World Wide Words -- 29 Sep 12

[Michael Quinion]

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WORLD WIDE WORDS        ISSUE 803         Saturday 29 September 2012
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Weird Words: Illeism.
3. Wordface.
4. Q and A: Fit to be tied.
5. Sic!
6. Useful information.


1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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HOOTENANNY  Linn Schulz pointed me to a discussion thread on the 
Mudcat Café website. One post quoted from Pete Seeger's book, The 
Incompleat Folksinger, published in 1972. Seeger says he encountered 
the word when he and Woody Guthrie played at one of the monthly 
fund-raising music events run by the people behind the Washington 
New Dealer newspaper in Seattle. They called them hootenannies, 
which Seeger says won out by a nose over "wingdings". Seeger started 
to use the word for informal folk evenings in people's homes. So 
there is a direct line of descent from the sense of an unspecified 
object through the New Dealer's choice of name via Pete Seeger to 
the wider folk-music community.

Philip Miller recalled yet another vintage sense of the word: "In 
the very early 1970s I was living in rural southern Michigan. I had 
a hand-cranked food mill to purée potatoes, make applesauce, and the 
like. My landlady, an elderly native of the area, saw it in my 
kitchen and exclaimed, 'A hootenany! I did not know they still made 
them.' This intrigued me, for I only knew the word in the folk-music 
context. She said that when she was a girl, around the time of the 
First World War, that is what the rural folks called a food mill."

One nonsense word in a quotation in the piece was "dingus". This 
seems so characteristically American that it was surprising to be 
told by Julie Swenson that it is also a common South African word. 
There's some doubt about where it was created - though some books 
say it was originally South African, the earliest US example on 
record is from 1876 while the first South African one is dated 1898. 
It might, of course, have been independently invented. Either way, 
it originated in Dutch "ding", a thing. In South Africa the word has 
a wider range of meanings - it can be a person whose name one can't 
recall (a what's-his-name) as well as a thing. And unlike the US 
version, it's said with a soft "g".

REVERSED WORDS  Following on the note in this column last time about 
the inversion of sense of "hoi polloi" in the US, Julia Cresswell 
noted, "It is not the only word or phrase that has reversed meaning 
in US use recently, influenced by similar sounding words. Two of my 
favourites are 'sacrosanct', taken to mean 'blasphemous' (presumably 
influenced by 'sacrilegious') and 'nonplussed' used to mean 'not 
surprised'. Presumably here the 'non' has dominated."


2. Weird Words: Illeism  /'IlIIz(@)m/ 
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Illeism is the habit of referring to oneself in the third person. 
Strictly speaking it refers to excessive use of the pronoun "he", 
because it derives from "ille", its Latin equivalent. That's why 
it's said like "illy-ism".

It is most often found in books about Shakespeare's plays, Julius 
Caesar in particular, in which characters often refer to themselves 
in the third person, a trick that Shakespeare took from Caesar's own 
writings. Characters in fiction sometimes refer to themselves in the 
third person, which can be an authorial device for indicating idiocy 
or overweening self-importance. Neither applies to Salman Rushdie's 
new book, a record of the years he spent in hiding from the risk of 
retaliation by Muslims against The Satanic Verses. His book's title 
is Joseph Anton, the pseudonym Rushdie took during this period; he 
distances himself from his alter ego by using the third person.

Illeism was coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1809 as the inverse 
of egotism, a mark of which is overuse of the pronoun "I". Coleridge 
also invented "tuism", meaning to refer to oneself as "thou" to 
refer to oneself ((on occasion people then still used "thou" as a 
familiar second-person pronoun equivalent to French "tu", from which 
he took the name). It also means giving priority to the interests of 
other people rather than oneself:

    The professional's attitude is or ought to be one of 
    "tuism" - in other words, he is concerned, through 
    beneficence coupled with integrity, to promote the 
    interests of his clients.
    [Ethics in Education, by David Fenner, 1999.]

The plural equivalent of illeism is nosism (from Latin "nos", we), 
referring to oneself as "we", something not much heard even from 
royalty these days ("We are not amused"). However it's often still 
called the "royal we". It can also be the "editorial we", since 
commentators like to use it in the hope that they will sound like 
spokespeople for the public, or at least the organisation for which 
they write. Nosisms can be heard from patronising doctors or nurses 
("How are we feeling this morning? Any better?") or in sarcastic 
comments ("Well, well! Aren't we looking awfully chic tonight?").


3. Wordface
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LOOKING BACK  If you have a secret yearning for the good old days 
and a general distaste for our contemporary culture, you may be a 
retrophile. Retrophiles yearn for the simplicity of earlier times, 
without all those complicated electronics that seem to be taking us 
over, when people were polite to one another and strangers didn't 
call you by your first name and when films had plots rather than 
just sequences of computer-generated mayhem. The condition is called 
retrophilia.

RAGE AGAIN  Observers of neologisms had begun to hope that the craze 
of the 1990s for compounds of "rage" had gone for ever. Terms like 
"road rage", "trolley rage", "computer rage" and their like are now 
rarely seen. One has reappeared widely: "Muslim rage". It refers 
particularly to protests in Islamic countries against the amateur 
video Innocence of Muslims. The term has actually been in use since 
the early 1990s and may have originated in an essay by the Islamic 
scholar Bernard Lewis in Atlantic magazine in 1990.

EXAM CHANGES  The acronym EBACC (said as "e-back") began to appear 
in British sources in 2011 but has been widely discussed this month. 
The coalition government announced it was scrapping existing school 
examinations for 16-year-olds in England and Wales and replace them 
in 2017 with the English Baccalaureate Certificate. This is designed 
on a European model and intended to test English, sciences, history, 
mathematics, geography and languages. Older Brits who delight in it 
because it reminds them of the School Certificate of their youth may 
be accused of retrophilia.


4. Q and A: Fit to be tied
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Q. Do you have anything on the origins of "fit to be tied"? [Stephen 
Wilder]

A. Just a few notes and comments ...

It's a puzzling slang expression, largely because it's hard to be 
sure which of the many adjectival senses of "fit" is appearing here. 
It isn't the one that means in good physical condition ("are you 
feeling fit?"), nor being sufficiently skilled or competent to take 
on a task ("it's all she's fit for"), nor matching accepted social 
standards ("a fit subject for discussion"), nor deserving or worthy 
("a book fit to be read"), least of all the mainly British slang 
sense of being sexually attractive ("she's fit!"). 

All these go back to the first sense of "fit" in English in the 
fourteenth century of something well adapted or suitable. It's 
probably from the Middle Dutch "fitten", which is related to the Old 
Norse "fitja", to knit. If Norse knitting came out right, it was 
presumably "fit for purpose".

We have several similar expressions to yours in the language, in all 
of which "fit" has rather broad meanings, very roughly "ready; about 
to; likely to". These include "fit to bust" (or "burst"), to do 
something with great energy ("he was laughing fit to burst"); "fit 
to drop", worn out or exhausted ("I worked till I was fit to drop"); 
and "fit to kill", doing something to excess, especially in fashion 
("she was dressed fit to kill"), though this is now usually heard as 
"dressed to kill". Older ones that have now vanished include "fit to 
freeze", extremely cold ("it was fit to freeze the very marrow in 
one's bones"), and "fit to sink", to be alarmed or ashamed ("I was 
fit to sink with fear that the bomb would explode"). Most of these 
are found in British and American writings going back to the 
beginning of the nineteenth century.

"Fit to be tied" means to be extremely angry. The idea behind it is 
that the person so described is in such a state of emotional excess 
that they need to be restrained to protect themselves or others. 
Luckily, most people described as fit to be tied are no more than 
extremely annoyed and the risk of violence is merely figurative.

The earliest examples I've found are these, respectively from the UK 
and the US:

    It is amusing to mark the rage and disappointment of 
    the Courier. ... "It is absolutely fit to be tied."
    [The Champion and Sunday Review (London), 15 Aug. 1819. 
    The quotes indicate it is considered very slangy.]
    
    
    [Two young women and their beaux are teasing their 
    chaperone on a train journey.] Shortly they were whisked 
    into a tunnel and all was darkness. "Smack? smack!" from 
    Cromwell, and ditto ditto from the Muffin as he faithfully 
    imitated loud kissing. It was pitch dark, and the old lady 
    was "fit to be tied." "Girls, what are you about?"
    [Wisconsin Democrat (Madison, Wisconsin), 1 Sep 
    1849.]


5. Sic!
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Bob Johnson tells us that on 24 September, The Weekly Standard of 
Maryland wrote about speed cameras, "it seems that residents ... are 
not taking this effort to squeeze money out of them for the crime of 
commuting lying down". Bob considers that lying down would be a fine 
way to commute.

This headline appeared over a story dated 24 September which Fr Eric 
Funston found on the website of KREM 2 News of Spokane, Washington 
state: "Woman found guilty of killing husband for second time".

"Funny how a missing comma creates a child prodigy," Claude Baudoin 
commented, having seen a sentence in The Houston Chronicle of 20 
September: "The 31-year-old Pasadena native, husband and father of a 
3-year-old who works as a freelance writer and sheet music salesman 
when not on stage ..."

Chris Smith, Peter Chase and Kathy Rowe all sent in the opening 
sentence of a story of 21 September in the Newport Plain Talk of 
Tennessee: "April Dawn Peters ... was charged with aggravated 
assault after she allegedly hit a man on his head at least five 
times with a hammer that she was having sex with."

"If at first you don't succeed", was Myron Linder's comment on an 
engagement announcement in the Las Cruces Sun-News of New Mexico on 
23 September, in which proud parents announced the "fourth coming 
marriage of their son".


6. Useful information
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ABOUT THIS E-MAGAZINE: World Wide Words is written and published by 
Michael Quinion in the UK. ISSN 1470-1448. Copyediting and advice 
are provided by Julane Marx in the US and Robert Waterhouse in the 
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