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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>Saturday 13 December 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>Get one’s goat.</b></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> The revised piece in the last brief issue brought some
comments. Members of the American Dialect Society mailing list noted that,
like one of their number, I had misread the date on the poor-quality image of
the Kid McCoy article as 1903. It was actually 1908.</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">Michael Ormsby wrote “The American military academies long have had
animal mascots: the US Army’s West Point had a mule while the US Naval
Academy at Annapolis had a goat, and these animals would be paraded before
athletic contests. Now, rivalry between the two academies has always been
intense and before the annual Army-Navy football game the cadets of each
school would and still do attempt to harass the other — one long ago prank was
to steal the other school’s mascot before the game and at least once in the
nineteenth century the Army cadets managed to ‘get the Navy’s goat’, and
disrupt the Navy’s prideful parade.” This has been suggested by others at
various times but isn’t supported by evidence.</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">Jean-Paul Buquet mentioned the common modern French idiom </span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>rendre
chèvre</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">, literally to make someone a goat, but figuratively to make angry, as by
taunting. From Australia, Bob Connell recalled that “Growing up in Sydney in
the 50s and 60s, the expression that I knew was </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>getting on my goat</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">. I wonder
why the variation?” David Morrish noted the old canard that </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>riding the goat</i></span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt">
constitutes a part of the ceremonies of initiation in a Masonic Lodge.</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">Americans often idiosyncratically pronounce foreign words in the names of
places, as inhabitants of the Iowa city of Des Moines (duh MOYN) will agree.
David Glagovsky pointed out this happens with a town mentioned in the
article: “Brazil, Indiana, the town referenced in the last issue, is not said like
the country. In Hoosierese, it’s pronounced ‘bray-zill’, with equal stress on each
syllable..” </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>Stepney.</b></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> My piece about this in the issue of 25 November led several readers
to comment on its usage in other countries. Kenan Er wrote that, as </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>stepne</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">, it’s
Turkish for a spare tyre. Rainer Brockerhoff emailed, “Your article solved a
long-standing mystery to me: in Brazil </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>estepe</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> is a common term for a spare
tire, but nobody seems to know the origin. It’s also used to designate
substitutes in general, and specifically for a ‘spare’ girlfriend or boyfriend.”
This is often mentioned in discussions of the term, but I left it out of my piece
because the link is unsubstantiated. Rainer Brockerhoff added, “It’s also used
for substitutes in general, and specifically for a ‘spare’ girlfriend or boyfriend.”
Vinay Kumar wrote from India to say that his country has a similar usage: “My
native language is Kannada. From childhood I have often heard these phrases,
‘How is your stepney?’, ‘Play these tricks with your stepney, not me.’ In my
native language, </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>stepney</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> means a ‘second wife’ or a woman with whom one has
an extramarital affair.”</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>Season’s greetings.</b></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> It’s unlikely that another issue will appear before the
end of the year unless some topical matter arises. All good wishes for the
holiday and the new year. I’ll write again early in 2015.</span></font></p>
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<span style=" font-size:14pt"><b>Phizzog</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 his blog </span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>The Oxford Etymologist</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">, Professor Anatoly Liberman recently
mentioned coming across </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>phizzog</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> in </span><span style=" font-size:13pt">
<i>Slabs of the Sunburnt West</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">, a book of
1922 by the American poet Carl Sandburg. He found that none of his students
knew the word. That confirms my own finding that in the US it’s almost totally
defunct as a slang term for the face.</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">As it happens, I encountered it equally serendipitously when researching my
piece on </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>fish-face</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> recently:</span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:10mm; margin-right:13mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:12pt">Why hadn’t the fish-faced Frenchman shown his phizzog?</span></font></p>
<div align="left" style="margin-left:10mm; margin-right:13mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:1.06mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia" color="#006000">
<span style=" font-size:11pt"><i>Salvage for the Saint</i></span><span style=" font-size:11pt">, by Leslie Charteris, 1983. This was a teleplay by John
Cruze for the British TV series </span><span style=" font-size:11pt"><i>Return of the Saint</i></span><span style=" font-size:11pt"> which was turned into a
novel by Peter Bloxsom; it appeared under Charteris’s name as the 50th and last
of his series of Saint stories.</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">The television programme was broadcast by CBS in the US at about the time
when </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>phizzog</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> was uttering its life’s last gasp; the programme seems to have
done nothing to revitalise its popularity.</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 term remains widely known in Britain, though you’re likely to come across
it in a dizzying variety of spellings guaranteed to dismay any seeker into its
history. However, </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>phizzog</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> itself is uncommon. The form most often used is
</span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>fizzog</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">, but it also appears as </span><span style=" font-size:13pt">
<i>phizog</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">, </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>phisog</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> and </span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>physog</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">, among others. The
shorter form </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>phiz</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> is also still popular:</span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:10mm; margin-right:13mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:12pt">I remember a moment between the ceremony and the reception when we
were queuing up in our gladrags to have our pictures taken for the </span><span style=" font-size:12pt"><i>OK!</i></span><span style=" font-size:12pt">
magazine spread. I felt a sudden, instinctive lurch – the thought of my
phiz besmirching every hairdresser’s salon and dentist’s waiting room.</span></font></p>
<div align="left" style="margin-left:10mm; margin-right:13mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:1.06mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia" color="#006000">
<span style=" font-size:11pt"><i>Observer</i></span><span style=" font-size:11pt">, 3 Oct. 2014.</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">It’s odd that in twenty-first-century Britain we should still be unable to agree
on the spelling, since </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>phizzog</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> and its relatives have been in use for at least 200
years. It’s also a little strange that the shorter form </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>phiz</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> appeared in the record
much earlier than the longer one. One of its first commitments to print was
this:</span></font></p>
<p style="margin-left:10mm; margin-right:13mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:2.11mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia"><span style=" font-size:12pt">By the Mackins, now I view his Phiz well, methinks I see the very same
Air and Meen, I’ve often seen in a Glass, he’s so damnably like me.</span></font></p>
<div align="left" style="margin-left:10mm; margin-right:13mm; text-indent:0mm; margin-top:1.06mm; margin-bottom:0.00mm;"><font face="Georgia" color="#006000">
<span style=" font-size:11pt"><i>Amphitryon</i></span><span style=" font-size:11pt">, by Titus Maccius Plautus, translated in 1694 by Laurence Echard
while still an undergraduate at Christ’s College, Cambridge. </span><span style=" font-size:11pt"><i>By the mackins</i></span>
<span style=" font-size:11pt">, a
euphemistic way of referring to the Christian Mass, was an emphatic way of
declaring something. We now spell </span><span style=" font-size:11pt"><i>meen</i></span><span style=" font-size:11pt"> as </span><span style=" font-size:11pt">
<i>mien</i></span><span style=" font-size:11pt"> and say </span><span style=" font-size:11pt"><i>mirror</i></span><span style=" font-size:11pt"> instead of
</span><span style=" font-size:11pt"><i>glass</i></span><span style=" font-size:11pt">, short for </span><span style=" font-size:11pt">
<i>looking-glass</i></span><span style=" font-size:11pt">.</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">The source of all the slang forms is </span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>physiognomy</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">. This came into English in the
fourteenth century from Greek via French. The Greek derives from </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>phusis</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">,
nature, and </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>gnōmōn</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">, a judge or interpreter. The first sense in English was that
of judging a person’s character from his features. A little later, it added the idea
of predicting a person’s future from his face; this seems a perilous method of
divination, though not a surprising one, since prognosticators have tried
everything from inspecting chicken entrails to studying the shape of clouds.
However, the main sense of </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>physiognomy </i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">has long been that of the facial
features themselves.</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 word has always been too long and scholarly-sounding to be welcome in
the ears of English speakers. Even before they chopped it back to </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>phiz</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> they
were slurring it. Shakespeare has the Clown in </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>All’s Well That Ends Well</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> assert
that the Black Prince’s </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>fisnomy</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> was better known in France than England.</span></font></p>
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<span style=" font-size:14pt"><b>Horse creature</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"> </span><span style=" font-size:13pt">
<i>From Christina Gibbs:</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> Genealogists searching old newspaper and court
records in America often find references to “seven head of horse creatures”,
with the number variable, of course. I’ve seen this in works from the 1800s.
Why did they use this circumlocution?</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"> This is an intriguing usage, hardly recorded in dictionaries, even the biggest,
and which hasn’t been noticed or discussed by any writer on language I’ve been
able to identify. I’ve found some intriguing leads but can’t claim to provide you
with a satisfyingly complete answer.</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">My check of old newspapers similarly found many examples, the earliest being
an advertisement in the </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>Hagers Town Torch Light And Public Advertiser</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> of
Maryland, dated February 1829: “1 Horse Creature, 5 Cows, 6 Sheep and Hogs,
Wheat, Rye, Corn & Buckwheat by the bushel”. The </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>Dictionary of American
Regional English</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> records </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>horse beast</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> and </span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>horse critter</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">, but not </span><span style=" font-size:13pt">
<i>horse creature</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">.
The </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>English Dialect Dictionary</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> a century ago likewise recorded </span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>horse beast</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">;
the printed record shows this is an ancient and once-common British English
form, use from at least the 1580s. </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>Horse beast </i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">also appears in a charter in
Pennsylvania in 1742, showing that it was, unsurprisingly, taken to the
American colonies by early English settlers.</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’m at a loss to explain why people felt it necessary to expand </span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>horse</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> in this way.
So I asked academic members of the American Dialect Society list. Joel Berson
recalled an American advertisement he had found dated 1715 for a horse race
that distinguished “Horse, Mare or Gelding”. This led me back to the </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>Oxford
English Dictionary</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">, which points out that </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>horse</i></span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt"> was once widely used to
specifically mean an adult male horse. </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">It could be that </span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>horse creature</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> and </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>horse beast</i></span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt"> were generic or formal terms
that included any horse, of whatever breed, age or sex. That would explain why
it’s often found in legal records and sale advertisements. </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">Following a hint from Jonathon Lighter, editor of the </span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>Historical Dictionary of
American Slang</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">, I’ve found similar forms relating to cattle. There are ancient
references in England to a </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>rother beast</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">, rother being a defunct word for a type
of horned cattle, an ox or bullock. Old American sources have </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>bull creature</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">,
</span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>bull critter</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> and </span><span style=" font-size:13pt">
<i>bull beast</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">, but here the term refers specifically to the male
animal and isn’t a generic term for cattle. There are examples to the present
day in the US of </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>cow creature</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> for any domestic bovine; </span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>cow</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> was long ago
adopted by people who know little about livestock farming for an animal of any
age or sex because English doesn’t have a unisex singular for </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>cattle</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">This suggests that some other reason must exist for adding </span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>creature</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> or </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>beast</i></span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt"> to
an animal’s name. It might have been no more than a verbal tic that became
established as an idiom.</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">Or it might have been a parallel to formations such as </span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>creature of the</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>horse
kind</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">, which Joel Berson points out was once common. He found that form used
of hog, goat, panther, opossum, weasel, cat and serpent, as well as horse. I’ve
come across many examples with </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>creature</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> replaced by </span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>animal</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> or </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>beast</i></span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt">, as in
this from Cervantes’s </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>Don Quixote: </i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt">“He fell in with a couple of either priests or
students, and a couple of peasants, mounted on four beasts of the ass kind.”</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">Meredith tells us that a caption to a photograph in a </span>
<span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>Boston Globe</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> article dated
30 November reads: “A statue of Laozi, often spelled Lao Tzu, is credited with
writing ‘The Scripture of the Way and Its Virtue’.”</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 Andrew wrote about a piece on the BBC website on 5 December with the
headline “Prince William to meet Obama in US”: “He is expected to give a
speech on combating illegal wildlife trafficking at the World Bank.” It has since
been reworded.</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">Chris Robinson was amused by the condition he had to agree to when booking
a reduced price coach ticket from National Express online: “I have read the
terms and conditions of this offer and can confirm that all travellers on this
booking carry a Southampton Bus.”</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 perturbing environmental story was given unconscious humour in the
headline to an undated story that Betty Haniotakis found on the Organic
Health website: “37 Million Bees Found Dead In Ontario, Canada After
Planting Large GMO Corn Field.”</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 entry for the “it could have been better worded” prize comes via
Erskine Fleck from the </span><span style=" font-size:13pt"><i>Denver Post</i></span><span style=" font-size:13pt"> on 23 November: “It is unclear how many
people were hurt, but except for the one death, all the injuries were non-fatal,
McIver said.”</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>
<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">
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