World Wide Words -- 22 Jan 00

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS        ISSUE 174          Saturday 22 January 2000
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Sent weekly to more than 7,000 subscribers in at least 97 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion        Thornbury, South Gloucestershire, 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: Target.
3. Weird Words: Inglenook.
4. Q & A: Up to snuff, Fair cop, Steal one's thunder.
5. Beyond words.
6. Administration: How to unsubscribe, Copyright.


1. Notes and feedback
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GROVEL, GROVEL  I write these newsletters with HTML tags included
so that I can paste them straight into Web pages. I was so up-to-
and-way-beyond-my-eyes with a job of designing a new subscriptions
database last week that I forgot to run the macro that deletes all
the code from the text of the mailing. For related reasons, I am
at the moment a bad correspondent: I hope eventually to reply to
all your messages!

B2B  Ole Andersen wrote from Denmark to point out that there are
other abbreviations in use by the same people that invented B2B.
One is B2C, for 'Business to Consumer', of which he gives the
example of the online submission of tax returns; another is B2A,
for 'Business to Administration'. These haven't achieved the same
circulation as B2B, and perhaps never will.

POUND  A lot of people pointed out that they still used the word in
a similar sense to the one I described. The word is actually in
common use throughout the English-speaking world, though the nature
of the pound, and who provides it, varies from place to place. I
included it in the Weird Words section because of the odd history
of the word, not because it was rare!

And several subscribers asked whether 'compound' in the sense of an
enclosed space was connected. It turns out it isn't. That sense of
'compound' comes from the Malay 'kampong', which arrived in English
in the seventeenth century through Dutch. When people Anglicised
its spelling, they may have had in mind the other, older meaning of
'compound', a thing composed of separate elements. (This word had
no connection with 'pound' either, as it comes from the Latin
'componere' via French 'compondre'.)

ORGANIGRAM  Marc Picard mentioned - as did others - that the word
had been known earlier in French and cites his French dictionary,
which gives a first date of 1952. It seems we borrowed it. Could we
give it back, I wonder?

GAFF  Several sailors wondered why I hadn't mentioned the nautical
meaning of 'gaff' to mean a type of spar. I did know about that
meaning, but left it out because the piece was long enough already.
That sense seems to be linked with that of a fishing pole.

And Marc Picard quoted me the entry from Guiraud's _Dictionnaire
des etymologies obscures_, which says that the origin of the word
in Provencal is 'gafa(r)', to ford, from which is derived 'gaf', "a
pole to ford a river by boat" and, by extension, "clumsiness,
awkwardness of someone crossing a ford on foot", which led directly
to our English 'gaffe'.

Laurie Malone reminded me about the Australian drink portergaff, a
mixture of the type of beer called porter with lemonade or ginger
beer. The word is a blend of 'porter' with 'shandygaff'. Porter is
so called because it was first made in London in the eighteenth
century for market porters. But the origin of shandygaff, the full
name for what is now more often called shandy, remains a mystery,
since nobody knows where either 'shandy' or 'gaff' come from.


2. Topical words: Target
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Everyone has targets - figurative ones, anyway. But the British
government was recently reported as having set 2,500 of them since
coming to power in 1997, which seems a bit excessive.

When 'targets' were tangible things, all you could do was hit them,
or - perhaps more often - miss them. But when the word moved out of
the literal field into the intangible arena of management, new
verbs became attached to it. Now we can set targets, or reach them,
or meet them, or even exceed them. Some of the targets we set are
tough ones, or ambitious ones. On occasion they aren't even single
points but target ranges, which have nothing to do with shooting
ranges, where one may find the corporeal sort of targets.

Historically, a target is a small targe. The latter was an ancient
word for the light shield carried by those who needed something
easy to lug around. Archers had them, and so did other fighters on
foot. Though the word is recorded in Old English as either 'targe'
or 'targa' - it was Germanic in origin, from a word that meant a
frame - its popularity seems to have been reinforced after the
Norman Conquest by the French form 'targe' - French had borrowed
the word earlier, most probably from the Franks. Naturally, the
English came to say the word the same way the French did, with a
soft 'g', to rhyme with 'large'. 'Target', a word for a little
shield, was created in French, so it, too, had the soft 'g' to
start with. It only changed to our modern pronunciation sometime
around the fifteenth century.

But in all this time, and for three hundred years afterwards,
target referred only to a shield. Our modern meaning of a device to
aim at only arrived in the eighteenth century, just too late for
the good Doctor Johnson to include it in his dictionary. (It's
first recorded in 1757, two years after that work was published).
The link was the shape, of course, since both shield and object
aimed at were round.

The figurative sense seems to have arisen around the middle of the
nineteenth century, at first for a person at whom abuse or scorn
was aimed. The idea of a target as an objective or goal dates only
from the 1940s. The verb appeared about 1600, but then it meant to
protect oneself from a blow, by using a target in the shield sense;
later it took on the idea of using someone as a (figurative) target
for abuse. Only in the late 1940s did it become management-speak
for planning to achieve a financial or other business objective.

But perhaps there's writing on the wall for over-users of the word.
The Labour government now prefers 'performance indicators' to
'targets'. It's a bit of a mouthful, but for clarity's sake even
this bureaucratic construction makes a refreshing change.


3. Weird Words: Inglenook
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A chimney corner.

Almost more than any other, this word evokes quiet contemplation in
a comfortable seat by a warm fire after a hard day, in the company
of friends and a pint that's been created by a brewer with a
conscience. Here's Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in _The Valley of Fear_,
evoking a typical scene: "Finally he lit his pipe, and sitting in
the inglenook of the old village inn he talked slowly and at random
about his case, rather as one who thinks aloud than as one who
makes a considered statement". Prosaically, an 'inglenook' is just
a seat in the 'nook', or corner, near the fire, or 'ingle'. We
hardly ever encounter the latter word nowadays except in dialect
usage or when accompanied by its other half. Various writers have
had a stab at a source for 'ingle'. The most common explanation is
that it comes either from the Scots Gaelic or Irish 'aingeal'; in
the former, it means a light or fire, in the latter a live ember.
These associations are too powerful for alternative explanations to
stand much chance of success, though some dictionaries hazard an
origin in the Latin 'igniculus', a diminutive of 'ignis', fire.


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. What is the origin of the phrase 'up to snuff'? [Jane Rawoof]

A. The snuff here is tobacco: nothing to do with the verb meaning
to extinguish. Several colloquial phrases are recorded that used
the word 'snuff', most of which date from the early part of the
nineteenth century in Britain, when snuff-taking was still common,
but less fashionable than it had been fifty years before.

The first meaning of 'up to snuff' was somebody who was sharp, not
easily fooled. This may have come from the idea of snuff being
itself a sharp preparation, but perhaps because it was mainly taken
by men of adult years and some affluence (it was expensive) who
would be able to appreciate the quality of snuff and distinguish
between examples of different value. The evidence isn't there to be
sure about its exact origin, though an early form of the phrase was
'up to snuff and a pinch above it', which at least confirms it did
indeed relate to tobacco.

Whatever its origin, the meaning of the phrase shifted slightly
after a while to imply somebody who was efficient and capable;
later still it often meant that something was up to standard, or of
the required quality. It was in this sense very similar to another
expression of the time, 'up to scratch'. This comes from prize-
fighting, in which the scratch was the line across the floor that a
contestant had to touch with his toe to indicate he was ready to
fight.

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Q.  In one of the Monty Python movies, as a woman falsely accused of
being a witch is being carted off to her destiny she says under her
breath, 'that's a fair cop!' Is this the common British slang for
being arrested? [Geoff Bird]

A. It's a well-understood British expression, though it has been
used so often in second-rate detective stories and police television
series down the decades that it has long since ceased to be possible
to use it seriously (the Monty Python team was playing on its status
as a cliche).

It comes from the same root as the term 'cop' for a policeman. This
may be from the slang verb 'cop', meaning to seize, originally a
dialect term of northern England that by the beginning of the
nineteenth century was known throughout the country. This can be
followed back through French 'caper' to Latin 'capere', to seize or
take, from which we also get our 'capture'. (See the article at
<http://www.quinion.com/words/qa/qa-cop2.htm> for more on the noun
form of 'cop' for policeman.) So a 'cop' in this sense was an
example of a seizure or capture.

'It's a fair cop' was what the essentially good-natured thief with a
typically British sense of fair play was supposed to say as his
collar was fingered by the fuzz, meaning that the arrest was
reasonable and that he really had done what he was accused of doing.
You will understand that this is, and always has been, an entirely
fictitious view of the relationship between British criminals and
the police.

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Q. Could you shed any light on the origins of 'to steal one's
thunder'? [Anon]

A. There's a rather splendid story about the origin of this most
colourful phrase. We know about it because it was recounted by the
eighteenth-century actor and playwright Colley Cibber, in his
_Lives of the Poets_, and was also mentioned by Alexander Pope in
his poem _The Dunciad_. The story goes that John Dennis, an actor-
manager of the early part of the eighteenth century, had invented a
machine to make stage thunder, which he employed in his own play,
_Appius and Virginia_, performed at Drury Lane Theatre in London in
1709. Mr Dennis, whatever his inventive gifts, was a very bad
playwright; the play was not a success and was soon taken off in
favour of a production of _Macbeth_ by another company. Dennis went
to the opening night and was astonished to hear his thunder machine
being used. He leapt to his feet and shouted, "That is my thunder,
by God; the villains will play my thunder but not my play!". Like
so many successful sayings, it has subsequently been refined and
sharpened.


5. Beyond Words
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>From the TV listings in the _Guardian_ on Wednesday of this week:
"They enjoy a few heavily subsided pints". No, the drinks were
subsidised - you only subside after you've drunk them.


6. Administration
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