World Wide Words -- 06 Oct 12

[Michael Quinion]

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WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 804          Saturday 6 October 2012
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Weird Words: Chucklehead.
3. Miscellany.
4. Q and A: Year dot.
5. Sic!
6. Useful information.


1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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NOSISM  Several subscribers suggested that doctors and nurses who 
used "we" ("And how are we today?"), which Hilary Powers calls the 
clinical we, isn't an example of nosism, using "we" for oneself. 
John Weiss argued it either meant "you" or was an embracing plural 
first person that included the patient.

FIT TO BE TIED  Judith Lowe, Graham Egan and John Gibbs mentioned 
the common Australian version of this idiom: "ropeable".

DINGUS  Several more comments came in about the Dutch antecedents of 
"dingus". Ilke Cochrane wrote, "As a native Dutch speaker I have 
long been familiar with the word 'dinges' (as it is usually spelled, 
although it obviously tends to occur in spoken rather than written 
language), which is pronounced with a 'g' like that in 'ringer', and 
can refer to things, people or words the speaker can't remember."


2. Weird Words: Chucklehead
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Many, many years ago, one of my teachers delighted in calling his 
less intellectually gifted pupils "chuckleheaded idiots". A nicely 
rhythmic expression, in real life it would have been likely to get 
him a punch on the nose. We slaves to mortarboarded masters didn't 
have that option.

English speakers have been able to call a stupid or foolish person a 
chucklehead at least since the early eighteenth century. For most of 
its life it was a local or dialect word, albeit widely distributed, 
not used by serious English writers unless they wanted to evoke the 
earthy language of a son of toil. Americans were more egalitarian:

    There wasn't a human being in this town but knew that 
    that boy was a perfect chucklehead; perfect dummy; just a 
    stupid ass, as you may say. Everybody knew it, and 
    everybody said it. Well, if that very boy isn't the first 
    lawyer in the State of Missouri to-day, I'm a Democrat!
    [Life On The Mississippi, by Mark Twain, 1883.]

It used to be assumed that the "chuckle" part represented the sunny 
attitudes of a person so dim-witted that he was unable to appreciate 
the horrors of everyday life and so lived happily within the narrow 
confines of his own mind. The first edition of the Oxford English 
Dictionary thought so but the experts now disagree. 

They say it's from "chuck" in the sense of a chock, which is really 
no more than a different spelling of the same word. Like chock, it 
could mean a lump of wood, but it could also be a piece of cheese or 
home-made cake or anything else small enough to hold in the hand. 
You might call it a chunk, which is another modification of the same 
word. We're familiar with the chuck of a drill, a shaped chunk of 
metal, but might not make the connection with "chuck steak", which 
is etymologically a lump of meat. So "chucklehead" is a relative of 
bonehead, knucklehead and other insulting assertions that the head 
of the addressee is solid right through.

Might the experts who equated chuckleheadedness with laughter have 
been thinking of the origin of "chuckle"? That, too, comes from 
"chuck", plus the "-le" ending that marks a repeated action. This 
chuck is a different word, however, probably imitating the sound of 
a contented chicken (it's in origin the same word as "cluck"). The 
theory that "chucklehead" came from chuckle might have implied the 
person so described was a birdbrain. But it isn't so.


3. Miscellany
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HOLDING IT TOGETHER  Mark Brown submitted a succinct query: "Who was 
Cotter and what was the first thing that he pinned?". Regretfully, 
we don't know much about the origin of "cotter", though we are sure 
it doesn't refer to a specific person. It turns up in the fourteenth 
century for any device, such as a pin, wedge or key, used to hold 
two components of a machine together. The word is a shortened form 
of "cotterel", but the origin of that is unknown.

TWEETING IN DIALECT  An article by Jan Griffiths in the Guardian on 
26 September began by describing a silent spring without birdsong: 
"No chittering, no fluting, no chissicking ...". "Chittering" I knew 
to mean a series of short, sharp sounds, a cross between twittering 
and chattering ("chitter" is actually a variation of "chatter"). But 
"chissicking" was new. Harold Orton's Survey of English Dialects has 
an entry for it as an Essex term for clearing one's throat with a 
forced cough. It has been applied to the sound the woodcock makes, 
which is fair enough, since one author described it as a series of 
grunts followed by a sneeze. As it has been, the croak of a jackdaw 
may with some poetic licence be called chissicking. It's a stretch 
to use it of starlings, as the Yorkshireman Richard Kearton did in 
Nature's Carol Singers in 1906; he wrote of the birds "sitting in 
one black mass on every available branch and bough, producing an 
indescribable din by all chissicking and chattering to each other at 
the same time". Starlings make lots of noises and certainly chatter 
(or chitter) inordinately. But throat-clearing noises? Surely not? 
It seems that writers who have borrowed this very rare dialect word 
have assumed it stands for a chirping sound.

FREEZING PHRASE  D L Taylor asked me about the US idiom "frosts my 
grommet", which seems to mean "makes me feel extremely unhappy". The 
expression appears in various blogs online, but never in any print 
publication I can trace, and may date back only a few years. I can't 
find anything about it. Might it be a bad-taste reference to the 
Challenger shuttle disaster of 1986, in which the fatal flaw was 
traced to the freezing weather hardening grommets (O-rings) in the 
solid-fuel boosters? 


4. Q and A: Year dot
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Q. My wife is Czech, and recently came across the English phrase 
"the year dot". I explained that it means "a long time ago" but was 
stumped as to why. Can you possibly shed some light on the origins 
of this please? [Anthony Lauder]

A. No problem.

It's tied to the idea of smallness. Ever since "dot" came back into 
the language in the sixteenth century (it had been recorded just the 
once in Old English, but then disappeared) it has meant something 
extremely small - a minute speck, including a tiny mark made by the 
nib of a pen, such as the dot over the letter "i".

Sometime around the start of the eighteenth century, this idea led 
to the idiom "to a dot", exactly or precisely alike, as equal as two 
minute dots. The Oxford English Dictionary records it first in a 
play in which two characters are comparing a letter and its copy:

    Lady Trap: Are you blind? they are both alike to a 
    tittle.
    Sir Positive: To a dot. Her hand to a dot." 
    [Love in Several Masques, by Henry Fielding, 1728.]

This is an example from much later:

    I see the handbill myself. It tells all about him, to a 
    dot - paints him like a picture, and tells the plantation 
    he's from, below Newr-leans.
    [The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, 
    1884.]

Sometime around the middle of the nineteenth century, people began 
to speak of "the year dot", meaning some notional date that's long 
in the past. This seems to have been built on the notion of a time 
that's so vanishingly distant it appears as a dot about which we can 
discern nothing. Some writers suggest it might refer in particular 
to that mythical year 0 between 1BC and 1AD, but I'm not convinced 
that users have ever thought the year dot to be that far back.

This is its first appearance that I can find; a correspondent is 
complaining about the state of customs officers' uniforms:

    Some of the liveries I think, to use a homely phrase, 
    were made in the year dot, and such is the liberal pay of 
    the men, that did their pride prompt them to purchase 
    others, their means would not allow them.
    [Ipswich Journal (Suffolk), 25 Mar 1873. "Homely 
    phrase" implies that "year dot" was by then well-known, at 
    least in the writer's experience.]

By the way, you might like to know that, when "dot" appeared that 
one time in Old English, it meant the head of a boil; it's also a 
relative of an Old High German word for a nipple.


5. Sic!
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Ted Buselmeier found this alarming sentence in the October issue of 
National Geographic Magazine: "They draw platoons of whale sharks, 
which feast on the eggs, and sometimes marine scientists as well."

The BayouBuzz website in Louisiana, M Anderson discovered, had this 
headline in embarrassingly large type over a story of 24 September: 
"Residents leave Calif. in drones over last two decades".

Another headline of note appeared in The Press of Christchurch, New 
Zealand, on 29 September: "Statue taken by Nazis from space". Thanks 
go to Alan Tunnicliffe for telling us about it. (The statue was made 
from a meteorite.)

Robin Dawes received a spam e-mail on 28 September. He commented 
that its contents were irrelevant, since everything he needed to 
know was in the subject line: "80% off, first come first severed".

Who guards the guardians? A headline in the issue of Medical News 
Today of 19 September was seen by Michael Belkin: "Bid To Develop 
Anthrax Vaccine To Counteract World Bioterrorism Threat By Cardiff 
Scientists"


6. Useful information
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