World Wide Words -- 10 Aug 13
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Aug 9 16:12:17 UTC 2013
--------------------------------------------------------------------
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 844 Saturday 10 August 2013
--------------------------------------------------------------------
This mailing also contains an HTML-formatted version.
A formatted version is also available online at
http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/yxcx.htm
Contents
--------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Velleity.
3. Agog.
4. Sic!
5. Subscriptions and other information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
--------------------------------------------------------------------
PONY UP Readers pointed out that are a number of competing theories
exist for why "pony" should have become associated with money. We
may disregard the one that says £25 was the cost of a small horse in
the eighteenth century, as that would have been a hugely inflated
price. David Coe reminded me of the widely believed story that it
derives from the days of the Raj, when the 25-rupee Indian banknote
was said to have had a picture of a horse on it. Nobody, so far as I
know, has ever found an example of such a note. (The same applies to
"monkey", slang for £500, which is said to have derived from the
500-rupee note.)
Amy Livingston mentioned another story, that "pony" is a shortened
form of the Latin words "legem pone" (in the second, the vowels are
roughly as in English "hot" and "met"), the first two words of the
fifth part of Psalm 119. Its first line is "Legem pone mihi Domine
viam iustificationum tuarum" ("Teach me, O Lord, the way of thy
statutes"). The Oxford English Dictionary says that this used to
begin the psalms at Matins on the 25th day of the month. It became
linked in particular with 25 March, the first quarter day of the
year, and hence to the settlement of debts. The OED adds that it
became used "as an allusive expression for payment of money or cash
down". It appears for the first time in Thomas Tusser's A Hundreth
Good Pointes of Husbandry of 1570. The OED has no citations after
1694, which is a century before "pony" starts to be recorded in its
monetary sense. Caution is needed because of the gap, but as "pone"
was said very much like "pony", the abbreviation of "legem pone"
followed by creation of the noun and verb seem so probable as to be
almost inevitable. It's notable that in many of the early examples
the word is spelled "poney", implying that its users knew it was not
the same word as "pony".
This may have blended with the idea of a pony being a small horse
and by extension a small amount of anything. This can be traced back
to the early eighteenth century, when "pony" is first recorded in
the sense of a small measure of alcohol. This sense is still known.
Walter Frank pointed out: "in Australia a pony of beer is the
smallest measure available." Larry Larson wrote, "A quarter-size keg
of beer is referred to as a 'pony keg' in the US."
Further to my mention of "Spanish" as a slang term for money, Nick
Humez commented, "The shortage of hard currency in the American
colonies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was so
acute that Spanish dollars (8-real coins) circulated, many of them
booty from privateering, and were widely used in lieu of, and even
in preference to, British money. If so, there may be even earlier
attestations for 'Spanish' than Grose awaiting discovery on both
sides of the pond." Emery Fletcher added, "I think you'll find that
in the US, actual Spanish-coined silver dollars were in use as late
as the last decades of the nineteenth century, possibly even more
recently in the Southwest. Around here in New Mexico, 'pony up the
Spanish' might have sounded contemporary into the 1940s."
2. Velleity /vE:'li:ItI/
--------------------------------------------------------------------
This is mere inclination, a wish or desire that lacks the strength
to overcome personal inertia. It is the ultimate inaction, far more
so than procrastination, which is merely the postponement of action
you know to be necessary. If you make a new year's resolution to get
fit but never even look into joining a gym, that's velleity. If a
notion to write a novel intrigues you, but you do nothing about it,
that's velleity.
Congress often contents itself with enacting
"velleities" such as the wish in the 900-page Dodd-Frank
financial reform act that "all consumers have access to
markets for consumer financial products and services ...
(that are) fair, transparent, and competitive."
[The Virginian-Pilot, 7 Jun. 2012.]
If the wish is father to the deed then velleity is childless. It is
the impotent relative of "volition", using one's will. Surprisingly
for two near opposites, "velleity" and "volition" share an origin.
Both are from the Latin irregular verb "velle", to will or wish,
though "volition" comes directly from "volo", I wish. The English
word "benevolent" is from the same verb, literally well-wishing.
You'll not find it much used, as it's restricted to those with large
vocabularies or the readiness to browse the less travelled pages of
dictionaries.
3. Agog
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. I am all agog to discover the derivation of "agog". [Gordon Keen]
A. Neatly put ...
It comes, like much of our language, from French. Middle French had
"gogue", entertainment, fun or amusement. From this developed "en
gogues", in good humour. English took it in and gave it a home, but
changed the first element to "on" and then to "a-", at the same time
shortening the unpronounced ending.
It's not a word that many people know or use. Standard dictionaries
say it has the sense that you're using - eager or curious to hear or
see something. "All agog" ("I was all agog to discover who the new
Dr Who would be") has an air of bouncy immature anticipation about
it that makes it difficult to use in serious contexts.
Looking around, I discovered that because it is uncommon but rather
a fun word to throw out, "agog" is having serious identity issues.
Typical of recent usage was a headline in the Irish Times in 2011,
"Americans left agog at confused cruelty of Irish abortion law". To
me, "agog" can't mean "astonished", but its entry in the Oxford
English Dictionary, revised in 2012, says it now can. There's also
the alliterative compound "agog and aghast", or "aghast and agog",
which seems destined to become a set phrase:
The discovery that Frankie Dettori had failed a drugs
test, at Longchamp in September, left his peers agog and
aghast.
[The Independent, 15 Nov 2012.]
This feels quite wrong - "agog" for me lacks the implications of
shock and horror that accompany "aghast". Might its users have been
confusing it with "goggle"?
Incidentally, a related Middle French form was "à gogo", joyfully or
uninhibitedly, probably formed from "gogue" by reduplication. This
is still in the language and appeared in Paris in 1952 in the name
of the nightclub and pioneering discotheque called the Whisky à Gogo
(that is, Whisky Galore, presumably from the film of the book of the
same title by Compton Mackenzie). The entertainment format became
fashionable and it and the name were brought into English, leading
to the modified version "a-go-go" appearing all over the place
during the 1960s as a fashionable creation.
4. Sic!
--------------------------------------------------------------------
"A nice homonym appeared in the Express and Star of Wolverhampton on
2 August," Alan Harrison reported. "The valuables stolen in a
burglary included a 'cygnet ring'."
A story of 2 August in the Press-Telegram of Long Beach, California
about a sandwich contest at a market caught the eye of Kitty Fries:
"Janet Swenson, a 52-year-old resident of Fallbrook, brought a filet
mignon goat cheese sandwich to the table. 'It's something you can
drink with a beer or cabernet,' Swenson said."
Jane Irish Nelson came across this sentence in Murder for Choir by
Joelle Charbonneau (in which Killer is a poodle): "Killer gave the
officers the evil eye as they walked past him gnawing on a doughnut-
shaped rawhide."
Peter Mortimer found this cricket report on the BBC website on 3
August: "On three occasions, thick inside edges avoided the stumps
and raced to the fence, while a brace of airy heaves into the leg
side somehow dissected the outfielders."
5. Useful information
--------------------------------------------------------------------
ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER: 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 by Robert Waterhouse in
Europe. Any residual errors are the fault of the author. The linked
website is http://www.worldwidewords.org.
SUBSCRIPTIONS: The website provides all the tools you need to manage
your own subscription. Please don't contact me asking for changes
you can make yourself, though if problems occur you can e-mail me at
wordssubs at worldwidewords.org. To change your subscribed address,
leave the list or re-subscribe, go to http://wwwords.org?SUBS. This
newsletter is also available on RSS (http://wwwords.org?RSSFD) and
on Twitter (http://wwwords.org?TWTTR). Back issues are available via
http://wwwords.org?BKISS.
E-MAIL CONTACT ADDRESSES: Comments on newsletter mailings are always
welcome. They should be sent to wordseditor at worldwidewords.org. I do
try to respond, but pressures of time often prevent me from doing
so. Items for the Sic! section should go to sic at worldwidewords.org.
Questions intended to be answered in the Q and A section should be
sent to wordsquestions at worldwidewords.org, not to me directly.
SUPPORT WORLD WIDE WORDS: If you have enjoyed this newsletter and
would like to help defray its costs and those of the linked Web
site, please visit the support page via http://wwwords.org?SPPRT .
COPYRIGHT: World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2013. All
rights reserved. You may reproduce this newsletter in whole or part
in free newsletters, newsgroups or mailing lists or as educational
resources provided that you include the copyright notice above and
give the web address of http://www.worldwidewords.org. Reproduction
of items in printed publications or commercial websites requires
permission from the author beforehand.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/worldwidewords/attachments/20130809/bdbfa0b3/attachment.htm>
More information about the WorldWideWords
mailing list