World Wide Words -- 10 Jul 99

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 148           Saturday 10 July 1999
------------------------------------------------------------------
>From Michael Quinion                        Thornbury, Bristol, UK
Sent every Saturday to more than 5,300 subscribers in 93 countries
Web: <http://www.quinion.com/words/>   E-mail: <words at quinion.com>
------------------------------------------------------------------

Contents
--------
1. Notes and feedback.
2. Turns of Phrase: Biosurgery.
4. In Brief: Telephone roulette.
5. Weird Words: Snollygoster.
6. Q & A: Mad as hops, Po-faced, Stick-in-the-mud.
7. Beyond Words.
8. Administration.


1. Notes and feedback
------------------------------------------------------------------
MAD AS HOPS. Lack of space forced this Q&A piece to be taken out
of last week's issue, but I forgot in the pressure of events to
remove it from the contents list. You will find it below.


2. Turns of Phrase: Biosurgery
------------------------------------------------------------------
If you are of a sensitive disposition, you may like to close your
eyes before reading on. It's been found in recent years that some
kinds of fly larvae, maggots to you, are excellent for cleaning
wounds, since if you pick the right sort (greenbottle larvae are
best), they eat the dead and decaying flesh but leave the healthy
stuff alone. They can even help new tissue grow, perhaps by
introducing natural antibiotics into the wound. The technique is
proving very helpful in cases where the injured person is infected
with bugs resistant to antibiotics. There are other ways in which
animals are being reintroduced to medicine, the main one being
that ancient mainstay, the leech. Understandably, patients don't
like the idea of nasty beasties being placed near their sensitive
places, so surgeons have invented the term biosurgery to disguise
what they're planning. You can open your eyes again now.

More and more doctors are using what is euphemistically being
called MT (for maggot therapy) or, even more cleverly,
'biosurgery'.
          [Robert & Michèle Root-Bernstein, _Honey, Mud,
                    Maggots and Other Medical Marvels_ (1997)]

Clinical indications for larval treatment or 'biosurgery' include
infected or necrotic wounds of all types, including those infected
or colonised with antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria such as
methicillin resistant 'Staphylococcus aureus'.
                     [_British Medical Journal_, Mar. 1999]


4. In Brief: Telephone roulette
------------------------------------------------------------------
Now that many teenagers have their own mobile phones, it has been
reported in Britain that a highly risky practice has grown up in
which some young people dial numbers at random and fix a blind
date with the first person they come across that they fancy.


5. Weird Words: Snollygoster
------------------------------------------------------------------
A shrewd, unprincipled person, especially a politician.

This is another of that set of extroverted and fanciful words that
originated in the fast-expanding United States of the nineteenth
century (I see a snollygoster as a outsized individual with a
carpetbag, flowered waistcoat, expansive demeanour and a large
cigar). These days it's hardly heard. Its last burst of public
notice came when President Truman used it in 1952, and defined it,
either in ignorance or impishness, as "a man born out of wedlock".
Many people put him right, some quoting this definition from the
_Columbus Dispatch_ of October 1895, with its splendid last phrase
in the spirit of the original: "A Georgia editor kindly explains
that 'a snollygoster is a fellow who wants office, regardless of
party, platform or principles, and who, whenever he wins, gets
there by the sheer force of monumental talknophical assumnacy'".
But an American dictionary fifty years earlier had defined it
simply as a shyster. The origin is unknown, though the _Oxford
English Dictionary_ suggests it may be linked to 'snallygoster',
which some suppose to derive from the German 'schnelle Geister',
literally a fast-moving ghost, and which was a mythical monster of
vast size - half reptile, half bird - supposedly found in
Maryland, and which was invented to terrify ex-slaves out of
voting.


6. Q & A
------------------------------------------------------------------
[Send queries to <qa at quinion.com>. Messages will be acknowledged,
but I can't guarantee to reply, as time is limited. If I can do
so, a response will appear both here and on the WWW Web site.]
-----------
Q. In _Patchwork Girl of Oz_ (L Frank Baum, 1913), I came across
the expression 'mad as hops'. Is that the forerunner of 'hopping
mad'? And what is so mad about hops? [Michael Turniansky]

A. There are indeed a number of old expressions using the word
'hops' in the sense of the plant. One was 'as thick as hops',
referring to the dense mats of creeper you can get when hops grow
wild and unchecked, and another was 'as fast as hops', because the
plant dies back in winter and then grows very rapidly from its
base each spring. These were both known by 1630 at the latest. The
phrase 'hopping mad' also dates from the seventeenth century, but
it uses a different sense of hop, the one of jumping up and down
on one foot, in other words of being so angry that one is
literally unable to keep still. It seems that sometime in the
nineteenth century in the US somebody punned by combining these
phrases to create 'as mad as hops'. The expression is first
recorded in _Harper's Magazine_ in 1884, but is probably older. So
there's nothing mad about the plant at all.
------------
Q. I have seen the expression 'po-faced' on several occasions and
when you used it in your mailing on July 3, I thought this would
be the best time to ask you where it comes from and what it means.
[Jacquelyne Lord, and others]

A. I wondered if readers would be puzzled by that word. It's
common enough in Britain as a term for someone who is priggish,
narrow-minded, disapproving or humourless, but not widely known
elsewhere; it does occasionally appear in America, though mostly
in writings by British authors.

It's usually supposed to derive from the slang term 'po' for a
chamber pot (it rhymes with 'no'), first recorded in the 1880s.
But the abbreviation is more likely to be from the French 'pot de
chambre' than from the English term. It was probably influenced by
the interjection 'pooh' for something that's distasteful, which is
of course related to the verb 'to pooh-pooh' meaning to express
contempt or disdain for something; both are conventional
reformulations of the noise one makes with the lips when appearing
to blow away something unpleasant.

'Po-faced' was perhaps applied to such people because they react
to insalubrious comments with a look of insufficiently disguised
distaste, as if suddenly presented with a used chamber pot. The
_Oxford English Dictionary_ also suggests it might have been
influenced by 'poker face', which is one of the senses it gives
for the word; that is not quite how it is understood today, but it
does imply somebody who is trying not to show a reaction to some
happening of which they disapprove.

It's actually quite a modern word, first recorded only in 1934 in
the book _Music Ho!_ by Constant Lambert, the British music critic
and composer: "I do not wish, when faced with exoticism, to adopt
an attitude which can best be described by the admirable
expression 'po-faced'. We cannot live perpetually in the rarefied
atmosphere of the austerer classics". Mr Lambert's phrasing
clearly suggests that the term was by then already well-known,
though perhaps within a restricted group (it has the feel of
public-school slang about it).

_Chambers Dictionary_ argues that it comes from 'poor-faced', but
this is a much less likely origin, especially when you consider
other British terms like 'potty' for a child's chamber pot, and
'pooh' or 'poo' for its contents, even though these are recorded
much later than 'po-faced'. A A Milne's 'Winnie the Pooh' (who
first appeared in print in 1926) was presumably so called because
he was a smelly bear, but this probably reflects the older sense
of 'pooh'.
------------
Q. I've read in a few places that 'stick-in-the-mud' comes from
the English habit of burying convicted pirates up to their necks
in mud at low tide. This sounds unlikely, but intriguing. Do you
know if this is true? And if so, how on earth did it come to mean
a boring person? [Sara Lorimer]

A. Isn't folk etymology inventive? Much more fun than boring old
lexicography. Firstly, so far as I know there was never any such
procedure for punishing pirates, or anybody else for that matter.
Even in older times that would have been regarded as cruel and
unnatural punishment. They were just hanged at Tyburn, like any
other self-respecting criminal. Secondly, the more prosaic, but
much more probable, answer is that it is just the most recent of a
number of expressions of similar type implying being stuck in or
held fast by something. Earlier examples were 'to stick in the
briars' and 'to stick in the mire', which were used for a person
who has got himself into a difficulty or trouble from which he is
having trouble extricating himself. 'Stick-in-the-mud' seems to
have been modelled on these earlier forms but was first recorded
in 1733 with essentially the modern meaning: a person who is
stolid and unimaginative, content with his lot and unprepared to
make an effort to improve it.


7. Beyond Words
------------------------------------------------------------------
Hazlitt Krog works with Internet start-up companies in California.
He heard the following during a meeting with clients last week:

    "Well, the glossy has come off the eyeball play so
    the VCs really want to see a solid fiscal model out
    of the gate to get to the first round".

He provides this useful glossary:

    * glossy has come off = it's not looking as promising
      as before
    * eyeballs = visitors to a web site/site traffic
    * play = a type of business angle or approach
    * VCs = venture capitalists
    * solid fiscal model = a business plan that shows revenues
      and profits
    * out of the gate = web site launch
    * first round = the initial round of venture or private
      placement capital

So, being freely interpreted, the sentence above means:

    "It's no longer sufficient merely to prove that you
    can generate a lot of traffic to get your Web venture
    funded. You also need to provide statistics and hard
    financial projections in your business plan that prove
    you can start making money as soon as you launch the
    site".


8. Administration
------------------------------------------------------------------
* To leave the list, send the message SIGNOFF WORLDWIDEWORDS to
  the list server address <listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org>.
  The subject line of your e-mail message will be ignored.

* WORLD WIDE WORDS is copyright (c) Michael B Quinion 1999. You
  may reproduce this mailing in whole or in part in other free
  media provided that you give the source and Web site address.
==================================================================