World Wide Words -- 12 Apr 14
Michael Quinion
michael.quinion at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Thu Apr 10 22:02:00 UTC 2014
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WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 877 Saturday 12 April 2014
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Hodmandod.
3. Wordface.
4. Stitched up like a kipper.
5. Sic!
6. Useful information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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WACKAGING Alison Williams responded: "My gut objection to your
complaint soon solidified as I thought of the enormous volume of
poetic examples known as 'personification', or maybe under the
heading 'anthropomorphism'. Do you not agree that there is a valid
path between 'Blow winds and crack your cheeks' and 'Hello, please
refrigerate me immediately'? If you can address a thing and imagine
it as an object, why not imagine the response?"
Many readers pointed out early examples of packaging that speaks to
you in the first person. Some reminded me of Eat Me dates, a brand
that long predates Innocent smoothies. The most famous examples must
be those encountered by Alice - a bottle labelled Drink Me and a
cake labelled Eat Me - about which she was rightly suspicious. But
it would be a calumny on Lewis Carroll to place the current fashion
for cutesy product blubs on his shoulders.
On my comment about buses now being signed, "I'm not in service",
Jill Williams responded, "To add insult to injury, some buses in
Glasgow display their non-availability in dialect: 'Ah'm no' in
service'."
2. Hodmandod
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A traditional English riddle runs
Though not a cow I have horns;
Though not an ass I carry a pack-saddle;
And wherever I go I leave silver behind me.
The answer, in a curious little southern English dialect word, sadly
long since defunct, is hodmandod - in everyday language, a snail.
Before a snail was a hodmandod, it was a dodman, whose origin is
puzzling, but may be related to the rare word "dod" for a rounded,
bare hilltop; this comes from the Middle English "dodden", to make
the top of something bare, an activity you will agree definitely
needs its own verb. The snail's shell might have been fancifully
compared to a bare hilltop. "Dodman" became extended through what
Malcolm Jones described in Dialect in Wiltshire as a "childish,
part-rhyming reduplication" to make "hoddy-doddy" and "hodmandod".
But "dodman" has outlived its extended relative and is still to be
found in Norfolk dialect.
The earliest example of "hodmandod" on record is in a work by the
famously arrogant and pedantic Elizabethan lawyer and writer Gabriel
Harvey. When he moved to London from his home town of Saffron Walden
(where saffron was once widely cultivated), he managed to get
involved in an interminable series of controversial exchanges with
some of the best pamphleteers of his time, including John Lyly and
Thomas Nashe. Gabriel Harvey responded to a scornful putdown of his
brother Thomas by Nashe, describing the latter in crude insults as
... the son of a mule, a raw grammarian, a brabbling
sophister, a counterfeit crank, a stale rake-hell, a
piperly rimer, a stump-worn railer, a dodkin author, whose
two swords are like the horns of a hodmandod; whose
courage [is] like the fury of a gad-bee; and whose
surmounting bravery, like the wings of a butterfly.
[Pierce's Supererogation, or a New Praise of the Old
Ass, by Gabriel Harvey, 1593. The spelling is modernised,
but not the vocabulary; "brabbling" meant hair-
splitting.]
Somehow, perhaps through a mental association with a hunchback, the
word also came to mean a deformed person:
His head was thrice broader than his body, which
fortunate accident had made such a hodmandod one of the
greatest philosophers of this age; but it had also given
the appearance of one of those rude and grotesque figures
which German wit carves out for a humorous pair of
nutcrackers.
[The Spirit of the Public Journals, 1807.]
Some writers have confused "dodman" with "dudman", a scarecrow. The
latter looks like a mere variation but its senses show that it must
have a different origin, though nobody knows what it is. We do know
that it comes from "duds" in the sense of clothing, which came to
refer particularly to rags and tatters. "Duds" is also the source of
"dud" in the sense of something counterfeit, useless or broken.
3. Wordface
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PASS, MUSTARD Connie Mcinnis emailed. She had been combing the
internet without success for the origin of the phrase "as grave as a
mustard pot". She doesn't mention where she found it but it must
have been in a publication of some antiquity as it has been out of
fashion for more than a century. In her form there are numerous
examples in British, Australian and American sources from the 1830s
onwards. A slightly different version appears in George Colman the
Younger's play The Heir at Law of 1797: "Look ye, you grave mustard-
pot of a philosopher!" But why should a mustard pot be thought
serious or solemn? I have not the slenderest clue.
BLENDED BEASTS From time to time, I've noted the tendency for dog
breeders to create quaint names for crossbreeds, such as labradoodle
and cockapoo. The same linguistic blending process has been used to
name naturally occurring animals such as the tigon and liger (lion +
tiger), terms which date from the 1920s. This week, I came across a
weirder example: "lijagulep", a lion crossed with a jaguar crossed
with a leopard. In 1908 an animal of this breeding was displayed at
the London Zoo as a Congolese spotted lion, but was shown to be a
hybrid. But the name "lijagulep" for it is much more recent, as are
others that Neil Patrick Stewart listed in Fact. Fact. Bullsh*t! of
2011: "My favorites are the lijagulep, the result of a male lion
mating with a female jagupard or leguar, and the leoligulor, the
result of a male leopon (which is actually fertile) mating with a
liguar."
4. Stitched up like a kipper
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Q. Do you have any ideas on where the phrase "stitched up like a
kipper" (and "stitch up", which I presume is an abbreviation), comes
from? Despite searching the internet I have not found a convincing
answer. [Sophie Yauner]
A. I have to confess to twitching whenever anybody mentions kippers.
A few years ago, I did a radio piece for an American radio programme
on another kipper-related expression. After my detailed exposition,
there was a silence and then the presenter said, "That's all very
interesting ... but, what's a kipper?"
So I must begin by explaining that kippers, traditionally part of
the British breakfast, are herrings that have been split, gutted,
lightly salted and cured by cold smoking. Anybody describing himself
or somebody else as kippered is suggesting that he's figuratively
"dead, gutted, skinned and cooked", in other words thoroughly
exploited or taken advantage of.
Eric Partridge suggested that the plain verb, "kipper", had been
used from the 1920s in the sense of having one's chances ruined. But
a longer version "done up like a kipper" starts to appear in the
record in 1981, in a script of the BBC television comedy show Only
Fools and Horses.
This is a recent example:
And being what is known as "an innocent abroad", he had
signed a number of rapidly drawn-up contracts and been
"done up like a kipper", which is to say, "taken to the
cleaners", which is to say, swindled.
[Nostradamus Ate My Hamster, by Robert Rankin,
1996.]
However, John Bagnall, one of the group of volunteers who sanity-
check the draft of this newsletter each week, recalls that both this
version and yours were around earlier in the spoken language:
I was chief press officer for EMI Records in the mid
1970s and recall "done up like a kipper" and "stitched up
like a kipper" being in popular record/music industry
usage around that time. Its chief proponent within EMI was
Eric Hall, then EMI's chief radio and TV "plugger"
(promotions man). The specific sense in which I often
heard or used them was that of being left with no room for
manoeuvre or scope for negotiation ("I thought the costs
would be shared but their lawyer had found a clause in the
contract that said we had to pay for everything; I tried
to negotiate but he'd got me stitched up like a kipper").
The "done up" version almost certainly came first but was soon
combined with the slightly older "stitched up", criminal slang for
having been falsely incriminated by the police through methods such
as planting evidence or faking confessions. The result, "stitched up
like a kipper", is wonderful nonsense, as it's one fate the hapless
herring can hardly expect to suffer.
Well, it now transpires that poor [Andrew] Mitchell may
have been stitched up like a kipper by a copper, because
part of the email evidence against him was fabricated by
an officer pretending to be an ordinary civilian who had
witnessed the altercation.
[The Sun, 20 Dec. 2012.]
5. Sic!
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"Not everything is bigger in Texas," Daniel Lavin commented, having
seen a warning the National Weather Service issued on 4 April for
the Corpus Christi area of the state: "At 4:28 am CDT, trained
weather spotters reported a severe thunderstorm the size of golf
balls."
The Telegraph reported about a BBC programme covering lambing time.
"The crew filmed the third series of the programme from March 24 to
March 28, where they focussed on the Dykes - a family that has been
sheep for three generations."
A review from the Fit for a Pig blog of a restaurant in Sydney's
Fish Markets sounded messy to Alan Eason: "Bite-sized prawns encased
within the glistening rice noodle roll formed the signature camel
humps that we all have come to recognize. Sitting in a pool of sweet
soy sauce, I picked up a roll hoping to find satisfaction in a meal
of disappointment."
6. Useful information
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ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER: World Wide Words is researched, written and
published by Michael Quinion in the UK. ISSN 1470-1448. Copyediting
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