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<title>World Wide Words Newsletter 884</title>
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<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 NEWSLETTER<br><span style="font-size:15pt;">Issue 884: Saturday 31 May 2014</span></p>
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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. Gyre.</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. Skeleton in the closet.</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. 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;">5. 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;">Holiday break</b> I’m away for a while and so there will be no issues during June. The next will be on 5 July.</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;">Nuciform</b> Several readers pointed out that there was nothing odd in Nehemiah Grew’s creation of <em>nuciprune</em> for the walnut, implying a fruit halfway between a nut and a plum. Fresh from the tree, walnuts are enclosed in nubbly green outer flesh and resemble unripe plums. Candida Frith-Macdonald commented, “Almonds are similarly wrapped in flesh, and fuzz, being the nutty cousin of the peach and apricot. But for the oddest of all, look at the Brazil nut fruit, a real master of disguise.”</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;">Arse versus elbow</b> Ray Heindl commented on my item about errors being introduced when scanning printed documents: “An OCR [optical character recognition] error is sometimes called a <em>scanno</em>, by analogy with <em>typo</em>. There are also <em>spellcheckos</em>, caused by blindly accepting a spellchecker’s suggestions.”</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;">Robert Nathan wrote, “Converting printed contracts and other documents into editable text frequently results in what a former secretary aptly dubbed <em>devilspeak</em>. I encountered the cited mis-transcription of <em>arms</em> [into anus] in scanning an early bound copy of Lewis Carroll’s <em>Through The Looking Glass</em>, when, in <em>Jabberwocky</em>, the invitation extended to <em>my beamish boy</em> took on an unforeseen and particularly salacious meaning.”</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. Gyre</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 people seeing this word would at once recall Lewis Carroll’s poem <em>Jabberwocky</em> from <em>Through the Looking-Glass</em>: “‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.”</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 might enjoy the version created some years ago by the British satirical columnist Miles Kington in the style of Raymond Chandler:</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;">Outside in the street, the first lights had come on and the slithy toves were doing whatever they do in the wabe. Some days they gyre, some days they gimble. It’s no skin off my nose, but I wish they’d make their minds up, then we could all rest easy.</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;">When the toves gyre they spin around, revolve or whirl, an animal impersonation of a whirling dervish. You might link it to <em>gyrate</em> or <em>gyroscope</em>, which would be appropriate, since all three words are from the same source, the Greek <em>guros</em>, a ring or circle. As a noun <em>gyre</em> means a spiral or vortex. Geographers use it for a circular pattern of currents in an ocean basin, such as the <em>North Pacific gyre</em>, which has become infamous as a perennially rotating mass of unrottable plastic rubbish. Like <em>gyrate</em> and <em>gyroscope</em>, <em>gyre</em> is said with a soft <em>g</em>.</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 one, by the way, is sure what slithy toves do when they <em>gimble</em>. It was one of Carroll’s lesser linguistic inventions and hasn’t caught on. Humpty Dumpty, Carroll's <em>alter ego</em>, suggested that they were making holes like a <em>gimlet</em> with their corkscrew noses. Carroll might also have had <em>gambol</em> in mind, or perhaps <em>gimbal</em>, a contrivance for keeping an instrument such as a compass horizontal in a moving vessel. If so, <em>pace</em> Miles Kington, toves must simultaneously gyre and gimble, spinning to stay balanced.</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. Skeleton in the closet</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 Martin Sturmer</em>: I can understand why a skeleton in the closet should mean an embarrassing fact that’s best kept secret, but how did it come into existence?</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> Being British, my figurative skeletons are in a cupboard rather than a closet. I learned the idiom that way in childhood, a form that's still the more common one, though the version with <em>closet</em> is also found.</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;">Such hidden embarrassments aren’t limited to family disgrace or private misdemeanour:</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;">RBS chief Stephen Hester has gone as far as he can to prepare expectations that the bailed-out bank will be slapped with a big fine when watchdogs around the globe finally finish their investigations into the manipulation of interest rates. But Libor is not the only skeleton in the cupboard for this industry.<br /><span style="color:#008000;"><em>Observer</em>, 28 Oct. 2012.</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;">A tale often repeated links the phrase to the difficulties surgeons faced, before the passing of the Anatomy Act of 1832, in obtaining cadavers for teaching students. They sometimes did so illegally, as the famous case of Burke and Hare made very public. After bodies had been thoroughly dissected, so the story goes, the surgeons had to hide the skeletons, as they were evidence of a crime. It’s sometimes suggested instead that it arose from a murder in a family in which the body had been hidden away, only later to be found in a mummified state, close enough to a skeleton for folkloric purposes. We may disregard these tales.</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 idea that a skeleton was a figurative representation of a secret shame was once thought to be the inspiration of William Makepeace Thackeray, who wrote in an article in <em>Punch</em> in 1845 that “There is a skeleton in every house.” In a novel ten years later, <em>The Newcomes; Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family</em>, he wrote, “It is from these that we shall arrive at some particulars regarding the Newcome family, which will show us that they have a skeleton or two in <em>their</em> closets, as well as their neighbours.”</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;">However, we now know that it appeared much earlier in the century:</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;">In these, as in many other highly important questions, men seem afraid of enquiring after truth; cautions on cautions are multiplied, to conceal the skeleton in the closet or to prevent its escape.<br /><span style="color:#008000;"><em>A Philosophical Treatise on the Hereditary Peculiarities of the Human Race</em>, by Joseph Adams, 1815, quoted in a review by an anonymous physician in the <em>Eclectic Review</em> of November 1816. This is the first work that set out modern principles of genetic inheritance; Adams is discussing the shame associated with congenital disease.</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;">So the original is actually <em>closet</em>. The earliest example of the <em>cupboard</em> version I can find is in the <em>Morning Post</em> in October 1858 and then as the title of a book by Lady Harriet Anne Scott in 1860.</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;">Why the shift? At the time the phrase first appeared, <em>closet</em> in British English could mean either a cupboard or a private room for retirement or study. My impression is that though the verb survived, the noun <em>closet</em> slowly fell out of use in both senses in Britain during the nineteenth century, perhaps because the rise of <em>water closet</em> (WC), using <em>closet</em> in the sense of a small private room, made it a less suitable word for polite conversation in Victorian times.</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;">For whatever reason, the shift didn't take place in the US, where <em>closet</em> has always been dominant, with <em>cupboard</em> a lesser used variant. The partial shift back towards <em>closet</em> in the UK seems to be the result of American influence.</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. 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;">• Tom DeLorey advises us that on 22 May the <em>Denver Post</em> reported on the bad weather in Colorado, “Both storms were driven by the way warm air flows into the metro area from the south and east because of typography of the surrounding region.”</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 that Mark Anderson read on the BBC website on 28 May about <em>genericide</em>, the loss of a trademark by a company because it had become a general term, had this to say: “German pharmaceutical firm Bayer was forced to give up its rights to the Aspirin trademark in the Treaty of Versailles, in 1919, which followed its defeat in World War 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;">• A piece on the <em>Telegraph</em> site dated 19 May about Spain’s new traffic laws surprised George R Francisco with this sentence: “It is quite common to witness car occupants swerving between lanes at speed without indicating.”</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 long as they can count,” was Bernard Robertson-Dunn’s comment on a job advertisement for a numerical analyst he saw on the Fish4Jobs site: “We are looking for individuals who understands the importance of customer relationships and who is solution focused with excellent communication skills.”</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;">• Margaret Vowles tells us that in the <em>Sunday Times</em> magazine article, <em>A Life in the Day</em>, of 18 May, Jane Percy, Duchess of Northumberland, said of her daughter “Our eldest, Catherine, is a country girl and an expert on birds who can mend guns.”</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="N5">5. 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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<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 2014. All rights reserved. You may reproduce this newsletter 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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