World Wide Words -- 14 Apr 01

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 232          Saturday 14 April 2001
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Review: They Have a Word for It.
3. Weird Words: Macaronic.
4. Q & A: Peter out, Fair dinkum.
5. Subscription commands, IPA, and copyright.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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KLU(D)GE  Too many people responded to my Q&A piece about this word
for me to quote them all. Several confirm that the word was around
in the 1950s and even earlier. Harold Hurwitz tells me he heard the
following joke while on a troop transport during World War Two:

   An officer was inspecting a ship and stopped to ask one of
   the sailors what his function was. The sailor replied that
   he was a 'kludge maker'. The officer did not want to admit
   that he had never heard of such a thing, so he asked the
   sailor for a demonstration. The sailor took a rivet in a
   pair of tongs and heated it red-hot. He then dropped it
   over the side of the ship. As the hot metal hit the water,
   it went 'kloodj'.

If this is a true memory of the joke and its date, it raises two
questions. Did the joke spawn the word? Or was it a play on an
existing word? Either way, it would suggest an origin in the early
1940s.

Several subscribers have asked whether the colloquial Scots word
for a toilet, 'cludgie', has any connection. I did mention this in
an early draft of the piece but pressure of space, and a feeling
that I'd gone on quite long enough already, persuaded me to take it
out. I have seen a suggestion this might be the source, perhaps
imported into America during World War Two as a result of borrowing
from British armed forces slang. I'm strongly inclined to count
this one a miss - it seems too much of a stretch.

RED-LETTER DAYS  I'm still reeling from listening to the BBC Radio
Four programme "Quote, Unquote" last week and unexpectedly hearing
the presenter, Nigel Rees, give World Wide Words a nice mention.
And I'd been told that the Whole Internet Calendar for 2001 had a
link to World Wide Words on its page for 9 April, so I waited for
that day with interest. What a lot of people own a copy! It was as
though somebody had fired a starting gun in cyberspace. Nisha Naik
wrote that "April 9 was World Wide Words day". I like that: perhaps
we should make it an annual event!


2. Review: They Have a Word for It
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You may recall that, as an introduction to the World Wide Words
competition earlier this year, I mentioned the Greek word for a
person who reads someone else's newspaper on the bus or train. Back
in 1988, Howard Rheingold published a whole book of foreign words
and phrases that he suggested were likewise untranslatable without
circumlocution. This has recently been reissued by Sarabande Press,
a non-profit publisher in Louisville, Kentucky.

Among the gems he uncovered are 'mamihlapinatapei', a word from
Tierra del Fuego that he says means "a meaningful look, shared by
two people, expressing mutual unstated feelings"; the German word
'Drachenfutter' for "a peace offering to a wife from a guilty
husband"; 'shibui', Japanese for "the beauty of ageing"; 'maya', a
Sanskrit term for "the mistaken belief that a symbol is the same as
the reality it represents". The Yiddish 'farpotshket' apparently
means "something that is all fouled up, especially as the result of
an attempt to fix it"; and he says that 'wistelkiya' is the Sioux
word for "sexual bashfulness between male and female relatives".

Each word is accompanied by a page or so of description, which
reads easily and non-technically (visit the publisher's site at
<www.sarabandebooks.org> to read some sample text). It has to be
said that a number of Mr Rheingold's words are comparatively well
known, such as 'potlatch', 'Schadenfreude', 'Gaia', and 'mantra',
but this doesn't weaken the value of the book.

Worth a look.

[Rheingold, Howard, _They Have a Word for It_, published by
Sarabande Books, Kentucky; ISBN 0-965-08079-X; publisher's price
US$14.95.]


3. Weird Words: Macaronic
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Of verse consisting of a mixture of languages.

If this sounds as though it is connected with Italian pasta, you're
right. It was coined in the sixteenth century by the Italian poet
Teofilo Folengo, in reference to a sort of burlesque verse he
invented in which Italian words were mixed in with Latin ones for
comic effect. He said that he linked the crude hotch-potch of
language in the verse with the homely foodstuff called macaroni, a
dish which he described (in Latin, of course) as "pulmentum farina,
caseo, botiro compaginatum, grossum, rude, et rusticanum" ("a
savoury dish bound together with flour, cheese [and] butter, [a
dish] which is fat, coarse, and rustic").

The word first appeared in English a century later and expanded its
scope to refer to any form of verse in which two or more languages
were mixed together. A once-famous American example was the mixed
German-English verses of _Hans Breitmann’s Ballads_ by Charles
Leland, in which a German immigrant is overwhelmed by mid-
nineteenth-century America and speaks in a mixture of German and
heavily accented English.

'Macaronic' verse has a link to the eighteenth-century London
dandies who were called 'macaronis' because they liked foreign
food, Italian in particular, as a result of experiencing it on the
Grand Tour. The official state song of Connecticut also contains
the word: "Yankee Doodle went to town, / Riding on a pony, / Stuck
a feather in his hat, / And called it macaroni", but that is linked
to the dandy sense, not the verse one.


4. Q&A
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[Send your queries to <qa at worldwidewords.org>. All messages will be
acknowledged, but I can't guarantee to reply, as time is limited.
If I can, a response will appear here and on the Web site. If you
wish to comment on one of the replies below, please do NOT use that
address, but e-mail <editor at worldwidewords.org> instead.]

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Q. Is there an interesting derivation of the phrase, 'peter out'?
[Dr Martin Taylor]

A. There probably is, but we're not sure. It's a puzzling phrase
and most reference works just say they don't know its origin.

A clue to where it comes from lies in this comment in an article on
hard-rock mining in _Appleton's Journal_ of New York, dated 18
October 1873: "No mortal forecast can tell whether a good vein will
not narrow to nothing ('peter out,' as the miners phrase it) in a
week; and, on the other hand, it may widen in that time beyond all
anticipation".

Other evidence backs up the implication here that the phrase began
its life as a bit of American miner's jargon for exhausted veins of
ore. The first example in the _Oxford English Dictionary_ is from
1846. Taking it back further, though, requires some guesswork. If
we leave aside a derivation from the proper name, which is
unlikely, there are two possibilities for where it came from. One
is the saltpetre (US spelling saltpeter) that was a component of
the blasting power that miners used (the second part comes from
Greek 'petros', a rock); this sounds a bit of a stretch, but you
never know. The other is French 'peter', which literally means to
fart, but which I believe has been used figuratively to mean "to
fizzle out" (and which famously appears in the English 'petard' for
a medieval military explosive device, from which we get "hoist by
his own petard").

There are other slang expressions that suggest the second may be
the more likely origin. 'Peter' was used in the eighteenth century
for a kind of loaded dice (on which, as Jonathon Green explains it,
the loser was hoist, as by a petard). It also turns up about the
start of the nineteenth century as a slang verb meaning to stop or
cease (there's an example known from 1812), which also looks as
though it derives from French.

However, at this point the evidence ... ahem ... peters out, so
nobody really knows.

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Q. I'm looking for the origins of the Australian slang phrase 'fair
dinkum', which I'm told originates from Chinese. It means 'real',
and is used to allay any potential disbelief about some claim the
speaker is making. Apparently, Chinese gold miners in the
nineteenth century would tell others of any discoveries of gold
using the phrase 'din gum' meaning 'real gold' in Chinese.
[Stephen Wan, Australia]

A. It's an excellent story, and for all I know the Chinese words do
really mean that. I've encountered the story before: it's recorded
in a 1984 issue of the _Sydney Morning Herald_, no doubt among many
other places. It's just another example, I'm afraid, of folk
etymology - a well-meaning attempt to clarify the puzzling and
explain the obscure.

Most dictionaries published outside Australia and New Zealand are
unhelpful, just saying "origin unknown". But it seems very possible
that it comes from an old English dialect term, which is recorded
principally in Joseph Wright's _English Dialect Dictionary_ of
1896-1905. He found several examples of 'dinkum' in various parts
of England in the sense of a fair or due share of work. He also
encountered 'fair dinkum' in Lincolnshire, used in the same way
that people might exclaim 'fair dos!', as a request for fair
dealing. But there's no clue as to where this word comes from, and
dictionaries are cautious because the word is not otherwise well
recorded.

It turns up first in Australian writing in 1888 in _Robbery Under
Arms_ by Rolf Boldrewood, in which it had the sense of work or
exertion: "It took us an hour's hard dinkum to get near the peak".
Early on it could also mean something honest, reliable or genuine,
though this is actually first recorded in New Zealand, in 1905.
'Fair dinkum' is recorded from 1890 in the sense of fair play, and
soon after in the way that Australians and New Zealanders still use
it - of something reliable or genuine. There have been lots of
related phrases since, like 'dinkum oil' for an accurate report.

For me, being about as far from Australia as it's possible to get
on this planet, the word brings to mind Robert Heinlein's _The Moon
is a Harsh Mistress_, about a future penal colony on the moon in
which everyone speaks a weird patois containing elements of
Australian and Russian slang. The sentient computer at the centre
of the story is described as "a fair dinkum thinkum". Go figure.


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