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<div align="left"><font face="Calibri" color="#008000" size="6"><span style=" font-size:24pt"><b>World Wide Words</b></span></font></div>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:0.00mm; margin-bottom:2.11mm;"><font face="Arial" color="#008000">
<span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>Issue 903: 13 November 2014</i></span></font></p>
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<span style=" font-size:14pt"><b>Feedback, Notes and Comments</b></span></font></div>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">
<b>Lilly-lo. </b></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> Following my discussion of this British regional term last time,
several readers were reminded of the German word </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>lichterloh</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">, meaning
burning brightly. There are also parallels in Scandinavian languages, such as
the Danish </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>lille lue</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">, small flame, which suggest that the first element may
actually be a survivor of an ancient Scandinavian import.</span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">I’ve expanded the piece and put it online </span></font>
<a href="http://wwwords.org/lillio"><font face="Georgia" color="#0000ff"><span style=" font-size:13pt"><u>here</u></span></font></a>
<font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">.</span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">
<b>Boot and trunk.</b></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> As a footnote to our discussions, a reader named Ian wrote,
“A colleague told me that he once said the following at a car rental desk in the
States: ‘I hired a car here a fortnight ago, and I think I left a pushchair in the
boot’. He was greeted by a blank stare.” Puzzled British readers may like a
translation into American: “I rented a car here two weeks ago, and I think I left
a stroller in the trunk.” </span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">
<b>Improved search.</b></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> The </span></font><a href="http://wwwords.org/bk"><font face="Georgia">
<span style=" font-size:13pt">back-issue archive</span></font></a><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt"> at the new list server doesn’t have
a search facility. So I’ve added one to the custom search box on every page of
the website. Successful searches will display a plain-text file of one month’s
issues. You may need to use your browser’s search function to find what you’re
looking for within the file.</span></font></p>
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<span style=" font-size:14pt"><b>Bridegroom</b></span></font></div>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Arial Black" color="#008000">
<span style=" font-size:12pt"><b>Q.</b></span></font><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt"> I was in India recently at the time shortly after Diwali when very many
weddings take place. There were festive wedding processions everywhere. Each
featured the groom riding on a white horse to collect his bride. It got me
wondering about whether </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>groom</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> in this sense has anything to do with taking
care of a horse. Or maybe that's what the groomsmen are supposed to do?
[Ellen Smithee]</span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Arial Black" color="#008000">
<span style=" font-size:12pt"><b>A.</b></span></font><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt"> </span><span style=" font-size:13pt">
<i>Groom</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> is common as a short form of </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>bridegroom</i></span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt">. How a word that we now
use for a man who looks after horses came to be linked to one half of a
marrying couple is a classic story of popular misunderstandings — folk
etymology — that cause language to evolve in unpredictable ways.</span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">In Old English, a bridegroom was a </span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>brydguma</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">, a compound of </span><span style=" font-size:13pt">
<i>bryd</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">, a bride,
and </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>guma</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">, a man. </span><span style=" font-size:13pt">
<i>Guma</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">, which is related to Latin </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>homo</i></span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt">, was a poetic term for
a man, which turns up in the epic poem Beowulf, as does another version of the
same word, </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>gome</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">. </span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">By the sixteenth century </span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>brydguma </i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">had become </span><span style=" font-size:13pt">
<i>brydegome</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> (though the
spelling was variable). This was starting to look puzzling, because </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>gome</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> had
become obsolete, and people didn’t connect it with that old word for a man. On
the other hand, they did have </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>groom</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">.</span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">In the twelfth century, this had been a term for a boy or lad, with something of
the colloquial informality about it that </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>kid</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> still possesses, though it could only
refer to a male child. Where it comes from is a mystery. Two centuries later it
had grown up to mean an adult man, but it had also taken on the idea of a
menial male, a serving-man or manservant. In the 1500s and 1600s it could
also mean a shepherd, sometimes in the extended </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>herd-groom</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">. Our sense of a
servant who attends specifically to horses developed in the seventeenth
century. People casting about in the sixteenth century in an attempt to make
sense of this mysterious old word </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>gome</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> seized upon </span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>groom</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> as an alternative,
despite its often inappropriate associations.</span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">A very few grooms had by then gone up in the world. Servants in the English
royal household had titles such as </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>Groom of the Privy Chamber</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">, </span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>Groom of the
Stool</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> and </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>Groom-in-Waiting</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">, all of which survived into the nineteenth century.
They were notionally menial — for example, the Groom of the Stool was an
intimate body servant, as you may guess from </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>stool</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> (from </span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>close-stool</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">) meaning
a commode — but in reality they were high-status posts because of the close
association with the monarch they provided. However, I doubt whether the
person in the street knew much about these unique positions.</span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">
<i>Groomsman</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">, by the way, appeared around 1700 as the male equivalent of the
bridesmaid. Before then the attendant on the groom was a </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>bridesman</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> or
</span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>brideman</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">. This is odd to us today, but from ancient times, compounds that
began with </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>bride-</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> had often been used for a wedding, not specifically a bride.
As with </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>gome</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">, people in time lost that connection and changed </span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>bridesman</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> to
</span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>groomsman</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> to make it clear which person was being attended.</span></font></p>
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<span style=" font-size:14pt"><b>Sic!</b></span></font></div>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">In view of the story above, the misprint that Al Segall spotted in a story in
</span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>Jerusalem Online</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> on 8 November seems relevant: “Welcoming the bridge and
the groom back from the hospital.”</span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">Another misprint suggested an unwise remembrance. John Straford tells us
from Australia that his wife had received an invitation to an open day, which
announced, “We will be commemorating Dame Nellie Melba with the unveiling
of a plague in her honour.”</span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">And Barry Prince found yet another in a subhead to a story in the </span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>Express</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">
online about Frank Zappa: “Fans of rock’s most avant grade figure will adore
this 40th anniversary re-release of his cult 1974 album.” The French language
police will be after him.</span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">Steve Cray and Bruce Ackerman noted this unfortunate sentence in the </span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>Mail</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">
online on 8 November (later understandably changed): “Robin Williams’
devastated widow was questioned whether he had practiced auto-erotica
following his death, the Coroners report yesterday revealed.”</span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">The headline John Emery saw in the police beat column of the </span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>Ellsworth
American</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> on 31 October didn’t sound quite so daft once he had read the story
underneath: “Bottle in bathroom brings charge against local man.”</span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:13pt">Almost equally puzzling was the headline that Sue Freivald found on the Fox
News site on 11 November: “Man who took phone from a woman killed by train
in custody”.</span></font></p>
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<span style=" font-size:14pt"><b>Useful information</b></span></font></div>
<p style="margin-left:0mm; margin-right:0mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:11pt">
<b>About this newsletter</b></span><span style=" font-size:11pt">: World Wide Words is researched, written and published by
Michael Quinion in the UK. ISSN 1470-1448. Copyediting and advice are provided by Julane
Marx, Robert Waterhouse, John Bagnall and Peter Morris. Any residual errors are the fault of
the author. The linked website is http://www.worldwidewords.org.</span></font></p>
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