World Wide Words -- 03 Sep 16

[Michael Quinion via WorldWideWords]

World Wide Words

Saturday 3 September 2016.

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Feedback, Notes and Comments

The last two pieces in this month’s issue are rewrites of ones that I 
created more than a decade ago. They’ve been amended so much they’re 
effectively new. Access to better sources of information means that it’s 
possible to say much more than I could when they were first written; in 
particular I can now provide a plausible origin for /no soap/. Since the 
last newsletter, I’ve also updated my pieces online on steal one’s 
thunder <../qa/qa-ste2.htm>, /Katy bar the door/ <../qa/qa-kat1.htm>, 
the old slang term /simoleon/ <../weirdwords/ww-sim1.htm>, and umquhile 
<../weirdwords/ww-umq1.htm>.

Nimrod

Q /From Barbara Murray, Wisconsin/: Oxford Dictionaries online defines 
/nimrod/ in UK English as a “skilful hunter” and, across the pond where 
I reside, as an “inept person”. Can you explain these more or less 
opposite meanings?

A Let’s start, as all good stories should, at the beginning. In the 
Bible, Nimrod was said to be the great-grandson of Noah. Genesis reports 
“And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in the earth. He was 
a mighty hunter before the Lord.”

>From the seventeenth century, Nimrod was conventionally used in 
literature on both sides of the Atlantic as the personification of a 
hunter, an eponym:

In front of him is the sporting Earl of Sefton, and that highly-esteemed 
son of Nimrod, Colonel Hilton Joliffe,— men of the strictest probity, 
and hence often appointed referees on matters in dispute.
/The English Spy/, by Bernard Blackmantle, 1825.

He was a complete Nimrod, now almost worn out.
/The Adventures of Daniel Boone/, by “Uncle Philip”, 1843.

In the UK, the name stayed largely a literary reference but even in that 
context it is now extremely rare. Several Royal Navy ships down the 
years have borne the name, as has a class of submarine-hunter aircraft. 
But we probably know it mostly as a piece of music much used on solemn 
state occasions. For geographical and social reasons it has never become 
a popular term in daily life for a hunter. When it did appear, it 
usually meant a rider to hounds:

The weather in the past few days has been so open, that the whole Nimrod 
school have had a fine run of enjoyment this season, except in cases 
where foxes are somewhat scarce.
/Jackson’s Oxford Journal/, 27 Jan. 1855.

In the US, with its longstanding and widespread tradition of hunting, 
much greater opportunities existed to describe individuals as Nimrods. 
It appears in sources such as newspapers from about the middle of the 
nineteenth century. At one time in the US it was also a moderately 
common given name in communities that went to the Bible for inspiration.

Early on, references were neutral in their implications, simply a 
figurative way to describe a person who hunted. Occasional descents into 
derision were prompted by a person falling short of competence, as in 
this tale about a group of young people out for a day’s sport:

Zindel was the mighty hunter of the crowd and after expostulations of 
his nimrod abilities the others watched him walk into a flock of a 
hundred quails and snap both triggers of his gun upon empty chambers.
/Fort Madison Weekly Democrat/ (Fort Madison, Iowa), 11 Jan. 1911.

Note that /Nimrod/ here has lost his initial capital letter, sure 
evidence that the word was losing its mental links with an historical 
personage. This is the way that eponyms evolve — we no longer capitalise 
/wellington/, /cardigan/, /pasteurise/, /diesel/, /silhouette/, 
/boycott/ or dozens of others of the same type.

>From the 1930s onwards we see an increasing tendency for /nimrod/ to be 
used much more in a disparaging or sarcastic way for a hunter with 
limited skills. Bugs Bunny, you may recall, referred to hunter Elmer 
Fudd as “poor little Nimrod”. Over time, /nimrod/ shifted still further 
towards meaning a damn fool who shot at anything that moved and even 
things that didn’t. By the 1960s, this transition was pretty much complete:

In Wisconsin, as I was driving through, a hunter shot his own guide 
between the shoulder blades. The coroner questioning this nimrod asked, 
“Did you think he was a deer?”
/Travels with Charley/, by John Steinbeck, 1962.

and was being applied in particular to people who shot up road signs for 
fun:

Martin estimated that nimrod sign destruction in Kansas costs taxpayers 
more than $1 million a year.
/Arkansas City Traveler/ (Arkansas City, Kansas), 9 Jan. 1960.

The next stage seems to have been largely catalysed by students in the 
1980s and 1990s, for whom /nimrod/ had lost its associations with 
hunting but retained those of a contemptible or inept person. By the 
turn of the new century, that sense had become the dominant one:

When you’re followed, you can’t know if it’s an experienced expert or 
some bloody nimrod who can’t find his way to the loo.
/Red Rabbit/, by Tom Clancy, 2002.

Isabelline

Pronounced /ɪzəˈbɛlɪn/

/Isabelline/ refers to a colour. The dictionaries variously describe it 
as greyish-yellow, light buff, pale cream-brown, dingy yellowish grey or 
drab. The /Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary /tries hardest to tie 
it down: “a moderate yellowish brown to light olive brown that is 
lighter and stronger than clay drab or medal bronze”. It has also been 
described as the colour of parchment or sand.

The female name /Isabella/ can similarly refer to the colour. Its first 
appearance in English is in an inventory of the wardrobe of Queen 
Elizabeth I in 1600: “one rounde gowne of Isabella-colour satten ... set 
with silver bangles”. Versions of it are known in various European 
languages from about the same date, including French, German, Spanish 
and Italian, usually for the colour of a horse.

The origin is unclear. That has led to stories growing up that associate 
/Isabella/ (and by implication /isabelline/) with an historical event 
involving a noble lady by that name. One identifies her as Isabella, 
Archduchess of Austria, daughter of Philip II of Spain. He laid siege to 
Ostend in 1601 and in a moment of filial fervour Isabella vowed not to 
change her undergarments until the city was taken. Unfortunately for her 
(and no doubt for those around her) the siege lasted another three 
years, supposedly leading to this off-colour word for over-worn 
underwear. Other European nations have a similar story, though they 
apply it instead to the siege of Granada by Ferdinand and Isabella of 
Castille in 1491.

/Isabelline/ is comparatively recent, appearing from about 1840 in 
descriptions by zoologists of a wide variety of species of bats, fungi, 
fish and mammals, but mainly birds, such as the /isabelline wheatear/ 
and the /isabelline shrike/. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace 
both used it, as did other writers of the nineteenth century:

To begin with, all the smaller denizens of the desert — whether 
butterflies, beetles, birds, or lizards — must be quite uniformly 
isabelline or sand-coloured.
/Falling in Love; With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science/, 
by Grant Allen, 1889.

It’s a specialist word of natural history writing and it’s rare to find 
it elsewhere other than occasionally as the horse colour.

Most experts say the proper name is the source, though nobody can 
explain how it came about. Some writers in French and Spanish say 
instead that it derives instead from an Arabic word, given either as 
/izah/ or /hizah/, referring specifically to the colour of a lion’s 
pelt. However, there seems to be no such word in Arabic and we must 
disregard the suggestion.

No soap

Q /From Anthony Pennock/: Why do we say /no soap/?

A I’m not sure that people do any more. From my vantage point in the UK, 
this classic Americanism appears to have largely died out, remembered 
and occasionally used only by older people.

A speaker usually means by it that there’s no chance of something 
happening or no hope of some outcome, that the enquirer is out of luck 
or more generally that some request is being denied.

When he called the Georgia senator to ask for his help on the defense 
reorganization bill, Russell replied, “No soap.”
/The Sputnik Challenge/, by Robert A. Divine, 1993.

For me, perhaps through reading too many old American crime novels, it 
brings to mind the 1930s and 1940s as a term of the underworld and 
hard-bitten detectives:

I dropped quietly on the running board and waited. No soap. Canino was 
too cagey.
/The Big Sleep/, by Raymond Chandler, 1939.

The first examples of the idiom appear near the end of the First World 
War in letters home from draftees. The more literate of such letters 
were often reprinted in small-town newspapers to let readers know how 
their boys were doing. The ones which I’ve uncovered that mention /no 
soap/ all came from recruits at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station 
in Illinois. This is a late example:

Saturday came along and we all dressed up in our best, as that was our 
liberty day, when the Commander came in and said “No Soap” on liberty as 
we were in a draft. No one is allowed liberty when they are on a draft, 
afraid that someone would run away.
/Versailles Republican/ (Versailles, Indiana), 3 Oct. 1918.

An article a few months later headlined “Demobilizing War Words” 
confirms that the expression was widespread within the US Navy:

A particularly pathetic case is that of the nautical term, “No soap!” I 
say “particularly pathetic” because I myself have found the phrase so 
much more satisfying than the more classical “nothing stirring!” which 
it has so amply replaced. “Nothing stirring” will find strong support 
among the purists, but half a million sailors and an equal number of 
sailors’ sweethearts are not going to surrender the new-found phrase 
without a fight.
/Boston Globe/ (Boston, Massachusetts), 9 Feb. 1919.

Later evidence suggests that it did remain popular and met a need within 
a wider audience for a sharply colloquial dismissive saying.

As with most slang expressions, where it comes from is uncertain. In the 
past, the experts have pointed to the much older use of /soap/ to refer 
to money, a term that was first recorded in a slang dictionary in 1859 
but which had a long run right down into the 1920s, overlapping with /no 
soap/. This overlap, I suspect, led etymologists to infer a connection 
between the two and it’s not implausible. It might well have been that a 
person who said “No soap!” meant something like “No, I haven’t any 
money” or “No, I won’t give you a loan”.

But other letters home from First World War navy recruits, coupled with 
newspaper articles from the period about naval slang, suggest a more 
mundane source. Recruits often complained they weren’t being supplied 
with soap, a need that was at times met by the Red Cross in the comfort 
kits they supplied. Soap was in short supply in the US at the time — as 
it was throughout Europe — because its raw materials of gelatine and fat 
were being diverted to make explosives. It seems likely that /no soap/, 
at first a rueful complaint, became for recruits a saying that meant — 
as early references confirmed — “you’re out of luck”. The slightly 
broader senses naturally followed.

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 
the author. The linked website is http://www.worldwidewords.org. 
<http://www.worldwidewords.org>

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