World Wide Words -- 24 Apr 99

Sat Apr 24 08:21:58 UTC 1999

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 141         Saturday 24 April 1999
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Written by Michael Quinion                  Thornbury, Bristol, UK
Sent every Saturday to more than 4,800 subscribers in 87 countries
Web: <http://www.quinion.com/words/>   E-mail: <words at quinion.com>
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Contents
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1. Feedback and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: V-mail.
3. Weird Words: Chiliastic.
4. In Brief: iSociety.
5. Q & A: Dibs, Come a cropper, The devil to pay.
6. Beyond Words.
7. Administration.

1. Feedback and comments
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HOLIDAY BREAK. This is advance notice that World Wide Words will
not be published on 8, 15, 22 or 29 May because I shall be away on
holiday. The next issue will be published as usual on 1 May; the
one after that will appear on 6 June.

DOWSE/DOUSE. Following last week's Beyond Words, a number of you
wrote to point out that dictionaries frequently give 'dowse' as a
secondary spelling of 'douse', which would make the piece correct.
Yes, many do, including various current Oxford dictionaries. But
it's rare, and I cannot remember ever having seen it in print; all
my style guides recommend that the spellings be kept distinct.

ANSIBLE. David Langford, who by no stretch of coincidence at all
writes a science-fiction newsletter called _Ansible_, points out
that Ursula K Le Guin used the word in an earlier work than _The
Left Hand of Darkness_, which I gave as the source last week. She
employed it in her 1966 book _Rocannon's World_: "You remember the
ansible, the machine I showed you in the ship, which can speak
instantly to other worlds, with no loss of years ...".

2. Turns of Phrase: V-mail
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Pretty obviously this is the video equivalent of e-mail. Though it
has been around in experimental conditions for some time, the term
itself seems to be no more than a couple of years old. V-mail is
only very slowly becoming a practical proposition, because until
recently the size of video clips made it impracticable to use them
in Internet messages and there was no simple way to record and
edit them. But now software is becoming available that permits
video clips to be created and viewed and then compressed to ease
transmission. Industry pundits are predicting that within a few
years it will be as common to see e-mail messages with video
attached as it is now to get them with sounds or still pictures.
But even with compression, a one-minute video clip takes up about
a megabyte, and information technologists worry that v-mail will
be yet another strain on the data-carrying capacity of the Net. We
shall also have to decide how to spell it: the term is currently
going through the same stages as 'e-mail', with and without an
initial capital 'V' or a hyphen.

Sending short video messages by e-mail - dubbed v-mail - is to
become a lot easier, thanks to a $99 system from Philips of the
Netherlands.
                                      [_New Scientist_, Nov. 1998]

A V-Mail takes megabytes to convey a message that could travel as
a kilobyte of text.
                            [_Personal Computer World_, Mar. 1999]

3. Weird Words: Chiliastic
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Relating to, or believing in, Christian millenarianism.

This word comes to us through Latin from the Greek 'khilias' "a
thousand years", from 'khilioi' "a thousand". It appeared in the
English language in the seventeenth century to refer to the belief
of some Christian sects that there will come a time when Christ
will reign in person on earth for a thousand years, either before
or after the Second Coming. So it's just a more highbrow and less
common equivalent of 'millenarian'. But it doesn't seem to have
quite the same figurative sense of belief in a future golden age
of prosperity, peace and justice (perhaps an unconscious link with
'chill' is coming into play). It's sometimes used to refer to the
impending millennium in the purely calendrical sense, without any
reference to Christian belief, a weakening of meaning that's
similar to the way that 'millennium' itself is so often employed.

4. In Brief: iSociety
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A report by the Future Foundation, a British think-tank, named and
discussed this group of workers. They have all changed careers at
some stage in search of greater independence (hence the 'i'),
often more than once, and have put their search for fulfilment
before the need to succeed at all costs.

5. Q & A
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[Send queries to <qa at quinion.com>. Messages will be acknowledged,
but I can't guarantee to reply, as time is so limited. If I can do
so, a response will appear both here and on the WWW Web site. Any
question sent to <words at quinion.com> will be moved over to Q&A!]
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Q. I am interested in learning the origin of the word 'dibs', as
used in the expression:  "I have dibs on that", meaning "to claim
a share of something". [Scott]

A. I've read half a dozen explanations of where this one came
from, and in nearly every one there's a howling great gap where we
might expect historical continuity. What we do know is that this
expression is first recorded in print, in _American Speech_, as
late as 1932. It comes into existence seemingly fully formed, with
no obvious links to any previous meaning of the word. That's
hardly likely, of course.

Most writers seize on what seems to be the most relevant older use
of 'dib' as a word connected with childhood. This refers to an
ancient game known by dozens of names ('jacks', 'knucklebones',
'fivestones', 'hucklebones'; 'pentalithia' in classical Rome),
though the name 'dibs' is recorded only from the early part of the
eighteenth century. Here's a late reference from Thomas Hardy's
_Jude The Obscure_ of 1895: "Why when I and my poor man were
married we thought no more o't than of a game o' dibs!". It seems
to be an abbreviation of an even older term, 'dibstones', a name
whose origin is obscure to the point of terminal murkiness. The
problem is that we have no idea how a word for a game in Britain
turned into an American expression claiming priority (British
children would often use 'bags' in this situation, a term derived
from public school slang).

Another sense of the word which is sometimes put in evidence is
the slang one meaning money. Here's H G Wells, in _The War in the
Air_: "He thought the whole duty of man was to be smarter than his
fellows, get his hands, as he put it, 'on the dibs,' and have a
good time". There are various other meanings of 'dib', as both
noun and verb, which has had a muddled history in which 'dab' and
'dap' feature strongly as variant forms. But none of these have
any obvious link to the word in the sense you're asking about.

Yet another suggestion is that the word is a modified abbreviation
of 'division' or 'divide'. This neatly circumvents the problems
with provenance, and fits the model of many children's slang terms
of this and earlier periods. But I've not found any evidence.
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Q. Any information about the expression 'to come a cropper'?
[Pauline Keitt; Henry Wieman; Peter Thorson]

A. We use 'come a cropper' now to mean that a person has been
struck by some serious misfortune, but it derives from hunting,
where it originally meant a heavy fall from a horse. Its first
appearance was in 1858, in a late and undistinguished work called
_Ask Mamma_, by that well-known Victorian writer on hunting, R S
Surtees, who's best known for _Jorrock's Jaunts and Jollities_.

The earliest easily traceable source of 'cropper' is the Old Norse
word 'kropp' for a swelling or lump on the body. This is closely
related to the Old English word for the rounded head or seed body
of a plant, from which we get our modern word 'crop' for the
produce of a cultivated plant. In the sense of a bodily lump, it
was applied first to the 'crop' of a bird but then extended to
other bodily protuberances. This is where things get complicated:
the same word travelled from a Germanic ancestor through Vulgar
Latin and Old French back into English as 'croup' for the rump of
a horse. From this we also get 'crupper', the strap on a horse's
harness that passes back from the saddle under the tail.

At the end of the eighteenth century English developed a phrase
'neck and crop', with the sense of "completely". This is first
recorded in a poem by Lady Carolina Nairne: "The startish beast
took fright, and flop / The mad-brain'd rider tumbled, neck and
crop!" (You may not know her name, but she's best remembered for
writing, among others, the songs "Will you no come back again?"
and "Charlie is my darling".) Now 'neck and crop' is a rather odd
expression, and we're not sure how it came to be. It could be that
'crop' is a variant of 'croup', suggesting that a horse that fell
'neck and crop' collapsed all of a heap, with both head and
backside hitting the ground together. Or perhaps 'crop' had its
then normal meaning, so the expression was an intensified version
of 'neck', perhaps linked to an older expression 'neck and heels'
that's similar to 'head over heels'.

It's thought that 'come a cropper' derives from 'neck and crop',
with 'cropper' in the role of an agent noun, that is, referring to
something done in a 'neck-and-crop' manner, and that the phrase
developed from there.
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Q. Is it true that the phrase 'the devil to pay' comes from the
18th or early 19th century navy? [Ian].

A. A naval origin is often given, but I don't think that's the
answer. The phrase is said to refer to the 'devil', a seam which
was difficult to reach and which needed a lot of tar to caulk, or
'pay'. The latter word is a well-attested usage on board ship,
first recorded in the seventeenth century, but 'devil' as a name
for a ship's seam is less well-known, and there's  suspicious
disagreement among sources as to which seam is meant. The full
expression given in many books is "there's the devil to pay and
only half a bucket of pitch", or "there's the devil to pay and no
pitch hot". But there's no evidence that the expression had a
nautical origin, though it was probably taken up on board ship
once it had become something of a cliche, based on the existing
shipboard meaning of 'pay'. The longer versions are most likely
fanciful later additions. It's more probable that the phrase was a
reference to a Faustian bargain, a pact with Satan, and to the
inevitable payment to be made to him in the end. Its earliest
appearances at about the beginning of the eighteenth century have
no hint of a naval origin or context. Here's an example written by
Jonathan Swift in 1738: "I must be with my Wife on Tuesday, or
there will be the Devil and all to pay".

6. Beyond Words
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ANTIPODEAN EPISCOPAL BARGEE? Words subscriber Michael Grounds saw
that the April issue of the _Melbourne Anglican_ newspaper had as
its front page headline "Bishop called to tow line".

GOOD BARGAIN MR CHIPS. Speaking of headlines, this one appeared
in Wednesday's _Guardian_: "Fury as school puts Old Master up for
auction".

REPLACE AND BE DAMNED. Here's a salutary warning that was reported
in this week's _New Scientist_. The Oxford, Cambridge, and RSA
examinations board (OCR) recently seemed to invent a new prefix in
a physics syllabus that included references to 'ocrajoules' and
'ocrawatts'. The board was equally recently renamed from the
Midlands Examination Group (MEG).

7. Administration
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