World Wide Words -- 19 Apr 14
Michael Quinion
michael.quinion at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Thu Apr 17 22:02:00 UTC 2014
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WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 878 Saturday 19 April 2014
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Odd.
3. Wordface.
4. Bug letter.
5. Sic!
6. Useful information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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GRAVE AS A MUSTARD POT Doug Lavin emailed to suggest that the idiom
"refers to a common thing on the table which is silent and unmoving
and so may appear grave, but has no gravitas at all."
Gary Mason noted that the earliest example of "mustard pot" in the
Oxford English Dictionary is by John Wycliffe, the first translator
of the Bible into English. In modern English, it says dismissively
"These letters are fine to cover mustard pots but not to create
happiness in people." The OED notes this was "echoed by Protestant
controversialists in the 16-17th centuries" and came about because
pots of prepared mustard were covered in parchment to keep out the
air. It would seem "mustard pot" had taken on a scornful sense of
useless disquisition, as one might expect from the academic lawyers
or philosophers of the period. It might then have moved towards the
sense of serious or authoritative, on the way losing its sarcastic
implications. We're guessing here but it feels plausible.
Candida Frith-Macdonald points out that there was a fashion in the
nineteenth century to produce mustard pots in the form of an owl. As
an owl is supposed to be a wise and serious bird, there would seem
to be a connection. However, the idiom is old enough that it is most
likely that the owl designs followed the idiom rather than being its
source. By the way, several readers noted the coincidence of names
between that of George Colman the Second, the playwright I cited in
the piece, and Jeremiah Colman, who founded the famous manufacturer
of mustard and other condiments, Colmans of Norwich, in 1814. So far
as I can discover, there's no link between the two men.
BLENDED ANIMALS Gordana Lalić-Krstin emailed from Serbia with two
papers she wrote in 2008 on names for cross-bred dogs and crosses of
other animals. Her detailed research identified 510 of the former
and 103 of the latter. She notes that it's conventional, though not
universal, to make the sire's name the first element to distinguish
between animals of different parentage, so that for example "liger"
is the offspring of a male lion and a tigress, while a "tigon" is
the other way round. So we can tell immediately that "zonkey" is a
male zebra crossed with a female donkey. Among her rarer findings
are "cama", a hybrid between a male dromedary camel and a female
llama, and "zorse", from a zebra stallion and a horse mare. As to
the dogs, the mind reels a little when contemplating their number.
Two examples are "mastador" (mastiff + labrador) and the difficult-
to-pronounce "basschshund" (basset hound + dachshund).
HODMANDOD Several readers forwarded a reference in Alfred Watkins'
book of 1925, The Old Straight Track, about the ancient tracks or
ley lines that he believed criss-cross the British Isles. Richard
Mellish wrote, "He had a theory that the original dodman was a
surveyor carrying two poles, used to establish a sightline from one
hilltop to another. The snail, with its 'horns', would thus have
been named after the man with his poles. Your information about the
word 'dod' for a hilltop would support the theory." However, Watkins
derived the word from the Welsh 'dodi', to lay or place, and from
"dodge", associating it with the actions of a surveyor moving his
surveying rod back and forth until it accurately lined up with
another one.
STITCHED UP LIKE A KIPPER Jim Delaney wrote, "In the days before
everything was shrink-wrapped in impermeable plastic, a kipper (more
usually a pair of kippers) sold loose would be wrapped closely and
thoroughly by the fishmonger to prevent the smell from tainting
everything else in your shopping bag or indeed your larder. It
always seemed obvious to me that the expression 'done up like a
kipper' derived from this custom of the trade."
2. Odd
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Perhaps I should resist the play on words, but "odd" really is odd.
At school, I was never able to get a good explanation why half of
all numbers were said to be odd. What was strange about 3 or 255 or
1729?
"Even" is easier to explain. It's from Old English "efen", derived
from a Germanic source, but nobody has yet been able to say for sure
whether it originally meant "level" or "equal, like". The Old
English word, however, definitely meant a flat piece of ground,
hence level or smooth. It began to be applied to numbers in the late
1500s with the idea that an even one could be divided into two equal
parts, figuratively on a level with each other. We know this because
"even" had been applied rather earlier in the century to accounts
that were in balance or square.
"Odd" began life in the various Scandinavian languages. In Old Norse
an "oddr" was a spear point, while in Old Icelandic "oddi" meant a
point or tongue of land, a word that still appears in one or two
ancient English place names. The figurative idea common to both was
a point, hence a triangle and from that the number three. In Old
Icelandic an "oddamaðr" was the third man, who had a casting vote;
English obtained "odd man out" from it. From all this came the idea
of numbers with an unpaired unit, originally the number three, that
left a remainder of one after dividing by two. "Odd" also came to
refer to an indefinite or unknown remainder above a round number
such as ten, a dozen or 100, giving us phrases like "her 50-odd
years" and "the book has 300-odd pages" as well as "odds and ends"
for miscellaneous remnants, stuff left over. It can also be a single
item left over, as when we say that a game was won by the odd goal.
The plural "odds" came to mean unequal things and then an abstract
noun for inequality or difference, as in "it makes no odds". Two
contending parties may be said to be "at odds" with each other. The
difference might be the extent to which one has superior capability
or strength, which led to the probability that some contest or game
would have a particular result, and from there to "odds" in the
gambling sense. It turns up in other places, too, such as "odds-on"
for something likely to happen.
Our common modern sense of an odd person being peculiar or strange
is a development of the old idea of "odd man out" that began to be
recorded in the late sixteenth century. Though he didn't invent it,
Shakespeare is an early user in Love's Labour's Lost in 1598: "He is
too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd as it were."
3. Wordface
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GOOD GRIEF Doug Hyden asked about the origin of "Good Friday" for
the Christian festival and wonders if "good" is a corruption of
"God", in the same way that "goodbye" is a corruption of "God be
with you". The evidence shows it isn't. "Good" is on record from the
eleventh century as being attached to somebody who was pious or
devout, religiously praiseworthy; the Bible was being referred to as
the Good Book from the seventeenth century; and the "good tides",
where "tide" has the sense of a fixed point during the year, were
Christian festivals such as Christmas (Christmastide), Shrove
Tuesday (Shrovetide) and Easter (Eastertide). Good Wednesday is an
old term for the Wednesday before Easter and Good Friday follows the
same pattern.
BRICKING IT Bernard Ashby asked about the colloquial Australian
expression "London to a brick", which he found in a report in the
Sydney Morning Herald recently. It's an exaggerated version of
phrases such as "it's a pound to a penny", meaning that the odds on
something happening are very great. Bruce Moore, currently editor of
the Australian National Dictionary, wrote about it in a glossary of
racing slang in Ozwords in October 1996, saying that the Sydney
racing commentator Ken Howard is credited with it: "'Brick' was
Australian slang for a £10 note (from its reddish colour), and so
if, towards the end of a race, Howard claimed that the odds of a
particular horse winning were 'London to a brick', he was saying
that the horse was at extreme odds-on, with an indisputable chance."
It may just possibly have been an oblique reference to the London
Brick Company, a very well-known maker whose products are to be
found in many houses in the South and Midlands of England.
4. Bug letter
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Q. When working for a large organisation, we would sometimes send
complaining customers a "bug letter". This was one contrived to seem
like a one-off personal response to a complaint, but was generally
sent out en masse to a number of complainants. Have you come across
this usage? [Richard Moseley]
A. I know of it. One example:
No one even gets the courtesy of "the bug letter" these
days. These days, what the consumer mostly gets is
neglect.
[Elyria Chronicle-Telegram (Ohio), 26 Sep. 2000.]
I remember a tale several decades ago about a customer complaining
to a British airline (BOAC, I think) about finding a cockroach on
board; this ended with his receiving an earnest apology, spoiled by
a scrawled note on his original complaint, accidentally included,
"Send this idiot the cockroach letter."
You mentioned that its origin is supposedly an incident in which the
American Pullman Car Company had received a complaint about a bug
infestation in one of its sleeping cars. The reply had accidentally
and similarly included an instruction to a secretary.
In The Baby Train and Other Lusty Urban Legends, the folklorist Jan
Harold Brunvand mentions a letter in the Princeton Alumni Magazine
of 5 February 1992 which claims to substantiate this story. It gave
detailed information about the supposed incident, in particular that
it took place on 4 March 1889 and involved Mr Phineas P Jenkins, a
salesman of pig-iron products for the Monongahela Ironworks Company
of Pittsburgh, who was travelling in a Pullman car on the New York
Central Railroad and found that his berth was infested with bedbugs.
He was said to have received a hugely apologetic and detailed reply:
The car was located on March 8th, immediately removed
from passenger service and sidetracked in a remote area
until it could be transported by a specially dispatched
locomotive to our maintenance facility at Alton, Illinois.
There, it has been stripped of all furnishings. The
bedding, upholstery, curtains, carpet and all other
combustible materials have been burned. The toilets and
their fixtures have been scrubbed down and sterilized with
carbolic acid. By the time you receive this letter, the
car will have been fumigated and steam cleaned from end to
end.
The effect was spoiled, the writer went on, because enclosed with
the letter was a hand-written note by George Pullman, "Sarah - send
this S! O! B! the 'bedbug letter'".
The writer to the Princeton Alumni Magazine identified himself as
"corresponding secretary of the George Mortimer Pullman Encomium
Society, Appalachian Branch". The letter reads too much like an
elaborate leg-pull to be trusted, particularly as I can find no
other reference to the wonderfully named Society, the Ironworks or
the Pullman company's Alton works.
The first example of the story that I know about, which Peter Morris
unearthed, is in a 1916 issue of an American periodical, Southern
Hardware, but only the punchline is visible, not the preceding text.
The next is in the Lowell Sun for 24 February 1917:
The passenger who complained to a western railroad that
he had to sit up all night in the smoking compartment,
rather than share his berth with a fine line of bedbugs,
received an abject apology. The letter was so courteous
and reasonable he felt that he had been rather curt and
fault-finding. Through error his original letter had been
returned with the letter of apology. Looking at it, he saw
scrawled across the top this blue pencil endorsement:
'Send this guy the bed-bug letter'.
It would seem that if the incident had ever happened, it had by this
date already passed into folklore. Many other examples have appeared
since, whose details have changed to fit contemporary circumstances.
By 1944, the term had become a generic one for any formal response:
An average of 2,200 requests for November general
election ballots are received each day from service men
and women in all parts of the world. ... Some of the cards
are not properly filled out and smooth future procedure is
hindered. These are returned to the senders with a form
letter, titled the "Bedbug" letter by the secretary of
state office workers.
[Racine Journal-Times (Wisconsin), 25 Aug. 1944.]
My gut feeling is that there never was a real incident that set this
urban legend in motion. It's so obviously a classic of the type. As
Jan Harold Brunvand says of others that he documents, such as the
Vanishing Hitchhiker, it has a strong and entertaining story, it's
believable, and it contains a meaningful message or moral, in this
case that people in authority tell lies, or perhaps - at the very
least - that the senders of such letters should take more care what
they're doing.
5. Sic!
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Doran Williams saw this in the Daily Mail of 12 April: "Men carrying
AK-47s and handguns were pictured at an increasingly large tent camp
in southern Nevada that has been set up in protest at the Bureau of
Land Management's attempt to confiscate cattle from a rancher who
has been working the land for centuries."
Don Donovan tells us that he had heard a New Zealand TV reporter say
that an underwater submarine was being used for the Malaysian
Airliner search.
A description on the Essential British Gardens website of the rose
garden at Castle Howard in Yorkshire was spotted by Jack Harvey:
"James Russell started the garden in 1975 and occupies a large
square area that has long been devoted to vegetables."
6. Useful information
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