World Wide Words -- 19 Feb 00

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS        ISSUE 178         Saturday 19 February 2000
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Sent weekly to more than 7,000 subscribers in at least 97 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion    ISSN 1470-1448    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. Topical Words: Insult.
3. Weird Words: Petard.
4. Q & A: Retort; Waiting for the other shoe to drop.
5. Book Review: Green English.
6. Administration: LISTSERV commands, Pronunciation, Copyright.


1. Notes and feedback
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ASCIAN  Lots of subscribers wrote with additional information about
this word (Q&A last week), which is both better recorded and more
interesting than I knew. Its derivation is as I gave it, but works
that include it say it's applied to "the inhabitants of the torrid
zone where the sun is vertical at noon for a few days every year".
It is in the _Oxford English Dictionary_ in the form 'Ascians', an
English form of the Latin word 'Ascii' for people who lived in
tropical climes. In the latter form, it first appeared in a work by
Nathanael Carpenter entitled _Geography Delineated Forth in Two
Books_, in 1726. And as 'Ascians' is pronounced with a soft 'sh'
sound, as /'aSI at nz/ or |AY-she-nz|, the derived adjective is
presumably said the same way.

DWILE FLONKING  Several Dutch subscribers wrote to say that the
word exists in Dutch - spelt 'dweil' - with the same meaning of a
dishcloth or floorcloth or, in older slang, a drunkard. There were
close links between parts of East Anglia and the Netherlands,
especially in the eighteenth century, and it is conceivable that
the Suffolk dialect word was borrowed from Dutch, though I've not
been able to track this down for sure.

Some questioning messages arrived, like this one from Steve Parkes:
"I would hesitate for a long, long while before even imagining that
you might be pulling our legs, but ... dwile flonking? I couldn't
clear my mind of images of Michael Bentine nurdling as I read". I
put the piece in straight-faced, but the origins and terminology
are just as I gave them, and I'd like to reassure everyone that the
game is real. I place in evidence this comment from the current
issue of the _New Yorker_: "Nominally a reserved people, the
British like to bottle up their exhibitionist tendencies and then,
at opportune moments, let them flood out in a rush". Hence dwile
flonking. And there is a link with Mr Bentine, a comic genius who
in the 1960s and early 1970s presented a BBC television programme
called _It's a Square World_. In 1970, he featured the game in an
interview; it sounded so unlikely and so much in his style that
many people were sure he invented it.


2. Topical Words: Insult
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A woman recently rubbed an eclair in the face of Nick Brown - the
British minister of agriculture - in protest against policies that
many think will bankrupt farmers. She was reported afterwards in
one newspaper as saying that she regretted her action "in the sense
that I have insulted Mr Brown".

This is an odd sense of the word for most people today, since it's
more usual to insult people in words rather than by applying cream
confections, especially such an upper-class one as an eclair, that
cake _Chambers Dictionary_ so famously defined as "long in shape
but short in duration".

But - if she actually said it - she was using the word in one sense
of the original Latin. 'Insultare' literally meant to leap at
somebody, to assail or assault them. It was entirely physical, with
no words implied, except perhaps a prefatory scream. Taking it back
a stage, it came from 'saltire', to jump, which is the origin of
two words I've already used in a circular way to define the Latin:
'assail' and 'assault'. (Among others it also gave us 'desultory',
'salacious' and 'salient'.) Even today, doctors still talk about a
disease 'insulting' the body when they mean it is causing harm or
hurt, a direct reference to this Latin original.

But the Romans could also use the word in a figurative sense, to
refer to a verbal assault, a tongue-lashing. We have just the same
idea in our modern phrase 'to jump on somebody'.

Like so much of our vocabulary, it journeyed to us through French,
in which 'insulter' meant to crow over a defeated enemy, to triumph
over someone in an arrogant way. It arrived in English at the end
of the sixteenth century. The _Oxford English Dictionary_ says with
its usual comprehensiveness that it then meant "to manifest
arrogant or scornful delight by speech or behaviour; to exult
proudly or contemptuously; to boast, brag, vaunt, glory, triumph,
especially in an insolent or scornful way". Hardly a pleasant
experience for the insultee.

The idea of boasting lasted quite a while; as late as 1666, Samuel
Pepys wrote in his diary about the defeat of the English fleet in a
sea battle with the Dutch: "The Dutch do mightily insult of their
victory, and they have great reason". The saying 'adding insult to
injury' was more powerful when it appeared in the following century
than it is now, as speakers still had an image of someone causing
physical hurt and then staying around to gloat about it.

But by Pepys's day, 'insult' had largely moved to our modern
meaning, first cousin to arrogant boasting but with the emphasis on
the alleged failings of the recipient rather than the supposed
superiority of the speaker.


3. Weird Words: Petard
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A small bomb used to blow in a door or gate.

If it wasn't for its appearance in Shakespeare's _Hamlet_: "For
'tis the sport to have the enginer / Hoist with his owne petar" and
its fossil survival in the rather more modern spelling 'to be hoist
with one's own petard', this term of warfare would have gone the
way of the halberd, brattice and culverin.

A 'petard' was a bell-shaped metal grenade typically filled with
five or six pounds of gunpowder and set off by a fuse. Sappers dug
a tunnel or covered trench up to a building and fixed the device to
a door, barricade, drawbridge or the like to break it open. The
bomb was held in place with a heavy beam called a 'madrier'.

Unfortunately, the devices were unreliable and often went off
unexpectedly. Hence the expression, where 'hoist' meant to be
lifted up, an understated description of the result of being blown
up by your own bomb. The name of the device came from the Latin
'petar', to break wind, perhaps a sarcastic comment about the thin
noise of a muffled explosion at the far end of an excavation.


4. 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 WWWords Web site.]

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Q. The Oxford English Dictionary Word of the Day today (11 February
2000) is the noun 'retort', a vessel used for distillation.  Did
the other sense of the word 'retort', as in a sharp reply, come
from this one, or from somewhere else? [Ali Bickford, Germany]

A. They do have the same origin, the Latin 'torquere', a verb
meaning to twist. (We owe several other words to the same source,
such as 'torment', 'torture', 'torque', 'extort', and 'torsion',
all of which have in them the idea of something being twisted). The
distillation vessel was so called because it had a curved or spiral
neck with which to condense the vapour, a device that was therefore
re-twisted - 'retorta' in Latin. The other sense implied a reply
that was likewise twisted, a sharp rejoinder to some comment that
was returned to the original speaker. It seems to have been first
used by Shakespeare, in _As You Like It_, though it became common
only in the nineteenth century.

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Q. I am interested in the origin of the phrase, 'waiting for the
other shoe to drop'. Would you know about this phrase? [Linda
Rodina]

A. I'm pretty much stumped. I have no idea where the expression
comes from, and none of my reference works even mentions it. There
was a brief discussion about this among members of the American
Dialect Society recently, to no very positive conclusion, though it
was established that it has been around for over half a century.
Barry Popik found a cartoon about Hitler in the _New York World-
Telegram_ for 15 February 1943 entitled "Waiting for That Other
Shoe to Drop!", indicating that the phrase was by then well enough
known to be something of a catchphrase. Its source must surely be
that old story about a man in a lodging house who couldn't get to
sleep through waiting for the person undressing in the room above
to drop the other shoe. It may be of some antiquity, perhaps from
music hall or vaudeville.


5. Book Review: Green English
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When cultures clash, the weak learn the language of the strong. It
has been so in Ireland in recent centuries, to the point that the
native Irish language has in the past hundred years been forced
back to the margins among fears that - despite great efforts - it
will follow Manx and Cornish into extinction.

In this monograph, Loreto Todd, Reader in International English at
the University of Leeds, argues that the influence of Irish on
English - not only on the English of Ireland, but also on that of
the Caribbean, the USA, Australia and elsewhere - goes much further
than linguists have traditionally believed.

She suggests that many English words may have had their roots in
Irish, words that most lexicographers today assign to other
origins: 'cant', for example (which most dictionaries say comes
from Latin); 'ballyhoo' (which dictionaries don't even try to give
an origin for); 'shanty' (in the sense of shack, more often said to
derive from Canadian French); 'slogan' (which is certainly Gaelic,
from words meaning an army war cry, but usually said to be from
Scots rather than Irish Gaelic); 'hobo' (from the Gaelic 'ob', an
origin which is disputable). She also argues that the personal
pronoun 'she' may come from Irish.

Loreto Todd takes readers through more than a thousand years of
Irish history, from the Celtic foundations of Irish society, the
incursions of the Vikings, the impact of Norman French, and the
settlement of English and Scots immigrants in different parts of
the country that have left the north linguistically different from
the south.

She examines the characteristic sentence patterns of Irish and the
way they have affected modern Irish English: why it is that the
Irish are so reluctant to answer a simple yes or no to a question,
or how such characteristic forms as "I'm after seeing him" or "I
have a terrible cold on me" have been built into Irish English,
based on Irish Gaelic models.

She deeply regrets the shift in Ireland towards losing the native
Gaelic elements in Irish English and argues that there must be a
way to keep Gaelic in a way attractive to future generations. Alas,
she presents no firm proposals for a way to do that.

[Todd, Loreto, _Green English_, The O'Brien Press, Dublin, 1999.
ISBN 0-86278-543-X. Hardback, pp152. Publisher's quoted price
GBP16.99.]


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