World Wide Words -- 29 Mar 14

[Michael Quinion]

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WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 875          Saturday 29 March 2014
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       This mailing also contains an HTML-formatted version.
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Cacoethes.
3. Wordface.
4. Box of birds.
5. Sic!
6. Useful information.


1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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SUPERNACULUM  Richard Brookman suggested an origin for "heel tap": 
"I remember heel taps from my childhood in Yorkshire, where they 
were the metal (or sometimes rubber) reinforcements that a cobbler 
would insert into the outside edge of the heel of the shoe, where 
most wear occurs. Metal ones made a tapping noise as you walked, 
hence the name. Its shape surely gives the connection with drink: 
it's exactly the one a slug of drink takes up in the bottom of a 
tilted glass. I had never heard the term in reference to drinking 
before, but the visual image was so exact I laughed."

Bill Winward recalled another association: "Almost fifty years ago 
when I first went to the working men's club with my father, he 
explained the etiquette of drinking in a round. Basically the rule 
was that the first man to finish his drink bought the next round of 
drinks. It was bad form to drink too quickly and rush other people 
and stupid to do it again as it could get very expensive. However, 
it was shameful to be considered a 'heel-tapper', a person who drank 
all but a small amount and then waited for someone else to finish 
their drink and get the next round in. I had thought that the 
expression derived from the person impatiently tapping their heels 
on the floor waiting for others to finish their drinks but now I 
know better."


2. Cacoethes /kak at U'i:Ti:z/
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An English word starting with a "kak" sound suggests something bad 
or unpleasant, by analogy with words such as "cacography" for bad 
handwriting (see http://wwwords.org/ccgy) and "cacophony" for a 
horrible discordant noise. These join a plethora of medical terms, 
mostly long obsolete, that include "cacothymia", a disordered state 
of mind, and "caconychia", decaying nails.) "Cack", dung or faeces, 
is a distant relative.

"Cacoethes" is of the same sort. It's an uncontrollable urge to do 
something, especially something harmful. The first part is from 
Greek "kakos", bad. To it has been added "thos", a disposition, 
making a word for a bad habit. It arrived in English unchanged via 
Latin.

It's almost, but not quite, as rare as some of those medical terms, 
appearing sporadically in prose of the more elevated or pretentious 
sort. (I was astonished to find hundreds of usages in newspapers in 
the late 1980s. Was this a sudden outburst of classical erudition? 
Alas not, just a successful racehorse. If it had been named as an 
attempt at inverted magic, it seems to have worked.)

In a dictionary of quotations of 1808, D E Macdonnel commented that 
"cacoethes" was never written alone, but always in combination with 
some other word. That's not true today, but one of his phrases is a 
Latin tag still known and quoted: "cacoethes scribendi". It's from 
the Satires of the Roman author Juvenal: "Tenet insanabile multos 
scribendi cacoethes"; in English, "many suffer from the incurable 
disease of writing". Aspiring wordsmiths should note that an 
uncontrollable urge to write doesn't necessarily lead to anything 
worth reading.

Macdonnel also listed the vastly less common "cacoethes loquendi", a 
compulsive desire to speak, where the second word derives from Latin 
"loquax", loquacious or talkative; and "cacoethes carpendi", where 
"carpendi" is from Latin "carpere", to pick, pluck or seize. He 
defined this as a rage for collecting, but more usually it has been 
an irresistible desire to criticize or find fault.


3. Wordface
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LINES ALIGNED  We've had sequels, prequels, interquels and midquels, 
now we have "parallelquels". These are subsequent works that take 
place in a similar period to an earlier one but from a different 
perspective. Films tagged with the term include The Bourne Legacy, 
whose events take place around the same time as those in the earlier 
Bourne Ultimatum, and 300: Rise of an Empire, a parallelquel to Zack 
Snyder's earlier film, 300, about the Battle of Thermopylae. But the 
first work to have the word used of it, in 2007, was The Eyre Affair 
by Jasper Fforde, in which he transforms the concept of fiction into 
Bookworld, a tangible fantasy alternative universe. The action takes 
place mainly within Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre; in the Bookworld 
version Jane goes to India with St John Rivers and leaves Rochester 
in Thornfield Hall. Her kidnap by an evil real-world character who 
is hiding in the book throws Bookworld into chaos and leads to the 
work changing to the version we know. 

I'M TERRIBLY SORRY  It's been around for years and I didn't know 
until this week. Michael Gove, the controversial British secretary 
of education, confessed in the Mail on Sunday last weekend that he 
had a soft spot for contemporary eccentric music and was addicted to 
chap-hop. This has been described as a mixture of hip-hop, steampunk 
and affectionate ridicule of traditional English obsessions such as 
cricket, tea and the weather. "Chap-hop artists," the Guardian 
commented, "rap about anachronistic British stereotypes in received 
pronunciation, often while smoking pipes and playing the banjolele". 
Chap-hop artists - frightfully nice chaps, one and all - include 
Poplock Holmes, Mr Bruce and the Correspondents, Professor Elemental 
(see him here: http://wwwords.org/chphp) and Mr B The Gentleman 
Rhymer. The genre is strongly linked to a magazine, The Chap, and to 
its anarchic humorous offshoot Chappism, whose followers advocate 
dressing well, pipe-smoking, wearing hats and moustaches, drinking 
fine beverages and behaving with courtesy, especially towards the 
ill-mannered. If you detect the influence of Wodehouse, the Goons 
and Monty Python, you're on the right lines.


4. Box of birds
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Q. I was discussing the expression "a box of birds" with a friend 
and we wondered about its origins. I couldn't see any reference to 
it when searching the site, so I wondered if you've ever mentioned 
it in your weekly posts. If you're not familiar with it, it's often 
used as a way of saying you're doing well: "I'm feeling like a box 
of birds." [Mike Crowl, New Zealand]

A. It's a curious idiom, a common New Zealandism that's also found 
in Australia, though much less often. You prompted a vague memory 
that I'd come across it somewhere before, but it took a few minutes 
to discover that it must have been in one of the Inspector Alleyn 
detective stories of the New Zealand writer Ngaio Marsh:

    "He can answer questions, can't you, Bellairs?"
    "I'm fine," Breezy rejoined dreamily. "Box of birds." 
    
    [A Wreath for Rivera, by Ngaio Marsh, 1949.]

This is an earlier example:

    At a gathering of his friends recently one insisted on 
    taking a [stimulant] pill to discover its effects. For the 
    remainder of the evening he was "the life of the party," 
    "a ball of muscle," "a box of birds," and everything else 
    synonymous with pep and vitality, according to the 
    soldier.
    [Auckland Star, 25 Sep. 1941.]

The story was about a soldier who had been invalided out after the 
battle of Crete. We may link this with an article in the Sunday Mail 
of Brisbane in July 1942, which recorded "to feel like a box of 
birds" as Second World War slang of the Australian Navy. These seem 
to suggest that it was slang of the armed forces that survived in 
New Zealand after the war but failed to be adopted to a significant 
extent in Australia. However, the first known use in print is this, 
only six months after the war began:

    I have lately seen an actual "Box of Birds." The phrase 
    I have always heard applied to a feeling of well-being, 
    pep, or happiness; but now I know that is wrong. The box - 
    or rather boxes - of birds I saw were some dozen or more 
    shallow wooden trays, with small-meshed wire-netting tops, 
    packed with poor miserable bedraggled sparrows, some dead, 
    some on their backs with legs in the air dying, and others 
    huddled together for warmth. They had been trapped for 
    subsequent release as live targets for a gun shoot. Now 
    when answering my inquiry "How are you?" I get "A box of 
    birds" I see red.
    [Evening Post (Wellington), 23 Apr. 1940.]

"The phrase I have always heard" strongly suggests that it predates 
wartime by a significant period. It could have been services slang 
from the interwar period, or - more probably in my view - it was a 
pre-war New Zealand idiom that was borrowed by Australian servicemen 
through contact with New Zealanders during the war.

The origin is almost certainly a play on "chirpy", meaning cheerful 
or lively, and it's linked to "chirpy as a bird", an expression of 
carefree happiness common in the nineteenth century. "Box of birds" 
is also often to be found much earlier, but solely in the literal 
sense of a box containing, for example, racing pigeons or chickens. 
We might guess the two were stuck together to make "chirpy as a box 
of birds" as a superlative that was later truncated into the idiom. 
But no trace exists in the record before the short form appeared.

It's likely it wasn't needed: "chirpy" is found long before "chirpy 
as a bird". New Zealanders do very occasionally use "chirpy as a box 
of birds" - like "chirpy as a bird" - it appears in the written 
record more recently than "box of birds".

Whatever its origins and history, it has humorously evolved: "box of 
fluffy ducks", "box of fluffies", "box of fluffy chooks" and "box of 
budgies" are all ways to say that you're happy or that everything is 
going well.


5. Sic!
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A review of Nymphomaniac Vol 1&2 which Alan Featherstone found in 
the print edition of The Week dated 1 March read: "The two-part film 
opens with the protagonist, Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg), being found 
beaten up in an alleyway by a kindly stranger". Understandably, the 
online version has been reworded.

Howard Ritter was surprised to learn arthritis is infectious. An 
American TV commercial for an arthritis medication features the 
golfer Phil Mickelson, who says sympathetically, "If you have 
painful, swollen joints, I've been in your shoes".

Athletic escapee shock! Ben Zipper saw this headline on Australia's 
ABC News online on 23 March: "Man falls to death from power pole 
while running from police".

Lynn Whinery tells us that the website Wealthy Health featured an 
item about allergies on 21 March. It commented: "People with this 
allergy report waking up in the middle of the night after eating 
meat covered in sweat and hives." Next time, buy from a different 
supermarket?


6. Useful information
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and advice are provided by Julane Marx, Robert Waterhouse, John 
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