World Wide Words -- 01 Dec 01

Sat Dec 1 16:45:35 UTC 2001

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 265         Saturday 1 December 2001
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Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK      ISSN 1470-1448
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Contents
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1. Weird Words: Garbler.
2. Turns of Phrase: Misomusist.
3. Q&A: Envision versus envisage, Gussied up.
4. Over To You.
5. Subscription commands.
6. Contact addresses.

1. Weird Words: Garbler
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A person who garbles.

We now use this word only in reference to the current sense of the
verb "to garble": to reproduce some message or information in a
confused or distorted way. But that's a long way from its first
sense in English. The word ultimately derives, through Arabic and
Italian, from Latin "cribrum", a sieve.

The word was a technical term in medieval commerce throughout the
Mediterranean, mainly within the spice trade. A "garbler" was a
person whose job was to sieve spices to remove the rubbish from
them, the "garble" then being the rubbish itself. It appears for
the first time in English in Richard Hakluyt's work The Principal
Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation in 1599.

In the next century the verb was applied to various figurative
kinds of sifting, such as the weeding out of unfit persons from an
organisation (so a writer during the Commonwealth period in Britain
in 1650 was able to issue the recommendation that "His army must be
garbled"). It was also applied to a process by which coins were
inspected for quality. That's where part of the transition to the
modern sense seems to have taken place. The coin sifting was done
as a form of counterfeiting: the good ones were melted down for
their precious metal content, while the rubbish was put back into
circulation.

You can see how that could lead - as it actually did - to the next
sense of the verb - to the idea of selecting material mischievously
in order to misrepresent what somebody said. Today we don't usually
imply malicious intent when we say something has been garbled in
transmission and the idea of sieving or of conscious selection has
vanished.

2. Turns of Phrase: Misomusist
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Invention of this word is usually credited to the Czech novelist
Milan Kundera, who described it like this in his book The Art Of
The Novel in 1988: "To be without a feeling for art is no disaster.
A person can live in peace without reading Proust or listening to
Schubert. But the misomusist does not live in peace. He feels
humiliated by the existence of something that is beyond him, and he
hates it".

So a "misomusist" is not a passive ignorer of culture, but an
active opponent of it. Active opposition to culture has been a
characteristic of totalitarian governments, summed up by a famous
saying: "Whenever I hear the word culture, I release the safety-
catch of my Browning!". (Often attributed in a different form to
Hermann Goering, it was actually written by the German dramatist
Hanns Johst in 1933.)

Presumably Milan Kundera coined the word in Czech, from which it
was carried over into the English translation. He took it from the
Greek "misos", hatred, and "mousa", learning (the word is also the
source of the name of the nine muses of Greek and Roman mythology
who presided over the arts and sciences).

He cannot claim sole credit, however, for he was pre-empted by Sir
Edward Dering more than three centuries ago, in his Collection of
Speeches in Matters of Religion of 1642: "Our better cause hath
gained by this light: which doth convince our Miso-musists". That
was a once-off invention that was never taken up by others. Even
after Kundera's reinvention, it can hardly be called common.

3. Q&A
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Q. Why do people in North America tend to use the word "envision"
when there is the perfectly acceptable word "envisage"? Is this
merely cultural snobbery, or does the usage run deeper? Is this
another case of divergent linguistic evolution? Should it annoy me
so much? [Myfanwy Oldershaw, Australia]

A. Don't let it get to you. Actually, both "envisage" and
"envision" have had their critics.

The older of the two is "envisage", which came into English from
French near the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was roundly
condemned by some grammarians, such as Henry Fowler, who called it
"an undesirable Gallicism". He pointed out that there several
suitable alternatives available, such as "recognise",
"contemplate", "realise", "view", "face", "confront", and "regard"
and that it was unnecessary to add to their number. His reviser in
1965, Sir Ernest Gowers, felt the same way, calling it "a
pretentious substitute". Neither would have begun to agree with you
that "envisage" was acceptable, except that Gowers rather
grudgingly allowed that its sense of "forming a mental picture of
something that may exist in the future" might on rare occasions
prove useful. However, attitudes have shifted in the past forty
years, and "envisage" is now considered to be entirely acceptable
in any company.

"Envision" arrived much later, about 1920 (too recently for Henry
Fowler to write about it in Modern English Usage in 1926). Some
writers have suggested that it is the loftier word of the two, more
likely to be employed in poetic or elevated writing (though many
Americans would say that of "envisage").

The usage evidence is that the two words have virtually identical
senses. There's a strong tendency for "envision" to be preferred in
North America and "envisage" in the UK and in British Commonwealth
countries, though that isn't absolute.

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Q. My searching for the origins of "gussied up" has been noticeably
a failure in finding anything other than "origin obscure". It is
used for something or someone that is all dressed up or fancy.
Anything you have would be appreciated. [W S Penn]

A. Actually, "origin obscure" is a pretty fair summary, but I can
put some flesh on the bones.

As you say, something "gussied up" has been made more attractive,
but in a showy or gimmicky way, so it's often not intended to be a
compliment. It can also refer to dressing in one's finery for some
special occasion, when it is intended to be taken more
straightforwardly. It is usually considered to be an American
expression, dating from the late 1930s or thereabouts. So it's a
little odd that the first recorded use of "gussy" as a verb in the
Oxford English Dictionary comes from a British source, Morris
Marple's Public School Slang of 1940.

Both the OED and Professor Jonathon Lighter (in the Random House
Historical Dictionary of American Slang) point tentatively to an
earlier use of Gussy or Gussie as a term for an effeminate or weak
person. This appeared in the US at the end of the nineteenth
century. The same word was used in Australia from about the same
period to describe a male homosexual. In both cases, the word was
usually written with an initial capital letter, which suggests it
came from the proper name "Augustus", being the sort of name that
authors associated with an effete or weak-willed man (think of P G
Wodehouse's wonderful invention of Gussie Fink-Nottle, who wasn't
gay but otherwise fitted the stereotype).

Nobody can be sure this is where it comes from, but if I were a
betting man, I'd wager a few coins on it.

4. Over to You
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LAST WEEK, S M Tucker wrote: "When I was a child my mother used to
describe knives or scissors in need of sharpening as "so dull you
could ride to China on them". In the more than half a century since
then I've only heard two other people use that expression and both
of them were from my hometown of Baltimore. I'd love to know if
this phrase is regional as well as getting a hook on the origin of
it".

A fascinating set of responses came in, not only from the USA, but
also from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, South Africa,
Germany, and the Netherlands. The only significant difference in
most cases was that the destination changed to fit the location or
inclinations of the speaker. So it's not specific to Baltimore, or
even to the USA.

Several replies came from Australia. This from Kevin Esposito was
typical: "In North Queensland, the phrase was 'so blunt you could
ride to London on it', frequently used by my Irish granny. It was
in common use in that area through the 1940s to 1960s". Other
Australians also recall London as the destination. Michael Grounds
said: "My mother (born in Australia about 1900), who had a very
English heritage, used to say of a blunt knife that you could ride
to London on it, and I was delighted to hear the same expression
again just recently".

What was especially interesting was that several German, Dutch and
South African subscribers also recognised it. Johan Viljoen wrote:
"In Afrikaans we say: 'Die mes is so stomp dat jy op hom Kaap toe
kan ry' ('The knife is so dull/blunt that you can ride to the Cape
on it'). The Cape refers to Cape Town". Ted Friethoff remarked:
"The funny thing about this expression is that here in Holland my
mother used the same expression about dull knives or scissors, with
this difference that she used to ride to Rome on it". S Windeisen
wrote from Germany: "The expression reminds me of something my
mother says about dull knives - in German, more precisely in our
Swabian regional dialect: 'You could ride to Stuttgart on this
knife without getting a sore behind'".

The reference to sore backsides is echoed by Alistair McCaw: "My
late father-in-law, who was English, often used the phrase 'you
could ride bare-arsed to London on this' in reference to blunt
tools or knives". Two British subscribers echoed the English links:
Cecil Ballantine wrote from Cheltenham to say that a Wiltshire
relative of his partner used that form of the expression. Angela
Shingler mentioned that her mother, from East Yorkshire, also used
it (though she referred to China as the destination).

This rather more pungent form of the saying suggests that it is
horse riding that is being referred to, rather than any more modern
form of transport. In turn this suggests that the expression is
quite old.

Angela Shingler wondered whether it was originally Yiddish, as this
would explain her mother's use of it. That sounds very reasonable,
especially considering its existence in German. It would have been
taken to other countries as a natural result of the emigrations of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

That it is quite unrecorded in any reference work or in any work of
mainstream literature that I can search shows only that it was one
of those folk sayings that never made the big time.

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THIS WEEK'S QUERY  Martha Brummett from Denver, Colorado, writes:
"If I woke up with messy hair, my late grandmother would say, "You
look like a mallyhooch". That is a phonetic spelling, of course,
but I think anyone would be able to pronounce it as she did from
the spelling. I recall her saying this very vividly, but in later
years she did not remember it, and did not know what it meant. Has
anyone other than my late grandmother ever used this word?"

I'm stumped. Over to you ...

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