World Wide Words -- 02 Mar 13

Fri Mar 1 16:49:52 UTC 2013

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WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 821            Saturday 2 March 2013
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Toffee-nosed.
3. Refocillate.
4. Hate-watching.
5. Sic!
6. Subscriptions and other information.

1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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DEFENESTRATION  Readers pointed out that I had omitted to note that 
there had been a defenestration in Prague in 1419 before the famous 
one of 1618 and that there have been others during the Communist era 
when dissidents suffered that fate, the best known being that of Jan 
Masaryk in 1948.

Cal White, Mitch Marks and Ant Allan all mentioned that they'd first 
come across the word in The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch, one 
of the Tales from the White Hart written by Arthur C Clarke: "All we 
know is that she went out of the apartment window, and of course it 
could have been an accident - but there was no way of asking her, as 
the Inches lived four storeys up. I know that defenestration is 
usually deliberate, and the Coroner had some pointed words to say on 
the subject."

"As you will likely be told by other computer-literate readers," 
emailed Al Sharka, "defenestration (as a pun) also refers to the 
removal of the default Microsoft Windows operating system that comes 
bundled with your PC, usually to install some version of Linux 
instead."

WHALE OF A TIME  Many subscribers mentioned that a big spender at a 
casino is known as a whale, presumably from the size of his wallet. 
The verbal use of "whale", to beat or flog (as in "whaling the tar 
out of somebody"), which others asked about, has a different origin. 
It's a variant spelling of the old verb "wale", to mark the flesh 
with the streaks or ridges once called "wales" (not "whales", let 
alone "Wales"), which survives for the ridges on corduroy, as in 
"wide-wale corduroy". These days, we commonly spell "wales" as 
"weals". 

2. Toffee-nosed
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Q. Someone from America asked me about "toffee-nosed", and I found a 
couple of derivations on the Internet, but they were unsatisfactory. 
Can you help? [Brenda Ferner, UK]

A. Americans don't much know this slang term - its constituency is 
mainly Britain and Australia. It's rude, describing a pretentiously 
superior, supercilious, snobbish or arrogant person.

    And while the politicians pushing this £32billion [high-
    speed rail] project would have us believe the people 
    fighting it are all toffee-nosed, middleclass landowners 
    living in country piles in affluent Cheshire, that simply 
    isn't true.
    [Sunday Mirror, 3 Feb. 2013.]

One rather splendid suggestion about its origin came from a British 
journalist some years ago. He argued it was WAAF (Women's Auxiliary 
Air Force) slang from the Second World War and referred to a facial 
expression caused by trying to disengage a toffee from your molars 
while keeping your mouth shut so as not to be noticed. "Inevitably, 
you are 'looking down your nose', the traditional long-faced and 
disapproving expression of snobs." 

Ingenious, but untrue. We can say this with certainty because the 
written evidence suggests that it was created in the First World 
War. Right context, wrong war. The issue of Notes and Queries for 10 
December 1921 includes an article with the title English Army Slang 
as Used in the Great War. It has the entry: "TOFFEE-NOSED. Stuck up. 
(Trenches.)" The trenches would be those in Belgium and northern 
France during the war. A services origin is supported by a quotation 
in Jonathon Green's Dictionary of Slang: it's dated 1922 and is from 
The Mint, a brutal but faithful record of life at that time in the 
Royal Air Force, written by J H Ross, a pseudonym of T E Lawrence, 
better known as Lawrence of Arabia. It also appears in a compilation 
of Soldier and Sailor Words and Phrases by Edward Fraser and John 
Gibbons of 1925, in which it is likewise defined as "stuck-up", a 
slang term of the time for the supposed nose-in-air attitude of the 
supercilious.

The origin has nothing to do with toffee but is "toff", a common 
slang term of the previous half century for a person who was well-
dressed to the point of being showy or flashy. This derives from 
"tuft", Oxford and Cambridge slang for aristocratic undergraduates 
who marked their status by a gold tassel on their academic squares, 
the headgear commonly called mortarboards. This led to "tufthunter" 
for a toadying or sycophantic follower, which I wrote about some 
years ago (http://wwwords.org?TUFT). 

"Tuft" seems to have become "toft" and then "toff", followed by the 
invention of the adjective "toffy", ending up with "toffy-nosed", a 
form used by some early writers. Through folk etymology the less 
familiar "toffy" became the commonplace "toffee".

3. Refocillate   /ri:'fQs(I)leIt/
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The initial syllable of this verb tells us that whatever action is 
being described is happening again. The word's core derives from the 
Latin "focus", a domestic hearth (the direct source of our word for 
a centre of interest or activity). The re-warming implied here is 
not literal but figurative, a revival or refreshment of the spirit 
or the senses.

The number of writers who have used it may be counted, if not on the 
fingers of one hand, then certainly on two. The first known was 
Thomas Coryate of Odcombe in Somerset, an inveterate traveller who 
died in India aged 40. A decade earlier he traversed much of Europe, 
frequently on foot, and published an early travel book in 1611, 
Coryates Crudities, which he announced was "Hastily gobled up in 
five Moneths travells in France, Savoy, Italy, Rhetia commonly 
called the Orisons country, Helvetia alias Switzerland, some parts 
of high Germany and the Netherlands." He visited Venice in 1608:

    It is wholly plaine, and beautified with such abundance 
    of goodly rivers, pleasant meadowes, fruitfull vineyardes, 
    fat pastures, delectable gardens, orchards, woodes, and 
    what not, that the first view thereof did even refocillate 
    my spirits, and tickle my senses with inward joy.

Here's a rare modern user:

    He thought for a moment of the things that magic had 
    accomplished in this very town. ... the innumerable wives 
    who had refocillated a dying passion in their husbands; 
    husbands who had regained the love of their wives ...
    [Time for a Tiger, by Anthony Burgess, 1956.]

4. Hate-watching
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"Hate-watching" is a neat term for watching television shows that 
you don't like but get perverse satisfaction from. But in these days 
of instant communications through social media, hate-watching isn't 
only a matter of watching stuff that's so bad it's almost cool; you 
and your friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter have to 
communally tear it to pieces to prove to each other just how bad it 
really is. What distinguishes hate-watching from guilty pleasure or 
simple displeasure is that the haters avidly watch every episode in 
order to keep on complaining.

Proto-hate-watchers have been around for decades, but net pundits 
say the term was inspired by NBC's Broadway drama Smash, which began 
in February 2012, and particularly by an article by Emily Nussbaum 
in the New Yorker on 27 April 2012. 

Some point to Aaron Sorkin's series Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip 
and Newsroom as classic TV hate-watch fodder. Brits often castigate 
Downton Abbey for its wonky plots and poor characterisation. (I 
prefer to hate its anachronisms of language and I know whereof I 
write since I've watched every episode. But I'm not a hate-watcher 
because I just shout at the telly and never post online about it. 
Well, hardly ever.) 

This is a further British view of hate-watching fodder:

    It's not just light entertainment that we "hate-watch" 
    - it's TV with pretensions. Shows in which the characters' 
    personalities change every two episodes and the scripts 
    are heavy with metaphor. ... Homeland series two, Downton 
    Abbey, Glee - these are the programmes which fuel Twitter, 
    the petrol to its engine, its users competing for the 
    drollest insult in the fewest characters in the fastest 
    time.
    [Observer, 17 Feb. 2013.]

This hate-blast suggests that you can hate-watch one-off films as 
well as television series:

    If by any chance you've recovered from seeing Lindsay 
    Lohan as Elizabeth Taylor in Lifetime's Liz & Dick, fear 
    not, because this week brings another incompetent, tawdry 
    biopic set during the waning years of Hollywood's Golden 
    Age. Alas, Sacha Gervasi's insultingly stupid Hitchcock is 
    not nearly as much fun to hate-watch, in no small part 
    because it seems to think it's being clever.
    [Philadelphia Weekly, 28 Nov. 2012.]

5. Sic!
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It was an appalling story and the Daily Telegraph's headline didn't 
help: "Patient bled to death at hospital where cuts 'put lives at 
risk'". Jos Mottershead sent that in.

Mike Lean contributed a sentence from a report to an Australian Arts 
funding body (names changed to protect the innocent): "In regards to 
the Historical Locations Game, feedback was received by Mrs Joe 
Bloggs, the mother of Andy Bloggs who won the prize and is 
attached."

A Yahoo news headline of 21 February seen by Andrew Holte: "Rapper 
Ja Rule leaves NY prison in gun case."

Ray Heindl spotted an Associated Press headline of 14 February: 
"Disabled cruise ship limps ashore as miserable passengers 
complain".

Angela Gardner found a headline over a Reuters story of 27 February 
on NBC news online (it also appeared elsewhere): "IKEA's horse meat 
worries mount". Any mount would be worried, she suggests.

6. Useful information
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