World Wide Words -- 05 Mar 11

Fri Mar 4 18:05:07 UTC 2011

WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 726          Saturday 5 March 2011
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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: Erumpent.
3. Wordface.
4. Q and A: Limerick.
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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PHROP  Lawrence Krakauer e-mailed: "It seems to me that you applied 
it to two entirely different things. A phrase like 'we must have 
lunch sometime' is not ambiguous, it's just insincere. But 'thank 
you for sending your book - I shall lose no time in reading it' is 
intentionally ambiguous. Perhaps we need different words for these 
two types of phrop." Perhaps, Julane Marx suggests, we might call 
the latter a malaphrop? The first sense is the original, as I noted 
in the piece; the other is an example of what some have described 
as autoantonymic or Janus phrases. The biggest group of these are 
humorously ambiguous job references. Readers sent in many examples, 
such as "You'll be lucky if you can get this man to work for you". 
There's even a book of them, The Lexicon of Intentionally Ambiguous 
Recommendations or LIAR for short. Guy Aron remembered the famous 
Pears soap advertisement from 1893 onwards, based on a cartoon in 
Punch in 1884 by Harry Furniss, in which a filthy tramp was writing 
to the firm: "Dear Sirs, two years ago I used your soap. Since then 
I have used no other."

THAT'S ALL SHE WROTE  An excellent find by Michael Templeton takes 
its written history back two years to an article about a cockfight 
in the April 1942 issue of H L Mencken's American Mercury: "'That's 
all she wrote!' gleefully called out a fan, before crossing the pit 
to collect a fifty-dollar bet." He also found a song by Ernest 
Tubb, the Texas Troubadour, entitled That's All She Wrote, also 
from 1942. Confusingly, that is widely attributed to Jerry Fuller 
in 1950, though as he was 12 at the time, he would have had to be 
precocious to write about being dumped by his girl. I posted these 
findings on the American Dialect Society discussion list; within 
hours Garson O'Toole had found three examples of "that's all she 
wrote" in the Atlanta Daily World from June and August 1942. As all 
these examples are from civilian contexts, the prevailing view that 
the idiom is from servicemen being dumped by Dear John letters is 
no longer sustainable. My guess is that the immediate source will 
turn out to be Ernest Tubb's song, which surely must have been 
performed on radio before 1942 and which popularised it.

2. Weird Words: Erumpent  /I'rVmp at nt/
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Stifle your delight, Harry Potter fans. We're not discussing that 
elephant-like beast, whose over-sensitive horn exploded in Harry 
Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

It's a good name for the animal, though, with its hints of "erupt" 
and "trumpet", and its true meaning, of something bursting forth, 
might describe an explosion. A few writers have borrowed the word 
to salt their prose: "The musicians added to the erumpent revelry 
with a sprightly semi-martial tune", wrote Alan Dean Foster in 
Icescape. Better was the almost poetic "Snowdrops are erumpent in 
the dreary winter landscape", which the gardener Lia Leendertz 
recently wrote in The Guardian, because it locates the word nearer 
to its true home.

Botanists and biologists, the only people who employ the word at 
all regularly, commonly bury it in the undergrowth of dense 
technical descriptions: "Pseudothecia mainly epiphyllous, in dense 
clusters, immersed but becoming erumpent". It has most often been 
used to refer to the fruiting bodies of fungi, which in their 
season are notably erumpent.

It's from the Latin verb "rumpere", to break out. That's the source 
of several much more common English adjectives and verbs that end 
in "-rupt", notably "abrupt", "erupt" and "interrupt", as well as 
the outstandingly rare "rumpent" - the Oxford English Dictionary 
defines this last word as an application for breaking a swelling, 
but it has only one example of it and doesn't explain further.

3. Wordface
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Bruce Thorpe tells me that the term MUNTED has been widely heard in 
New Zealand in the past ten days in reference to the Christchurch 
earthquake. A typical comment is "our neighbour's house is munted", 
meaning that it has been totally destroyed. This sense is confined 
to New Zealand. In Australia it's known in the broader sense of 
something deeply ugly or unpleasant. Teen slang in the UK uses it 
as a derogatory term for an unattractive woman, who may be a 
MUNTER. In all three countries it also means being very drunk or 
out of it on drugs. The word is 1990s slang but nobody seems to 
have much idea where it comes from. 

4. Q and A: Limerick
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Q. It has for many years puzzled me that the verse form should be 
known as a limerick. Can you help? [James Grainger]

A. Your puzzlement has long been shared by historians of language.

The nineteenth-century illustrator and poet Edward Lear is closely 
associated with the form. But he didn't invent it. He borrowed it 
from examples that he discovered in a book of 1822, Anecdotes and 
Adventures of Fifteen Gentlemen (a couple of other books containing 
examples appeared two years before). One verse gave Lear the idea 
of writing limericks to accompany his illustrations for children:

    There was a sick man of Tobago
    Who lived long on rice-gruel and sago;
      But at last, to his bliss,
      The physician said this - 
    "To a roast leg of mutton you may go."

The form is often claimed to be older. Modern books about Ireland 
link it to the eighteenth century Filí na Máighe, Gaelic poets of 
the Maigue, based in a pub in Croom, County Limerick. Two members 
of the group were Seán Ó'Tuama and Aindrias MacCraith, who jousted 
in verses with limerick metre. These were translated into English 
by the poet James Clarence Mangan, and appear in both languages in 
John O'Daly's The Poets and Poetry of Munster of 1850. This was 
before Edward Lear's work became widely known; he became popular 
only after his Book of Nonsense of 1846 was republished in 1861.

Neither Lear nor O'Daly nor the authors of the books of the early 
1820s called these poems limericks. The first known appearance of 
that name is in a letter dated 1896 by the artist and illustrator 
Aubrey Beardsley.

In O'Daly's book the verses are headed by "Air: The Growling Old 
Woman", indicating that they were intended to be sung, not recited. 
In 1898, a contributor to the scholarly journal Notes and Queries 
expanded on this: "Certain it is that a song has existed in Ireland 
for a very considerable time, the construction of the verse of 
which is identical with that of Lear's". He went on to describe a 
custom at convivial parties:

    One member of the party started a verse, and when he 
    had concluded the whole assembly joined in the chorus. 
    Then the next performer started a second verse, and so on 
    until each one had contributed a verse; repetitions were 
    not allowed, and forfeits were extracted from those who 
    could not fulfil the conditions. This meant that each one 
    had to supply an original verse of his own.
    [Notes and Queries, 9th Series, Vol 2, 10 December 
    1898.] 

The writer adds that the chorus consisted of the repeated lines 
"Will you come up, come up? / Will you come up to Limerick?" 
Stephen Goranson, a librarian at Duke University, North Carolina, 
has found a related reference from the other side of the Atlantic 
from 18 years earlier:

    There was a young rustic named Mallory,
    who drew but a very small salary. When
    he went to a show, his purse made him go to
    a seat in the uppermost gallery. Tune,
    wont you come to Limerick.
    [St John Daily News (New Brunswick), 30 Nov. 1880.]

The tune is presumably the traditional jig often called Will You 
Come Down To Limerick ("up" and "down" seem to be interchangeable 
or omitted at will). It appeared under that title in the famous 
collection Music of Ireland by Captain Francis O'Neill, published 
in Chicago in 1903.

Stephen Goranson argues on the basis of this item that the limerick 
was named in the US, with the chorus of the jig based on a Civil-
War era slang phrase, "come to Limerick" or "bring to Limerick", 
meaning submit to authority, which he suggests might be a reference 
to the Civil War in Ireland, concluded at Limerick in 1691. He has 
as yet been unable to confirm this and I'm sceptical. (I'm going to 
write about this in more detail later.)

To summarise, we have two possibilities for the origin. The obvious 
one is that the name comes from the verses written by the men of 
County Limerick. But if that's so, why didn't the name appear much 
earlier than it did? I'm sure they became at all known only after 
"limerick" had entered the language and people began to seek its 
source, seizing on the Filí na Máighe without looking too deeply 
into dating. The other possibility is that the name was taken from 
the chorus or title of the jig. As it was known on both sides of 
the Atlantic, and the earliest examples of the term are from the 
UK, it is likely to have first appeared in Britain. This remains 
the more probable suggestion.

5. Sic!
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The Camden New Journal of London, dated 24 February, featured an 
article on a sit-in at the Barclays bank in Tottenham Court Road, 
which got Julia Clarke's attention for the wrong reason: "Organised 
by UK Uncut, campaigners claim the multinational bank only pays a 
slither of its national profits in corporation tax, amounting to 1 
per cent." Free association test: "Banker?" "Slither!"

A mixed metaphor appeared in the Daily Telegraph on 25 February. 
Anthony Massey found it in a piece claiming that cuts in UK defence 
spending would make it difficult to mount even a small-scale 
operation in future. An officer was quoted: "We have cut our cloth 
very small and if we bit off more than we could chew we would be in 
trouble."

The Morning Sentinel of Waterville, Maine, carried a report on 28 
February which John Sweney read. It concerned a parish letter sent 
by the local pastor, Father Joseph Daniels, that detailed cutbacks 
in services due to a shortage of priests: "Daniels also said the 
parish will need to eventually grapple with a longer-term problem: 
the number of shrinking Catholics attending church in the 
Waterville area." 

Stu Wrenn and Laurie Camion spotted a photo caption in a story on 
the Daily Mail website on 2 March: "Floundering tyrant: Gaddafi, 
pictured last night as he made a series of bizarre statements, has 
had billions of pounds worth of his assets frozen along with his 
daughter and four sons".

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