World Wide Words -- 07 May 16

[Michael Quinion via WorldWideWords]

World Wide Words

Saturday 7 May 2016.

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  Feedback, notes and comments

Fewmet. Many readers pointed out that I might more appropriately have 
quoted from T H White’s /The Once and Future King/ of 1939; this would 
seem to be the source from which everybody has copied:

“I know what fewmets are,” said the boy with interest. “They are the 
droppings of the beast pursued. The harbourer keeps them in his horn, to 
show to his master, and can tell by them whether it is a warrantable 
beast or otherwise, and what state it is in.”

“Intelligent child,” remarked the King. “Very. Now I carry fewmets about 
with me practically all the time.”

“Insanitary habit,” he added, beginning to look dejected, “and quite 
pointless. Only one Questing Beast, you know, so there can’t be any 
question whether she is warrantable or not.”

Lie doggo. David Means emailed from Kansas City: “Although I am familiar 
with /lying doggo/ as a term for hiding temporarily, the term I’ve heard 
used most often in this region is /lie in the weeds/, which conveys the 
same sense. The implication is that weeds are unkempt and tend to grow 
tall, so it’s easy for someone to lie down in the midst and remain 
relatively hidden. It’s used most often about someone who has made some 
gaffe, or has done something that is socially outside the pale, and 
needs to retire from public life for a time until it blows over.”

Dingbat. “Allow me to add further detail to your interesting 
discussion,” emailed P W Bridgman. “I would venture that many Canadians 
of my vintage (born 1952) will remember the Charles E Frosst calendars 
that hung in many doctors’ offices in the 1950s and 1960s. The Frosst 
company was a manufacturer of pharmaceuticals and, undoubtedly, provided 
its calendars to physicians as part of its marketing program. The 
calendars are memorable for their whimsical, cartoon-like images of many 
stylised creatures, called /dingbats/, all busy at work rendering some 
kind of medical care or other. The images were clever, highly detailed 
and perfectly fascinating to children otherwise burdened with feelings 
of trepidation about being subjected to medical assessment. The 
calendars provided, I suppose, a welcome and comforting distraction from 
whatever indignities might be in store when, eventually, the shirt came 
off or (heaven forbid) the pants had to come down.”

Over to you. I haven’t been able to help Rachel Clark with a query and 
wonder if anybody can help. She wrote: “I recently came across a 
wonderful word in my grandmother’s letters and things from the 1930s or 
so. It is /umphidilious/ (though I’m not positive on the spelling) and 
apparently means wonderful or awesome or amazing. She lived in Rhodesia, 
now Zimbabwe, and her heritage is mainly Dutch I believe. My dad 
remembers her and others using this word (and its short form /umfy/) 
quite frequently. I did a web search for this word but could find nothing.”


  Lame duck

Q. From James Macdonald: During Barack Obama’s recent visit to London, 
some British newspapers referred to him as a /lame duck/ president. That 
expression is familiar to me, of course, but I did wonder why somebody 
who was ineffectual or unsuccessful should be described in that strange 
way. /Lame/ I can understand, but why /duck/?

A. Lame ducks, of course, can be incompetent or ineffectual firms or 
governments as well as individuals — British political life has seen 
many examples of both described as lame ducks down the decades. However, 
the specific reference here is to American politics, an association that 
began back in the 1860s.

Despite that, for its origin we have to look to Britain and to the stock 
market of the middle of the eighteenth century. The disabled bird 
belongs with the other members of the market’s menagerie, the bulls, 
bears and stags (more on the first two here 
<http://wwwords.org/blsbrs>). London stockbrokers and jobbers operated 
from coffee houses such as Jonathan’s and Garraway’s in a little street 
called Exchange Alley, close to the main commodity trading centre, the 
Royal Exchange.

The street name was often abbreviated to Change Alley or just the Alley. 
It still exists, now officially called Change Alley, as a network of 
five back streets of no particular distinction in the City of London. 
The coffee houses are long gone; the jobbers and brokers left even 
earlier, decamping to a specially constructed building in Sweeting’s 
Alley in 1773, which later became the Stock Exchange.

About 1760, some wit created the term for stock market traders who 
failed to pay up when bills became due, effectively bankrupting 
themselves and leading to their being barred from trading. Among the 
first people to use the term was the antiquarian and MP Horace Walpole, 
the son of Sir Robert Walpole, the man usually regarded as the first 
British prime minister. He was puzzled by the language of the trade:

Apropos, do you know what a Bull, and a Bear, and a Lame Duck are? Nay, 
nor I either: I am only certain that they are neither animals or fowl.

A letter to Sir Horace Mann by Horace Walpole, 28 Dec. 1761.

Walpole clearly kept a close ear on evolving language because the 
currently earliest known example appeared in the Newcastle Courant on 5 
September that year, in a brief report of moneys being paid by 
subscription into the Bank of England, with a note that there were “No 
lame ducks this time”. Within a couple of months the term began to 
appear in London newspapers and quickly became common. This is the 
earliest metropolitan example that I’ve so far unearthed:

Thursday a Lame Duck disappeared from J———’s, to the no small 
Mortification of his Brother Bulls and Bears, whom he has touched very 
considerably. ... Yesterday four more Lame Ducks took their Flight.

/London Evening Post/, 21 Jan. 1762.

It’s easy enough to see how the /lame/ part came about, a figurative 
reference to a person injured through inability to maintain his 
financial position. But no reference of the time that I can find makes 
clear why they were visualised as ducks. It might, at a stretch, be a 
rhyme with /luck/, I suppose.

Almost every one of the many later references to these failed traders 
refers to them as /waddling/ away, an early example being in the Leeds 
Intelligenceron 29 June 1762 (emphases in the original): “Yesterday a 
/lame duck/ or two made shift to /waddle/ out of ’Change Alley”. Perhaps 
they were low-slung portly gentlemen, the eighteenth-century equivalent 
of today’s fat cats, and the way they walked suggested a duck with a bad 
foot? More probably, having established that failures were to be called 
lame ducks, the derisive image of them struggling away limping was too 
good not to use.

Incidentally, I can find no examples of /lame duck/ being used literally 
before it took on this sense. This casts doubt on the commonly stated 
view that failed financiers were called lame ducks because they 
resembled an injured bird that was unable to keep up with the flock and 
so was more vulnerable to being attacked by a predator. And the failures 
of lame ducks in any case were usually due to their over-stretching 
themselves in speculative ventures, not being brought down by others.

The term was taken to North America and came to mean there a financially 
unstable or insolvent undertaking. Its association with Washington 
politics is said to have begun in 1863. It refers to an elected 
politician who is coming to the end of his or her period in office and 
so has little or no time left to do anything effective. More strictly, 
it means one at the very end of that period, after a successor has been 
elected but before his or her term actually ends. At one time, this 
period was several months, which tempted representatives to use their 
final time in office to act in a way that benefitted only themselves. 
Scandals led to the 20th amendment to the constitution in 1933, 
sometimes called the /Lame Duck Amendment/, which shortened the period 
between elections and new members taking office.


  Logomaniac

You, dear reader, would almost certainly happily admit to being a 
/logophile/, a lover of words — why else are you here? But what if 
somebody called you a /logomaniac/? I suspect you might reject the 
assertion of uncontrolled passion that /maniac/ implies.

/Logomaniac/ was coined in the nineteenth century:

We have outgrown the customs of thoselogo-maniacs, or word-worshippers, 
whom old Ralph Cudworth in his /True Intellectual System of the 
Universe/, p. 67, seems to have had in view.

/Shakespeare and the Emblem Writers/, by Henry Green, 1870.

It had a brief spurt of usage in Australia at the end of the century, 
such as here:

What a farce must the criminal law in New South Wales be when any 
rantipole logomaniac can, by appealing to the passions of the “great 
unwashed,” suspend its machinery and render its punitive provisions and 
its administrators alike contemptible.

/Evening News/ (Sydney, NSW), 30. Sep. 1895. More on rantipole 
<http://wwwords.org/rntple>.

Otherwise, it has only had significant exposure in the past 50 years. 
Perhaps because its circulation has been so limited, it comes to people 
fresh and unworn, like a new penny. Without much in the way of usage 
examples, it’s not always easy for the tyro user, or even the 
dictionaries, to be sure exactly what people mean by it.

Some reference works define it — certainly incorrectly — as “a person 
who loves words”, a simple synonym of /logophile/. Others generate 
deeper mental associations by asserting that it refers to an obsessive 
user of words:

[Bertrand] Russell was one of those people who wrote almost 
continuously; he lived his life on paper. ... The only comparable 
logomaniac over such a lifespan is Shaw.

/The Independent/, 20 Apr. 1996.

The Century Dictionary of 1899 went further still, suggesting that the 
obsession was unhealthy by defining /logomaniac/ as “One who is insanely 
devoted to words.” A recent work implies that it may be a mental 
malaise, “pathologically excessive (and often incoherent) talking”, 
perhaps applicable to people who talk to themselves in public all the 
time without benefit of mobile phone. Other authors imply it may be the 
lesser condition of mere talkativeness:

I tried more conversational gambits than a lonely logomaniac at a 
singles’ bar.

/Brother Odd/, by Dean Koontz, 2006.

“This is just me, talking.”
“You are crazy.”
“Actually, I believe the technical term is /logomaniac/. It’s from the 
Greek: /logos/ meaning word, /mania/ meaning two bits short of a byte. I 
just love to chat is all.”

/Think Like a Dinosaur/, by James Patrick Kelly, 1995.

Confusingly, a more recent affliction given the same name is//an 
obsession with brands and brand images; a logomaniac of this character 
might be fixated on the fashionable display of trademarked designs on 
articles of clothing.

While searching online for examples of the word’s usage, I came across 
an article — it must be hoped that it had been automatically generated 
as the result of my search — entitled What Is The Meaning Of Baby Name 
Logomaniac? We trust no loving but word-ignorant parent will foist this 
abomination onto their offspring.


  But and ben

Q. From Jim Black: In Scotland, one may find a style of house known as a 
/but and ben/. That’s a curious term and I’m thinking it has an 
interesting history. Can you help?

A. I can. It’s a phrase steeped in Scottish history and culture, 
traditionally crofting but also rural life generally. It can evoke a 
poverty-stricken hardscrabble life that has at times been romanticised, 
as in this song by Sir Harry Lauder:

Just a wee deoch an’ doris, afore ye gang awa’;
There’s a wee wifie waitin’ in a wee but an’ ben.

/Deoch an doris/, a custom of a parting drink, is from Scottish Gaelic 
/deoch an doruis/, a drink at the door.

The survival of the term in Scotland has been placed squarely on the 
cartoon strip The Broons, which has appeared in The Sunday Post for the 
past 80 years. They live in the fictional Auchenshoogle, probably a 
district of Glasgow, but have a /but an’ ben/ in the hills as a holiday 
home.

A /but and ben/ is a two-roomed house of one story. There was usually 
only one door to the outside; this gave access to the kitchen, the 
public room in which everyday life took place and in which members of 
the family often slept. This led into a private inner room, where guests 
could be entertained and which — like many a front room or best room in 
poor but decent homes everywhere — was often furnished to a higher 
standard but less often used. If the family was large, however, the 
inner room could double up as a bedroom.

The outer room was the /but/ and the inner one the /ben/. Putting them 
together the /but and ben/ was the whole house.

The cottage had originally consisted of the usual “but-and-ben”, that is 
to say, in well regulated houses (which this one was not) of a kitchen — 
and a room that was not the kitchen. The family beds occupied one corner 
of the kitchen, that of Bridget and her husband in the middle (including 
accommodation for the latest baby), while on either side and at the 
foot, shakedowns were laid out “for the childer,” slightly raised from 
the earthen floor on rude trestles, with a board laid across to receive 
the bedding.

/The Dew of Their Youth/, by S R Crockett, 1910.

Some people have guessed that /ben/ is Gaelic or from some Norse word. 
But there’s no evidence for either and the experts are now sure it’s a 
dialect variant of the Middle English /binne/, within. (If you know 
Dutch or German, you will be familiar with its relative /binnen/ with 
the same meaning.) /But/ is a special instance of our everyday 
conjunction, which stems from the Old English /be-utan/ and which 
variously meant without, except or outside.

So the /but/ was the “outside” room and the /ben/ the room “within”.

This led to various phrases. Both words were used in the extended 
phrases /but the hoose/ and /ben the hoose/ for the two rooms. To be 
/far ben with one/ meant to be a close friend, who was regularly 
admitted to the ben. To /go/ /but and ben/ was to move from the inner to 
the outer room and back again, hence repeatedly going backwards and 
forwards, to and fro. Since the but and the ben constituted the whole 
house, /but and ben/ could also mean everywhere.

Blithe, blithe and merry was she,
Blithe was she but and ben:
  Blithe by the banks of Ern,
And blithe in Glenturit glen.

/Blithe Was She/, by Robert Burns, in /The Works of Robert Burns/, 1800.

Families occupying two-roomed apartments in tenements, which led off a 
common passage as close neighbours, were said to be /living/ /but and ben/.


  Type louse

Q. /From Martin Schell/: I enjoyed your recent piece on /dingbat/ and 
noticed that one quotation mentioned /type-lice/. What does this term 
refer to?

A. The species has not been well studied scientifically but has been 
identified on occasion as /Pediculous typus/ or /Pyroglyphidae 
typographicus/; at one time it was called the /typographical beetle/. 
British printing shops seem thankfully free of the pest but a search 
among writings by American printers and newspapermen produced many 
descriptions of the damage that these little beasts could do. The /Cedar 
Rapids Tribune/ of January 1947, for example, described them as “the 
traditional fly in the printer’s ointment”.

They were reported to feed on type, the resulting gnaw marks requiring 
the affected type to be thrown away. They liked to secrete themselves 
among type, sometimes, it was said, in the /fl/ and /fi/ ligature 
compartments of type cases where they would be least disturbed, They 
were often held responsible for errors in setting type and even of 
rearranging the type to make nonsense words.

This is how one Canadian publication explained them:

In the old days, when this newspaper was printed by means of what is 
called the hot-lead system, many so-called simple errors were caused by 
type lice. Type lice laid their eggs in the bottoms of galley trays. 
There they hatched. There they spent their lives. And there they created 
their havoc. If printers carelessly left the lead type in these galley 
trays for extended periods of time, the type lice would actually consume 
amazingly large quantities of lead, often making a’s look like o’s, 
turning 2’s into 3’s and worse.

/The Brandon Sun/ (Manitoba), 6 Mar. 1975.

The same article reported that in recent years type lice had built up 
such a strong natural immunity to insecticides that serious infestations 
of the creatures had made hot-lead composition all but impossible. The 
downside of consequent advances in technology, such as computer 
typesetting, has been a serious loss of habitat, leading to a severe 
decline in the numbers of type lice; if not actually extinct they are 
now restricted to small print shops still using hot or cold metal type.

The first reported appearance of the type louse was in The Hancock 
Jeffersonian of Findlay, Ohio, in May 1869 (“the poor printer is often 
compelled to explain and show everything about the office, even down to 
the type lice”), though it’s hard to be sure this is the same species as 
others mentioned from time to time; as this description explained, type 
lice were difficult to conclusively identify:

The type louse is like the common Pediculus capilus, in that it is a 
wingless, hemipterous insect, but it is unlike in the fact that it is 
continually undergoing metamorphosis and no two persons ever saw the 
insect the same, nor no one person ever saw it twice in the same place 
or same condition.

/The Evening Times/ (Monroe, Wisconsin), 5 Jun, 1895.

Young apprentices, traditionally called printer’s devils, were often 
told about the lice by seasoned journeymen on first arriving in the 
shop, who would promise to show the boys an example. When one was 
spotted, the nuisance potential of the type louse was such that attempts 
to point it out invariably led to unfortunate consequences:

The foreman of the office where I began promised to show me a type-louse 
— and he kept his promise. One day while he was making up a form on the 
imposing-stone — that is, placing the set type between the column rules 
and sopping it down with a wet sponge, as printers do in country 
offices, he exclaimed, “Come quick, Newt — here’s a type-louse!” I 
rushed to his side. “Right there it is,” he whispered: “bend close to 
that type and look sharp!" I followed instructions and while I was 
rubbering diligently he socked together, under my nose, two sections of 
water-soaked type with great violence, whereupon the water squirted up 
into my expectant face and eyes.

/The Boston Post/, 6 Apr. 1922.

As the Morgantown Dominion News wrote in March 1969, the type louse 
“played an important role in the training of the novice printer”, 
equivalent to the left-handed monkey wrench, ready-made posthole, tartan 
paint, spare bubbles for spirit levels and buckets of steam known in 
other trades.


  Corium

Q. From Chester Graham: I came across the word /corium/ in a strange 
online article about nuclear reactor disasters. I looked it up in my 
favourite dictionaries, where it means one of the layers of skin. Has 
the writer made a serious mistake?

A. We must forgive your favourite dictionaries for not including 
/corium/. Though it’s a real word with a distinct meaning, it’s part of 
the specialist jargon of nuclear safety experts and almost totally 
unknown to the wider world.

It seems to have been invented by the team investigating the Three Mile 
Island nuclear accident in 1979. They used it to describe the mass of 
lava-like molten fuel, fission products, control rods, structural 
materials and concrete that flowed into the base of the reactor after it 
had overheated.

I’ve not been able to track down the origin in more detail but it was 
almost certainly created as a compound of /core/ with the suffix /-ium/ 
that usually marks a chemical element. I’d guess it was a black joke, 
created to relieve the awfulness of the situation confronting the 
investigators, who needed a term to describe the material generated by 
the disaster, which hadn’t been seen before. However, it had been a 
worry for years that a disaster of the sort might happen, and a decade 
earlier /China syndrome/ had appeared for a nuclear accident so bad that 
the core fancifully melted its way right through the earth.

The nuclear accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima have also produced 
corium and the term has been used in the technical reports of both.

Incidentally, your dictionaries’ sense of /corium/, though not so rare 
as the nuclear one, is also unfamiliar to most people. These days, it’s 
more usually called the /dermis/, the “true skin” which lies beneath the 
surface layer that, logically enough, is the /epidermis/ (Greek /epi/, 
upon or near). /Corium/ is Latin for skin, hide or leather. It appears, 
somewhat disguised, in /excoriate/, literally to remove the skin but 
usually figuratively to criticise somebody so harshly that it feels like 
being skinned. Even more obscurely, it’s the source of /cuirass/, a 
piece of armour originally made from leather, and yet more so of 
/malicorium/, an old word for the rind of the pomegranate, which 
strictly speaking ought to mean an apple skin, as it’s from Latin 
/malus/, apple, though in antiquity any globular fruit could be called 
an apple.


  Sic

James Pearce concluded from a link he saw on the Channel 7 website on 17 
April that Australia must have a better class of miscreant: “Cars 
attacked by vandals wielding gold clubs.”

Christine Shuttleworth was struck by this image in Mary Portas’s 2015 
memoir Shop Girl: “Sprawling across two connected buildings and two 
floors, Jim founded Godfrey’s nearly 20 years ago.”

A similar grammatical error appeared in a caption to a photograph of the 
Nazca lines, which Erik Kowal found on the Lifehack Lane site: “Only 
visible by air, generations of scientists and historians continue to be 
baffled by just how such etchings were made.”

This headline on an American News article on 15 April was spotted by 
Paul White: “Defense Secretary Goes Rouge, Leaks Precious Information 
About Obama.” Red faces all round.


  Useful information

About this newsletter: World Wide Words is researched, written and 
published by Michael Quinion in the UK. ISSN 1470-1448. Copyediting and 
advice are freely provided by Julane Marx, Robert Waterhouse, John 
Bagnall and Peter Morris, though any residual errors are the fault of 
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