World Wide Words -- 10 Nov 12

[Michael Quinion]

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WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 809         Saturday 10 November 2012
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Weird Words: Mulct.
3. Miscellany.
4. Q and A: Eggy.
5. Sic!
6. Useful information.


1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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MRS  John Dylan asked when "mistress" became a term for the female 
half of a long-lasting extra-marital relationship. It's on record 
from 1601, though it's probably older. Incidentally, "miss", the 
conventional term for an unmarried woman, began life at about the 
same time as the shortened form of "mistress" in the kept-woman 
sense but by the middle 1600s was already being used as we do now 
for any unmarried woman. And at about the same time "Ms" was very 
occasionally used as an abbreviation for "mistress", in all its 
meanings, though its application as a neutral alternative to Mrs or 
Miss is a modern US introduction. Though popularised during the 
1960s, it is on record as having been suggested by a correspondent 
to the Springfield Sunday Republican of Massachusetts in November 
1901.

"Mistress has been used as a form of address in relatively recent 
times," commented Gill Dunn. "In the late 1950s, my stepmother, as 
the wife of the headmaster of a village school in Northumberland, 
was addressed as Mistress Wood." George Chamier concurs: "'Mistress' 
as a term of address to a married or mature woman was still used 
until very recently in the Scottish Highlands - and may still be by 
the elderly. I recall a railway official at Inverness station (I 
suspect he was a Gaelic speaker which may account for the usage) 
addressing my wife as such in the 1970s.". "In 1954, as a young 
teenager living in Exeter (UK)," wrote Roger Clark, "I took part in 
a school exchange with a French boy who stayed with us for three 
weeks. When he came downstairs the first morning he greeted my 
mother with 'Good morning, Mistress!' I never did discover where he 
learned this but I suspect he had a rather old-fashioned teacher."


2. Weird Words: Mulct  /mVlKt/
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I've been spending too much time in the garden: my mind keeps trying 
to insist this word is said as "mulch". No, the "c" is hard, like 
the effect on the person being mulcted.

It derives from classical Latin, in which "multa" or "mulcta" meant 
a fine or penalty. The "c" was probably introduced as the result of 
confusion with the verb "mulcare", to handle roughly or damage, an 
unsurprising association of ideas. But many centuries passed before 
the change became general. Both Anglo-Norman and Middle French had 
"multer", to pay a fine. It came into in English in the fifteenth 
century as "mult" and it was a century before the "c" became wedged 
permanently into place. (The same thing happened in French, in which 
"mulcter" evolved from "multer" at about the same time, though the 
verb has disappeared from the modern language.)

"Mulct" remains in English, though in its original sense it is now 
restricted to the world of lawyers and judges. Elsewhere, it has 
shifted to refer to the illegal extraction of money through fraud or 
extortion. Since it appears in phrases such as "mulcting the poor 
taxpayer", we may assume people subject to some legally sanctioned 
mulct came to regard it as excessive to the point of extortion.

    The [energy supply] industry is quick to pass on price 
    increases, and damnably slow to give customers the benefit 
    of today's tumbling costs. It is no good urging these 
    hardfaced profiteers. The only thing they understand is 
    the brute force they use to mulct their customers.
    [Daily Mirror, 12 Dec. 2008.]


3. Miscellany
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NEVERMORE?  "Never event" is well known in the medical profession 
but new to me. It's a mistake in surgery that, by definition, ought 
never to happen. A recent report records the UK's National Health 
Service as having had 326 never events during 2011, including 161 in 
which a foreign object was left in the body after an operation and 
70 in which patients had surgery on the wrong part of the body. We 
may take some small comfort from learning that 326 is a minuscule 
number compared with the 4.2 million operations carried out each 
year in England alone.

FIFTY SHADES OF SWANS?  We learned of figurative black swans as a 
result of Nassim Taleb's book of that title in 2008, a term that he 
coined for an event which is both unpredicted and unpredictable. 
(The analogy was with the finding of black swans in Australia by the 
seventeenth-century Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh, at a time 
when all swans were thought to be white.) Last week, Sir Martin 
Sorrell, the chief executive officer of the WPP advertising agency, 
invented similarly figurative grey swans. These are events we do 
know about but whose outcomes are equally unpredictable. He cited 
four: the crisis in the Eurozone, the turmoil in the Middle East, 
the slowdown in the fast-growing economies of China, Brazil and 
India, and the consequences of the US presidential election. As to 
the last of these, it's too early to tell, though the swan in this 
case may be said to have turned blue.

POTS AND KETTLES  A word turned up in my newspaper that I thought 
had outlived its fashionableness, even its utility: "whataboutery", 
but it turns out to have significant currency still. It's associated 
particularly with the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Bitter arguments 
by one side about terrorism were often countered, not by reasoned 
argument, but by accusations of similar atrocities by the other. In 
2000, The Scotsman attributed the coinage to the former West Belfast 
MP Gerry Fitt, and gave this example: "Aye, the IRA might be bad, 
but what about ...". That makes clear it's "what about" turned into 
a noun. The Belfast Telegraph used it on 29 September: "Both sides 
are steeped in historical 'whataboutery' and they cannot see the 
historical woods for the modern trees." A less contentious form was 
known in the nineteenth century: "whatabouts", which was a pun on 
"whereabouts". One's whatabouts were one's activities, doings or 
occupations, in British English what one was about.

UNMATCHABLE RHYMES  Todd Sidwell asked me a question that has given 
poets much grief: "Is there an English word that rhymes with month?" 
It is usually considered to be almost as difficult to match as those 
notorious rhyme-breaking hues orange, purple and silver. Some poets 
have argued that number words such as "millionth", "seventh" or 
"dozenth" can work. A jokester has created "dunth", defined as "a 
word that rhymes with month", presumably without knowing that Dunth 
is a real, though unusual, family name. By coincidence, a letter to 
The Observer newspaper two Sundays ago from Liz Ratcliffe quoted a 
brief snatch of doggerel that Robert Browning wrote when presented 
with the same challenge:

    From the Ganges to the Blorenge 
    Comes the Rajah once a month. 
    Sometimes chewing on an orange. 
    Sometimes reading from his Grunth.

Browning wasn't cheating by inventing words: "Blorenge" is a small 
mountain in Wales, while "Grunth" is a Sikh holy book. This exotic 
solution may merely illustrate the truth of the generality.


4. Q and A: Eggy
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Q. I'd be interested to learn more about the history of the British 
slang "eggy", meaning slightly annoyed. A couple of Idahoan friends 
have taken to using it (I'd lay money that P G Wodehouse is behind 
the conspiracy), and my curiosity has risen like a well-executed 
soufflé. Thank you! [Valerie B]

A. I'm not so sure that Wodehouse could be an influence. The only 
example of the word I can find in his books is a character called 
Eggy, who appeared in Laughing Gas in 1936. Another character said 
of him, "I can't imagine anybody more capable of worrying a family 
than Eggy", but that's because he was idle, dissolute and a 
drunkard. He was annoying, but not himself annoyed.

The Oxford English Dictionary records "eggy" from the year before 
Laughing Gas was published, in Judgment Day, the last of the Studs 
Lonigan trilogy by the American author James T Farrell, set in 
Chicago. So there's a good argument for saying that "eggy" isn't 
originally British at all. Your Idahoan friends might have taken it 
from the books or - if they have long memories - from the 1960 film 
or the 1979 miniseries made from the trilogy. However, you're right 
to say that it's known to some extent in the UK - I've come across 
it as school playground slang from the 1990s.

If one has figurative egg on one's face, appearing ridiculous or 
foolish, the result may well be annoyance, but linguistically the 
two seem unconnected. It has been suggested "eggy" is a modified 
version of "aggravated", but that's too much of a modification to be 
easily accepted as the source. Others argue that it's from "edgy", 
nervous, tense or irritable, which may have been an influence. 
"Edgy" comes from, or is associated with, being "on edge", though it 
has a more recent sense of being unconventional - on the cutting 
edge of style, so to speak. Though the OED does suggest a link 
between "eggy" and "edgy", it's through another sense of the verb 
"to egg", one that has nothing to do with soufflés or hens, but is 
associated with the idiom "to egg someone on", to incite, provoke or 
encourage.

The egg in this phrase is from Old Norse "eggja", to incite, which 
has the same source as the verb "to edge", to sharpen a weapon. (In 
1603 the Bishop of Lincoln, William Barlow, wrote in his Answer to a 
Catholic Englishman, "Not blunting the sword of Justice, but rather 
edging it.") For centuries, down to the late 1800s, "egg on" also 
appeared as "edge on". I guess that the idea behind "egging on" is 
that a person is being encouraged to take action by figuratively 
suggesting he sharpen his sword.

We've lost "to edge on" and this has made a puzzling idiom more so. 
The unknown person who derived "eggy" from its "egg on" version to 
suggest somebody who had been egged on or provoked to the extent of 
becoming annoyed almost certainly wasn't thinking of blades.


5. Sic!
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Paddy Crean was attending the Wexford Opera Festival in Ireland and 
found this entry on a handwritten menu at the Talbot Hotel: "Locally 
caught chunks of fresh fish."

"I came across an unfortunate use of words on the bottom of a new 
kitchen appliance," wrote Frances Cave: "This kettle is made from 
completely tasteless materials". Peter G Millington-Wallace noted a 
label on his purchase, a pack of replacement toothbrush heads, which 
claimed, "Effectively remove plague".

Grant Agnew e-mailed: "On 1 November, Australia's SBS-TV World News 
had an item about our latest Victoria Cross winner. The reporter 
told us that he is the 96th 'since the Boer War at the turn of the 
century'. I hope this doesn't mean that the twentieth century is 
going to be repeated."

An article in The Australian on 7 November commented, "The risk of 
having a heart attack and developing heart disease increased with 
each additional sign of aging among both men and women, who made up 
45 percent of survey participants." Thanks to Christine Robey for 
that.

Still in Australia, Chris Gray noted that the Business Spectator 
wrote on 1 November: "Filippo and Maria had emigrated to Australia 
from Sicily in 1950s and settled in Griffiths, NSW, where they 
eventually bought 50 acres and planted grapes, peaches and prunes as 
well as four children."


6. Useful information
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