World Wide Words -- 09 Dec 00

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 216         Saturday 9 December 2000
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Book Review: How We Talk: American Regional English Today.
3. Weird Words: Skimmington.
4. Topical Words: Aluminium.
5. Q & A: Right as rain.
6. Administration: How to join and leave the list, Copyright.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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HOLIDAY BREAK  The next issue, for 16 December, will be the last
before the holiday. I'm taking two weeks off. The newsletter will
next appear on Saturday 6 January 2001, no doubt with its editor
replete with residual holiday spirit and left-over turkey.

SUBSCRIBERS  Keen-eyed readers will have spotted the small change
in the masthead that indicates another milestone along the road to
wor(l)d domination has been reached: this newsletter has achieved
the dizzying distinction of having 10,000 subscribers. Keep telling
your friends about World Wide Words: the next target is 20,000!

ADRIAN QUIST  Australians tell me that a more usual form of the
expression discussed last week was 'he was a bit Adrian Quist', as
British people talk about someone being 'Brahms and Liszt'. An
example is in _A Dictionary of Australian Colloquialisms_ by G A
Wilkes: "Got Adrian Quist somethin' terrible the other night".
Thanks to Laurie Malone of Bigola, New South Wales, and Janie
Kibble, of Quambone, also in Australia, for their comments.

PROFESSOR LIGHTER'S first name is Jonathan, not John as I had it
last week (and several times previously). Apologies to him.


2. Book Review: How We Talk: American Regional English Today
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Where I stand, three thousand miles to the east, American looks and
sounds much more homogeneous a language than it really is. While
watching films and television programmes, even an Englishman with a
tin ear can tell a Southerner from a Minnesotan from a native of
New York. But it's only when you travel to these and other parts of
the US that you realise accents are not only much more subtle and
variable than these big divisions suggest, but that there are
distinctive vocabularies to go with the voices.

Allan Metcalf has done a service to anybody wanting to learn more
about these characteristic regional variations in American English.
His book is slim enough not to intimidate, it's written in non-
technical language that avoids the intricacies of phonetics, and it
wears its learning lightly.

He devotes a chapter to each of the main linguistic regions. He
starts in the South, that most colourful region of American speech,
then moves north and east through the Midlands area to New England
and New York, across the country to the west, and finally beyond to
Alaska and Hawaii. Each chapter is self-contained, combining a
description of the characteristic local speech patterns with a
section on vocabulary.

So you can discover where in America people put their groceries in
a sack, in a bag, or even in a poke; where that place on the elbow
that hurts so much when you hit it is called a funny bone and where
speakers prefer crazy bone; in what areas speakers might ask for a
submarine, a hoagie, a grinder, a hero, or an Italian sandwich;
where a group description might include y'all, youse, you'uns, or
you guys; where your cake might have frosting on it rather than
icing; and where coyote has two syllables and where it has three.

He has sought out many regional words. He explains, for example,
where an ice house is a convenience store, a gully washer is heavy
rain, where a mango is a green pepper, where you might be offered
flannel cakes, where you may regularly meet Arabs in the street or
might find scrod, and where a drinking fountain is a bubbler.

Don't be fooled by how easy it is to read this book. Allan Metcalf
is professor of English at MacMurray College in Illinois; he has
been executive secretary of the American Dialect Society since 1981
and an editor of the ADS newsletter for many years. He has been
able to draw on research for the ADS's great work in progress, the
_Dictionary of American Regional English_, as well as much other
data.

Recommended.

[Metcalf, Allan A _How We Talk: American Regional English Today_,
published by Houghton Mifflin, Boston, on 16 October 2000; pp208;
ISBN 0-618-04363-2 (hardback), ISBN 0-618-04362-4 (paperback);
publisher's list prices are $24.00 for the hardback and $14.00 for
the paperback.]


3. Weird Words: Skimmington
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A noisy and rude procession intended to bring ridicule on an erring
husband or wife.

In English towns this was a common way to express moral outrage at
the actions of a member of a married couple, perhaps because the
man was a wife-beater or the woman an adulterer. An important part
of it was noise. Francis Grose described the way of it in his
_Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue_ in 1796: "Saucepans, frying-pans,
poker and tongs, marrow-bones and cleavers, bulls horns, etc.
beaten upon and sounded in ludicrous processions". So crucial was
this element that another name for the custom was 'rough music';
yet another was 'ran-tanning', probably an echoic phrase. Effigies
of the guilty parties were paraded through the streets on a cart or
the back of a donkey; sometimes neighbours would impersonate them
instead. It was this part of the custom that was the skimmington,
or skimmington riding. The word probably derives from a skimming
ladle, shown in early illustrations wielded by an enraged wife.
The custom is recorded from the seventeenth century onwards, in
Pepys's diary for example, and there's a good description in
Thomas Hardy's _The Mayor of Casterbridge_ of 1884:

  The numerous lights round the two effigies threw them up into
  lurid distinctness; it was impossible to mistake the pair for
  other than the intended victims. "Come in, come in," implored
  Elizabeth; "and let me shut the window!" "She's me - she's me
  - even to the parasol - my green parasol!" cried Lucetta with
  a wild laugh as she stepped in. She stood motionless for one
  second - then fell heavily to the floor. Almost at the
  instant of her fall the rude music of the skimmington ceased.
  The roars of sarcastic laughter went off in ripples, and the
  trampling died out like the rustle of a spent wind.


4. Topical Words: Aluminium
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Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time there was an unwise
writer on words who mentioned the difference between the American
and British spellings of this metal, in connection with a piece
about Noah Webster's dictionary, but didn't check his facts with
sufficient care. The resulting correspondence turned his mailbox
white hot. Let me put the record straight (for, dear reader, that
writer was I).

The metal was named by the English chemist Sir Humphry Davy (who,
you may recall, "abominated gravy, and lived in the odium of having
discovered sodium"), even though he was unable to isolate it: that
took another two decades' work by others. He derived the name from
the mineral called 'alumina', which itself had only been named in
English by the chemist Joseph Black in 1790. Black took it from the
French, who had based it on 'alum', a white mineral that had been
used since ancient times for dyeing and tanning, among other
things. Chemically, this is potassium aluminium sulphate (a name
which gives me two further opportunities to parade my British
spellings of chemical names).

Sir Humphry made a bit of a mess of naming this new element, at
first spelling it 'alumium' (this was in 1807) then changing it to
'aluminum', and finally settling on 'aluminium' in 1812. His
classically educated scientific colleagues preferred 'aluminium'
right from the start, because it had more of a classical ring, and
chimed harmoniously with many other elements whose names ended in
'-ium', like 'potassium', 'sodium', and 'magnesium', all of which
had been named by Davy.

The spelling in '-um' continued in occasional use in Britain for a
while, though that in '-ium' soon predominated. In the USA -
perhaps oddly in view of its later history - the standard spelling
was 'aluminium' right from the start. This is the only form given
in Noah Webster's _Dictionary_ of 1828, and seems to have been
standard among US chemists throughout most of the nineteenth
century; it was the preferred version in _The Century Dictionary_
of 1889 and is the only spelling given in the _Webster Unabridged
Dictionary_ of 1913. However, there is evidence that the spelling
without the final 'i' was used in various trades and professions in
the US from the 1830s onwards and that by the 1870s it had become
the more common one in American writing generally.

Actually, neither version was often encountered early on: up to
about 1855 it had only ever been made in pinhead quantities because
it was so hard to extract from its ores; a new French process that
involved liquid sodium improved on that to the extent that Emperor
Napoleon III had some aluminium cutlery made for state banquets,
but it still cost much more than gold. When the statue of Eros in
Piccadilly Circus in London was cast from aluminium in 1893 it was
still an exotic and expensive choice. This changed only when a way
of extracting the metal using cheap hydroelectricity was developed.

The official change in the US to the '-um' spelling happened quite
late: the American Chemical Society only adopted it in 1925. The
International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC)
officially standardised on 'aluminium' in 1990, though this has
done nothing, of course, to change the way people in the US spell
it for day to day purposes.

It's a word that demonstrates the often tangled and subtle nature
of word history, and how a simple statement about differences in
spelling can cover a complicated story.


5. Q&A
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[Send your queries to <qa at worldwidewords.org>. All messages will be
acknowledged, but I can't guarantee to reply, as time is limited.
If I can, a response will appear here and on the Words Web site. If
you wish to comment, please e-mail editor at worldwidewords.org]

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Q. I have been deputized by a small group of your readers and
admirers to ask you a question. What is the meaning and origin of
the phrase, 'right as rain'? Is it an aesthetically pleasing but
essentially meaningless alliteration, or is 'rain' really correct
in some way? [Julane Marx, California]

A. An interesting question. Thank you for mentioning admirers. I'm
more doubtful about the deputising: presumably the next stage would
have been to get up a posse.

Perhaps surprisingly, there have been expressions starting 'right
as ...' since medieval times, always in the sense of something
being satisfactory, safe, secure or comfortable. An early example,
quoted as a proverb as long ago as 1546, is 'right as a line'. In
that, 'right' might have had a literal sense of straightness,
something desirable in a line, but it also clearly has a figurative
sense of being correct or acceptable. There's an even older
example, from the _Romance of the Rose_ of 1400: "right as an
adamant", where an adamant was a lodestone or magnet.

Lots of others have followed in the centuries since. There's 'right
as a gun', which appeared in _Prophetess_, one of John Fletcher's
plays, in 1622. 'Right as my leg' is also from the seventeenth
century - it's in Sir Thomas Urquhart's translation of _Gargantua
and Pantagruel_, by Rabelais, published in 1664: "Some were young,
quaint, clever, neat, pretty, juicy, tight, brisk, buxom, proper,
kind-hearted, and as right as my leg, to any man's thinking".
There's 'right as a trivet' from the nineteenth century, a trivet
being a stand for a pot or kettle placed over an open fire; this
may be found in Charles Dickens's _Pickwick Papers_ of 1837: "'I
hope you are well, sir.' 'Right as a trivet, sir,' replied Bob
Sawyer". About the same time, or a little later, people were saying
that things were 'as right as ninepence', 'as right as a book', 'as
right as nails', or 'as right as the bank'.

'Right as rain' is a latecomer to this illustrious collection of
curious similes. It may have first appeared at the very end of the
nineteenth century, but the first example I can find is from Max
Beerbohm's book _Yet Again_ of 1909: "He looked, as himself would
undoubtedly have said, 'fit as a fiddle,' or 'right as rain.' His
cheeks were rosy, his eyes sparkling". Since then it has almost
completely taken over from the others.

It makes no more sense than the variants it has usurped and is
clearly just a play on words (though perhaps there's a lurking idea
that rain often comes straight down, in a right line, to use the
old sense). But the alliteration was undoubtedly why it was created
and has helped its survival. 'As right as ninepence' has had a good
run, too, for much the same reason, but that has vanished even in
Britain since we decimalised the coinage and since ninepence
stopped being worth very much.


6. Administration
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