World Wide Words -- 10 Jun 00

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 194           Saturday 10 June 2000
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Sent weekly to more than 8,000 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 comments.
2. Weird Words: Florilegium.
3. Q & A: Sick as a dog, Pop goes the weasel, Horns of a dilemma.
4. Administration: LISTSERV commands, Copyright.


1. Notes and comments
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EMMETS  Last week's piece provoked replies mentioning other words
for tourists: Wayne Chapman from New Zealand said that in the South
Island tourists are often referred to as 'loopies', partly because
of the giant road loop they travel along to visit the most popular
destinations, but also because they do mad things. And Mike Sheehan
told me that where he lives in northern Michigan tourists are known
as Fudgies "because of their proclivity for buying fudge in the
innumerable tourist shops".

FINGER INPRECISION  Several subscribers wrote about my accidental
inclusion of "a excellent", a typo caused by removing an adjective
but forgetting to update the article. You were not short-changed in
the 'n' department, however, since I wrote "an phrase" in another
place. "£", which also appeared, is HTML code for the British
pound sign, which my formatting macro omitted to change to GBP; the
<ex> codes appeared because I'm writing a book that has a different
tagging scheme and I got confused. It makes one pine sometimes for
quill pens and parchment ...

GROCK  The clown of that stage name - real name Adrien Wettach -
was Swiss by birth, not British as I mistakenly said last week. My
apologies for the error. He was well-known in Britain, though, at
least in part through his 1956 book _Grock, King of Clowns_.

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2. Weird Words: Florilegium
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A collection of writings; a portfolio of flower pictures.

This Latin word is from 'flor-', a flower, and 'legere', to gather
or collect. In that language it didn't refer literally to flowers,
but to little flowers of composition, choice poems or epigrams by
various authors (it's the exact Latin equivalent of the Greek
'anthology', which derives from 'anthos', a flower, and '-logia', a
collection). However, 'florilegium' first appeared in the English
language in 1711 in a sense nearer the literal one: describing a
collection of flower illustrations. This continued a usage that had
begun a century earlier in the Latin titles of books by European
illustrators like Emanuel Sweert and Jean Theodore de Bry. Though
the word was soon after taken back by scholars to refer to
collections of writings, this sense may still sometimes be found,
for example in the title of a 1996 book _A Hawaiian Florilegium_,
subtitled "Botanical Portraits from Paradise". Now another early
collection, created by Alexander Marshal, has been published after
being hidden away for years in the Royal Collection at Windsor
Castle, and this book, too, has 'florilegium' in its title.


3. 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 would appreciate it if you could help me find the origin of
the expression 'sick as a dog'. [Ehud Maimon, Jerusalem]

A. There are several expressions of the form 'sick as a ...', that
date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 'Sick as a dog'
is actually the oldest of them, recorded from 1705; it is probably
no more than an way to give force to a strongly worded statement of
physical unhappiness. It was attached to a dog, I would guess,
because dogs have often been linked to unpleasant or undesirable
things; down the years they have had an incredibly bad press,
linguistically speaking (think of dog tired, dog in the manger,
dog's breakfast, go to the dogs, dog Latin - big dictionaries have
long entries about all the ways that 'dog' has been used in a
derogatory sense).

At various times cats, rats and horses have been also dragged in to
the expression, though an odd thing is that horses can't vomit; one
nineteenth-century writer did suggest that this version was used
"when a person is exceedingly sick without vomiting". The strangest
member of the set was used by Jonathan Swift in 1731: "Poor Miss,
she's sick as a Cushion, she wants nothing but stuffing" (stop
laughing at the back).

The modern 'sick as a parrot' recorded from the 1970s - at one time
much overused by British sportsmen as the opposite of 'over the
moon' - refers to a state of deep mental depression rather than
physical illness; this perhaps comes from instances of parrots
contracting psittacosis and passing it to their human owners.

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Q. Having a little rug rat, I am now at that stage where I find
myself revising my knowledge of nursery rhymes. The one at the top
of my mind currently is 'Pop Goes the Weasel'. Most people remember
the first two verses but there are three more, as you can see
below. Can you help explain them? [Nigel Neve, UK]

Half a pound of tuppenny rice,
Half a pound of treacle.
That's the way the money goes,
Pop goes the weasel.

Up and down the City road,
In and out the Eagle,
That's the way the money goes,
Pop goes the weasel.

Every night when I go out
the monkey's on the table.
Take a stick and knock it off
Pop goes the weasel.

A penny for a ball of thread
Another for a needle,
That's the way the money goes,
pop goes the weasel.

All around the cobblers bench
the monkey chased the people;
The donkey thought 'twas all in fun,
pop goes the weasel.

A. Before anybody rushes to put fingers to keyboard, let me say
that this is by no means the only version of the lyric. There are
several others, especially from the United States. But this is the
usual British version, a famous catchy rhyme (or at least, as you
say, the first two verses are). It started its life as a song for
adults, not children, as perhaps may be inferred by its absence
from Iona and Peter Opie's collection of British nursery rhymes.

The earliest reference I can find to music with this name actually
comes from the United States, from sheet music entitled "Pop goes
the Weasel for Fun and Frolic", published in 1850 by Messrs Miller
and Beacham of Baltimore. Another from three years later refers to
"the latest English dance" and also "an old English Dance lately
revived", so it seems to have been imported from Britain. None of
these early versions had any lyrics apart from a repeated "Pop goes
the weasel", the catch line of the dance, which was sung or shouted
by the dancers as one pair of them darted under the arms of the
others. Several references in books and magazines suggest that the
tune soon became extremely well known, and that 'pop goes the
weasel' became a catchphrase, as it later did in Britain.

The first British mention of the phrase 'pop goes the weasel' dates
from a music-seller's advertisement of 1853 which described "the
new country dance 'Pop goes the weasel', introduced by her Majesty
Queen Victoria" (a puff to be taken with a large pinch of salt, we
may assume). There have been suggestions that the phrase was
intended to be ribald or erotic, though the explanations I've seen
are somewhat fanciful.

Talking of Queen Victoria, I found these words attached to the tune
in the March 1860 issue of the _Southern Literary Messenger_ of
Richmond, Virginia:

Queen Victoria's very sick,
Prince Albert's got the measles.
The children have the whooping cough,
And pop! Goes the weasel.

Her Majesty would not have been amused.

Your version was a British music-hall song of the latter part of
the Victorian period (quite when I haven't been able to discover);
it is highly probable that the words were composed to the tune of
the earlier dance because everyone on both sides of the Atlantic
seems to have the same one, even if the words are different.

Some of the references are now quite opaque, but we can take a fair
shot at a few. In the second verse, the City Road was - still is -
a well-known street in London, more than a mile long. The Eagle was
a famous public house and music hall, which lay near the east end
of the road on the corner of Shepherdess Walk; this had started its
life as a tea-garden, but was turned into a music hall in 1825 (one
of the very first); it ended its days as a Salvation Army centre
and was pulled down in 1901.

The City Road had a pawnbroker's shop near its west end and 'to
pop' was a well-known phrase at the time for pawning something. So
the second verse says that visiting the Eagle causes one's money to
vanish, necessitating a trip up the City Road to Uncle to raise
some cash. But what was the weasel that was being pawned? Nobody is
sure. Some suggest it was a domestic or tailor's flat-iron, a small
item easy to carry. My own guess is that it's rhyming slang:
'weasel and stoat' = coat. Either way, it seems to have been a
punning reinterpretation of the catch line from the older dance.

The first verse just refers to a couple of domestic food items; the
fourth to sewing or tailors' requisites. The third introduces the
monkey, one sense of that word being a nineteenth-century term for
a drinking vessel in a public house, which makes sense in context.
(It may derive from an older phrase, 'to suck the monkey', to drink
from a bottle, which was also used by dock workers in London for
illicitly drinking brandy from a cask by inserting a straw through
the bung.) A 'stick' was a shot of spirits, such as rum or brandy;
'to knock it off' was to knock it back, or drink it.

The reference to the monkey in the fifth verse stumps me; in this
case it seems to be a real beast. I suspect there are topical or
slang references in there that are now lost.

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Q. A friend and I were discussing the phrase 'on the horns of a
dilemma', and pondering its origin. He thought it came from what is
made explicit in the definition - that there are two choices, like
two horns. But I wonder if it could be derived from the Devil or
the god Pan? [Anne Fairbrother, USA]

Q. Nothing to do with the Devil, or indeed cuckold's horns, and
little to do with choice either, as it turns out. The original
'dilemma' in rhetoric was a device by which you presented your
opponent with two alternatives; it didn't matter which one he chose
to respond to - either way he lost the argument. When you did this
to your opponent you were said to present two horns to him, as of a
bull, on either of which he might be impaled. As the scholar
Nicholas Udall said in a translation of a work by Erasmus in 1548,
it didn't matter to which of the two points a person made a direct
answer, either way he would run on to the sharp point of the horn.

A famous example is that of John Morton, Lord Chancellor to Henry
VII, a permanently hard-up monarch. Morton (who was also Archbishop
of Canterbury at the time) was a brilliant extractor of forced
loans - benevolences, as they were euphemistically called - through
what is known as Morton's Fork. His ploy was to go to prominent
people and ask them for money. If they were big spenders, then they
must be rich, and could afford to give money to the King; if they
spent little, then they must have a lot of money stashed away, and
could well afford to give some to the king. That's a dilemma with
really sharp horns: either way the unwilling donor was forced to
cough up.


4. Administration
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