World Wide Words -- 18 Feb 12

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 774         Saturday 18 February 2012
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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: Alamagoozlum.
3. Wordface.
4. Q and A: God willing and the creek don't rise.
A. Manage your subscription.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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HALT  Numerous readers noted the continuing use of compounds of this 
term, such as "halting", as in "halting speech". 

Others commented in terms such as those of Richard R Losch: "Is it 
possible that in earlier times 'lame' meant completely crippled, as 
opposed to 'halt', merely somewhat impaired?" There's something in 
this. Many dictionaries in essence equate the terms, defining "halt" 
as meaning lame. But, in an entry written a century ago, the Oxford 
English Dictionary defines one meaning of "lame" as "disabled in the 
foot or leg, so as to walk haltingly or be unable to walk", a higher 
level of disability than just a limp. Dr Johnson, in his Dictionary 
of 1755, says likewise that "halt" means "to be lame"; however, he 
defines "lame" as "crippled; disabled in the limbs", again a more 
severe affliction than the way that "halt" seems to have been used. 

In this connection, I've since found a very much earlier use of the 
phrase "halt and lame" in Cursor Mundi, a Northumbrian poem of the 
fourteenth century. The OED says that "lame" in those days could 
mean disabled in any part of the body, not merely the legs, which 
suggests that the phrase then did imply two different conditions. 
Over time, as "halt and lame" became a set phrase, we may guess that 
the difference in meaning between its two words lessened and it 
became similar in type to repetitive expressions such as "kith and 
kin" and "time and tide" (in the latter, "tide" means a season or 
moment in time, as in "eventide").

MORE POTTERING (OR PUTTERING) ABOUT  Following last week's piece, 
several readers asked whether the "putter" spelling had a connection 
with the golf club called a putter. It doesn't. "Putter" in this 
sense derives directly from the verb "putt", which is a variant form 
of "put". 

While looking into "potter/putter", some unsystematic investigations 
in dictionaries had turned up an old English dialect sense that 
stood apart from the others: to trample in soft mud. In the eastern 
US many years ago, it was a boy's sport of trying to run on broken 
ice without falling in the water. I was delighted to learn from the 
Dictionary of American Regional English that in Rhode Island within 
living memory pieces of ice floating on salt water were given the 
name of "bandudelums".


2. Weird Words: Alamagoozlum
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It's a wonderful word, one of the best of the exotics that came out 
of North America in the nineteenth century. It's still to be found, 
though you're likely to encounter it in the company of the Corpse 
Reviver, the Fogcutter, the Monkey Gland and the Widow's Kiss.

The original alamagoozlum was maple syrup. The name may have been a 
blend of French-Canadian and American terms, since it's conjectured 
it was created from "à la" (as in à la mode) and "goozlum", with a 
"ma" thrown in to make it bounce better in the mouth. The goozlum or 
goozle was the throat, windpipe or Adam's apple, possibly a variant 
form of "guzzle".

The word was rarely recorded in the old days. The Bradford Era of 
Pennsylvania in 1888 did its best to confuse unwary etymologists by 
composing a ditty that included the lines, "From Alamagoozlum / To 
Kalamazoo, / We can bamboozle 'em!"

Today, alamagoozlum is almost entirely the province of those well-
informed mixologists who know their old-style cocktails. Charles H 
Baker recorded it in 1939 in The Gentleman's Companion or Around the 
World with Jigger, Beaker and Flask. It's not a drink for the faint-
hearted, either to create or consume, since it includes Chartreuse, 
gin, Jamaican rum, orange curaçao, egg whites, Angostura bitters, 
and a big dollop of syrup. Curiously, none of the recipes that I've 
seen even mention maple syrup, the classic ingredient being gomme 
syrup (perhaps from French "gomme" or an old form of English "gum"), 
which is a now unobtainable but one-time fashionable mixture of a 
simple sugar syrup with gum arabic.


3. Wordface
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HAS THE OTHER ONE DROPPED?  At a party, Daniel Elasky and friends - 
for no good reason that he can recall - were reading job titles from 
the US Census Bureau's Occupational Classification. They spluttered 
a bit when they reached ODD SHOE BOY. It's hardly a job title that a 
modern youth would aspire to. But it was indeed a class of work (one 
can hardly dignify it as an occupation) in the US boot and shoe 
industry, and seems to date from the early twentieth century. He 
would run errands or do jobs that needed no training. ODD SHOE GIRLS 
also existed and - if we're to judge by the number of advertisements 
for them - were more common. But they required experience. (So did 
an even more odd-sounding job from the Classification, a BAD WORK 
GIRL, who repaired mistakes in a dress factory.) A report of 1915 
noted that in one shoe factory the cobbler was paid $12 and the odd 
shoe boy $6 a week. The job has vanished, as have so many specialist 
trades, but as recently as 1968 it was being advertised alongside 
other work in the industry:

    We have immediate full time openings for experienced 
    Shankers, Heel Attachers, Last Pullers, Innersole Packers, 
    Upper Trimmers. Sole Layers, Odd Shoe Boy, Sock Liners, 
    Heel Paddlers Cleaners, TCF Pressers. Also inexperienced 
    help wanted.
    [Lowell Sun, (Massachusetts), 30 Aug. 1968. We may 
    assume that the reason only one odd shoe boy was wanted 
    was that they necessarily always came singularly.]

MULL THIS OVER?  Lorna Russell e-mailed from New Zealand about a 
headline she had seen: "Agency mulled to run emergency 111 system". 
She had never seen "mulled" used in this way before and wondered if 
it was an error. I'd never come across it either and it's not in my 
dictionaries but a search found many examples of similar usage, 
mostly in India and south-east Asia. I conclude that "mulled to" is 
an extension of "to mull over", to think about or ponder something, 
but meaning instead "be minded to" do something, to be disposed to 
do a particular thing. Can anyone comment?


4. Q and A: God willing and the creek don't rise
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Q. An item that has been floating around the internet claims that 
the expression "God willing and the creek don't rise" referred to 
the Creek Indians, not a body of water. It mentions Benjamin Hawkins 
of the late 18th century, who was asked by the US president to go 
back to Washington. In his reply, he was said to have written, "God 
willing and the Creek don't rise". Because he capitalized "Creek" 
it's asserted that he was referring to the Creek Indian tribe and 
not a body of water. Is this derivation correct? [Bob Scala]

A. Quite certainly not. Every researcher who has investigated the 
saying has dismissed an Indian connection as untrue. The tale is 
nevertheless widely reproduced and believed. It's worth looking into 
because of the way in which it has been elaborated in the version 
you quote.

Anecdotal evidence from people who have got in touch with me down 
the years suggests that it has been in regular use throughout the 
lifetimes of some elderly folk in parts of the US. I'm told it was a 
sign-off tag line of the 1930s US radio broadcaster Bradley Kincaid.

If we relied on written sources it would be hard to believe in such 
continued use. The written record dates the saying from about the 
middle of the nineteenth century. But I know of just four instances 
from that century. Then there's a long gap in the record before it 
began to appear again in the 1950s. It took a further decade for it 
to become popular as a supposedly hayseed utterance, sometimes as 
"and the crick don't rise" to reflect a regional form. 

The earliest example known is this mock rustic speech:

    Feller-citizens - I'm not 'customed to public speakin' 
    before sich highfalutin' audiences. ... Yet here I stand 
    before you a speckled hermit, wrapt in the risen-sun 
    counterpane of my popilarity, an' intendin', Providence 
    permittin', and the creek don't rise, to 'go it blind!'
    [Graham's American Monthly Magazine, Jun. 1851.]

And this is one appearance in a newspaper:

    We are an American people, born under the flag of 
    independence and if the Lord is willing and the creeks 
    don't rise, the American people who made this country will 
    come pretty near controlling it.
    [The Lafayette gazette (Louisiana), 3 Nov. 1894.]

You will have spotted that neither of these capitalises "creek", 
which suggests they didn't have the Creek people in mind. In fact, 
virtually all the examples that I've found in books and newspaper 
archives down to the present day are in lower-case.

That argues for a more mundane origin: the old-time difficulties of 
travelling on dirt roads that forded rivers and streams; a sudden 
storm could cause water levels to rise without warning and render 
the route impassable. "If the creek don't rise" was a whimsical way 
of saying that the speaker would carry out some task provided that 
no figurative obstacle were put in his path. It can be summarised as 
"if all goes well". It's a more conditional statement of intent than 
"come hell or high water". (See http://wwwords.org?CHOHW.)

The saying has been attributed to Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson 
among others, on the usual principle that attaching a famous name to 
a story validates it. Mentioning Benjamin Hawkins is a masterstroke, 
since he was the General Superintendent for Indian Affairs between 
1796 and 1818 and was principal Indian agent to the Creek nation; he 
became so close to its people that he learned their language, was 
adopted by them and married a Creek woman. Who better to write about 
the risks of the Creek rising in revolt?

But if the supposed letter was ever written, it doesn't now exist in 
any archive that any researcher has so far found (his letters have 
been published, if anybody would like to check). It must surely be 
the creation of a fertile modern mind desiring to put the flesh of 
evidence on the dry bones of outright invention. And even if it did, 
the initial capital letter would mean nothing, as at the time it was 
still common practice to capitalise all nouns.


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