World Wide Words -- 23 Jan 99

[Michael B Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS        ISSUE 128         Saturday 23 January 1999
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A weekly mailing from Michael Quinion       Thornbury, Bristol, UK

Contents
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1. Notes and feedback.
2. Turns of Phrase: Business theatre.
3. Topical words: Bluestocking.
4. In Brief: Paramotoring.
5. Weird Words: Octothorpe.
6. Q&A: Groovy; In cold blood; Shiver my timbers.
7. Beyond Words.
8. Housekeeping.


1. Notes and feedback
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WOT ROT. As several subscribers gently pointed out after my Q&A
item on "to wit" last week, 'wot' is the *present* tense of a
variant form of the verb, not the past tense. And the quotation
from T E Brown should have read: "A garden is a lovesome thing,
God wot", not "Got wot". Apologies.

BUSY, BUSY. In the past week World Wide Words has been mentioned
in the LINGUIST list, the Scout Report, Net-Happenings and several
other online newsletters, and was chosen as a Web pick by _USA
Today_. As a result, World Wide Words has 750+ more subscribers
today than it had this time last week. Partly as a result, the
volume of e-mail has gone up substantially and I am way behind
with replies to enquiries.


2. Turns of Phrase: Business theatre  /'bIznIs ,TI at t@/
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This seems to be a common term of trade in the exhibitions field
in North America, dating from the late eighties at least, which
has also been spotted in Britain. It seems to be a jargon term not
well known outside that business. The need to make an effective
impact at business presentations to dealers and customers has led
to the techniques of the more high-tech end of modern theatre
being applied to sales pitches and promotion. Take a line through
the average new car launch: complex stage sets, vast lighting
grids, high-powered sound systems, actors, dancers, the whole
theatrical experience applied to the business of persuasion. So
it's not hard to see how the phrase 'business theatre' (less
commonly 'business theater') came to be applied to this approach,
even though much of the conference organisation, exhibition
creation, and event management that's lumped under the name is
considerably more modest than these relatively infrequent set-
pieces.

It's not like a business theatre show, where you're going into a
ballroom, or a stadium show, where you're on a playing field. It
was a chance to build conventional scenery, and showcase it.
                       [_Theatre Crafts International_, Apr. 1995]

As creative director of Spectrum, a company which specialises in
'business theatre', Elliott has vast experience of designing
exhibitions, conferences and live events all over the world ...
                             [_Independent on Sunday_, Sept. 1998]


3. Topical words: Bluestocking  /'blu:stQkIN/
------------------------------------------------------------------
Some eyebrows have been raised recently through Amanda Foreman's
decision to pose naked for the February issue of _Tatler_
magazine, albeit semi-modestly behind a large pile of her new
book. She has just spent five years, as she said in the magazine,
"cooped up in libraries" writing the biography of Georgiana,
Duchess of Devonshire and decided "why not have some fun now?".
Georgiana was one of the more flamboyant women of the eighteenth
century, and researching her seems to have affected Ms Foreman
deeply.

In a strained bit of wordplay, Cayte Williams commented in the
_Independent on Sunday_ last weekend: "It comes to something when
Britain's top bluestockings start whipping off their suspender
belts". Leaving aside the shaky fashion notes, 'bluestocking' is
getting to be rather an old-fashioned pejorative description for
an intellectual woman.

What is especially odd about the term, though, is that the first
bluestocking was a man. He was a learned botanist, translator,
publisher and minor poet of the eighteenth-century named Benjamin
Stillingfleet. He wrote an early opera and also published the
first English editions of works by the Swedish botanist Linnaeus.

The story starts in the early 1750s, when a group of independently
minded women decided to break away from the stultifying sessions
of card playing and idle chatter which was all that tradition
allowed them. They began to hold literary evenings, in direct
imitation of the established salons of Paris, to which well-known
men of letters would be invited as guests to encourage discussion.

One of the leading lights of this group was Mrs Elizabeth Montagu,
a powerful and rich figure in London society (she was the cousin
of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who brought smallpox inoculation
back from Turkey). Literary and theatrical luminaries like Samuel
Johnson, David Garrick and Lord Lyttleton attended what she and
her friends referred to as conversations, but which Horace
Walpole, a frequent guest, called petticoteries. Another regular
visitor was Joshua (later Sir Joshua) Reynolds, who, to complete
the circle of associations, painted a portrait of Georgiana,
Duchess of Devonshire, in 1786.

Mr Stillingfleet was asked to attend by Mrs Vesey, one of the
group. He felt he had to decline, as he was too poor to afford the
formal dress then required for evening events, which included
black silk stockings. According to Fanny Burney, who told the
story later, Mrs Vesey told him to come as he was, in his informal
day clothes. Which he did, wearing his blue worsted stockings, and
started a trend.

Admiral Edward Boscawen, who was known to his friends as "Old
Dreadnought" or "Wry-necked Dick", was the husband of one of the
more enthusiastic attendees. He was very rude about what he saw as
his wife's literary pretensions and is said to have derisively
described the sessions as being meetings of the Blue-Stocking
Society. And so those who attended were sometimes called Blue
Stockingers, later abbreviated to blue stockings. (Another name
was the French form 'Bas Bleu', which Hanna More, another member,
used in her poem, _The Bas Bleu, or Conversation_, which gives a
lot of information about the group.)

A slightly different version of the story and of the influence of
Benjamin Stillingfleet is told by James Boswell in his _Life of
Johnson_: "Such was the excellence of his conversation, that his
absence was felt as so great a loss, that it used to be said 'We
can do nothing without the blue stockings,' and thus by degrees
the title was established".

With such a wealth of documentary evidence, you might think that
the origin of the word was established, as they might have said at
the time, beyond a peradventure (though Dr Johnson was dismissive
of that word, no doubt repeating at one of those evenings what he
said in his dictionary: "It is sometimes used as a noun, but not
gracefully nor properly"). But some works say firmly that the
tradition goes back to the 1400s, to the blue stockings worn by
the members of a society in Venice called 'Della Calza' ("of the
stockings"), which later spread to Paris, from which the society
ladies of London were supposed to have taken it up.

I've not got to the bottom of this one and it may be a false lead
(can a blue stocking be a red herring?), but even if Hanna More,
James Boswell, and Fanny Burney were all recounting a kind of
early urban myth about the circumstances, there's no doubt that
the English word was coined as a result of those conversational
evenings in the mid eighteenth century.


4. In Brief: Paramotoring
------------------------------------------------------------------
This is a newish aerial sport, which was first developed in France
and Germany in the late eighties but is now rapidly spreading
world-wide. You fly wearing a paraglider canopy that's combined
with a motorised pusher fan. It needs no airfield, as you can take
off and land almost anywhere. When you're done, you can fold it up
and put it in the back of your car.


5. Weird Words: Octothorpe  /'Qkt at UTO:Rp/
------------------------------------------------------------------
Another name for the telephone handset symbol #.

This word is just beginning to appear in the dictionaries, but
still seems mostly to be jargon of the North American telephone
business. But it is one of the few such words with a documented
history, thanks to a note that Ralph Carlsen of Bell Laboratories
wrote just before his retirement in 1995.

He records that Bell Labs introduced two special keys on the then
new touch-tone telephone handsets in the early 1960s, both of them
now standard. One of these is the symbol '*', usually known
formally as the asterisk but which Bell Labs reasonably decided to
call the 'star' key. The other was the '#' symbol. This was more
of a problem, as there are lots of names for it. In the US it is
often called the pound key, because it is used to mark numbers
related to weight, or for similar reasons the number sign, which
is also one of its internationally agreed names. Elsewhere it is
commonly called hash, but it also has lots of other names, such as
tictactoe and cross-hatch. In Britain, the Post Office, then
responsible for telecommunications, added to the plethora of names
by deciding to call it 'square', though that, too, has become an
official name internationally.

The story as told by Ralph Carlsen is that a Bell Labs engineer,
Don Macpherson, went to instruct their first client, the Mayo
Clinic, in the use of the new system. He felt the need for a fresh
and unambiguous name for the # symbol. His reasoning that led to
the new word was roughly that it had eight points, so ought to
start with 'octo-'. He was at that time active in a group that was
trying to get the Olympic medals of the athlete Jim Thorpe
returned from Sweden, so he decided to add 'thorpe' to the end.

'Thorpe' is, of course, also the Old Norse word for a hamlet,
village or farm, which is common in British place names. Another
story of its origin is that the sign was thought to look like a
group of eight fields surrounding a village. The existence of this
other story means that dictionaries usually say the word is of
disputed origin, though Mr Carlsen's note is so circumstantial and
full of detail that it is convincing.

Over the past three decades, 'octothorpe' has gradually crept into
various official publications and manuals in the North American
telecommunications system. But even so it's hardly a common word.


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6. Q & A
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[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, but if I can, I will reply privately first; a response will
later appear here and on our Web site.]
-------------------
Q. I was a product of the 60's when we used the word 'groovy'
constantly. I thought that my generation invented the word. I was
surprised to discover recently while watching the original movie
trailer for _Miracle on 34th Street_, which was produced in 1948,
that the word 'groovey' was used in one of the big graphic
headlines which scrolled over the video. I'm sure that you will
have an amusing and edifying explanation of how old this
expression is, and how it came to be? [Roberta E Richardson]

A. I'll just give you the facts, ma'am ... it's even older than
1948, I have to tell you. The first citation in the _Oxford
English Dictionary_ is dated 1937. It comes from jazz, when to be
'groovey' (the original spelling) was a shortened form of "in the
groove", meaning that somebody was playing brilliantly or easily,
perhaps like a gramophone needle slipping along a groove, or
making music as perfectly as a needle does in the grooves of a
record.

Tom Dalzell, in his _Flappers 2 Rappers_, quotes from the _San
Francisco Chronicle_ of 13 March 1938, in which Herb Caen is in
turn quoting Bing Crosby: "In the groove means just right, down
the middle, riding lightly and politely, terrific, easy on the
ears". Mr Dalzell suggests that 'in the groove' was not replaced
by 'groovey' until about 1941, and that the latter only really
caught on from about 1944-5 for a period of less than ten years.

So the mid-sixties usage, in its slightly different spelling, was
most definitely its second time around. Now, of course, it can
only be used as a deliberate anachronism or by the terminally out-
of-touch.

-------------------

Q. What is the origin of 'in cold blood'? [Andy Cilley].

A. Think of the effect of doing something with emotion, passion or
great exertion. The blood flows to your face and you feel hot. At
a time before our understanding of the human body was as good as
it is now, it was thought that the blood actually grew hot at such
times. We still have a set of phrases in the language that reflect
this, such as 'his blood boiled' or 'in the heat of passion',
which contrast with others that describe a person whose blood is
cold or cool, so detached or uninvolved. So, an action that was
carried out without excitement or emotional involvement was said
to have been taken when the blood was cold (the exact equivalent
of the French 'sang froid'). The phrase is now usually taken to
refer to some act that might look like an act of passion but which
was actually done with cool deliberation; it's first recorded in
Joseph Addison's _Spectator_ in 1711.

-------------------

Q. Please could you tell me where the phrase 'shiver my timbers'
originated? [Tad Spencer]

A. This is one of those supposedly nautical expressions that seem
to be better known through a couple of appearances in fiction than
by any actual sailors' usage. It's an exclamation that may allude
to a ship striking some rock or other obstacle so hard that her
timbers shiver, or shake, so implying some calamity has occurred.
It is first recorded as being used by Captain Frederick Marryat in
_Jacob Faithful_ in 1835: "I won't thrash you Tom. Shiver my
timbers if I do". It has gained a firm place in the language
because almost fifty years later Robert Louis Stevenson found it
to be just the kind of old-salt saying that fitted the character
of Long John Silver in _Treasure Island_: "Cross me, and you'll go
where many a good man's gone before you ... some to the yard-arm,
shiver my timbers, and some by the board, and all to feed the
fishes". Since then, it's mainly been the preserve of second-rate
seafaring yarns.


7. Beyond Words
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The newsletter _Tasty Bits from the Technology Front_ this week
featured the phrase "to eat our own dog-food", which is a bit of
computer-industry jargon meaning that software developers ought to
actually use the products they develop, preferably before they
start to sell them. _TBTF_ says the phrase has now been verbed,
with a Microsoft employee reported as saying "we have to dog-food
this architecture before we release it".


8. Housekeeping
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