World Wide Words: 10 Feb 01

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS        ISSUE 223         Saturday 10 February 2001
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Webucation.
3. Weird Words: Bodger.
4. Q&A: Hot dog, Ocker.
5. List commands and copyright.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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DELAY IN DESPATCH  Apologies for the late despatch of this mailing:
the server that manages the process (made available free to World
Wide Words by the kindness of the Linguist List) suffered a problem
late on Friday which took all of Saturday to fix.

NEW SUBSCRIBERS  A special welcome to everyone who joined following
the piece about World Wide Words in the Earthlink Weekly Newsletter
this week, and the Site of the Day reference at www.ceoexpress.com.

RETRONYMS  Lots of people wrote about retronyms following the Weird
Words piece last week. Professor Lawrence Horn makes a distinction
between the ordinary sort and the ones containing a repeated word
(as in "book-book"), calling them 'clones' ('doublet' has also been
used). He mentioned a recent study of them entitled _Contrastive
Focus Reduplication in English_, but I have to agree that 'clone'
and 'doublet' are pithier! He pointed out that 'retronym' is older
than I said, as William Safire wrote about it in a column in 1980.

AS ANY FULE KNO  Together with other subscribers, John Weisse wrote
"As you quoted 'as every fule kno' and not every fule does, perhaps
a word of explanation would add to the fun". I left Dermod Quirke's
comment in place in his competition entry with a slight mischievous
desire to see what would happen. The reference is to the Molesworth
British school stories by the late Geoffrey Willans, illustrated by
Ronald Searle, in which schoolboy spellings are common. The phrase
"as any fule kno" ("as any fool knows") became a catchphrase in the
1950s and later.

DUVET DAYS  A chorus of American voices confirm what Julane Marx,
my invaluable US editor/copyeditor/advisor/counsellor/critic (we're
still arguing about her title) told me: that this current British
term, featured in the In Brief section last week, could not have
originated from there, because 'duvet' is uncommon in the US. Many
alternative names were put forward for the idea of taking a day off
to recuperate without actually being ill (their number suggests a
real need for such provision), including 'mental health day', a
truly excellent and discriptive expression.

Derry Cook-Radmore reminded me that in the UK there once were (and
perhaps still are) 'Whitley days' in the Civil Service for what was
more formally called 'uncertificated sick leave'; this was named
after the late J H Whitley, who chaired a key committee on terms
and conditions of service. (The BBC used to have the same idea, but
called them 'bisque' leave, from the tennis and croquet term.) And
Christopher Key wrote: "What was once known as 'sick leave' is now
generally known as 'personal leave' and may be used in any way the
employee sees fit. It might even be an example of a retronym".


2. Turns of Phrase: Webucation
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Obviously enough, this is education provided over the World Wide
Web, a concept also sometimes called 'e-education'. Most of the new
terms beginning with 'Web-' have been short-lived, but this one
shows signs of surviving. It refers to various ways of using the
Internet to contribute to learning at a distance, in particular for
bringing education to groups not previously well served. But it
also includes school management systems, educational software, and
ways to wire the classroom. Many companies in the educational field
and many prestigious educational institutions are investigating the
options for 'webucation'. The idea is seen to have great potential,
but there's also a lot of work to be done making it a practical
(and paying) proposition.

Webucation will be big, but will it be profitable? After all, the
public has grown accustomed to getting information for free on the
Web - it has on network TV.
                                      [_Forbes Magazine_, May 2000]

"Webucation" is the great new market of the internet age and
companies - from the giants of the media sector to dotcom start-ups
- are clamouring to be in the right place at the right time.
                                     [_Financial Times_, Sep. 2000]


3. Weird Words: Bodger
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An itinerant chair-leg turner.
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This term was once common around the furniture-making town of High
Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, between London and Oxford (so much so
that the local football team, Wycombe Wanderers, is nicknamed 'The
Bodgers'). 'Bodgers' were highly skilled itinerant wood-turners,
who worked in the beech woods on the chalk hills of the Chilterns.
They cut timber and converted it into chair legs by turning it on a
pole lathe, an ancient and very simple tool that uses the spring of
a bent sapling to help run it. Their equipment was so easy to move
and set up that it was easier to go to the timber and work it there
than to transport it to a workshop. The completed chair legs were
sold to furniture factories to be married with other chair parts
made in the workshop.

The word only appears at the end of the nineteenth century. There
may be a link - through the idea of a itinerant person - with a
much older sense of the word, for a travelling merchant or chapman.
The _Oxford English Dictionary_ finds examples of this meaning from
the eighteenth century, but there's a much earlier one from
_Holinshed's Chronicles_ of 1577 (a major source for Shakespeare)
in which William Harrison rails against bodgers who bought up
supplies of wheat to sell abroad, leaving nothing for local people
to make their bread with.

But that leaves us with another sense, the more common one (at
least in Britain and Australia) of an incompetent mender of things,
which Americans may prefer to see spelled 'botcher'. In both
spellings this comes from the Middle English 'bocchen', which had a
sense of repairing or patching. It could be significant that in
medieval times it was a neutral term that had no associations with
doing a job badly. It's possible that this old sense of the word
survived in dialect or local usage, and evolved into the furniture
'bodger', while its meaning in the standard language changed.


4. Q&A
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[Send your queries to <qa at worldwidewords.org>. All messages will be
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If I can, a response will appear here and on the Words Web site. If
you wish to comment, please e-mail <editor at worldwidewords.org>.]

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Q. What is the origin of 'hot dog' as in a sausage in a
roll? [Alec and Edna Collins, Israel]

A. The usual story told about this comestible is that it was first
sold by a food concessionaire named Harry Stevens at New York's
Polo Grounds, the home of the New York Giants, in the early 1900s.
It is said that the famous cartoonist T A Dorgan (Tad) recorded
these odd new things in a cartoon in the _New York Journal_,
drawing them as dachshunds in buns, and called them 'hot dogs'
because he couldn't spell 'frankfurter'.

This tale is reproduced in almost every book on word histories I
have on my shelves, and at many online sites, too. It seems to have
come about as the result of the obituary of Harry Stevens that
appeared in the New York _Herald Tribune_ on 4 May 1934, in which
these supposed events were recorded; the writer may have borrowed
the story from an article in _Restaurant Man_ in 1929. There are
variations: the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ says the first stall
selling them was at Coney Island in 1916; I've also seen the St
Louis World Fair of 1904 cited as the starting point, which takes
us well away from the New York nexus of the majority view.

Hardly any of this is true.

Leonard Zwilling, of the Dictionary of American Regional English,
has published a lexicon of Tad's language (he popularised a number
of phrases, such as 'malarkey', 'hard-boiled', and 'kibitzer', so
he was worth the effort), and he did find a 1906 cartoon
illustrating Harry Stevens' hot dogs, though it was at a six-day
bicycle race in Madison Square Garden, not at the Polo Grounds.
However, since the first recorded use of the phrase is way back in
1895, neither Tad nor Mr Stevens could claim inventor's rights in
the name.

All this has been exhaustively researched by Barry Popik of the
American Dialect Society, and a summary appears in _America in So
Many Words_ by David K Barnhart and Allan A Metcalf. Information
here comes directly or indirectly from Mr Popik.

It seems that the link of 'dog' with sausage actually goes back to
the middle of the nineteenth century in the US, expressing dark
suspicions about their contents. Mr Popik has even found a popular
song of 1860, of which you may know another version:

  Oh where oh where has my little dog gone?
  Oh where oh where can he be?
  Now sausage is good, baloney, of course.
  Oh where oh where can he be?
  They make them of dog, they make them of horse,
  I think they made them of he.

What seems to have happened is that near the end of the nineteenth
century, around 1894-95, students at Yale University began to refer
to the wagons selling hot sausages in buns as 'dog wagons'. One at
Yale was even given the nickname of "The Kennel Club". It was only
a short step from this campus use of 'dog' to 'hot dog', and this
fateful move was made in a story in the issue of the _Yale Record_
for 19 October 1895, which ended, "They contentedly munched hot
dogs during the whole service".

By one of those coincidences that one can only suspect was part of
some vast and subtle linguistic conspiracy, the term 'hot dog' had
been invented about a year earlier in another context, as a term
for a well-dressed young man (though it has since evolved, so that
these days it suggests showing off, for example performing showy
manoeuvres while surfing). This may have been borrowed from an
older bit of American university slang, 'to put on (the) dog' (see
<http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-put1.htm>), to assume
pretentious airs, whose first recorded use is also from Yale.

The combination of the existing and new usage seems to have been a
potent one in the air of the 1890s and within a few years 'hot dog'
become the most usual term (though 'frankfurter' and 'wiener' are
both recorded from the early 1880s, they lost out somewhat in the
popularity stakes to hot dog's native charm).

There is enormous inertia in false but fascinating stories. I've
added my two bits on the side of truth, and perhaps one day the
real story of 'hot dog' will be in all the books.


5. List commands and copyright
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