World Wide Words -- 04 Jun 16

[Michael Quinion via WorldWideWords]

World Wide Words

Saturday 4 June 2016.

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  Feedback, notes and comments

But and ben. “The term is not one I am familiar with,” John Jefferies 
emailed, “but it does bring to mind a well-established Irish (Gaelic) 
word /bothán/ which is a small hut, shed or cabin and would neatly match 
your description of a small two-roomed house.”

Barbara Roden wrote, “Your explanation of the phrase was especially 
interesting, as I’m familiar with it from a children’s skipping rhyme 
that was in circulation after the crimes of anatomists Burke and Hare in 
early 19th century Edinburgh were exposed:

Up the close and doun the stair,
But and ben wi’ Burke and Hare.
Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief,
Knox the boy that buys the beef.

Dutch speakers noted the close associations between the Scots words and 
ones in their language. Alexander Bocast commented, “The expressions 
/binnen en buiten/ and /buiten en binnen/ are not uncommon in Dutch, 
although they generally contrast the interior of a building to its 
exterior. For example, a restaurant might advertise /buiten and binnen/ 
to inform customers that they can eat either inside or outside on, say, 
a terrace or patio.”

Several British readers complained at my seeming to have adopted the US 
spelling /story/ instead of /storey/ in this piece for one level of a 
building. It was, of course, a typing error.

Logomaniac. Medical practitioners pointed out that a person who exhibits 
what I described as “pathologically excessive (and often incoherent) 
talking”, is usually said to be suffering from /logorrhoea/ rather than 
/logomania/.

Type lice. Rob Graham wrote, “I would like to think that by the end of 
the first paragraph I was suspicious of this lovely bit of writing. My 
father sent me to the local shop for /elbow grease/ when I joined the 
school army cadets and had brass buttons to polish.” David Pearson 
recalls, “I, too, was the object of many such a prank when in the 1960s 
I was a fairly gullible teenager working in a factory and later on a 
building site. Among other things, I was told to fetch a /skyhook/ 
(before the term became more common, notably in sci-fi) and was sent 
once for a /long stand/, at which point the storeman disappeared for 10 
minutes and was presumably sitting out of sight reading a newspaper 
while I stood waiting at the counter.”


  By hook or by crook

Q.From Alice Winsome: I know that /by hook or by crook/ means to do 
something by any means possible, but why those two words? What’s the 
story behind it?

A.This curious phrase has bothered many people down the years, the 
result being a succession of well-meant stories, often fervently argued, 
that don’t stand up for a moment on careful examination.

As good a place to start as any is the lighthouse at the tip of the Hook 
peninsula in south-eastern Ireland, said to be the world’s oldest 
working lighthouse. It is at the east side of the entrance to Waterford 
harbour, on the other side of which is a little place called Crook (or 
so it is said: no map I’ve consulted shows it). One tale claims that 
Oliver Cromwell proposed to invade Ireland during the English Civil War 
by way of Waterford and that he asserted he would land there “by Hook or 
by Crook”. In another version the invasion of Ireland was the one of 
1172 by Richard de Clare, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, also known as Strongbow.

Two other stories associate the phrase with gentlemen called Hook and 
Crook. Both appeared in early issues of the scholarly research 
publication /Notes and Queries/. One linked it with the difficulties of 
establishing the exact locations of plots of land after the great fire 
of London in 1666. The anonymous writer explained:

The surveyors appointed to determine the rights of the various claimants 
were Mr. Hook and Mr. Crook, who by the justice of their decisions gave 
general satisfaction to the interested parties, and by their speedy 
determination of the different claims, permitted the rebuilding of the 
city to proceed without the least delay. Hence arose the saying above 
quoted, usually applied to the extrication of persons or things from a 
difficulty. The above anecdote was told the other evening by an old 
citizen upwards of eighty, by no means of an imaginative temperament.

/Notes and Queries/, 15 Feb. 1851.

The other supposed derivation was equally poorly substantiated:

I have met with it somewhere, but have lost my note, that Hooke and 
Crooke were two judges, who in their day decided most unconscientiously 
whenever the interests of the crown were affected, and it used to be 
said that the king could get anything by Hooke or by Crooke.

/Notes and Queries/, 26 Jan. 1850.

Most of these stories can be readily dismissed by looking at the 
linguistic evidence, which tells us that the expression is on record 
from the end of the fourteenth century, by which time it was already a 
set phrase with the current meaning.

During this period, local people sometimes had rights by charter or 
custom known as /fire-bote/ to gather firewood from local woodlands. It 
was acceptable to take dead wood from the ground or to pull down dead 
branches. The latter action was carried out either with a hook or a 
crook, the latter implement being a tool like a shepherd’s crook or 
perhaps just a crooked branch.

Little contemporary evidence exists for this practice. Written claims 
for it dating from the seventeenth century are said to exist for the New 
Forest in southern England, one of which argued for an immemorial right 
to go into the king’s wood to take the dead branches off the trees “with 
a cart, a horse, a hook and a crook, and a sail cloth”. Another version 
was once claimed to be in the records of Bodmin in Cornwall, whereby 
locals were permitted by a local prior “to bear and carry away on their 
backs, and in no other way, the lop, crop, hook, crook, and bagwood in 
the prior’s wood of Dunmeer.” Richard Polwhele’s /Civil and Military 
History of Cornwall/ of 1806 argued in support of this claim that images 
of the hook and the crook were carved on the medieval Prior’s Cross in 
nearby Washaway, though modern writings describe them as fleurs-de-lys.

The examples suggest that this origin for the expression is the correct 
one, though some doubt must remain. If so, as /hook/ and /crook/ were 
effectively synonyms, it was almost inevitable that they were put 
together to make a reduplicated rhyming phrase.


  Loggerhead

This word appeared in the caption to a photo I saw recently in a whaling 
museum in the Azores. (I spare no effort to bring you interesting words.)

The caption mentioned the groove that had been worn by ropes in the 
loggerhead on a whaling boat. A /loggerhead/, I have learned, was a 
round timber block set upright in the stern of the boat. Once a 
harpooner had struck the whale, he passed the rope attached to the 
harpoon round the loggerhead a couple of times to hold it fast.

The loggerhead in the photo had been carefully fashioned, so there was 
nothing log-like about it other than it having been made of timber; 
however, you might fancifully say that it looked like a wooden head. So 
it wasn’t an altogether unlikely name for the contrivance. But when I 
came to look into the history of the word it turns out that the whaling 
sense was a latecomer.

/Loggerhead/ starts to appear in the historical record near the end of 
the sixteenth century. An early example:

Ah you whoreson loggerhead! You were born to do me shame.

/Love’s Labour’s Lost/, by William Shakespeare, /c/1596.

At that time it meant a stupid person, the closely similar /blockhead/ 
suggesting the idea behind it. Though presumably derived from /log/, 
what a /logger/ was at the time is unclear, because it doesn’t appear in 
print until much later. The usual view among dictionary makers is that 
it was a heavy block of wood fastened to the leg of a horse to hobble 
it, to prevent it straying, an assertion that dates back no further than 
a dialect dictionary of 1777.

What went through the minds of whalers who applied it to the useful 
device on their boats is impossible to discover but but we might guess 
that it was similarly considered to be a dumb block of wood for 
restraining an animal, although a whale rather than a horse.

We know /loggerhead/ these days most commonly in the idiom /to be at 
loggerheads/, meaning to be in stubborn or irresolvable disagreement or 
dispute over some issue:

The school security guards are now at loggerheads with the city’s police 
department, who they accuse of attempting to hide the true scale of the 
problem, to improve their crime statistics.

/The Independent/, 16 May 2016.

As /loggerhead/ has no clear meaning in current English (its whaling 
sense being a long obsolete term of art in a specialised and localised 
activity) the idiom is meaningless in itself, but its form is expressive 
and it has lasted surprisingly well in the language. It can be traced to 
1671 in the related /go to loggerheads/, to start a fight, though its 
modern form came into being in the early nineteenth century.

How /loggerhead/ began to be used for a fight is similarly lost to 
history. One image it calls up is of two thick-headed idiots 
face-to-face in an argument that is likely to end in fisticuffs. That 
may be enough to explain the origin. However, some writers point to 
various implements with bulbous ends, of which one was used on board ship:

They had been sparring, in a spirit of fun, with loggerheads, those 
massy iron balls with long handles to be carried red-hot from the fire 
and plunged into buckets of tar or pitch so that the substance might be 
melted with no risk of flame.

/The Commodore/, by Patrick O’Brian, 1994.

There are records of the devices being used as weapons during close 
engagements of ships, perhaps contributing to the genesis of the expression.

Another maritime association is with the /loggerhead turtle/; in this 
case the idea is that of an animal with a big, heavy head. A couple of 
birds, a Falkland Islands duck and several fish have also had the word 
applied to them at various times for related reasons. In English 
dialects a large moth, tadpoles and a species of knapweed have also been 
called /loggerheads/.

There are three small places in England and Wales with the name. The one 
in Staffordshire is said to take its name from the local pub, /The Three 
Loggerheads/. This almost certainly derives from an old visual joke — 
the inn sign would have pictured only two stupid men, the third being 
taken to be the onlooker.


  Polish off

Q. From Evan Parry, New Zealand: In conversation about a culinary 
celebration, my friend used the expression /polish off/, thus: “I 
polished off the leftover food next morning”. While its meaning in 
context is generally understood, where and how did the expression originate?

A. It does indeed often appear in connection with food, the key idea 
being that of consuming it completely and probably quickly:

I could easily polish off a packet of biscuits throughout the afternoon, 
before my dinner of cheesy pasta with buttered bread.

/The Sun/ (London), 15 May 2016.

though it can be used in a variety of other situations, implying the 
rapid completion of some activity or the subjugation of some adversary:

Freshman Matt McFadden returned the opening kickoff 36 yards and senior 
Kyle Wigley polished off the drive with a two-yard run into the end zone.

/Gettysburg Times/ (Pennsylvania), 14 Nov. 2015.

He’ll limp to the election; cross the line sadly weakened; and then, in 
due course, be polished off by another thrusting contender who better 
understands the political process and can command a majority of the party.//

/The Age/ (Melbourne), 24 May 2016.

The idiom has been around since at least the early nineteenth century. 
Its initial examples were all in the more general sense, extending to 
getting rid of something, or even to destroy or kill. The application to 
food seems to have come along a little later in the century, sometimes 
being simplified to /polish/ without the /off/. But in his /Classical 
Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue/ of 1785 Francis Grose mentions /to 
polish a bone/, meaning to eat a meal, so perhaps the food sense really 
did come first.

The idea here is presumably that of clearing the dish by eating 
everything on it so thoroughly that it ends up appearing polished. This 
modern work makes it explicit:

He knew that it was polite to leave a little something on your plate 
when you finished, but this evening he decided to throw etiquette aside 
and polished his plate to a shine.

/Adam/, by Richard Allen Stotts, 2001.

The earliest usages of /polish off/, however, focus on defeating 
somebody. Some slang dictionaries expressly say that the first context 
for the idiom was “pugilistic”, that is, linked to bare-knuckle fist 
fighting:

Bob had his coat off at once — he stood up to the Banbury man for three 
minutes, and polished him off in four rounds easy.

/Vanity Fair/, by William Makepeace Thackeray, 1847.

It may be that a slightly different idea is behind this meaning. Since 
polishing is the last job to be done to complete a piece of work such as 
making a item of furniture, to polish off an opponent is to finish him, 
to defeat him utterly.


  Sic

Spectral examination? The lead sentence on a /Guardian/ article of 26 
May confused Emery Fletcher: “Shortly after receiving the news of his 
death, Steve Hodel found himself sorting through his father’s belongings.”

Mathematics as it isn’t taught, from the /Observer/ newspaper of 29 May: 
“Mandate Now claims that more than four-fifths of five developed nations 
have some form of mandatory reporting.”

Robert Musgrave wrote, apropos of something completely different: “You 
may be amused that my first introduction to /Schadenfreude/ was via a 
howling misprint in a cheap paperback dictionary, in which it was 
defined as the derivation of joy from the misfortune of otters.”

John C Waugh tells us that the /New Zealand Herald/ online on 31 May 
reported that “A person has been struck by a train in Auckland for the 
second time today.” Not a particularly unfortunate passenger, but two 
separate incidents.

An online report by the Australian national public television network 
SBS had the headline, “Americans are being warned of possible terror 
attacks in Europe over summer by the US State Department.” Thanks to 
Judith Lowe for spotting that.

Bill Waggoner found this in a report dated 2 June on the website 
BoigBoing about a man who “has settled a case with people who live near 
him in DC, who caught him repeatedly stealing the license plates off 
their nanny's car using a hidden camera.”


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