World Wide Words -- 04 March 00

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 180           Saturday 4 March 2000
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Sent weekly to more than 7,900 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. Turns of Phrase: Fashionista.
3. Weird Words: Rhadamanthine.
4. Q & A: Fine fettle, Boycott, Grass widow.
5. Administration: LISTSERV commands, Copyright.


1. Notes and feedback
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DECADE  Some time ago, I wrote a piece about a survey that asked
about names for the decade that is upon us. Since then I've seen
newspaper references to it as the Noughts and the Zeroes. In order
to update the piece, I'd be very interested to hear words for the
decade that subscribers come across, if at all possible with full
details of source and date.


2. Turns of Phrase: Fashionista
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This is a gently sarcastic term for a person who is an enthusiast
for fashion. It covers not only the dedicated followers of fashion
who wear the clothes, but also those who write about them. And it
can refer to those who design, make, model and publicise clothes,
and the fashion buyers whose decisions determine the success of a
collection.

I'm told by researchers at the _Oxford English Dictionary_ that it
goes back to 1993, to a book by Stephen Fried entitled _Thing of
Beauty: the Tragedy of Supermodel Gia_. The word began to become
more widely popular from about 1998 onwards, has just started to
appear in dictionaries, and looks set to become a permanent part of
the language.

It's formed from 'fashion' by adding the suffix '-ista' from
Spanish, equivalent to our '-ist' ending. English has comparatively
recently borrowed this from familiar Spanish-language terms such as
'Sandinista' and 'Peronista'. Such words have often had negative
associations in English and new words using the suffix are usually
derogatory, like 'Blairista' for a supporter of the British prime
minister, Tony Blair. 'Fashionista' was one of this type, and it
has not yet entirely lost its disparaging associations with
triviality.

Last week I finally realized that no matter how hard I try, I'll
never be a true fashionista - one of those guys and gals who can
stumble out of a swamp covered with leeches and still look like a
million bucks.
                         [_Denver Rocky Mountain News_, Sept. 1999]

As founder and editorial director of Wallpaper magazine, the style
and design bible for the fashionista, he is a man on first-name
terms with good taste.
                                     [_Daily Telegraph_, Feb. 2000]


3. Weird Words: Rhadamanthine
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Rigorously just and severe.

We are taught less about the classics than we once were, so the
name of Rhadamanthus (sometimes spelt Rhadamanthys) probably rings
few bells. In Greek mythology, he was the son of Zeus and Europa,
brother to King Minos of Crete and (in some versions of the tale),
Prince Sarpedon of Lycia. In life he was renowned for his wisdom
and justice. When he died, according to Plato, he went to Elysium,
where the most favoured mortals were chosen by the gods to stay
eternally, and there became ruler and judge. Together with Minos
and Aeacus, he decided the fate of everyone who was brought before
him - whether to live forever in Elysium, or be banished to the
underworld - and in judging was able to detect all the sins of
one's life, no matter how well hidden. So Rhadamanthus became a
byword for justice in its most severe and rigorous form. Here's an
example of its use, from _The Egoist_ by George Meredith: "As to
the sentence he pronounces, I am unable to speak, but his forehead
is Rhadamanthine condemnation".


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. I do, indeed, feel in fine fettle today. However, a young friend
asked where the word 'fettle' came from as she had never heard of
it. It seems 'fettle' is always used with 'fine' and I realize now
I have never heard it expressed in any other way. If you have the
time I shall appreciate learning its origin. [Pat Cagle]

A. These days, you're indeed likely only to hear 'fettle' when it's
shackled to 'fine' to make a set phrase. It's a fossil, left over
from a time when the word was better known. The repeated initial
letter undoubtedly helped stick them together, which is why you
only rarely (if ever) hear of something in 'good fettle' or 'bad
fettle' or the like. Older works sometimes employ other modifiers:
in 'John Barleycorn' by Jack London, for example, there appears:
"Those fifty-one days of fine sailing and intense sobriety had put
me in splendid fettle".

The word was most typically used as a verb meaning to put things in
order, tidy up, arrange, or prepare. Here's an example, from Anne
Bronte's _Agnes Grey_ of 1847, in the Yorkshire dialect speech of a
servant: "But next day, afore I'd gotten fettled up - for indeed,
Miss, I'd no heart to sweeping an' fettling, an' washing pots; so I
sat me down i' th' muck - who should come in but Maister Weston!".
In northern English it can still have the sense of making or
repairing something. In Australia, a 'fettler' is a railway
maintenance worker, responsible for keeping the line in good shape.
It's also used in some manufacturing trades - in metal casting and
pottery it describes the process of knocking the rough edges off a
piece. But all of these are variants of the basic sense. So the
noun refers to condition, order or shape, and 'fine fettle' means
to be in good order or condition.

Its origins are a bit obscure. It seems to come from the Old
English 'fetel' for a belt, so the verb probably first had the
meaning of girding oneself up, as for a heavy task. It's related to
the German 'Fessel' for a chain or band, but not to the confusingly
similar 'fetter', which actually comes from the same root as
'foot'.

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Q. I searched for the word 'boycott' on your site but could not
find anything. A television program recently said, I believe, that
it was about the Revolutionary War and the boycott of British
taxes. [Jennifer, USA]

A. Wrong period and wrong country, I'm afraid. No one who organised
a boycott at that time could have used the word, because it only
appeared in the language in 1880. It's an excellent example of an
eponym, a word based on a proper name, like wellington boots,
garibaldi biscuits or the mackintosh.

Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott was an Englishman working in
Ireland. In the 1870s he was farming at Loughmask in County Mayo
and serving as a land agent for an absentee English landlord, Lord
Earne. This was the time of the campaign organised by the Irish
Land League for reform of the system of landholdings. In September
1880, protesting tenants demanded that Captain Boycott give them a
substantial reduction in their rents. He refused. Charles Stuart
Parnell, the President of the Land League, suggested in a speech
that the way to force Boycott to give way was for everyone in the
locality to refuse to have any dealings with him. Labourers would
not work for him, local shops stopped serving him (food had to be
brought in from elsewhere for him and his family), and he even had
great trouble getting his letters delivered. In the end, his crops
were harvested that autumn through the help of fifty volunteers
from the north of the country, who worked under the protection of
nine hundred soldiers.

The events aroused so much passion that his name became an instant
byword. It was first used - in our modern sense of collective and
organised ostracism - in the _Times_ of London in November 1880,
even while his crops were still being belatedly harvested; within
weeks it was everywhere. It was soon adopted by newspapers
throughout Europe, with versions of his name appearing in French,
German, Dutch and Russian. By the time of the Captain's death in
1897, it had become a standard part of the English language.

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Q. Where does the term 'grass widow' come from, and why?
[Maryalice Shaw, USA]

A. The usual meaning given in British dictionaries is of a woman
whose husband is temporarily away, say on business. This sense is
known in other English-speaking communities such as Australia. It
has long been used in the USA in the rather different sense of "a
woman who is separated, divorced, or lives apart from her husband",
as the _Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary_ has it.

Some writers have suggested that it's actually a corruption of
'grace-widow'. But etymologists are quite sure that the first word
does in fact refer to the plant, because there are related words in
other European languages, such as 'Strohwitwe' in German (straw
widow) and 'grasweduwe' in Dutch, and the phrase has from earliest
times in English been recorded with 'grass' and not 'grace'.

Another theory is that it's slang from the British Raj for wives
sent away during the hot summer to the cooler (and greener) hill
stations while their husbands remained on duty in the plains. We
can trace this theory back to the famous Anglo-Indian dictionary
_Hobson-Jobson_ of 1886. It says that the term is applied "with a
shade of malignancy", a tantalisingly opaque comment.

The phrase itself is much older than British India. It's first used
by Sir Thomas More in his _Dialogue_ of 1528. But then it meant
something rather different: either an abandoned mistress or an
unmarried woman who had cohabited with several men. It might have
expressed the idea that the abandoned lover had been "put out to
grass". But it could conceivably have come from the same type of
origin as 'bastard'; this is from the Latin _bastum_ for a pack
saddle, suggesting a child born after a brief encounter on an
improvised bed, such as a packsaddle pillow, whose owner had gone
by morning. Could the grass in 'grass widow' refer to surreptitious
love-making in the fields rather than indoors, or the straw in a
barn used for an illicit tryst?

Our modern meaning first turns up in the 1840s. It seems possible
that the term was applied derisively to Anglo-Indian wives sent
away for the summer (were there perhaps well-known opportunities
for hanky-panky in the hill stations?) and that it only gradually
took on the modern sense through a reinterpretation of 'grass' to
mean the green landscape of the hills. That could explain the
"shade of malignancy" comment in _Hobson-Jobson_, though it says
tactfully about the older senses of the word that "no such
opprobrious meanings attach to the Indian use".


5. Administration
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