World Wide Words -- 15 Mar 14
Michael Quinion
michael.quinion at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Thu Mar 13 23:01:00 UTC 2014
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WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 873 Saturday 15 March 2014
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This mailing also contains an HTML-formatted version.
A formatted version is also available online at
http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/wfwl.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Misanthrope.
3. Wordface.
4. Brown Windsor soup.
5. Sic!
6. Useful information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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WINKLE OUT Several readers suggested that a much earlier example of
the figurative sense appeared in Sense and Sensibility, by Jane
Austen, published in 1811: "What sort of man is he, Miss Dashwood?
Is he butcher, baker, candlestick-maker? I shall winkle it out of
you somehow, you know!" Unfortunately for word sleuths, this appears
only in the 1995 film and was an invention of the scriptwriter, Emma
Thompson, who is thereby condemned to ceremonial hissing and booing
for historical linguistic inaccuracy.
Many people noted that I might also have mentioned winklepickers,
shoes with a long pointed toe. These were favoured by stylishly
dressed young British men (and some women) of the late 1950s and
early 1960s.
CLUBBING The majority response to Ted MacKinney's query last week
about "clubs hands" is that the phrase isn't colloquial American
English and so must be an unconscious blend of "club together" and
"join hands with". However, Harry Campbell found that the phrase
"clubbing hands with" does appear online in several sources, all of
them from India, where it may be an accepted expression. He also
discovered an American example from a book of 1874, Forgiveness and
Law, "To make sure against him, he undertakes to strengthen himself
by clubbing hands with his great public enemy!" This may be set
aside as an accidental one-off creation.
2. Misanthrope
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A misanthrope dislikes the human race and avoids human society as
far as possible. He - most are male - isn't an easy person to get
along with, and he would greatly prefer you didn't try.
"Misanthrope" is from the classical Greek "misanthropos". It shares
with "misogyny" and a few other words a beginning from "misein", to
hate. The second part is from "anthropos", a human being, which we
also have in words such as "anthropology". From the same source,
"philanthropy" is the opposite of misanthropy, literally a love of
mankind that expresses itself in active efforts to help other
people.
History and fiction record many misanthropes. The best-known
fictional one is Alceste, in Molière's comedy Le Misanthrope of
1666, which helped to popularise the word. The most famous real
person was Timon, though strictly speaking we have to take the word
of a couple of classical Greek writers that he actually existed. He
is said to have lived in Athens in the fifth century BC and became
known as Timon Misanthropos because he turned against people after
he lost his fortune through being too generous to his friends and
had to earn a living as an agricultural labourer. His story was
taken up by William Shakespeare; around 1606, in collaboration with
Thomas Middleton, he wrote what is probably his least popular play,
Timon of Athens:
I am Misanthropos, and hate mankind,
For thy part, I do wish thou wert a dog,
That I might love thee something.
3. Wordface
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PEDAL POWER A reader's comment attached to a Guardian story online
attracted Bill Edmonds's attention: "on your bike". This was clearly
intended in a literally dismissive sense of "go away" or "clear off"
and he wondered where it came from. It's British and dates - so far
as anybody can tell - from the 1960s, though it might be as old as
the Second World War (some connect it with the actor Jack Warner in
the days before he became PC Dixon of Dock Green). It's probably
Cockney, often as "on yer bike", rude but not obscene, a rephrasing
of the older "push off". "On your bike" become much more widely
known in the 1980s following a speech at the Conservative Party
Conference in 1981 by the then Employment Secretary, Norman Tebbit,
in which he said that his father hadn't rioted in the 1930s when
unemployed, but had "got on his bike and looked for work". It became
a catch phrase urging somebody to get a move on or make an effort.
CHICKEN RUN Dennis Vandenberg used the expression "Nobody here but
us chickens" but, when challenged, couldn't explain where it came
from. About a decade ago, an American phrase finder, Sam Clements,
unearthed an example in a 1909 issue of the Daily Northwestern of
Oshkosh, Wisconsin, which showed it to be in origin a racist joke.
A farmer, on hearing a noise in his chicken house, called out "who's
there?" to which came the reply, "Nobody here but us chickens,
massa." Another version appeared in Everybody's Magazine the
previous year with the punchline, "Deed, sah, day ain't nobody hyah
'ceptin' us chickens". It must surely be even older. The expression
was widely popularised by the 1946 number-one hit single, Ain't
Nobody Here But Us Chickens, by Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five.
DEADLINE TIME Barry Rein asked about a comment in the Economist of
6 March that Prime Minister David Cameron has been called the "essay
crisis" prime minister for his tendency to take decisions at the
last minute. It's been applied to him a number of times, at least as
early as the Independent on Sunday in October 2011: "He is an 'essay
crisis' prime minister, best at make-or-break time". The term has
been around for decades among students faced with the panic-inducing
realisation that carefree procrastination has left them needing to
produce thousands of words of relevant prose in next to no time.
4. Brown Windsor soup
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Subscriber David Procter recently alerted me to a curious culinary
and linguistic conundrum.
Brown Windsor is a British soup that rarely appears on menus these
days, though chefs such as Jamie Oliver have reinterpreted it for a
new generation. Some recent books and foodie websites salute it as a
grand old traditional dish which fuelled the nineteenth-century
middle classes and sustained the British Empire. This is one:
This hearty soup was both nourishing and popular during
the Victorian and Edwardian periods. In fact, Queen
Victoria was fond of this soup, and it was often served at
royal banquets.
[The Unofficial Downton Abbey Cookbook, by Emily Ansara
Baines, 2012.]
The problem is that nobody has found any mention of brown Windsor
soup before this:
After queuing for a quarter of an hour for a seat, he
shared a table with a woman whose idea of a suitable four
o'clock meal was brown Windsor soup followed by prunes and
custard.
[The Fancy, by Monica Dickens, 1943.]
If it was so significant a dish, why isn't it in published Victorian
menus and why isn't it mentioned in any cookery book or newspaper of
the period?
The name "brown Windsor soup" may have been a mashup of several
other terms. A Windsor soup is known from the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries and appeared on many menus, one classic recipe
requiring chopped beef, veal and bacon. White Windsor soup also
existed, a vegetable soup which a recipe of 1911 says was made from
white stock, mashed potato and sago. Some writers have used Windsor
soup for calves' feet soup, a food for invalids said to have been
served to Queen Victoria in childbed. A few very early recipes for
Windsor soup say it should include Windsor beans, presumably the
source of the name (despite one claim online, there's no connection
with the British royal family, which changed its name from Saxe-
Coburg-Gotha to Windsor only in 1917). In Victorian times dinners
might begin with a choice of brown or white soup, so named. The
former was a meat soup whose recipes broadly match those of the meat
form of Windsor soup.
There's one other possible constituent of the linguistic melange,
the similarly named brown Windsor soap. Its first appearance was in
an advertisement in the Times in 1818 and it seems to have had an
excellent reputation. It is said to have been a mixture of olive oil
and ox suet, coloured with burnt sugar or umber. It's possible that
people could have unconsciously conflated "brown soup" and "brown
Windsor soap".
Alternatively, and more plausibly, they might have been conjoined as
a humorous denigration of an inferior version of brown soup during
the austerity of the Second World War.
And I can remember - which of my generation can't? -
the particular culinary horrors of war: Woolton pie,
composed of vegetables and sausage meat more crumb than
sausage, and brown Windsor soup which tasted of gravy
browning. ... Woolton pie and brown Windsor soup featured
largely on the menu of the British Restaurants set up
under the aegis of the Ministry of Food to provide
inexpensive and healthy meals.
[Time to be in Earnest, by P D James, 1999. Woolton Pie
commemorates Lord Woolton, Minister of Food in 1940.]
Whatever its origins, references to brown Windsor soup are common
after the Second World War, often in horrified descriptions of the
then dreadful state of British cooking in pretentious restaurants
and on trains and ferries. It became shorthand for awful food;
comics only had to mention it to get a laugh.
But as we've seen, in some quarters brown Windsor soup is now held
up as an example of excellent nineteenth-century British fare. To
explain the change probably needs a culinary expert or a folklorist
rather than an etymologist.
5. Sic!
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George Watson found this in the rules of the Twiggy competition in
the 25 February issue of the British publication Women's Weekly:
"The winner will be selected at random from all correct entries
received after the closing date."
We now know, via John Donlevy, that the Australian Spectator wrote
on 8 March about a Friday night lock-in at a former pub in
Melbourne: "If you wanted to get in after the doors were shut, all
you had to do was throw pebbles at an upstairs widow from the car
park next door."
Kate Schubart was also amused by a missing letter, in a column in
the Washington Post on 10 March: "Half of the money will come from
his fortune as a former hedge-fun manager."
In a piece of 6 March, Norman C Berns noted, the gossip site TMZ
reported: "David told TMZ Live he got [Michael Jackson's] dental
impression from a Beverly Hills doctor that he got at an auction."
Acquisition fever knows no bounds, Lisa Robinton learned in the 18
December issue of an e-newsletter from MakeUseOf.com: "After being
acquired by Google, the world was waiting to see what Motorola would
come up with."
6. Useful information
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