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<title>World Wide Words E-Magazine 791</title>
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<p style="font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica,san-serif;font-weight:bold;font-size:12pt;color:#008000;margin-bottom:0px;padding-top:12px;" id="top">Contents</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:12pt;margin-bottom:0pt;margin-left:0pt;margin-top:1pt;padding-right:6pt;text-align:left;">1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:12pt;margin-bottom:0pt;margin-left:0pt;margin-top:1pt;padding-right:6pt;text-align:left;">2. Weird Words: Gamp.</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:12pt;margin-bottom:0pt;margin-left:0pt;margin-top:1pt;padding-right:6pt;text-align:left;">3. Wordface.</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:12pt;margin-bottom:0pt;margin-left:0pt;margin-top:1pt;padding-right:6pt;text-align:left;">4. Questions and Answers: Wag.</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:12pt;margin-bottom:0pt;margin-left:0pt;margin-top:1pt;padding-right:6pt;text-align:left;">5. Sic!</p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica,san-serif;font-weight:bold;font-size:12pt;color:#008000;margin-bottom:0px;padding-top:12px;">1. Feedback, Notes and Comments</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;"><b style="margin-right:12px;">Wrong and wrongly</b> Carolyn Dane commented, “I agree entirely with your use of <i>wrong</i>. Another instance of the same issue is people who feel <i>badly</i> about something. As Isaac Asimov said, ‘The only people who feel badly are inept dirty old men.’”</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">Marc Picard introduced me to a new grammatical term. “Adverbs like <i>wrong</i>, <i>sure</i>, <i>fast</i>, <i>slow</i>, etc. actually have a name, as I discovered recently when one of my students did a paper on this phenomenon in a course I was giving on the history of English. They’re called <i>flat adverbs</i>, presumably on the basis of phrases like ‘to fall flat’ or ‘to turn down flat’.” The <em>Oxford English Dictionary</em> includes <i>flat adverb</i> as first being used by the philologist John Earle in his work <em>The Philology of the English Tongue</em> of 1871, though it doesn’t explain why he chose it.</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">A perspective on all such intricacies of English was supplied by Vivien Allen: “As a teacher of English as a foreign language before I retired I always read your weekly magazine with great interest. Today I was reminded of a class at a language school in Cambridge where I taught at one time. I had been taking my students through the various pronunciations of <i>-ough</i> and had put a list of words such as <i>bough</i>, <i>tough</i> and <i>through</i> on the blackboard. At the end a German boy sighed deeply and said, ‘Mrs Allen, You don’t know how lucky you are being born speaking English’! On another occasion I congratulated a Dutch student on his excellent English and commented that the Dutch students always arrived well grounded in the language. He replied, ‘If you are born speaking a language that sounds like swearing in hiccups you have to be good at English’!”</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;"><b style="margin-right:12px;">On the edge</b> Several readers provided a further illustration of the worrisome difficulties of English. They noted that in this section last time I wrote, “Two comments suggest that I sounded the death knell on <i>Great Wen</i> too precipitately”. They firmly told me that the word should have been <i>precipitously</i>. Having written one long piece last week to justify my choice of adverb, I’m disinclined to impose another on long-suffering subscribers: the complicated story of the ways in which the two words have interacted in meaning and usage would need a substantial and probably boring article. However, I’m surprised at the comments, since all the dictionaries that I’ve consulted give as their first sense of <i>precipitate</i> phrases such as “sudden, hasty, rash” or “done without careful consideration”, They also give one sense of <i>precipitous</i> as “hasty or precipitate”. Jeff Kabacinski lightened his gentle criticism by ending his message, “though it does bring to mind that old chemistry joke, ‘If you’re not a part of the solution, you’re a part of the precipitate’.”</p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica,san-serif;font-weight:bold;font-size:12pt;color:#008000;margin-bottom:0px;padding-top:12px;">2. Weird Words: Gamp</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">A new subscriber from Australia told me he had come across the site through trying to solve a crossword clue in <em>The Age</em>, “1000-ampere rain shedders”. He didn’t get any help from the site, because I’d never written about <i>gamps</i>, but he solved the clue anyway. (Was the compiler thinking of a thousand US dollars, a <i>g-note</i>? I’d normally take the prefix <i>g</i> to mean <i>giga-</i>, a thousand million.)</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">A gamp is indeed a rain shedder, more prosaically an umbrella, one particularly suited to this apology for a summer we’re currently having in Britain. But we Brits are inured to rain. As <em>The Times</em> commented in April 2011, “When the clouds open we will bring out brollies, beach parasols, golf umbrellas, gamps, sou’westers, oil-skins, gaberdines and rain-ponchos.”</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;"><i>Brolly</i> is, all the best authorities assure us, a clipped and altered form of <i>umbrella</i>, supposedly beginning its life as university slang at Oxford and Cambridge in the 1870s (it’s also sometimes known as a <i>brelly</i>, which makes a little more sense). But <i>gamp</i> had preceded it into the printed record for what a writer described in 1864 as “a large, bulgy, loosely tied cotton umbrella”.</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">We are once again indebted to the fertile mind of Charles Dickens. Mrs Sarah (Sairey) Gamp appeared in his novel <em>Martin Chuzzlewit</em> in 1846. She had a large umbrella, “in colour like a faded leaf, except where a circular patch of a lively blue had been dexterously let in at the top”, which entered into so many adventures during the course of the story that it almost become a character in its own right.</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">Mrs Gamp, a disreputable drink-sodden widow, first appears when she is engaged as a <i>night watcher</i> to sit up with the body of Anthony Chuzzlewit during the week before his funeral; she claimed also to be a midwife, though she was really what was then called a <i>monthly nurse</i>, one who stayed with and looked after women for that period after childbirth. (The modern equivalent is sometimes called a <i>doula</i>, from the classical Greek word meaning a female slave.)</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;"><i>Gamp</i> is not now much used, even in the country of its birth, but it’s still in the dictionaries and it’s well enough remembered that a crossword setter in Australia could base a clue on it and expect it to be solved.</p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica,san-serif;font-weight:bold;font-size:12pt;color:#008000;margin-bottom:0px;padding-top:12px;">3. Wordface</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;"><b style="margin-right:12px;">Not lost but refashioned</b> Tony Chabot wrote that he came across this sentence in a seventeenth-century letter from Sir Isaac Newton to Robert Hooke: “I have long grutched the time spent ...”. He feels that <i><b>grutched</b></i> has a wonderful sound to it and that it should be more commonly used. In Newton’s time it was still employed in the sense of being reluctant to give or allow something, to begrudge, but it seems to have gone out of mainstream English currency around 1700. It lasted long enough in a few local dialects for it to be included in the <em>English Dialect Dictionary</em> at the very end of the nineteenth century and to be resurrected, temporarily, by Rudyard Kipling in his <em>Barrack-Room Ballads</em> (“I paid my price for findin’ out, / Nor never grutched the price I paid”). Its origin is the Old French word <i>groucier</i>, to murmur or grumble. Our modern <i>grudge</i> is an altered form of it.</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;"><b style="margin-right:12px;">Beware of the invitation</b> One form of online confidence trick is aimed at scientists and technologists, always eager because of the pressure to publish to take up invitations to present a paper at a prestigious conference. E-mail messages and websites advertise a conference in their field with a personal invitation to take part, subject only to the usual conference registration fee. A gullible booker finds too late that the conference doesn’t exist — it’s a <i><b>scamference</b></i>. The term dates back to the middle of the last decade.</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;"><b style="margin-right:12px;">Deus ex moneta</b> For the first time ever, journalists were allowed into the Vatican Bank this week. They found an ATM in the banking hall that displayed its messages in Latin. <i>Deductio ex pecunia</i> means “cash withdrawal”. But what’s the Latin for “international requirements on financial transparency”?</p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica,san-serif;font-weight:bold;font-size:12pt;color:#008000;margin-bottom:0px;padding-top:12px;">4. Questions and Answers: Wag</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-left:0px;margin-bottom:6px;"><span style="background-color:#008000;color:#ffffff;font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica;font-weight:bold;font-style:normal;font-size:1.1em;margin-right:6px;padding-left:4px;padding-top:1px;padding-right:4px;padding-bottom:1px;">Q</span> <em>From Malcolm Sealy</em>: I often hear <i>to wag off</i> here in Australia — meaning to cut classes — and thought it was an Australianism. However it seems to have been in use in England at the end of the nineteenth century, as James K Jerome uses it in <em>Three Men on the Bummel</em>. Any ideas on its derivation?</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-left:0px;margin-bottom:6px;"><span style="background-color:#008000;color:#ffffff;font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica;font-weight:bold;font-style:normal;font-size:1.1em;margin-right:6px;padding-left:4px;padding-top:1px;padding-right:4px;padding-bottom:1px;">A</span> It’s rather older than Jerome. It certainly is British, having been first recorded here:</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica,sans-serif;margin-left:24px;margin-top:6px;margin-right:80px;margin-bottom:6px;font-size:11pt;line-height:14pt;">“My misfortunes all began in wagging, Sir; but what could I do, exceptin’ wag?” “Excepting what?” said Mr Carker. “Wag, Sir. Wagging from school.” “Do you mean pretending to go there, and not going?” said Mr Carker. “Yes, Sir, that’s wagging, Sir.”<br /><span style="color:#008000;"><em>Dombey and Son</em>, by Charles Dickens, 1848</span></p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">My wife remembers taking a day off when she was a student teacher at a London school in the 1960s and being asked the following day by a child, “Was you hoppin’ the wag, Miss?” That’s recorded a century earlier, from the 1860s. Other formulations have been documented:</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica,sans-serif;margin-left:24px;margin-top:6px;margin-right:80px;margin-bottom:6px;font-size:11pt;line-height:14pt;">The most general term for truancy seems to be “to play hookey” (an Americanism which became naturalized around 1900), although very often, particularly in the north, young ne’er-do-wells use the older phrases “playing wag”, “playing the wag”, “hopping the wag”, “wagging school”, or “wagging it”, speaking with the same tongue boys used in the time of Dickens.<br /><span style="color:#008000;"><em>The Lore and Language of School-children</em>, by Iona and Peter Opie, 1967.</span></p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">My impression is that <i>wag</i> in its various forms is still known in the UK, though it’s local. Around here in Gloucestershire, <i>skiving</i> and <i>bunking off</i> are usual. I remember Sir Paul McCartney a couple of years ago referring to <i>sagging off</i> school during his Liverpool childhood. <i>Nobbing</i>, <i>dodging</i>, <i>plunking</i> and <i>twagging</i> are also known in various parts of the UK. The last one is fairly recent and some writers have suggested that it derives from <i>wag</i>.</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">Otherwise, we use the verb <i>wag</i> these days almost exclusively to mean moving something rapidly from side to side (or up and down): a dog wags its tail, a person may wag his finger as a warning or a reprimand, or gossips may wag their tongues. This is ancient: it appears in the fourteenth-century poem <em>Piers Plowman</em> by William Langland, though he meant by it a boat rocking from side to side (it’s from Old English <i>waggian</i>, to shake).</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">Earlier still it could mean to move one’s limbs with difficulty, to totter, stagger, or walk unsteadily. The mental picture of side-to-side movement may have emerged from this. The <em>Dictionary of American Regional Usage</em> records <i>wag</i> from some parts of the US in the sense of staggering along, especially under a heavy load, and so to carry something heavy. A person who was swinging from a rope after being hanged was at one time said to be wagging, which led to <i>waghalter</i> for a man who was going to be hanged, or deserved to be. Though the evidence is indecisive, it may have been abbreviated back to <i>wag</i> and softened to mean a mischievous prankster or youth — hence <i>wag</i> for a facetious person or practical joker. (Recent <i>wag</i> for a wife or girlfriend is an acronym.)</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">The unsteady walking sense evolved into wandering about from place to place or moving away from some place, especially with difficulty or under pressure to remain. The idea of truancy evolved from this, though uncertainty about the source of the mischievous youth sense of <i>wag</i> leaves the experts uncertain whether it might be from <i>waghalter</i> instead.</p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica,san-serif;font-weight:bold;font-size:12pt;color:#008000;margin-bottom:0px;padding-top:12px;">5. Sic!</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">• This appeared in the <em>New York Times</em> magazine on 17 June, Sarabell Stoll tells us. “When Pablo Escobar was Chapo’s age, he had been dead for more than a decade.”</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">• An article in the <em>Guardian</em> on 23 June described a possible reaction of a hospital patient seeing a clergyman approaching his bed. “Is he here to give me the last rights?” Unfortunately, the writer was Giles Fraser, formerly Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral.</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">• On 19 June the Australian Government released a report, catchily entitled <em>Post Implementation Review of the VET FEE-HELP Assistance Scheme</em>. Gavin Moodie found this sentence in it: “Consideration also needs to be given to the role played by other relevant bodies to ensure, where possible, ongoing alignment in policy and minimisation of regulatory duplicity.”</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">• A report on ABC News online on 27 June interested Brian Barratt. Below the headline, “Cops scour Darwin bush for beheading suspect”, one line read “Police cars are patrolling the area, and a chopper is circling above.” Add your own punchline.</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-top:6px;margin-bottom:6px;">• Raymond Noë wrote from The Netherlands concerning a headline he had seen in the <em>New York Daily News</em> of 26 June: “Reading books will help shorten Brazilian prisoners’ sentences”. But as he says, improved literacy may equally result in their sentences getting longer.</p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica,san-serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;background-color:#ffffff;color:#ffffff;margin-top:24px;margin-bottom:15px;border-bottom:2px solid #008000;">x</p>
<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-left:0px;margin-bottom:6px;"><b style="margin-right:12px;color:#008000;">About this e-magazine</b> <em>World Wide Words</em> is written, edited and published in the UK by Michael Quinion. ISSN 1470-1448. Copyediting and advice are provided by Julane Marx in the US and Robert Waterhouse in the UK. The linked website is <a href="http://www.worldwidewords.org">http://www.worldwidewords.org</a>.</p>
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<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-left:0px;margin-bottom:6px;"><b style="margin-right:12px;color:#008000;">E-mail contact addresses</b> Comments on e-magazine mailings are always welcome. They should be <a href="mailto:wordseditor@worldwidewords.org">sent to me</a>. I do try to respond, but pressures of time often prevent me from doing so. Items intended for the <i>Sic!</i> section should go to <a href="mailto:sic@worldwidewords.org">sic@worldwidewords.org</a>. Questions intended to be answered in the Q and A section should be sent to <a href="mailto:wordsquestions@worldwidewords.org">wordsquestions@worldwidewords.org</a>, not to me directly.</p>
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<p style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#000000;font-family:Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:12pt;line-height:15pt;margin-left:0px;margin-bottom:6px;"><b style="margin-right:12px;color:#008000;">Copyright</b> <em>World Wide Words</em> is copyright © Michael Quinion 2012. All rights reserved. You may reproduce this e-magazine in whole or part in free newsletters, newsgroups or mailing lists online provided that you include the copyright notice above and give the website address. Reproduction of substantial parts of items in printed publications or websites requires permission from the editor beforehand.</p>
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