World Wide Words -- 21 Apr 01

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 233          Saturday 21 April 2001
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Editor: Michael Quinion  : ISSN 1470-1448 :  Thornbury, Bristol, UK
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Scofflaw.
3. The Word Detective, by Evan Morris.
4. Turns of Phrase: Tweenager.
5. Q & A: Pairs of pants.
6. Subscription commands, IPA, and copyright.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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PETER OUT  Several subscribers mentioned that they had been told
this phrase derives from St Peter, whose support for Jesus waned at
a crucial moment. But this is unlikely to be its origin, since no
direct evidence exists for the link, and it seems somewhat strained
as an association of ideas.

MORE FAME  Many thanks to Derek K Miller for mentioning World Wide
Words in his Bookmarks section in the Vancouver Sun on 19 April; a
special welcome to everyone who has joined the list as a result.


2. Weird Words: Scofflaw
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A person who flouts a law, especially an unsustainable one.

There have been many competitions down the years encouraging people
to coin new words, such as the one here on World Wide Words earlier
this year. Few of these creations ever take a permanent place in
the language, because they have to meet an obvious need or catch
the public's imagination to be successful. 'Scofflaw' has achieved
this difficult feat.

A contest was held in Boston in 1923, during the Prohibition era,
to find a descriptive word for "a lawless drinker of illegally made
or illegally obtained liquor". A prize of $200 was offered by
Delcevare King of Quincy, a rich Prohibitionist, to find such a
word in order to "stab awake the conscience" of those who drank
alcohol.

Since $200 was a sum not to be sneezed at, more than 25,000 entries
were received from all over America and beyond. The winner was
announced on 15 January 1924; as 'scofflaw' had been sent in by two
contestants, the prize was divided equally between Mr Henry Irving
Dale and Miss Kate L Butler.

H L Mencken mentioned the competition in his work _The American
Language_, commenting that "The word came into immediate currency,
and survived until the collapse of Prohibition". As any modern
dictionary will relate, it has survived rather longer than that,
though these days it often refers to persistent offenders against
parking laws and other minor regulations.


3. The Word Detective, by Evan Morris
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Evan Morris is a second-generation etymologist. His father, William
Morris, was the editor-in-chief of the ground-breaking _American
Heritage Dictionary_, which caused such a stir in 1963 when it
dared to tell the language the way it really was instead of the way
pundits said it ought to be. When his father died in 1994 Evan
continued the _Words, Wit and Wisdom_ newspaper column that his
father had written for many years, later renaming it _The Word
Detective_ (see <http://www.word-detective.com>). This book is a
collection of his columns on the stories behind words and phrases.

As he answers readers' questions, his columns cover much the same
ground as my Q&A section. His style is very different, though: he
adopts a joshing approach that is characteristically American. As
you might expect, he and I have been asked many of the same
questions; interestingly, we often agree, though I think he's a bit
off beam with 'the full monty', 'butterfly', 'the exception proves
the rule', and 'mufti'. But then, nobody's perfect.

Necessarily, we have also met many of the same issues and problems.
This comment in his introduction was particularly recognisable:

   One of the lessons I have learned over the past decade is
   that the more interesting or heartwarming or unusual or
   "cool" a word-origin story is, the less likely it is to
   reside in the same ballpark as the truth... Unfortunately,
   my determination not to endorse etymological fables has
   sometimes been distressingly at odds with the apparent
   prevailing public desire to believe all sorts of nonsense
   about word origins.

That is sadly very true. Have you seen those e-mails about "Life in
1500" and the like that are circulating online? Some people believe
the stories about getting trench mouth from eating a trencher, or
that a wake was so called because the family would sit around the
coffin to see whether the corpse would wake up. Coincidentally,
Philip Klatte wrote recently to say that "I read today, in _How To
Talk American_, a book about American idioms and dialects, that
'graveyard shift' was coined in Seattle. The author asserts that it
comes from an early Seattle incident when a group of merchants or
businessmen moved bodies in the middle of the night to open up
prime real estate". When stuff like that appears in print, it's
hard to fight it, or even retain the will to live. The New York
researcher Barry Popik has been trying for a decade to get books
and newspapers to tell the true story of how New York became known
as the Big Apple, and where 'hot dog' came from. He has not yet
succeeded. There's an equivalent to Gresham's Law in etymology: bad
stories tend to drive out good ones, entertaining bad stories even
more so.

Provided that we have enough writers like Evan Morris, whose pieces
are not only entertaining, but (mostly) correct, we can only hope
that one day everybody will know the correct Big Apple story (which
he explains). Meanwhile, in the absence of my own as yet uncompiled
magnum opus (note to publishers and agents: I'm open to offers)
you're going to have make do with buying Evan Morris's book. You
could do worse.

[Morris, Evan  _The Word Detective_, published by Algonquin (a
division of Workman Publishing) in December 2000; hardcover; 228
pages; ISBN 1-56512-239-9; publisher's price US$17.95. I have to
declare an interest: Mr Morris has cited World Wide Words as being
an excellent Web site.]


4. Turns of Phrase: Tweenager
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This is a currently fashionable marketing term for pre-teens, girls
in particular, aged between 7 and 11, a group having substantial
purchasing power. They are more worldly-wise, fashion-conscious and
media-aware than children of this age used to be, and are growing
up faster. It's a younger group than that identified by 'tweenie'
(see <http://www.worldwidewords.org/turnsofphrase/tp-twe1.htm>).
The term has appeared sporadically since the 1980s, though early
sightings suggest it used to refer to the 10 to 13 age group, and
the _Oxford English Dictionary_ database has an example from 1952,
in the title of a book by A A Macfarlan: _New Games for Tween-
agers_. But it has become more visible only in the past couple of
years or so, even though it is still principally a specialist term
within the marketing field. In Britain, people have become more
aware of it as a result of a recent BBC television documentary,
"Little Women - A Day in the Life of a Tweenager". The word is
obviously formed from the second part of 'between', on the model of
'teenager'.

If you think teenagers are growing up too quickly, take a look at
their younger sisters, the 7 to 11-year-olds the marketing industry
has branded as 'tweenagers'.
                                            [_Guardian_, Mar. 2001]

Kids Klub and Tweenager Club for pre-teens meets Wednesdays.
                                       [_Tampa Tribune_, Mar. 2000]


5. 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. Speaking of 'pants', as you were the other week, my 14-year-old
asked me why, if you put on a pair of pants, you don't also put on
a pair of shirts? Can you illuminate the matter for us? [Corey and
his mother; related questions came from Linda Rodgers, Peter C
Mann, and others]

A. People do ask the most intriguing questions. This one has been
posed several times, and even now I'm not sure I've got a good
answer.

I've looked at the entry in the _Oxford English Dictionary_, which
suggests that the form 'pair of pants' was standard right from its
earliest use. Indeed, words for nether garments all seem to have
been commonly plural throughout their history, often prefixed by
'pair of ...': 'breeches', 'shorts', 'drawers', 'knickers' (short
for 'knickerbockers'), 'panties', 'tights', and 'trousers'.

'Pants' is short for 'pantaloons', also plural, which in their very
earliest incarnations were nearer stage tights; their name comes
from a Venetian character in Italian commedia dell'arte who was the
butt of the clown's jokes and who always appeared as a foolish old
man wearing pantaloons. Commentators referred to them when they
first appeared as being a combination of breeches and stockings.
Later the word was applied to fashionable tight-fitting trousers.

'Trousers' came into the language in the seventeenth century from
the Gaelic 'trowse', a singular word for a slightly different
garment rather more like breeches; a later version of it was
'trews', taken to be a plural because of the final 's'. 'Breeches'
has been plural throughout its recorded history, a long one (it
dates from at least the year 1200).

It would seem that there's a strong element of conventional usage
here and that the influence of plural words like 'pantaloons' and
'breeches' (and the supposed plural form of 'trews') has been
strong enough to force these other terms into the plural. That
doesn't, of course, explain why these older words should have been
plural; I can only hazard a guess that such garments were much more
obviously bifurcated than are shirts, and that their plural nature
is emphasised because most of us have to put them on one leg at a
time.

It's worth noting that the posher tailors, as in London's Savile
Row, still often refers to 'a trouser' and the singular 'pant' and
'tight' are not unknown in clothing store terminology in America -
so the plural is not universal.


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