World Wide Words -- 03 Nov 12
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Nov 2 14:47:25 UTC 2012
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WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 808 Saturday 3 November 2012
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A formatted version is also available online at
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Weird Words: Fugleman.
3. Miscellany.
4. Q and A: Mrs.
5. Sic!
6. Useful information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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SOBRIQUET A frequent comment about last week's Weird Word was that
readers pronounced the final "t". This seems much more common in the
US - in Britain, we have largely retained the French pronunciation.
Somebody coming across it for the first time will most likely say it
as an English word; it's rare enough that a spelling pronunciation
isn't likely to be corrected through hearing the word said.
Marc Picard told me about the word's entry in Guiraud's Dictionnaire
des étymologies obscures. According to this, "it's actually from
'briquet' which today means a '(cigarette) lighter' but which used
to be the name of the piece of metal on which a stone was rubbed to
create a spark and start a fire. The movements to do this, called
'battre le briquet', 'to strike a light', were thought to resemble
the derisive gesture which consisted of rubbing beneath a person's
chin repeatedly with one's index finger. This was probably often
done when calling somebody names such as Fatso, Shorty, Baldy and
the like, and so came to mean 'derisive nickname'."
HEBDOMADAL A response last week from Canada to the previous week's
Weird Word mentioned "les journaux hebdomadaires". Claude Baudoin e-
mailed: "What an interesting combination of words: 'journal' comes
from 'jour', meaning day, so it literally means a daily newspaper.
It would seem that my Quebec cousins have thus invented the weekly
daily!"
LUMP Following up notes here last time about "lumpers", several
readers noted that that term was known in Australia and the UK as
well as in North America. Irish and British readers mentioned the
native phrase "on the lump", a form of self-employment, especially
in the building trades. Workers were paid a lump sum for a job,
without deduction of tax, rather than a weekly wage. The practice
was made illegal in the early 1970s.
CONGLOMERATING Last week's issue contained a query from Jae Kamel
about the meaning and origin of the rare word "hetegonic". He and I
are indebted to Doug Wilson, who found the noun form "hetegony":
The study of the sequence of processes by which the
solar system originated has often been called cosmogony, a
term which, however, is used in many other connections. As
the origin of the solar system is essentially a question
of the repeated formation of secondary bodies around a
primary body, the term hetegony (from Greek hetairos or
hetes = companion) has been suggested.
[Plasma physics, Space Research and the Origin of the
Solar System, by Hannes Alfvén, Nobel Lecture, December
11, 1970. Professor Alfvén shared the 1970 Nobel Prize for
physics with Professor Louis Néel. It is probable that the
former invented the word.]
CORRECTION The writer of the classical Greek period, mentioned last
time in my piece about "hair of the dog", was Lucian of Samosata,
not Lucien.
2. Weird Words: Fugleman /'fju:g(@)m at n/
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A recent obituary of Sir Rhodes Boyson, an eccentric and thoroughly
conservative former headmaster who was a junior education minister
under Margaret Thatcher, described him as an early fugleman for her
cause. That's a rare word indeed.
It tends these days to be used in the sense intended in the
obituary, for a person who is a staunch advocate, a cheerleader or
publicist, or - as Chambers Dictionary puts it in an odd intrusion
of American slang into a traditional Scots work - a mouthpiece. An
older sense is that of a person who leads by example or an exemplar.
Two decades ago, Philip Howard, a fine wordsmith and intrepid
explorer of the byways of language, wrote of the famous editor of
the Oxford English Dictionary:
The importance of Sir James Murray's pioneering work
was recognized disgracefully late by his university, but
it is now rightly recognized as fugleman for the rest of
the world in lexicographical studies.
[The Times, 17 May 1990.]
That meaning derives directly from the original German, Flügelmann,
literally "wing man". He was a soldier of long experience, expert in
the intensive drill of the old Prussian Army, who stood at the front
and side of a company of soldiers to show how it should be done. The
same technique was once used in the British Army, though an article
in 1867 remarked that it had by then long since been done away with,
only retained by a few old-fashioned yeomanry regiments such as the
Gloucestershire Hussars.
That article spelled it "flugelman", but for half a century it had
been appearing as "fugleman", which has triumphed. Why the initial
"fl" should have proved unattractive to British ears can't be
explained: we seem happy enough with flügelhorns and flogging.
3. Miscellany
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FLOWERY LANGUAGE My knowledge of the language of flowers is sparse
but I do know that the choice of flower always has special meaning:
white lilac for purity, freesias for everlasting friendship, red
rose for true love, and so on. Looking into it, I was amused to find
that the language has dialects: lavender could mean either devotion
or distrust, for example. I'd not before encountered the term
"floriography" for this branch of folklore and antique mystery until
I came across it in a newspaper last week. It comes from Latin
" floralis", pertaining to Flora, the goddess of flowering plants (a
word which has bequeathed us "flower", "floral" and other words),
plus Greek "graphein", writing. In August 2000, The Times wrote,
"Fifty sites on the Internet specialise in the newly rechristened
'Floriography' and florists are once again preparing to say it with
flowers." Its appearances in print and online suggest it might be
modern but I have unearthed an Our Notebook column in the London
Illustrated News, dated 15 May 1965. The British historian Sir
Arthur Bryant quoted from a book once owned by his grandmother,
Flora Symbolica: or, The Language and Sentiment of Flowers, dated
1869, which I was able to track down. The author, John Ingram, told
his readers that in the Middle Ages, "No gallant knight or gentle
dame could then aspire to good breeding, unless perfectly conversant
with florigraphy, as then taught." (Sir Arthur misspelled Ingram by
inserting an extra "o".) It seems the word fell out of use, to be
rediscovered or reinvented in the past couple of decades in the
modified spelling that Sir Arthur pioneered. The Oxford English
Dictionary hasn't yet noticed flori(o)graphy, but I commend it to
its editors.
4. Q and A: Mrs
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Q. A quick question on something that's bothered me since grade
school: where on earth does the "r" in "Mrs" come from? And why do
we pronounce "Mrs" as "missis" or "missus"? Thanks so much! Love
your site! [Shyane Siriwardena]
A. I can give you a correspondingly quick answer to the first part
of your question: the "r" comes from "mistress". But that needs
explanation.
The word "mistress" is a shadow of what it once was. It came into
English from Old French in the fourteenth century as the female
equivalent of "master", a woman having authority or who exerts
control of some sort over other people. It usually referred to the
female head of a household. It was common in later centuries to call
a husband and wife "the master and mistress". And "mistress" was
also a title of respect conferred on the wives of farmers, the lower
clergy, small tradesmen and the like - recall Shakespeare's Mistress
Quickly, an innkeeper in four of his plays.
In writing, "mistress" was conventionally shortened to forms such as
"Mres" or "Mris". The churchwarden's accounts of St Mary at Hill in
London recorded in 1485 a gift of a pyx cloth from "Mres. Sucklyng".
From the seventeenth century, the abbreviation was limited to the
title "mistress" when it was attached to a proper name. The "Mrs"
spelling had already begun to appear in the later sixteenth century,
initially in accounts, church records and the like. This is an early
appearance in print, in an official publication of the Parliamentary
cause during the English Civil War:
Another part of his Letter was to desire safe conduct
from Oxford to London, for Mrs. Elizabeth Crofte with a
Coach and six.
[A Perfect Diurnall of Some Passages and Proceedings of
Parliament and in Relation to the Armies in England and
Ireland, Middlesex, 13 May 1644.]
The "Mrs" spelling had long become standard by the time this famous
novel appeared:
Upon these apprehensions, the first thing I did was to
go quite out of my knowledge, and go by another name. This
I did effectually, for I ... took lodgings in a very
private place, dressed up in the habit of a widow, and
called myself Mrs. Flanders.
[Moll Flanders, by Daniel Defoe, 1722.]
Nobody knows for sure how Defoe would have pronounced the "Mrs". He
might have given it the older full form of "mistress", but he would
probably have adopted an elided form, "missis", which was in common
use later in the century:
The same haste and necessity of dispatch, which has
corrupted Master into Mister, has, when it is a title of
civility only, contracted Mistress into Missis. -- Thus,
Mrs. Montague, Mrs. Carter, &c. are pronounced Missis
Montague, Missis Carter, &c. To pronounce the word as it
is written would, in these cases, appear quaint and
pedantick.
[A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, and Expositor of
the English Language, by John Walker, 1791.]
That comment was published before the first appearance of the
spelling "missus" in the historical record. By the 1790s, it was
being used in the West Indies for the way servants addressed their
mistresses. That spelling is also found in American writing of the
nineteenth century. In the early 1800s it's recorded as a dialectal
form in parts of England - Edward Moor commented in Suffolk Words
and Phrases in 1823 that "Misses" was "the usual way of addressing a
woman, especially a matron."
Charles Dickens, who had an extraordinarily keen ear for the way
people spoke, often recorded the "missus" form for the way that
tradesmen and similar men addressed women, here in the fictitious
northern English industrial city of Coketown:
On his telling her where he worked, the old woman
became a more singular old woman than before. 'An't you
happy?' she asked him. 'Why - there's awmost nobbody but
has their troubles, missus.'
[Hard Times, by Charles Dickens, 1854.]
The exact pronunciation has varied, as has the way in which those
variant speech forms were transcribed.
5. Sic!
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An offer in an advertisement for the furniture store Hammonds in
Tunbridge Wells struck Peter Ellefsen as odd: "I am giving away a
free Whittard Hot Chocolate and Mug set to every customer worth
£12." How do they know you're worth it?
A BBC news report on the conviction of the Pope's butler included
this splendid sentence, submitted by Anne Chippindale: "Vatican City
has a railway station - with only one train a week bringing in
bonded duty-free goods, a Post Office, a radio station, a pharmacy,
a supermarket, a fire brigade, a five-star hotel, and one of the
world's most visited museums ..."
Jack Harvey saw this in a promotional flyer from a Ballarat real
estate agent: "Every home we sell, we donate to Breast Cancer
Research".
Spelling mistakes can open up new realms of wonder. The Raw Story
site headlined a report on 25 October: "Scientists discover new
spices of snake in museum" (this has since been corrected, but not
in the page address). Discovery News reported on 26 October that the
hominid Australopithecus afarensis "occupied wooden environments".
WKRN, a Nashville TV station, noted that at a local attraction, "we
can pan for gym stones". A picture caption on the Telegraph site on
29 October, accompanying a story about Chinese attacks on the New
York Times, noted that "People's Daily turned its canons on the 161-
year-old newspaper on Monday". And in the New York Times on the same
day, in a story about post-tropical storm Sandy: "With the storm
growing in ferocity, it was not safe to send workers to dissemble
the crane." (Thanks to Lindsay Knapp, J E Bruce, Jessie Peacock,
Terence McManus and Roger Crombie for these.)
Angela Smith tells us that Atlantic magazine reported in an article
on 11 October: "They ultimately ended up with 46 permanent vendors,
representing a wide mix of products: cupcakes with unique toppings
like fried chicken, Aussie-style meat pies, bicycle accessories, and
vintage-style swimwear, just to name a few."
6. Useful information
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