World Wide Words -- 30 Oct 99

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 164         Saturday 30 October 1999
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Editor: Michael Quinion                      Thornbury, Bristol, UK
Web: <http://www.quinion.com/words/>    E-mail: <words at quinion.com>
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Contents
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1. Notes and feedback.
2. Book Review: Frantic Semantics by John Morrish.
3. Topical Words: Rookery.
4. Weird Words: Flibbertigibbet.
5. In Brief: Actoid, E-wallet, Stovepipe.
6. Q & A: Under the rose.
7. Administration: How to unsubscribe, Copyright.


1. Notes and feedback
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OLLIE OLLIE OXEN FREE  A lively correspondence followed this Q&A
piece last week. Charles Wilson wrote: "When I was growing up in
the American South we actually said, 'All ye all ye outs in free'
when playing hide-and-seek (although we called it 'hide-and-go-
seek)". Others reported hearing similar forms, which may suggest
that the first part of the saying was once "all of you". This seems
likely, but we may never know the truth, since the phrase is so
mutable and its history so badly recorded.

STAPLE  Several writers commented on another sense of 'staple', for
the individual fibres of wool, especially regarding their length
and quality. I didn't mention this (the piece was quite long enough
already) but this sense may be a back-formation from the old use of
'stapler' for a wool-merchant, since sorting wool for quality was
obviously part of the job.

Others have pointed out that today German and Dutch use 'stapel'
for a pile of something, so the name for a trading place may just
have been transferred from the piles of merchandise waiting to be
sold (Manten van Steenbergen tells me that in Dutch a 'stapelmarkt'
is a pile-it-high, large-volume market).


2. Book Review: Frantic Semantics by John Morrish
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Sometimes it's rough being a reviewer. You're all set to write an
objective piece, you settle down, get yourself comfortable, open
the book, and find yourself cited in the acknowledgements. But I'm
not going to be influenced by that, even though Mr Morrish has been
kind enough to describe World Wide Words as a pioneering Web site.
I'm going to be nice about this book despite what he says.

John Morrish is a freelance journalist who used to work on _Private
Eye_ and edit _Time Out_, but now lives in deepest Gloucestershire
with a wife, two teenage sons and a room full of dictionaries. He
writes a 350-word column in the _Daily Telegraph_ each Saturday
about a word in our evolving language and the mess we make trying
to use it. If that sounds a bit like my _Topical Words_ articles,
then you're on the right track.

Here are rather more than 150 of his weekly pieces, one to a page,
on words as diverse as 'actually', 'brand', 'cool', 'morph',
'syndrome' and 'wonk'. He has a sharp ear for shifting senses,
incoming Americanisms, home-brewed curiosities and limping similes.
But they're written from a strictly British perspective, so if
you're from somewhere across the water, do be prepared first to
take a brief course in British politics, soaps and daily life. Then
you can appreciate fully Mr Morrish's sallies into the way we
pummel, distort and regularly reinvent the English language.

"The point about the Frantic Semantics," he writes, "is that they
are supposed to be fun. Accurate, usually; comprehensive and
balanced, occasionally; entertaining, wherever possible." Seems a
fair summary ...

[Morrish, John, _Frantic Semantics: Snapshots of our Changing
Language_, Macmillan, UK, 1999. ISBN 0-333-76352-1. Publisher's
quoted price 9.99 pounds.]


3. Topical Words: Rookery
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A British government research report last week on how to prevent
burglaries pointed the finger at the malign influence of
'rookeries'.

In something like the sense the writers mean, this word has been
around in the language since the end of the eighteenth century. The
poet George Galloway was the first person known to have used it in
print, in 1792. Then it was a slangy term for what the _Oxford
English Dictionary_ describes, with a nice drawing away of its
academic skirts, as "a cluster of mean tenements densely populated
by people of the lowest class".

By Victorian times these slums had become the most disreputable and
notorious parts of every large British city. The most famous was
the St Giles Rookery at the bottom of Tottenham Court Road, in the
heart of London. Charles Dickens, who described the low-life of
these areas as well as anybody, wrote in _Sketches by Boz_:
"Wretched houses with broken windows patched with rags and paper:
every room let out to a different family, and in many instances to
two or even three ... filth everywhere - a gutter before the houses
and a drain behind - clothes drying and slops emptying, from the
windows; girls of fourteen or fifteen, with matted hair, walking
about barefoot, and in white great-coats, almost their only
covering; boys of all ages, in coats of all sizes and no coats at
all; men and women, in every variety of scanty and dirty apparel,
lounging, scolding, drinking, smoking, squabbling, fighting, and
swearing".

No wonder observers found the word for a colony of treetop nests
described it best; the rook is such a noisily conversational and
sociable bird that there have even been fanciful stories of rook
parliaments.

The slang 'to rook', to cheat or steal, looks as though it came
from a link with these slums, but the verb was already well
established by Shakespeare's time. The bird's supposedly thieving
habit was the source, something that today we associate more with
the magpie. A 'rookie', as an inexperienced new member of a group,
may have started off as a child employed as a rook scarer in farm
fields, though others say it's just a form of 'recruit'. Though the
bird doesn't occur in North America, 'rookery' was borrowed late
last century to describe the slums of cities such as New York and
San Francisco.

But such fetid concentrations of humanity don't exist in Britain
any more. The writers of the report instead seem to be using the
word to describe a group of criminal families that form a well-
established network, of a kind found on many run-down public
housing estates on the fringes of our big cities. It's a natural
enough development of the old sense, which intimately associated
'rookeries' with crime, but we've moved a long way from the
overcrowded slums evoked by its earlier users.


4. Weird Words: Flibbertigibbet
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A frivolous, flighty, or excessively talkative person.

This is a fine word to throw out, in the appropriate circumstances,
though there's a risk of tripping over all those syllables. That's
no doubt why it has had so many spellings. The original seems to
have been recorded about 1450 as 'fleper-gebet', which may have
been just an imitation of the sound of meaningless speech ('babble'
and 'yadda-yadda-yadda' have similar origins). It started out to
mean a gossip or chattering person, but quickly seems to have taken
on the idea of a flighty or frivolous woman. A century later it had
become respectable enough for Bishop Latimer to use it in a sermon
before King Edward VI, though he wrote it as 'flybbergybe'. The
modern spelling is due to Shakespeare, who borrowed it from one of
the 40 fiends listed in a book by Samuel Harsnet in 1603. In _King
Lear_ Edgar uses it for a demon or imp: "This is the foul fiend
Flibbertigibbet. .. He gives the web and the pin, squints the eye,
and makes the harelip; mildews the white wheat, and hurts the poor
creature of earth". There has been yet a third sense, taken from a
character of Sir Walter Scott's in _Kenilworth_, for a mischievous
and flighty small child. But despite Shakespeare and Scott, the
most usual sense is still the original one.


5. In Brief
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ACTOID  One of the robotic soap actors in Alan Ayckbourn's new West
End comedy _Comic Potential_, emotionally managed from the control
room of a regional TV station sometime in the future; in particular
it refers to the heroine, Jacid Triplethree, who goes wrong and
develops a sense of humour.

E-WALLET  A substantial proportion of online shoppers cancel their
intended purchases because the electronic shopping basket system is
too complicated. The 'e-wallet' idea hopes to stop the hassle by
storing personal details on a secure Web site so that customers can
let the online store retrieve it.

STOVEPIPE  The name that _Vogue_ magazine has given to this
season's fashionable shape of women's trousers, low-slung onto the
hips, tight to the knee but then flared to block-heeled boots (the
only shoe decreed appropriate for the style). Nothing so timid as
boot cut here, but a much more dramatic flare.


6. 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 limited. If I can do so,
a response will appear both here and on the WWW Web site.]

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Q. How did a rose come to mean confidentiality, as in 'sub rosa'?
[Noah S Baer]

A. The allusion goes back to classical times. The Romans adopted the
Egyptian sun-god Horus as part of a cult of Isis and Serapis that
reached them through Greece. The Greeks had taken him over as Horus
the child (whose name in Egyptian was 'her-pa-khrad'), Greeking his
name to Harpocrates. The Egyptian hieroglyph for a child was a
seated boy sucking his finger; the Greeks thought this showed him
with his finger to his lips and so made him the god of silence and
secrecy.

He became popular among Romans once the cult had been officially
sanctioned during the reign of Caligula in the first century AD.
There's a famous story from those times in which Cupid - the Roman
god of love - was said to have given a rose to Harpocrates as a
little thank-you bribe for not letting on what his mother Venus, the
goddess of sensual love, was up to (very filial, that).

So the rose became the symbol of confidentiality in the classical
Roman world. The ceilings of Roman dining rooms were decorated with
roses to remind guests that what was said there under the influence
of wine ('sub vino') was also 'sub rosa', under the rose, privileged
and not to be made public.

The symbol of the rose was well-known throughout the post-classical
period and is recorded in particular in old German writings, which
is how it may have got into English. The first use of the English
translation of the phrase occurs in the State Papers of Henry VIII
in 1546 (though the writer had to explain what it meant). The rose
was used in medieval times and later much as the Romans did, and at
one time appeared as a symbol in the confessional. The tag in Latin
or English is still to be heard, especially among people who prize
confidentiality.


7. Administration
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