World Wide Words -- 15 Oct 11
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Oct 14 16:40:27 UTC 2011
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 758 Saturday 15 October 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: Gainsay.
3. Wordface.
4. Q and A: Burden of one's song.
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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IDIOTICON Peter Judge reminds us that "idiom" is another word that
traces its ancestry back to classical Greek "idios" for something
private (its equivalent in French, "idiotisme", shows the historical
link with our "idiot").
HOMOPHONES Following up my mention of these in the piece last week
about "punt", Gerry Foley pointed out that other languages have it
worse: "The incidence of these words in English pales in comparison
with Mandarin. I just looked up the word 'he' which sounds like
English 'her' with a rising tone. There are at least 25 words with
this sound, most represented by distinct ideograms, having meanings
as diverse as: river, small box, Holland, what, lotus. There are
many further meanings for the word 'he' that carry one of the other
three tones of the language. Many words in Mandarin carry similar
numbers of homophones; yet, as with English speakers, this doesn't
lead to a lot of confusion. Interestingly, one of the arguments made
against changing written Chinese to a phonetic system based on Roman
letters is that the traditional ideograms (of which there are many
thousands) help to distinguish all these homophones in writing."
2. Weird Words: Gainsay
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Most dictionaries mark this verb - to deny or contradict - as formal
or literary; some go further and suggest it's archaic; the Oxford
English Dictionary, in an entry written over a century ago, stops
partway, describing it as "slightly archaic" (is that like being a
little bit pregnant?).
The number of times the verb turns up in books and the better sort
of newspapers might make you doubt that verdict, but inspection
shows that it's formulaic and almost always used in the negative, in
forms such as "no one can gainsay" or "it is impossible to gainsay".
Positive cases are rare and remarkable and do feel archaic:
One can gainsay de Gaulle's conclusion, or at least his
overall description of the profession of arms, without
contradicting his general - and even obvious - point that
history can be interpreted at one level as the history of
'force'.
[The Warrior Queens, by Antonia Fraser, 1988.]
The word is a compound of the verb "say" with the most definitely
archaic prefix "gain-", against. This came from an Old English word
that's related, for example, to modern German "gegen", against; it
is a close relative of "again", and turns up also in "against"
itself. So "gainsay" literally means to speak against something.
The verb has largely lost its mental associations with "say". Though
its forms conform to those of the root in writing - "gainsaying",
"gainsays", "gainsaid" - they don't in speech, because they're so
rare that people say them as they're spelled. "Gainsays" rhymes with
"days" and "gainsaid" with "shade" (which is why it also appears as
"gainsayed").
3. Wordface
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PUBLICANS AND SINNERS A delightful collection of alcoholic epithets
appears in Leslie Hotson's 1949 work, Shakespeare's Sonnets Dated:
"London beer made of filthy Thames water was so celebrated and
sought after that despite the diligent bezzling and beer-bathing of
English tosspots, bench-whistlers, and lick-wimbles the hard-working
brewers of England made enough not only to satisfy the home market,
but to supply a large export trade as well." TOSSPOT was a habitual
drinker, one who tossed back the contents of his pot to make ready
for the next. A BENCH-WHISTLER in Shakespeare's day was an idler who
spent his days sitting on the alehouse bench, supping beer (and no
doubt whistling between sips). I can find scant evidence for LICK-
WIMBLE, though it turns up in a satirical print of about 1632 in the
collection of the British Library as one in a list of "downright
drunkards". A WIMBLE was a gimlet or auger and a WIMBLER was a maker
of holes of various sorts; by analogy with "lickspittle", a toady or
sycophant, we may guess that a lick-wimbler insinuated himself into
convivial company to cadge drinks, though presumably not by boring
them. BEZZLING was drunken revelry or dissipation, from Old French
"besiler", to plunder or ravage and a BEZZLER figuratively plundered
an alehouse's stock by consuming it on the spot. These are relatives
of EMBEZZLE, whose first sense in English was to carry off anything
that was owned by somebody else, but which later narrowed its focus
to fraudulently appropriating money.
4. Q and A: Burden of one's song
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Q. A newspaper account in 1877 of the murder of my great-great-
grandfather (the first police officer to be killed in the line of
duty in my Texas home town), contains an odd phrase that puzzles me
and may be of interest to your detective work: "Perry Davis, the
burden of his song, was indicted by the Grand Jury." What can you
tell me about the peculiar expression, "burden of his song"? [Neill
D Hicks]
A. The literal meaning of the burden of a song is its refrain or
chorus. Its most famous appearance is probably this:
There was a jolly miller once
Liv'd on the river Dee;
He worked and sung from morn till night,
No lark more blithe than he;
And this the burden of his song
For ever us'd to be,
I care for nobody, not I,
If no one cares for me.
[The Miller of the Dee, from Love in a Village, a comic
opera by Isaac Bickerstaffe (1762), now a popular folk
song in several extended versions. You might get extra
points in a pub quiz for knowing that the character in the
play who sang it was Master Hawthorn, a farmer.]
"Burden" in this sense is first recorded in the seventeenth century.
It's the result of a mistake. The original is the French "bourdon",
among other things the drone of bagpipes and the bass string of a
violin. In late medieval times it was brought into English for a
singer's bass accompaniment to a song. By Shakespeare's day, it had
become permanently confused with "burden", probably because the bass
part was figuratively thought to be "heavier" than the melody. As
the bass often contributed to the refrain, the part that may be
repeated many times and which often sums up the sense of the piece,
the idea grew up that the burden "carried" the meaning of the song.
"Burden" later extended to mean the chief theme or leading idea of
any written work or utterance. It forms part of several phrases -
the most common is yours, but variants are known such as "the burden
of his confession" and "the burden of his story". ("Burden of proof"
is unconnected, as "burden" here refers to an obligation, which is
figuratively perceived as a heavy weight.)
The idiom "burden of his song" is now extremely rare but was better
known a century or more ago, as these two examples show:
The meal was of the most substantial kind, and while
both the showman and his wife did ample justice, they were
unceasing in their attentions to me, the burden of their
song being, "Make yourself at home, sir," an entreaty with
which their evident sincerity made it easy to comply.
[The Great Army of London Poor, by Thomas Wright,
1882.]
"'Was ever a woman so pampered? And that young man - he
might have been my own son. He had the run of my house.
And yet see how they have treated me! Oh, Dr. Watson, it
is a dreadful, dreadful world!' That was the burden of his
song for an hour or more."
[The Adventure of the Retired Colourman, by Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle, in The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes,
1926.]
In the newspaper item that you quote the phrase is used intriguingly
differently. You supplied a number of verbatim extracts from the
Waco Daily Examiner, which make clear that Perry Davis murdered your
great-great-grandfather. The sentence you quote, "Perry Davis, the
burden of his song ..." is the beginning of a news report on 28
August 1877; "his" can only be Perry Davis himself. I read this to
mean that Davis was the author of his own misfortunes, perhaps
through a misunderstanding of "burden" by the writer.
It's rare to find the expression referring to a person, rather than
an idea, but it's not utterly unknown. On rare occasions it was used
for the focus of an individual's attention or his primary concern,
as here:
He seemed to have intense affection for that boy: for
him Danny was the burden of his song; he was very
affectionate towards his children, but particularly
towards Danny.
[The New York Herald, 13 Apr. 1870.]
5. Sic!
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Department of double time. Karen Courtenay found this in the Boston
Globe of 8 October: "Jeff Lane, an environmental specialist for
Boston public schools, [added] that the state now requires annual
tests twice a year."
Liz Broomfield initially misread a report on the BBC's website on 8
October: "David Cameron wants initial findings of a Ministry of
Defence inquiry into Defence Secretary Liam Fox's work relationship
with a friend on his desk on Monday." It was later reworded.
"We were in Maine recently," wrote Larry Nordell, "and found a
neatly printed but disconcerting sign in a motel bathroom that said
'Please put only toilet paper in the toilet. All other wastes go in
the waste basket.'"
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