World Wide Words -- 28 Jan 12
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jan 27 18:11:35 UTC 2012
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 771 Saturday 28 January 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: Fandangle.
3. Q and A: Haywire.
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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YALE There are yales at Yale University, readers tell me. Two in
chains flank the portico of Davenport College and one is depicted on
the official banner of the president of the university. The campus
radio station uses a yale as a logo. This is actually a play on
words, since the university was named in memory of Elihu Yale, a
governor of the British East India Company. His name comes from Iâl,
a place in north Wales, which in turn is from the Welsh word for a
fertile or arable upland.
AUSSIE RULES Readers' pointed out that the second expression I
discussed last week, "don't piss in my pocket", is a shortened form
of "don't piss in my pocket and tell me it's raining". The idiom is
also known with "down my back" and "down my leg". They mean "don't
take me for a fool; don't try to deceive me, don't flatter me with
your lies". Plain-speaking Australians are notoriously unreceptive
to what one correspondent described as "sneaky conniving bastards".
As I noted, the abbreviated "down my back" version is as least as
old as the early nineteenth century.
COMPETITION UPDATE We're on the final straight in the contest for
the 2011 Best Website About the English Language, organised by the
Macmillan Dictionary. Voting closes at midnight GMT on 31 January.
World Wide Words is second but running about a thousand votes behind
the leader. One last push, people, please! If you haven't yet voted,
please do via my link http://wwwords.org?MCMVC. (World Wide Words is
on page three of the list.)
2. Weird Words: Fandangle /fan'daNg(@)l/
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A fandangle may be a useless or purely ornamental thing. It may also
refer to something nonsensical, foolish or silly:
A big white wedding is a huge fandangle for not much
return. The guests carp about their placement; the vicar,
it turns out, would rather be at a funeral; and the happy
couple are either rigid with stress or flaccid with
drink.
[Sunday Telegraph, 8 Aug. 2010.]
One of my dictionaries describes it as archaic, but nobody seems to
have told its users, who continue to find it the right world for any
situation that implies confusion or fatuousness. This is from a New
Zealand book review: "There's a sense of déjà vu about so much of
the plot. And the whole fandangle could have been at least 100 pages
shorter." And this from the US: "Feuding politicians in Washington
continue their endless fandangle on possible changes to the evermore
complicated federal tax code." It seems still to be known, to some
small extent, almost everywhere English is spoken.
A plausible suggestion for its origin is the Spanish dance called
the fandango, known from the eighteenth century but whose name in
English by the early nineteenth century had taken on the same senses
of foolish nonsense or useless ornament that were later transferred
to fandangle. Was this a Puritan reaction to the dance, perhaps?
This oblique example suggests that "fandangle" was in use rather
earlier in the nineteenth century than the reference books usually
say:
It seems that there is one James Daly, of the county of
Galway, and he wants to be called Lord Fandangle, or
Dumsprandle, or something of that sort, and the king was
afraid to go through the operation of conferring the royal
nick-name! What a pity: what a shocking disaster, that the
Connemara men could not call sweet James Daly by the name
of Lord Fandangle! (Great laughter.)
[The Standard (London), 6 Jun. 1829. James Daly was the
MP for Galway Borough and Galway County for some 25 years;
in 1845 he was made a peer as Baron Dunsandle and
Clanconal; to a person unversed in Irish place names these
must have been only a little less nonsensical than
Fandangle or Dumsprandle. He had clearly been angling for
the honour for many years.]
3. Q and A: Haywire
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Q. I recently saw the word "haywire" in print. From the context, I
think that it means something that is not working properly. What is
its etymology? [Richard D Stacy]
A. Might your query be prompted by the recent release of the Steven
Soderbergh thriller by that title?
Our modern sense of "haywire" is an interesting example of semantic
drift. In the US of the latter part of the nineteenth century, "hay
wire" (also commonly called baling wire, which is now what people
usually call it) was literally a type of thin wire. In addition to
tying together bundles of hay after cutting, it fastened bundles of
grain stalks that had been cut by a horse-drawn reaper.
But its uses went far beyond this. It was the duct tape of its era,
the stuff you reached for when you had anything to mend, one of the
world's most versatile repair materials. If you needed to fix a
broken barn-door hinge, the tailboard of a wagon, or a hole in a
chain-link fence, you turned to hay wire. The first instance of the
term I've been able to find records a particularly melancholy
improvised use:
A young man named Samuel C. Hoyd who resided on the
Mesa, South Pueblo, committed suicide on the 20th by
hanging himself to a cottonwood tree with a piece of bale
hay wire.
[Daily Gazette (Colorado Springs) 22 Jul. 1881.]
This is a famous description of the wide utility of the stuff:
No logging camp could operate without axes, and in time
it came to be that no camp could operate without haywire.
This wire was the stuff with which hay for the oxen and
horses was bound into bales, for compact toting into the
distant camps. ... Loggers used the strands to strengthen
an axe helve or to wind the split handle of a peavey.
Cooks strung haywire above the stove over which to dry
clothes and to hang ladles; and often to bind the very
stove together. In the zither era, so old-timers have
vowed, a length of haywire came in handy to replace a
broken string, and they say never was a more resonant G
sounded, clear and deep as any harp.
[Holy Old Mackinaw: A Natural History of the American
Lumber-Jack, by Stewart Holbrook, 1938. A peavey is a
lumberman's hook with a spike at the end, named after its
inventor, blacksmith Joseph Peavey.]
There was a dark side to this. Around 1900 the term hay-wire outfit
appeared, for a ramshackle, poorly equipped or roughly contrived
business, one figuratively held together by hay wire. Later, a thing
was described as haywire if it was broken or not working properly:
"it's gone haywire", people would say.
The only thing that can be said in favor of the
electric light company when the lights go out is, perhaps,
its inability to make the meter go around when the juice
has gone haywire.
[Daily Globe (Ironwood, Michigan), 9 Sep. 1921.]
A contributor to American Speech in 1925 noted that this and similar
phrases, such as "I feel haywire all over", had been known to him
from boyhood in the language of loggers. In literalness the term may
have began on American farms but the road to figurativeness ran
through the lumber camps.
It was just a small step to applying "haywire" to people who were
metaphorically broken - out of control, mentally confused, erratic
or crazy. In this early case, the speaker is applying it to himself
when speaking to a young woman:
I didn't come out here tonight to lie to you. I've gone
hay-wire about you, and I've come to tell you so.
[Burlington Hawk Eye (Iowa), 14 Sep. 1927.]
My experience of farming is limited to childhood visits to my elder
brother, then a cowman on an Oxfordshire farm. His equivalent was
baler twine or baling twine, an equally universal panacea for all
malfunctions. Several humorous websites list "101 uses for baling
twine" and the stuff even has its own Facebook page. A modern
example:
Where my uncle's machines were held together with baler
twine, cardboard and rubber-solution glue, the machines in
here had all been crafted from high-quality alloys.
[Lost in a Good Book, by Jasper Fforde, 2002.]
4. Sic!
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Margaret Joachim found this in the Traveller section of The Times on
17 January about the delights of a river cruise: "The Rhine is much
wider and flatter now, with gently rolling hills and vineyards."
Let's hope the boat manages to get up those hills.
On 20 January at least two newspapers - the Daily Mail and The Times
- briefly headlined a report, "At Last singer Etta James dies at 73"
before changing it. Thanks go to William Wilson and Ewan Croal, who
both knew At Last to be the title of her most famous number.
Henry Peacock received a letter from the Royal Preston Hospital:
"Having now had your hearing aids for a number of years, we are
contacting you to see if you are experiencing any problems."
Andrew Holte tells us that BreakingNews.com had a headline on 20
January: "Pilot dies in mid-air on Bangkok to Moscow flight with 239
passengers on board, lands safely in Siberia".
Ian Dalziel e-mailed: "In the same batch of emails as World Wide
Words today I have received notification of a special offer from
Clifford James. 'Leather Shoes - Buy 1 get 1 free'. It's a deal I
had rather come to take for granted."
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