for hire in London in 1823." The consensus was 
that it must have been a well-preserved and much-travelled horse.

Child cruelty? Hal Keen noted that the Star Tribune of Minneapolis/ 
St Paul for 1 July described protesters at the state capitol: "Some 
held babies and others held umbrellas to protect them from the 
burning summer sun." 

"Quick work!" commented Robin Dawes about a news item on the BBC 
website on 4 July: "The Duchess wore an electric blue Jacquenta 
dress, by Erdem, the Canadian-born British designer who designed 
the dress on her arrival in Canada on Thursday."

In another BBC news story, on 30 June, Tim Conway read of the 
wildfire that threatened radioactive material at the Los Alamos 
National Laboratory. It quoted a manager: "I have 170 people who 
validate their measures. They're in steel drums, on a concrete 
floor."

Sean Brady sent a clipping from a local freesheet, the Saffron 
Walden Reporter, dated 30 June. A report on a wedding said that the 
happy couple were "jetting off to the sunny climbs of California 
for their honeymoon." Yosemite perhaps? 

The Beirut Daily Star of 6 July aroused Pattie Tancred's interest 
with this report: "Attorney Salem Salim and his family miraculously 
survived a fatal attack after unknown assassins fired around 30 
bullets at Salim's home." Miraculous indeed.

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