<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html><head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" >
<title>World Wide Words E-Magazine 804</title>
</head><body style="background-color:#ffffff;">
<table cellpadding="0" border="0" cellspacing="0" style="margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:0px;"><tr>
<td width="600">
<p style="font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica,san-serif;font-weight:bold;font-size:18pt;background-color:#008000;color:#ffffff;padding-top:12px;padding-bottom:12px;text-align:center;margin-bottom:6px;">WORLD WIDE WORDS E-MAGAZINE<br><span style="font-size:15pt;">Issue 804: Saturday 6 October 2012</span></p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica,san-serif;font-weight:bold;font-size:9pt;background-color:#ffffff;color:#008000;text-align:center;margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:24px;">
<a href="http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/wodr.htm" style="text-decoration:none;color:#008000;">Online version</a><span style="margin-left:6px;margin-right:6px;text-align:center;">|</span>
<a href="http://www.worldwidewords.org/" style="text-decoration:none;color:#008000;">Home page</a><span style="margin-left:6px;margin-right:6px;text-align:center;">|</span>
<a href="http://www.worldwidewords.org/feedback.php" style="text-decoration:none;color:#008000;">Contact me</a><span style="margin-left:6px;margin-right:6px;text-align:center;">|</span>
<a href="http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/" style="text-decoration:none;color:#008000;">Subscriptions</a><span style="margin-left:6px;margin-right:6px;text-align:center;">|</span>
<a href="http://www.worldwidewords.org/php/bin/surprise.php" style="text-decoration:none;color:#008000;">Surprise me!</a>
</p>
<p style="font-family:Arial,Tahoma,Helvetica,san-serif;font-size:10pt;color:#008000;margin-bottom:24px;text-align:center;margin-left:60px;margin-right:60px;font-style:italic;">This mailing also contains a plain-text version. Settings in your e-mail viewer will determine which version you see by default.</p>
<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: Chucklehead.</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. Miscellany.</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: Year dot.</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;">Nosism</b> Several subscribers suggested that doctors and nurses who used <i>we</i> (“And how are we today?”), which Hilary Powers calls the <i>clinical we</i>, isn’t an example of nosism, using <i>we</i> for oneself. John Weiss argued that it either meant <i>you</i> or was an embracing plural first person that included the patient.</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;">Fit to be tied</b> Judith Lowe, Graham Egan and John Gibbs mentioned the common Australian version of this idiom: <i>ropeable</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;"><b style="margin-right:12px;">Dingus</b> Several more comments came in about the Dutch antecedents of <i>dingus</i>. Ilke Cochrane wrote, “As a native Dutch speaker I have long been familiar with the word <i>dinges</i> (as it is usually spelled, although it obviously tends to occur in spoken rather than written language), which is pronounced with a <i>g</i> like that in <i>ringer</i>, and can refer to things, people or words the speaker can’t remember.”</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: Chucklehead</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;">Many, many years ago, one of my teachers delighted in calling his less intellectually gifted pupils “chuckleheaded idiots”. A nicely rhythmic expression, in real life it would have been likely to get him a punch on the nose. We slaves to mortarboarded masters didn’t have that option.</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;">English speakers have been able to call a stupid or foolish person a chucklehead at least since the early eighteenth century. For most of its life it was a local or dialect word, albeit widely distributed, not used by serious English writers unless they wanted to evoke the earthy language of a son of toil. Americans were more egalitarian:</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;">There wasn’t a human being in this town but knew that that boy was a perfect chucklehead; perfect dummy; just a stupid ass, as you may say. Everybody knew it, and everybody said it. Well, if that very boy isn’t the first lawyer in the State of Missouri to-day, I’m a Democrat!<br /><span style="color:#008000;"><em>Life On The Mississippi</em>, by Mark Twain, 1883.</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;">It used to be assumed that the <i>chuckle</i> part represented the sunny attitudes of a person so dim-witted that he was unable to appreciate the horrors of everyday life and so lived happily within the narrow confines of his own mind. The first edition of the <em>Oxford English Dictionary</em> thought so but the experts now disagree.</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;">They say it’s from <i>chuck</i> in the sense of a chock, which is really no more than a different spelling of the same word. Like <i>chock</i>, it could mean a lump of wood, but it could also be a piece of cheese or home-made cake or anything else small enough to hold in the hand. You might call it a <i>chunk</i>, which is another modification of the same word. We’re familiar with the chuck of a drill, a shaped chunk of metal, but might not make the connection with <i>chuck steak</i>, which is etymologically a lump of meat. So <i>chucklehead</i> is a relative of <i>bonehead</i>, <i>knucklehead</i> and other insulting assertions that the head of the addressee is solid right through.</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;">Might the experts who equated chuckleheadedness with laughter have been thinking of the origin of <i>chuckle</i>? That, too, comes from <i>chuck</i>, plus the <i>-le</i> ending that marks a repeated action. This chuck is a different word, however, probably imitating the sound of a contented chicken (it’s in origin the same word as <i>cluck</i>). The theory that <i>chucklehead</i> came from <i>chuckle</i> might have implied the person so described was a birdbrain. But it isn’t so.</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. Miscellany</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;">Holding it together</b> Mark Brown submitted a succinct query: “Who was Cotter and what was the first thing that he pinned?”. Regretfully, we don’t know much about the origin of <i>cotter</i>, though we are sure it doesn’t refer to a specific person. It turns up in the fourteenth century for any device, such as a pin, wedge or key, used to hold two components of a machine together. The word is a shortened form of <i>cotterel</i>, but the origin of that is unknown.</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;">Tweeting in dialect</b> An article by Jan Griffiths in the <em>Guardian</em> on 26 September began by describing a silent spring without birdsong: “No chittering, no fluting, no chissicking ...”. <i>Chittering</i> I knew to mean a series of short, sharp sounds, a cross between twittering and chattering (<i>chitter</i> is actually a variation of <i>chatter</i>). But <i>chissicking</i> was new. Harold Orton’s <em>Survey of English Dialects</em> has an entry for it as an Essex term for clearing one’s throat with a forced cough. It has been applied to the sound the woodcock makes, which is fair enough, since one author described it as a series of grunts followed by a sneeze. As it has been, the croak of a jackdaw may with some poetic licence be called chissicking. It’s a stretch to use it of starlings, as the Yorkshireman Richard Kearton did in <em>Nature’s Carol Singers</em> in 1906; he wrote of the birds “sitting in one black mass on every available branch and bough, producing an indescribable din by all chissicking and chattering to each other at the same time”. Starlings make lots of noises and certainly chatter (or chitter) inordinately. But throat-clearing noises? Surely not? It seems that writers who have borrowed this very rare dialect word have assumed it stands for a chirping sound.</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;">Freezing phrase</b> D L Taylor asked me about the US idiom <i>frosts my grommet</i>, which seems to mean “makes me feel extremely unhappy”. The expression appears in various blogs online, but never in any print publication I can trace, and may date back only a few years. I can’t find anything about it. Might it be a bad-taste reference to the <em>Challenger</em> shuttle disaster of 1986, in which the fatal flaw was traced to the freezing weather hardening grommets (O-rings) in the solid-fuel boosters?</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: Year dot</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 Anthony Lauder</em>: My wife is Czech, and recently came across the English phrase <i>the year dot</i>. I explained that it means “a long time ago” but was stumped as to why. Can you possibly shed some light on the origins of this please?</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> No problem.</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;">It’s tied to the idea of smallness. Ever since <i>dot</i> came back into the language in the sixteenth century (it had been recorded just the once in Old English, but then disappeared) it has meant something extremely small — a minute speck, including a tiny mark made by the nib of a pen, such as the dot over the letter <i>i</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;">Sometime around the start of the eighteenth century, this idea led to the idiom <i>to a dot</i>, exactly or precisely alike, as equal as two minute dots. The <em>Oxford English Dictionary</em> records it first in a play in which two characters are comparing a letter and its copy:</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;"><i>Lady Trap</i>: Are you blind? they are both alike to a tittle.<br />
<i>Sir Positive</i>: To a dot. Her hand to a dot.<br /><span style="color:#008000;"><em>Love in Several Masques</em>, by Henry Fielding, 1728.</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;">This is an example from much later:</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;">I see the handbill myself. It tells all about him, to a dot — paints him like a picture, and tells the plantation he’s from, below Newr<i>leans</i>.<br /><span style="color:#008000;"><em>The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn</em>, by Mark Twain, 1884.</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;">Sometime around the middle of the nineteenth century, people began to speak of <i>the year dot</i>, meaning some notional date that’s long in the past. This seems to have been built on the notion of a time that’s so vanishingly distant it appears as a dot about which we can discern nothing. Some writers suggest it might refer in particular to that mythical year 0 between 1BC and 1AD, but I’m not convinced that users have ever thought the year dot to be that far back.</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 is its first appearance that I can find; a correspondent is complaining about the state of customs officers’ uniforms:</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;">Some of the liveries I think, to use a homely phrase, were made in the year dot, and such is the <i>liberal</i> pay of the men, that did their pride prompt them to purchase others, their means would not allow them.<br /><span style="color:#008000;"><em>Ipswich Journal</em> (Suffolk), 25 Mar 1873. <i>Homely phrase</i> implies that <i>year dot</i> was by then well-known, at least in the writer’s experience.</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;">By the way, you might like to know that, when <i>dot</i> appeared that one time in Old English, it meant the head of a boil; it’s also a relative of an Old High German word for a nipple.</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;">• Ted Buselmeier found this alarming sentence in the October issue of <em>National Geographic Magazine</em>: “They draw platoons of whale sharks, which feast on the eggs, and sometimes marine scientists as well.”</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 BayouBuzz website in Louisiana, M Anderson discovered, had this headline in embarrassingly large type over a story of 24 September: “Residents leave Calif. in drones over last two decades”.</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;">• Another headline of note appeared in <em>The Press</em> of Christchurch, New Zealand, on 29 September: “Statue taken by Nazis from space”. Thanks go to Alan Tunnicliffe for telling us about it. (The statue was made from a meteorite.)</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;">• Robin Dawes received a spam email on 28 September. He commented that the contents were irrelevant — everything he needed to know was in the subject line: “80% off, first come first severed”.</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;">• Who guards the guardians? A headline in the issue of <em>Medical News Today</em> of 19 September was seen by Michael Belkin: “Bid To Develop Anthrax Vaccine To Counteract World Bioterrorism Threat By Cardiff Scientists”</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>
<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;">Subscriptions</b> The website provides all the tools you need to manage your own subscription. Please don’t contact me asking for changes you can make yourself, though if problems occur, you can e-mail me at <a href="mailto:wordssubs@worldwidewords.org">wordssubs@worldwidewords.org</a>. To leave the list, change your subscribed address or resubscribe, please visit the <a href="http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/index.htm">mailing-list page</a>. You can also maintain your subscription by e-mail; to get a list of commands, send the <a href="mailto:listserv@listserv.linguistlist.org">list server</a> the message INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS. This e-magazine is also available as an <a href="http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/newsletter.xml">RSS feed</a> and via <a href="https://twitter.com/wwwordseditor">Twitter</a>. Back issues are available on the <a href="http://www.worldwidewords.org/backissues/">website</a>.</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;">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>
<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;">Support World Wide Words</b> If you have enjoyed this e-magazine and would like to help defray its costs and those of the linked website, please visit the <a href="http://www.worldwidewords.org/support.htm">support page</a>.</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;">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>
</td></tr></table>
</body></html>