World Wide Words -- 09 Jan 99

[Michael B Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 126         Saturday 9 January 1999
==================================================================
A weekly mailing from Michael Quinion       Thornbury, Bristol, UK

Contents
--------
1. Truncated mailing.
2. Weird Words: Wassail.
3. Q & A.
4. Beyond words.
5. In Brief: Food desert.
6. Housekeeping.


1. Truncated mailing
------------------------------------------------------------------
This mailing is shorter than usual and rather unbalanced in its
content because I'm in the middle of a bout of influenza. I hope
that normal service will be resumed next week.


2. Weird Words: Wassail  /'wQseIl/
------------------------------------------------------------------
A festive occasion on which toasts are drunk; the ale or wine in
which such toasts are made.

In Saxon times you would have used the original form of this word,
'was hail', to greet or say goodbye to somebody; literally it
means "be in good health". By the twelfth century, it had become
the salutation you offered as a toast, to which the standard reply
was 'drinc hail', "drink good health". ('Hail' is an older form of
our modern word 'hale', "health; well-being" and is also closely
connected with our word 'hail', "to salute, greet, welcome".) The
toast seems to have come over with the Danes; by the twelfth
century the Norman conquerors of Britain regarded it as one of the
most characteristic sayings of the country. Later, the word came
to be used also for the drink in which the toast was offered,
especially the spiced ale or mulled wine that was drunk on
Christmas Eve or Twelfth Night. In the western counties of
Britain, the tradition grew up on Twelfth Night of toasting the
good health of the apple trees that would bear the crop from which
next year's cider would be made. Pieces of bread soaked in cider
were placed in the crooks of trees, guns were fired to ward off
evil spirits, and special songs were sung:

     Let every man take off his hat
     And shout out to th'old apple tree
     Old apple tree we wassail thee
     And hoping thou will bear.

Ceremonies like these have almost entirely died out, though one or
two are self-consciously kept alive in Somerset.


3. Q & A
------------------------------------------------------------------
[The section in which I (attempt to) answer your questions. Send
your queries to <qa at quinion.com>. I can't guarantee to answer
them, or even always to acknowledge your message, but if I can,
a response will appear here and on our Web site.]
-----------
Q. Can you shed some magical clarity on 'abracadabra' please?
[Speranza Spiratos]

A. Let me wave my wand ... It's ancient, first mentioned in a poem
by Quintus Serenus Sammonicus in the second century AD. It is
believed to have come into English via French from a Greek word
'abrasadabra' (the 'c' in English seems to be a confusion with the
Greek 'c', which is pronounced as an 's'). It originated as a
secret and mystical word with a Gnostic sect in Alexandria called
the Basilidians (named after their founder Basilides of Egypt). It
was probably based on 'Abraxas', the name of their supreme deity,
but is sometimes said to have been constructed from the initial
letters of three Hebrew Words: 'Ab', the father, 'Ben', the son,
and 'Acadsch', the holy spirit. It was used as a charm, written in
the shape of a triangle on a piece of parchment worn round the
neck, and was believed to have the power to cure toothaches,
malaria and other scourges. And 'Abraxas' itself was said to have
magical powers of its own, as a word that represented the number
of days in the year, 365. This was derived by adding up the
numerical values of its seven Greek letters by a process called
gematria. For this reason, it was often engraved on amulets and
precious stones.
-----------
Q. Any ideas on the origin of 'ringer', meaning a contestant or an
athlete who is entered dishonestly into a competition? [Gord
Forsythe]

A. The origins are moderately obscure. It is US slang, dating from
the latter years of last century, originally in connection with
horse racing. A horse of better class than that permitted was
entered fraudulently into a race, with bets being placed on it by
those in the know. The word has spread its associations quite
widely since, and can now refer to anything which has been
tampered with in order to deceive, such as a motor vehicle. It may
be connected with an old sense of 'ringer' for a counterfeit gold
sovereign sold at fairs, because a good way to tell if such a coin
was genuine was to drop it on a hard surface and listen for it to
ring (a real one didn't). By the way, it seems not to be linked
with the Australian sense of "something especially good" which
comes from sheep-shearing.
---------
Q. Please can you tell me what 'mullered' means and how old it is.
I have only heard it in the last few months. Some people use it in
engineering to mean damaged, but it seems to mean drunk too.
[Richard Bolingbroke]

A. It's a relatively recent British slang term, so far as I know,
certainly only dating from the nineties. I've not come across it
in the sense of "damaged", but only that of "intoxicated", either
by drink or drugs. It has been said to be a variant form of the
older word 'mulled', with the same meaning, which presumably
derives from the sense of a drink that's has been made into a hot
spicy concoction.
---------
Q. I am trying to locate the origin of the word 'pretty' and its
early usage. It apparently had a different meaning in early
English that is unrelated to the way we currently use it. [Barbara
Storm]

A. That's correct. It is first recorded in Old English, when it
had the sense of "trick, deceit". Then it disappears from the
recorded language for some centuries, turning up again in the
1400s in a variety of meanings, none of them exactly equivalent to
the Old English form. It could mean "clever, artful", or
"something ingeniously or cleverly made". And it could be applied
to a man, as "brave, gallant, warlike", which weakened down the
years until it was used in the eighteenth century in the phrase "a
pretty fellow", meaning a 'swell' or a 'fop'. But the word also
existed in a weakened sense, very much like our modern 'nice' -
pleasing or satisfactory in a vague sort of way. In this sense it
was applied, in rather a condescending way, to young women as a
reduced version of 'beautiful'.


4. Beyond words
------------------------------------------------------------------
Supposedly from a catalogue produced by the Swedish furnishing
firm IKEA, quoted in the BBC radio programme, _News Quiz of the
Year_: "It is advisory to be two people during construction".


5. In Brief: Food desert
------------------------------------------------------------------
The move of retailing away from the inner cities has left some
parts of them without easy access to fresh foods at reasonable
prices, 'food deserts' in fact.


6. Housekeeping
------------------------------------------------------------------
* To leave the list, send the following message to the list server
  address <listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org> (the subject line
  will be ignored):

    SIGNOFF WORLDWIDEWORDS

* To subscribe to the list, send the following message to the list
  server address <listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org> from the
  e-mail address which is to receive mailings:

    SUBSCRIBE WORLDWIDEWORDS First_name Last_name

* To change address, send a SIGNOFF message from your old address,
  followed by a SUBSCRIBE message from the new one.

* To obtain information on other commands, send the text:

    INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS

* Other messages, including feedback and comments, should be sent
  to <words at quinion.com> (general feedback, problems, screams of
  rage, etc) or <qa at quinion.com> (if you are asking a question).
  Do *not* send subscription requests to these addresses.

------------------------------------------------------------------
WORLD WIDE WORDS is a weekly newsletter on language, copyright (c)
Michael B Quinion 1999. All rights reserved. Reproduction in other
online lists in whole or in part is permitted provided this notice
is included. Reproduction in paid-for media or Web sites requires
prior permission from the author. The World Wide Words Web site is
at <http://www.quinion.com/words/>.