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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. Turdiform.</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. Nummits and crummits.</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="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;">6. Useful information.</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;">Gibbous</b> “Gimme a break!” Clark Stevens wrote, voicing the views of many other readers, “Were you giddy or loaded to the gills when you declared it a rule that ‘g followed by i is soft’?” Mea culpa. I must have had some rule in my mind: it may have been the one that reader Bron Forman was taught, that <em>g</em> followed by <em>e</em>, <em>i</em> or <em>y</em> <em>may</em> be soft. That one small word makes all the difference since — as Mr Stevens’s examples show — my version of the rule is more honoured in the breach than in the observance. It’s true that <em>g</em> before <em>e</em> and <em>i</em> is often soft, but that’s so only for words from Romance languages; those from Germanic sources are almost always hard. This makes it useless as guidance unless you know the etymology of every word you use, in which case your pronunciation is probably expert anyway. (Incidentally, and for the avoidance of further queries, <em>Germanic</em> isn’t a Germanic word; it comes from Latin.)</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;">Vireya Jacquard wrote from Australia: “Until now I had assumed that gibbous was the adjectival form of <em>gibber</em>, a stone, because once the moon was past half-way, it looked like a stone.” You have to be Australian, I think, to know that word (which, by the way, is said with a hard <em>g</em>, like <em>gibbous</em> but unlike the other meaning of <em>gibber</em>, as in <em>gibbering idiot</em>, which is soft). It most often appears in <em>gibber plain</em>, a phrase describing extensive stony areas, and is from the Dharuk Aboriginal language of the area around Sydney.</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;">Roger Clark wrote, “Just a stickling comment. <em>Gibbous</em> is used to refer to both waxing and waning phases of the moon, not just moving towards full.”</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 tell the people in my parish,” Fr Noel Burke wrote from Glasgow, “about the gibbous moon they’ll see on Palm Sunday. Easter is set by the first full moon occurring after the Spring equinox. So on the Sunday before Easter the moon will always be gibbous. They also learn a new word!”</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;">Giving the mitten</b> Following up my piece two weeks ago, Antero Ranne emailed: “<em>To get mittens</em> is a common Finnish expression for having a marriage proposal rejected. The Institute for the Languages of Finland says: ‘Many Germanic nations had a custom of giving gloves as a present when an agreement, for example a marriage contract, was made. If the gloves were returned, it meant that the proposal was rejected. The custom had its origin in the Middle Ages.’ ” This greatly strengthens the view that the expression was borrowed from continental European custom, as several sources assert.</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;">Shipper</b> Debi Smolinske emailed, “I love how well you research your subjects. But I just had to write to let you know that you got it horribly wrong in your usage of the term <em>slash fiction</em>. Slash fiction is always of the homosexual variety. Slash fiction is never heterosexual. That is the whole point of it. It is the frequent on-screen bromances that lead fan writers (nearly always female) to create slash fiction. You are correct that the term slash fiction comes from the written Kirk/Spock, because they were the first pair to become the subject of this type of fan fiction.”</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;">Lee Billings added: “The term <em>slash</em> is still very much in use to describe fanfic [fan fiction] involving same-sex relationships; the corresponding term for male-female relationships is <em>het</em>. Both of these imply a sexual component is involved; if not, it’s described as <em>gen</em> (from <em>for general audiences</em>). The Kirk/Spock pairing has been written as sexually explicit from the very beginning; those stories probably predate the <em>bromance</em> versions.”</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 recollection of shippers,” John Bradford wrote, “though I didn’t know it had a name until now, was in the late sixties (probably) when I saw a newspaper headline “Will Perry Marry Della?”. Those born in the final part of the last century or later won’t have a clue what that’s about. I’ve no idea when <em>The X-Files</em> began, but it’s surely later than Perry Mason.”</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;">Waitlisting</b> Jeremy Weatherford pointed out that there is another term used in the email field that’s close in sense: <em>greylisting</em>, which is the automatic temporary rejection of incoming email from unknown senders with instructions to the originating server to send the message again after a delay. Spammers’ systems don’t usually bother to re-queue messages, so it’s a simple way of ensuring it’s genuine.</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;">Whet and wet</b> The piece on this last week made the assumption that <em>wet</em> and <em>whet</em> are pronounced alike, as they are in most English varieties. But some speakers, for example in Ireland and parts of the US, maintain the historical difference in sound in which <em>wh</em> is a breathy sound said as though it’s written <em>hw</em>. Such speakers also distinguish many other pairs, including <em>which-witch</em> and <em>wine-whine</em> (hence <em>wine-whine merger</em> for the loss of the distinction).</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;">“You didn’t mention one of the major reasons for the confusion between whet and wet,” wrote Charlotte Riggle. “If you are using a whetstone to sharpen a knife, you have to wet it. It’s natural, then, for folks who no longer use the word <em>whet</em> as a synonym for sharpen to call it a <em>wetstone</em>. Even some manufacturers of whetstones call them wetstones!”</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;">David Rosen recalled an etymological story that <em>whistle</em> was an old term for a scythe. He thinks he may have heard it in a broadcast by the late American poet John Ciardi. Steve Shervais found a reference to the same idea in Neal Stephenson’s <em>Baroque Cycle</em>: farmers, it is said, would whet their whistles with a whetstone. Thus <em>whet one’s whistle</em>. But there’s no example known of <em>whistle</em> being used as a term for a scythe and the idiom is certainly <em>wet one’s whistle</em>. This story is surely fanciful and muddies the etymological waters.</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;">Paul Hatt wrote: “One use of <em>whet</em> is to be found in Shakespeare’s <em>King John</em>, at the end of Act 3; but the line with it in has been cut on the two occasions I have seen the play. Cardinal Pandulph urges the Dauphin to join him in trying to get the French king to take action against wicked King John with the words ‘I will whet on the king.’ [He means he would sharpen the king’s resolve.] You can see why the line has to be cut, as even the best actor emphasising the <em>h</em> in the word would, I think, be greeted with laughter at a solemn moment.”</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. Turdiform</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 one of a select class of English words, including <em>crapulent</em> and <em>formicate</em>, that are guaranteed to mislead readers and raise a giggle among children of all ages.</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’m reminded of a wonderful monologue that the British comedy actor Ronnie Barker gave many years ago on a television show called <em>The Two Ronnies</em>. In a sketch peppered with real and fictional Cockney rhyming slang he claimed to have encountered a small brown Richard the Third on the ground, which he picked up and put on a wall out of the way. The story ends with it flying off.</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;">There’s a good reason for my bringing that up, apart from wanting to share a memory, because <em>turdiform</em> is an adjective that refers to birds of the thrush family. It comes from Latin <em>turdus</em> for one of the European thrushes, probably the song thrush or mistle thrush (the latter having been given that name because it was noted for eating berries, particularly those of the mistletoe).</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;"><em>Turdiform</em> is found exclusively in old-time ornithological works. It has always been specialist and technical; its appearances lie mainly in the period from 1870 to 1910 and it is obsolete. We may guess that a certain fastidiousness on the part of writers has led to their expelling it from their vocabulary.</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;">Hucking off</b> The British snowboarder Billy Morgan could finish only tenth in his slopestyle final at the Sochi Winter Olympics. While being interviewed live for the BBC he said “I knew that maybe if I landed my run it’d put me up there on the podium, so I just thought, I’ll just huck it.” The presenter heard a very different four-letter word and apologised for it. I’m not acquainted with the terminology of skateboarding, but I have learned that <em>huck</em> is a verb used as a macho cry meaning to go all out or to hurl oneself into the air with great force. The first known example in print was in the <em>Washington Post</em> in 1989. Despite the similarity, <em>huck it</em> isn’t a euphemism, although we might guess there’s an element of faux innocence in it.</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. Nummits and crummits</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 Chris Sheldon</em>: I have been reading a book on Devon customs published in 1900 with the odd title of <em>Nummits and Crummits</em>. Even after reading this I still don’t know what these words mean!</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> Yes, it’s a nuisance that Sarah Hewett doesn’t define these two crucial words in her book, though she gives hints. She writes in the introduction, “Apologies are offered to any one whose <em>Crummits</em> have been appropriated without permission or acknowledgment” and in the chapter headed <em>Nummits and Crummits</em> she quotes an old Devon verse about mealtimes:</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;">A wee-bit and breakfast,<br />
A stay-bit and dinner,<br />
A nummit and a crummit,<br />
And a bit arter supper.</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 place to get the answers is the <em>English Dialect Dictionary</em>, a huge compilation in six volumes published between 1898 and 1905. It was based on submissions by a large number of local dialect field workers, of whom Mrs Hewett was one.</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 EDD defines <em>crummit</em> as a small bit or a crumb. A <em>nummit</em> is a meal eaten in the field by farm labourers, either in the middle of the morning or in the afternoon, at <em>nummit-time</em>. The phrase <em>nummit and crummit</em> meant a snack, a bit of something taken between meals. You might translate the title of Mrs Hewett’s book as “bits and pieces” or “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;">As to the other words in the rhyme: a <em>wee-bit</em> is a snack taken early in the morning before the regular breakfast; <em>stay-bit</em> means likewise a snack, something to stay your hunger before a main meal. <em>Arter</em> is a local form of <em>after</em>. If you take the <em>bit after supper</em> to be another snack, the rhyme lists three main meals a day plus five snacks. We might assume Devon agricultural labourers were notably well-fed, but a description in a little book of sketches of Devon life shows that the verse particularly applied to one type of work (note the different version of the rhyme):</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;">“Haymakers are the hungriest folks out — ‘Fore-bit and Breakfast, Rear-bit and Dinner; Nummit and Crummit, And a Bit after Supper’ — that’s what they had when my mother was a maid, and that’s what they want to-day and for ever.” ... Perhaps, if Aunt Charity were alive now, she would lament for the good old times when haymakers expected their eight meals a day, and earned them.<br /><span style="color:#008000;"><em>Devonshire Idyls</em>, by Miss H C O’Neill, 1892.</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;"><em>Nummit</em> is widely known in English dialect and has other many other spellings. The <em>Oxford English Dictionary</em> has it under that spelling and says it’s a variant of <em>noonmeat</em>. It would seem that mealtimes and their names have changed somewhat since <em>noonmeat</em> was current (it died out in the eighteenth century). Nobody seems to know the origin of <em>crummit</em> but it might be from <em>crumb</em>.</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;">• An advertisement for an ethnic grocery store in the <em>Mississauga News</em> of 6 February seen by Dave Tracey: “Free butter running chicken”. We may guess that <em>free range</em> was meant.</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 2013 issue of the Journal of the Ceredigion Historical Society of Wales contains this sentence, Rhys Jones tells us: “Evan is described as the vicar of the parish, the church being dedicated to St Michael, aged thirty-one and unmarried”.</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 know what they mean. Richard Mellish found this in a BBC report online on 10 February: “Trains between Exeter St Davids and Waterloo are now able to run normally following a landslip near Crewkerne.”</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 good example of a classic error appeared in the <em>Edinburgh Evening News</em> of 5 February, courtesy of Nicholas Radcliffe: “A once forlorn and deserted area of Edinburgh, Iain Mercer finds new life at the West End...”</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;">• No news in the headline Victor Steinbok found over a Reuters report of 10 February: “Sexually active midlife women continue to have sex.”</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="N6">6. Useful information</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 newsletter</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, Robert Waterhouse, John Bagnall and Peter Morris. 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 newsletter 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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