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<p
style="font-weight:bold;margin:0;font-size:24pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;color:green;">World
Wide Words</p>
<p style="color:green;margin:0 0 6pt
0;font-size:12pt;font-family:Arial,sans-serif;font-weight:bold;line-height:14.0pt;">Saturday
5 November 2016.</p>
<p style="color:green;margin:6pt 0 18pt
0;font-size:12pt;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;font-weight:bold;">This
newsletter is also available online at <a
href="http://wwwords.org/fkwb">http://wwwords.org/fkwb</a><br>
and is also attached to this message as a PDF file containing
illustrations.</p>
<p
style="font-family:Georgia,serif;margin:0;line-height:15pt;font-size:12pt;"><i>Check
the recipient address if you reply to this message. For security
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Either use the email address from the </i>Reply-to:<i> header
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<p
style="background-color:#ffffff;color:green;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;font-size:14pt;line-height:14pt;font-weight:bold;margin:18pt
0 0 0;">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;">It
was a pleasure to learn on Tuesday that Randy Cassingham, who
writes the <em>This Is True</em> newsletter, had included <em>World
Wide Words</em> in his Top 11 Hidden Gems of the Internet
suggested by his subscribers. He described the site as “a treasure
trove of past articles: the kind of site where you pop in ... and
don’t look up again for hours.” Check out the others here: <a
href="http://wwwords.org/hdngms">http://wwwords.org/hdngms</a>.
A special welcome to the new subscribers who joined through
consulting the list.</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
piece below about the expression <em>happy as a sandboy</em> is a
substantial revision with new information of one first written in
2002.</p>
<p
style="background-color:#ffffff;color:green;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;font-size:14pt;line-height:14pt;font-weight:bold;margin:18pt
0 0 0;">Fizgig</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;">Today
— 5 November — is one of those periodic celebrations of failure we
Brits so much enjoy, in this case the inability of Guy Fawkes to
blow up Parliament on this day in 1605. For the four centuries
since, the day has been celebrated with fireworks and bonfires.</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;">One
such firework was the <em>fizgig</em>, an unspectacular device
that hissed rather than banged, for which reason it has also been
called a serpent; a conical form has the name volcano. A English
poet once compared a man to one:</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;">Northmore
himself is an honest, vehement sort of a fellow who splutters out
all his opinions like a fiz-gig, made of gunpowder not thoroughly
dry, sudden and explosive, yet ever with a certain adhesive
blubberliness of elocution.<br>
<span style="color:#008000;">Letter from Samuel Taylor Coleridge
to Thomas Poole, 16 Sep. 1799.</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>Fizgig</em>
in the sense of the firework is now quite dead, as are most of the
other senses that this weirdly catholic word has had. The original
was a frivolous woman, fond of gadding about in search of pleasure
— an alliterative-minded seventeenth-century man wrote of
“Fis-gig, a flirt, a fickle .... foolish Female”. The word was
built upon <em>gig</em>, another word that has had many meanings;
Chaucer knew it as a fickle woman but Shakespeare considered it to
be a child’s top. The first part of <em>fizgig</em> is obscure.
It can’t be <em>fizz</em>, effervescence, because that came along
much later, probably as an imitative sound. It may be the same
word as the obsolete <em>fise</em> for a smelly fart.</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
defunct meaning of <em>fizgig</em> is that of a harpoon, a
fish-spear:</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;">Two
dolphins followed us this afternoon; we hooked one, and struck the
other with the fizgig; but they both escaped us, and we saw them
no more.<br>
<span style="color:#008000;"><em>Journal of a Voyage from London
to Philadelphia</em>, by Benjamin Franklin, 1726.</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
was sometimes perverted into <em>fish-gig</em> by popular
etymology. It has no link with the other senses but derives from
the Spanish word <em>fisga</em> for a harpoon.</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>Fizgig</em>
principally survives in Australian slang, where it means a police
informer. It turns up first in the 1870s, perhaps as an extension
of the female sense, considered stereotypically as dashing about
madly and gossiping indiscreetly:</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;">Without
their allies — “the fizgigs,” the police seem powerless to trace
the authors of the robberies which are now of such frequent
occurrence.<br>
<span style="color:#008000;"><em>Victorian Express</em>
(Geraldton, WA), 15 Nov. 1882.</span></p>
<p
style="background-color:#ffffff;color:green;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;font-size:14pt;line-height:14pt;font-weight:bold;margin:18pt
0 0 0;">Spin a yarn</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 From Ada Robinson</em>: I came across the phrase <em>spinning
a yarn</em> (in the sense of telling a story) recently, and for
the first time wondered about its origin. Can you shed light on
how the word <em>yarn</em> acquired the second meaning of a tale?</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>
It’s puzzling because we’ve lost the context.</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 that sailors were the first to use <em>spinning a yarn</em>
— often in the extended form <em>spinning out a long yarn</em> —
to refer to telling a story that described a speaker’s adventures
and exploits.</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
start to see the expressions in print in the early nineteenth
century, though its ultimate origin is unclear. However, we do
know that one task of sailors was to make running repairs to the
various ropes of the ship — the cables, hawsers and rigging. As
with people on shore, <em>yarn</em> was their word for the
individual strands of such ropes, often very long. Their term for
binding the strands into fresh rope was <em>spinning</em> or to <em>spin
out</em>. The next part is a jump of imagination, for which you
may substitute the word guess, though I would prefer to call it
informed speculation. The task of repair was necessarily long and
tedious. We may easily imagine members of the repair crew telling
one another stories to make the time pass more easily and that
this practice became associated with the phrases.</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 second decade of the century, the term was being used ashore
and became a popular slangy idiom. One appearance was in a jocular
report of a police court action in Edinburgh which centred on a
sailor who had stolen a milk cart:</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;">When
the first witness was put in the box, and had his mouth most
oracularly opened, preparing to speak, Jack, twitching him by the
collar with his forefinger, caused him at once to descend, and
exclaimed — “Avast there; none of your jaw; who wants you to spin
out a long yarn?”<br>
<span style="color:#008000;"><em>The Edinburgh Advertiser</em>, 17
Nov. 1826.</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;">In
time, <em>yarn</em> came to refer to the stories. Many must have
been exaggerated or bombastic and that sense of something not
readily believable still attaches itself to the word. In Australia
and New Zealand the word has softened in sense to mean no more
than chatting.</p>
<p
style="background-color:#ffffff;color:green;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;font-size:14pt;line-height:14pt;font-weight:bold;margin:18pt
0 0 0;">Chalazion</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;">Peter
Gilliver, the eminent lexicographer with the <em>Oxford English
Dictionary</em> whose book I mentioned last time, quoted this
word in an interview a couple of weeks ago. He said he had found
it when a youngster in a children’s dictionary that was full of
such unusual words.</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
made the mistake of looking for it in Google Books, where I found
several works which explained it in terms such as “a common
lipogranulomatous inflammation of the sebaceous glands of the
eyelids, most often the meibomian glands.” Some works also noted
that it’s sometimes known as a <em>hordeolum</em>. In confusion,
I visited Dr Gilliver’s wonderful online repository of knowledge,
in which <em>chalazion</em> is defined as “a small pimple or
tubercule; especially one on the eyelid, a stye.”</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>Chalazion</em>
is the diminutive of Greek <em>chalaza</em> for almost any lump,
including a small hailstone and a pimple. The <em>OED</em>
helpfully pointed me to its entry for <em>chalaza</em>, which
stated that in English it’s a zoological term for “Each of the two
membranous twisted strings by which the yolk-bag of an egg is
bound to the lining membrane at the ends of the shell.” </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
<em>meibomian</em> glands make a lubricant for the eye. Their name
isn’t from a classical language but derives from a
seventeenth-century German anatomist named Heinrich Meibom. And <em>hordeolum</em>
derives from the Latin word for barley grains</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
plural of <em>chalazion</em>, should you ever suffer from more
than one, is <em>chalazia</em>.</p>
<p
style="background-color:#ffffff;color:green;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;font-size:14pt;line-height:14pt;font-weight:bold;margin:18pt
0 0 0;">In the news</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>Words
of 2016.</b> The annual lexicographical wordfest began on
Thursday with a list of topical terms from <em>Collins Dictionary</em>.
Its choice for Word of the Year was <em>Brexit</em>, Britain’s
exit from the European Union. The term went from nowhere to
established part of the language in an extraordinarily brief time.
The earliest recorded use may have been the one in <em>The
Guardian</em> on 1 January 2012 but it became widely used by the
general public only in the early months of this year. The
publisher suggests it<em> </em>“is arguably politics’ most
important contribution to the English language in over 40 years”.
It has spawned many spin-offs, including <em>Bremorse</em> for
the regret by people who voted to leave but realise they made a
mistake and would like to <em>Bremain</em> or <em>Breturn</em>.
Other words in the Collins topical list are <em>hygge</em>, a
suddenly fashionable and much written about Danish concept of
creating cosy and convivial atmospheres that promote wellbeing,
and <em>uberization</em>, derived from the name of the taxi firm
Uber, for the adoption of a business model in which services are
offered on demand through direct contact between a customer and
supplier, usually via mobile technology.</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>Fount
of fonts.</b> Subscriber Bart Cannistra came across a news item
about a new pan-language collection of fonts from Google and
Monotype that supports more than 100 scripts and 800 languages in
a common visual style. Its name is Noto, which its website says is
short for “<b>no</b> more <b>to</b>fu”. It explains that <em>tofu</em>
is digital typographer’s jargon for one of those little
rectangular boxes that appear when your browser doesn’t have the
appropriate font to display a character. The boxes sometimes have
a question mark or cross inside them but it’s their rectangular
shape that has given them the name, since they reminded some
unheralded type designer of the cuboid blocks of tofu.</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>Not
that kind of girl.</b> Readers outside the UK are most likely
unfamiliar with the term <em>Essex Girl</em>, which <em>Collins
Dictionary</em> defines as “a young working-class woman from the
Essex area, typically considered as being unintelligent,
materialistic, devoid of taste, and sexually promiscuous.” It’s in
the news because two Essex women have begun a petition to have the
term stricken from dictionaries because they’ve had enough of
derogatory references. They have been criticised for starting the
petition because it only leads to more public mention of the term.
The term came to public attention in 1991 with the publication of
<em>The Essex Girl Joke Book</em> (typical example: “How does an
Essex Girl turn on the light after sex? She opens the car door”),
but the stereotype is best known through the long-running ITV
programme <em>The Only Way is Essex</em>. The <em>OED</em> has
already refused to remove the term, on the excellent grounds that
it’s part of our living language.</p>
<p
style="background-color:#ffffff;color:green;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;font-size:14pt;line-height:14pt;font-weight:bold;margin:18pt
0 0 0;">What am I? Chopped liver?</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 Mary Clarke</em>: Your piece on Joe Soap made me think of
the phrase <em>What am I? Chopped liver?</em> Is this a New York
expression or a Jewish expression? I ask this because we seem to
eat more chopped liver here than anywhere else and because one of
the nicest compliments I’ve ever received was from a friend who
said my chopped liver was better than her Jewish grandmother’s.</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>
This takes me back. In November 1999, when this newsletter had
already reached issue 167, I mentioned that a reader had asked
about this but as it was unfamiliar to me, I asked for
elucidation. The resulting flood of emails was overwhelming.
Though I summarised the results the following week, I realise now
that I never went into detail, nor posted anything on my website.</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
dish of chopped liver — fried chicken livers with eggs, spices
and, if you’re being really traditional, schmaltz and gribenes
(respectively rendered chicken fat and fried chicken skin as a
form of crackling) — is common at Jewish celebratory meals. It’s
also a standard dish in New York Jewish delicatessens. But it’s
inexpensive and never a main dish, wherein lies the core of the
idiom. Sol Steinmetz, the American linguist and Yiddish expert,
explained that “Chopped liver is merely an appetizer or side dish,
not as important as chicken soup or gefilte fish. Hence it was
used among Jewish comedians as a humorous metaphor for something
or someone insignificant.” Robert Chapman argued in his <em>Dictionary
of American Slang</em> that the idiom originated in the 1930s in
this sense.</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;">Early
in its development a negative reference to chopped liver
developed, which instead suggested something excellent or
impressive. It parallels another American idiom, <em>that ain’t
hay</em>. The idiom appeared in various forms, such as <em>it
ain’t chopped liver, that’s not chopped liver</em>, and <em>it’s
not exactly chopped liver</em>. The first of these forms is
noted by Jonathan Lighter in his <em>Historical Dictionary of
American Slang</em> from a Jimmy Durante television show in
1954. It must surely be older. This is another version, from a
little 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;">Some
of the critics put it right up there with “My Fair Lady.” Even
before it lifts the curtain there is a million dollars in advance
orders and this as the boys say is not chopped liver ...<br>
<span style="color:#008000;"><em>The Victoria Advocate</em>
(Victoria, Texas), 8 Mar 1959.</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;">The
form that you mention appears in the historical record a few years
later still. Somebody exclaiming <em>What am I? Chopped liver? </em>is
expressing annoyance at being thought unworthy of attention: “What
about me? Why am I being ignored? Don’t I matter?”</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
could be New York Jewish. It has the right cadence for a Yiddish
exclamation and chopped liver, as we’ve seen, is an archetypal
Jewish dish. And the experts suggest it grew out of a catchphrase
of comedians in the Borscht Belt of the Catskill Mountains
patronised by Jewish people from New York City. But there’s no
certain connection. What is clear that it filled a need and that
even by its earliest written appearances it had already reached
places well away from centres of Jewish life.</p>
<p
style="background-color:#ffffff;color:green;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;font-size:14pt;line-height:14pt;font-weight:bold;margin:18pt
0 0 0;">Happy as a sandboy</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 Niki Wessels, South Africa; a related question came from
Robert Metcalf in Singapore</em>: Our family recently discussed
the expression <em>happy as a sandboy</em>, and wondered where
and how it originated. My dictionary informs me that a sandboy is
a kind of flea — but why a boy, and why is it happy?</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>
Let me add an explanatory note to your question, as many readers
will never have heard this saying. It’s a proverbial expression
that suggests blissful contentment:</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;">Made
me think it might be a good idea to mark the occasion. Nothing too
big, you understand. Not looking for fireworks and flags or
anything. I’m a modest man with modest needs. Give me a bit of
cake, maybe some tarts, throw in a couple of balloons and I’m
happy as a sandboy.<br>
<span style="color:#008000;"><em>Bristol Evening Post</em>, 11
Aug. 2015.</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’s
mostly known in Britain and Commonwealth countries. An older form
is <em>as jolly as a sandboy</em>, which is now rarely
encountered. The first examples we know about are from London
around the start of the nineteenth century.</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
sandboy in some countries can indeed be a sort of sand flea, but
this isn’t the source of the expression. Incidentally, nor is
there a link with the <em>sandman</em>, the personification of
tiredness, which came into English in translations of Hans
Christian Andersen’s stories several decades after sandboy.</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
sandboys of the expression actually sold sand. <em>Boy</em> here
was a common term for a male worker of lower class (as in <em>bellboy</em>,
<em>cowboy</em>, and <em>stableboy</em>), which comes from an old
sense of a servant. It doesn’t imply the sellers were young — most
were certainly adults — though one early poetic reference does
mention a child:</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
poor shoeless Urchin, half starv’d and suntann’d,<br>
Pass’d near the Inn-Window, crying — “Buy my fine Sand!”<br>
<span style="color:#008000;"><em>The Rider, and Sand-Boy</em> in
the <em>Hereford Journal</em>, 13 Jul. 1796. The title contains
the earliest known reference to a sandboy. The poem was
unattributed but is almost certainly by William Meyler of Bath.
Note that to be described as suntanned wasn’t then a compliment;
it implied an outdoor worker of low class.</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;">The
selling of sand wasn’t such a peculiar occupation as you might
think, as there was once a substantial need for it. It was used to
scour pans and tools and was sprinkled on the floors of butchers’
shops, inns and taprooms to take up spilled liquids. Later in the
century it was superseded by sawdust.</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;">Henry
Mayhew wrote about the trade in his <em>London Labour and the
London Poor</em> in 1861. The sand was dug out from pits on
Hampstead Heath and taken down in horse-drawn carts or panniers
carried on donkeys to be hawked through the streets. The job was
hard work and badly paid. Mayhew records these comments from one
of the excavators: “My men work very hard for their money, sir;
they are up at 3 o’clock of the morning, and are knocking about
the streets, perhaps till 5 or 6 o’clock in the evening”.</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;">Their
prime characteristic, it seems, was an inexhaustible desire for
beer. Charles Dickens referred to the saying, by then proverbial,
in <em>The Old Curiosity Shop</em> in 1841: “The Jolly Sandboys
was a small road-side inn of pretty ancient date, with a sign,
representing three Sandboys increasing their jollity with as many
jugs of ale”. An early writer on slang made the link explicit:</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;">“As
jolly as a sand-boy,” designates a merry fellow who has tasted a
drop.<br>
<span style="color:#008000;"><em>Slang: A Dictionary of the Turf,
the Ring, the Chase, the Pit, of Bon-tom, and the Varieties of
Life</em>, by John Badcock, 1823. To have become an aphorism
by this time, <em>sandboy</em> must surely be older than the
1796 poem quoted above.</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;">Quite
so. But I suspect that the long hours and hard work involved in
carrying and shovelling sand, plus the poor returns, meant that
sandboys didn’t have much cause to look happy in the normal run of
things, improving only when they’d had a pint or two. Their
regular visits to inns and ale-houses presented temptation to a
much greater degree than to most people and it has also been
suggested that they were often paid partly in beer.</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
sandboys were happy because they were drunk.</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;">At
first the saying was meant ironically. Only where the trade wasn’t
practised — or had died out — could it became an allusion to
unalloyed happiness. To judge from the answers to a question about
its origin in <em>Notes & Queries</em> in 1866, even by then
its origin was obscure.</p>
<p
style="background-color:#ffffff;color:green;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;font-size:14pt;line-height:14pt;font-weight:bold;margin:18pt
0 0 0;">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;">•
A headline on the <em>Hertfordshire Mercury</em> site on 14
October — “Tributes paid to Waltham Cross Labour councillor who
was a ‘real character’ following his death” — led Ross Mulder to
wonder what the man was like during his life.</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;">•
If you’re going to do something, do it properly. Ted Dooley found
this news in an email from the <em>Minneapolis Star Tribune</em>
on 7 October: “Ryan D. Petersen, 37, was convicted Friday morning
of first-degree premeditated murder for fatally shooting a law
clerk eight times earlier this year.”</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 puzzling statement from <em>The Age</em> of Melbourne of 10
October about the illegal demolition of a heritage-listed pub was
submitted by Susan Ross: “A petition law students started this
week demanding the pub be rebuilt by Tuesday afternoon had more
than 5000 signatures.” A comma after “rebuilt” might have helped.</p>
<p style="font-weight:bold;margin:18pt 0 0
0;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;font-size:14pt;color:green;">Useful
information</p>
<p
style="color:black;font-family:Georgia,serif;font-size:12pt;margin:6pt
0 0 0;"><b>About this newsletter:</b> World Wide Words is
researched, written and published by Michael Quinion in the UK.
ISSN 1470-1448. Copyediting and advice are freely provided by
Julane Marx, Robert Waterhouse, John Bagnall and Peter Morris,
though any residual errors are the fault of the author. The linked
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