World Wide Words -- 22 Jul 00

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 197           Saturday 22 July 2000
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Sent weekly to more than 8,700 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 comments.
2. Weird Words: Turlough.
3. Topical Words: Crumpet.
4. In Brief: Facemail, Text, Ticker shock.
5. Q & A: Jimmy a lock, Quack.
6. Beyond Words.
7. Administration: LISTSERV commands, Copyright.


1. Notes and comments
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WE'RE BACK  Much mail has accumulated during our break, which is
taking some time to work through; if you're waiting for an answer,
please be reassured I'll get to you sometime soon.

GROCKLE  An interesting note has arrived from Dr Jeremy Marshall,
an associate editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED has
worked on the word, preparatory to writing the entry for it (which
will not, however, appear for some years). The results of their
research overturn the theory that it is linked to the Swiss clown
Grock. Dr Marshall says "The word was popularized because of its
use in the film _The System_ in 1962, the script-writer having
picked the word up from the locals during filming in Torquay.
According to research by a local journalist in the mid-1990s, the
word in fact originated from a strip cartoon in the comic _Dandy_
entitled 'Danny and his Grockle'. (The grockle was a magical
dragon-like creature.) A local man, who had had a summer job at a
swimming pool as a youngster, said that he had used the term as a
nickname for a small elderly lady who was a regular customer one
season. During banter in the pub among the summer workers, the term
then became generalized as a term for summer visitors. I have the
impression that this had occurred in, or only shortly before, the
summer in which _The System_ was filmed: we know of no instances of
the word from the 1950s, or indeed from before the release of _The
System_". As usual, we are left with loose ends, in particular
where the writer of the cartoon got the name from, but this seems
pretty definitive.

NEW OXFORD DICTIONARY OF ENGLISH  A Dutch subscriber has reported
problems obtaining the CD-ROM of this work, which was reviewed here
on 25 May. The OUP publicity people say that publication has been
delayed, but that it should now be readily available.

WEB UPDATES  To repeat what I said before the break: readers of
this newsletter will now receive pieces a week before the Web pages
are updated.


2. Weird Words: Turlough  /'tU at laUx/
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A temporary lake, especially in Ireland.

Flat-bottomed sinkholes in limestone areas, especially that barren
limestone pavement landscape in western Ireland called the Burren,
can become flooded in wet weather as underground systems fill up
and the water table rises. The resulting lakes, turloughs, can
appear quite quickly after a spell of wet weather, vanishing again
within a few days of the rain stopping. Some lakes are seasonal,
water-filled in winter but reliably dry enough in summer for them
to be used for pasture. Turloughs empty through parts of the floor
of the sinkholes and also through swallow holes - small depressions
filled with loose rocks. Researchers in Ireland argue turloughs are
unique, quite unlike others, such as some English meres, and types
variously called dolines, uvalas and poljes. The Irish ones are
more erratic in the way they appear and disappear, as the result of
climate, underlying rock type, and depth of soil in the sinkholes
that holds back drainage. The word is from Irish 'turloch', which
derives from 'tur', dry, plus 'loch', lake, the second element
being pronounced with a guttural 'ch' as in the Scots 'loch'.


3. Topical Words: Crumpet
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Nobody outside a Trappist monastery on Mars can have failed to hear
that the fourth Harry Potter book was published on 8 July.

In the _New York Times_ on 10 July, Peter Gleick wrote that he had
discovered with disappointment that the American publishers,
Scholastic Press, had translated many British terms in the first of
the books into their American equivalents - 'lorry' to 'truck',
'sellotaped' to 'taped', 'fortnight' to 'two weeks', 'pitch' to
'field'. They also altered the title from _Harry Potter and the
Philosopher's Stone_ to _Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone_.

You might feel these are minor changes, since few American readers
will realise they have been made, much less care. But they do tend
to obscure the British setting of the book, a large part of its
appeal. And the title change is a clumsy conversion that loses the
reference to the original 'philosopher's stone', that mythical
substance beloved of the alchemists that could turn base metals
into gold, cure all disease and prolong life indefinitely.

However, Scholastic Press tells me they have made virtually no
alterations to the most recent book, _Harry Potter and the Goblet
of Fire_, seemingly feeling that with greater success comes greater
willingness to accept such British terminology as 'skiving off'
(avoiding work).

The changes to the earlier volumes is surprising when you consider
that Briticisms have been readily accepted in other imports. Take
the recent film _Chicken Run_. The Yorkshire dialect ('you great
lummox', 'nellypodging', 'I didn't do owt!') hasn't stopped it
being successful. Nor has its ironic homage to British World War
Two prison-camp films, nor its gentle send-up of the WW2 fighter-
pilot idiom and attitudes of the old cockerel ("Chocks away!",
"When I was in the RAF!"), nor the affectionate depiction of a
certain kind of middle-aged British female (think of the knitting
chicken in the big escape scene). I doubt even the sly repetition
of that complaint of the British about wartime GIs - "over paid,
over-sexed, and over here" - puts American audiences off.

Mr Gleick's greatest castigation was reserved for 'crumpet', which
the translators of the first book reportedly changed to 'English
muffin'. There are two things wrong with this: one culinary, one
cultural.

English muffins and crumpets are quite different things. (Neither
should be confused with an American muffin, which to British eyes
and taste buds is a sweet-tasting cake.) English muffins are a type
of bread, baked into a disc about three inches across and an inch
or so deep. A crumpet is about the same size and shape but is made
from an egg and flour mixture that's cooked in a pan, in the process
generating deep dimples on one side. It must be toasted and spread
liberally with butter.

It's the cultural associations - immediately recognisable to most
English readers - that matter most. Toasting crumpets for tea in
front of an open fire on winter days in the company of parents or
friends is a traditional image of comfortable, unthreatening
middle-class English life of an older period. It's associated in
particular with boarding school, and features in school stories
going back more than a century, of which the Harry Potter books are
just the most recent. You can't expect an American youngster to
appreciate all these subtleties, but to remove the potential of
doing so is a pity.

Crumpets have been known for several centuries, though the origin
of the name is obscure. It is first recorded in the modern spelling
and sense in the eighteenth century, though earlier there was
something called a 'crompid cake', where 'crompid' means curved up
or bent into a curve, which is what usually happens to thin cakes
baked on a griddle; the word may be linked to 'crumb', 'crimp' and
other words from a common Germanic origin.

In the 1930s, the word became British English slang for a woman
regarded as an object of sexual desire. No doubt men remembered
their schooldays and associated female pulchritude with something
tasty. (In the 1960s the British broadcaster Joan Bakewell was
infamously described, in a quote attributed to the late Frank Muir,
as "the thinking man's crumpet".) It was earlier a slang term for
the head, and also served for a while as a term of endearment (as
in P G Wodehouse's book title _Eggs, Beans and Crumpets_).

It's a word with many cultural undertones that's worth retaining.
Mr Gleick's conclusion seems valid, at least for the first in the
series: buy the British edition, not the attenuated American one.
Let's hope the forthcoming film is more faithful to the original.

[Thanks to Donald G Yeckel for telling me about the _New York
Times_ piece, and to Julane Marx, the editor of Humour-Net, for
additional information and comments. To subscribe to Humour-Net,
send a message to <humour-net-subscribe at entrenet.com>.]


4. In Brief
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FACEMAIL  Actually talking to somebody, rather than sending them an
e-mail message. Like many other cyber-sayings reported here, this
is more usually a facetious formation (a water-cooler joke, you
might say) than a real bit of jargon.

TEXT  This is a more subtle example of the way in which the march
of technology is changing the language. As a result of new mobile
telephone systems that enable users to send and receive short text
messages, 'text' has become a verb for the process ("I'll text him
an invite"). This is appearing in mainstream publications and so
seems to be a genuinely new term, not a joke.

TICKER SHOCK  It is said that a compulsive habit has developed
among new dot.com millionaires and other recently seriously rich
business people of obsessively studying the stock market ticker
prices to see how their share options are getting on. Their mood
swings with the index, inducing shock when the swing is large.


5. 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. I am curious about the origin of the word 'jimmy', as in to
'jimmy a lock'. Does the expression derive from a nimble-fingered
fellow named James, or does it have nothing to do with the
Christian name James? [Steven Shumak, Toronto]

A. The British English term for the housebreaker's implement was
usually 'jemmy', still common here and also in Australia and New
Zealand. Authorities are fairly sure this - and the verb 'to jemmy'
or 'to jimmy' derived from it - did come from a familiar form of
'James', though precisely why seems likely to remain for ever a
mystery. There seems to be a strong tradition of giving tools the
names of people. Think of the 'jack' you use to lift the car when
you're replacing a wheel - this seems to be from the familiar form
of 'John'. Another thieves' term for a short iron bar used to force
locks or break open doors was 'bess'; yet another was 'billy'. Yet
another example is the term 'derrick' for a type of crane, named
after a famous early seventeenth-century hangman.

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Q. I would like to know the origin of the word 'quack' as in the
fake doctor. [Tom]

A. It's an abbreviation of an old Dutch word that in the modern
language is spelled 'kwakzalver'. It comes from 'quack', an early
modern Dutch word meaning somebody who chatters or prattles
(probably connected to the English word for the noise a duck
makes), and 'salf', essentially the same word as our 'salve'. So a
'quacksalver' was somebody who boasted about the virtues of his
remedies, so it later became attached to a person who claimed to
have miraculous medications. The longer form was common in the
sixteenth century, but it was abbreviated later.


6. Beyond Words
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AIRSTRIP ONE REDUX  In a report in the _Sunday Times_ last week
saying US Air Force stealth bombers may be based in Britain, John-
Peter Maher found this delightful sentence: "One Labour MP
complained that 'America wants to use us as a floating aircraft
carrier again'". As Mr Maher says, it's the best sort ...


7. Administration
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