World Wide Words -- 17 Feb 01

Sat Feb 17 09:13:14 UTC 2001

WORLD WIDE WORDS        ISSUE 224         Saturday 17 February 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: Caitiff.
3. Topical Words: Carnal.
4. Q & A: Ocker.
5. List commands, IPA, and copyright.

1. Feedback, notes and comments
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COMMISSION AND OMISSION  A couple of spelling mistakes crept into
last week's mailing, for which my apologies. And several observant
subscribers noticed that 'Ocker' was in the list of contents but
didn't appear in its place in the text. Last week's mailing grew so
much in size I took it out at the last moment - you will find it
below. Also, I misspelled Professor Laurence Horn's first name and
gave an alternative name for some kinds of retronyms as 'doublets'
when it should have been 'doubles' ('doublet' has long had another
sense in linguistics, for multiple sequential borrowings from
another language, such as 'gentile', 'genteel', and 'jaunty').

DUVET DAYS  To put it mildly, I have had mixed signals about this.
After posting the piece two weeks ago I passed on last weekend the
essence of the chorus of messages that I had received telling me
that the phrase could not be American, because Americans don't know
about duvets, only to be told in a further cascade this past week
that indeed Americans are totally familiar with the word. The world
seems to polarise into Americans who have never heard of the term,
and those who are thoroughly familiar with it, all of whom now seem
to have written to tell me about it ...

More e-mail has arrived containing other names for days off when
you are admittedly not sick. Sandie Walters wrote: "I thought you
may be interested to know that in Commonwealth offices in Canberra,
Australia, we have a term TOIL days, which has a similar meaning.
TOIL is an acronym for Time Off In Lieu - my favourite oxymoron".
Peavey Nasby wrote from the US to say that: "During my stint in the
civil service, a fairly popular term for a day of sick leave taken
when no illness existed was called 'a self-awarded meritorious day
off,' or simply a 'SAM' day".

BODGER  Following last week's piece about this word, several people
queried the Flanders and Swan song about the rhino:

    The bodger on the bonce, the bodger on the bonce
    Pity the poor old rhino with the bodger on the bonce.

This would seem to have been Michael Flanders seeking out a good
alliterative nonsense term to go with 'bonce', the head. At least,
there's nothing I can find anywhere that gives an insight into it.

Several British subscribers pointed out that 'botch' is at least as
common in the UK as 'bodge' in the sense of doing a job badly (the
Oxford English Dictionary, in rather an old entry, indeed
marks 'bodge' as obsolete, though current Oxford dictionaries
disagree). Peter Weinrich put in evidence Hilaire Belloc:

    I am a sundial, and I make a botch
    Of something done much better by a watch.

though rhyme may have had something to do with his choice ...

HOT DOG  We seem to be in rhymester mode. Following my piece last
week, Philip Budd wrote from somewhere in Britain to say that in
his youth, some five decades ago, he learnt:

    The sausage was a fat one,
    The outside was the skin,
    The inside was a mystery of
    A little dog, called Tim.

Suspicion about what lies under the skin of a sausage is universal,
it would seem. He and I would both appreciate knowing more about
the origin of this rhyme, and whether there's more of it.

3. Weird Words: Caitiff  /'keItIf/
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A contemptible or cowardly person.

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This word is archaic, so if you say it with a straight face you
might even get away with the insult. It's also a word that - like
many in the lexicon - has come down in the world. It started out,
sometime before 1300, to mean a captive. It came through French
from Latin captivum, with the same sense (captive
comes from the same Latin word by a later re-borrowing, again
through French, so it and caitiff make a doublet).

As captives were not in the best of circumstances, caitiff
began to mean a wretched or miserable person. Chaucer uses it
several times in the Canterbury Tales, as in the Knight's
Tale: "And now I am so caitiff and so thrall / That he that is my
mortal enemy / I serve him as his squier poorely". [thrall:
enslaved; squier: squire]. The sense then shifted further
towards contempt, implying a mixture of misery and wickedness, and
then to the sense of cowardly. Later it became a staple of those
historical writers seeking to gain some antique credibility through
choice of language (Sir Walter Scott comes especially to mind).

3. Topical Words: Carnal
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When this word turns up nowadays, most people immediately think of
sex, a link that goes back almost as far as the word itself. As
long ago as 1450, the phrase <i>carnal knowledge</i> appeared in
the anonymous romance <em>Merlin, or the Early History of King
Arthur</em>, and it and similar phrases have been around ever
since.
<p>
So you may imagine the images conjured up by the phrase <i>carnal
art</i>, which appeared in my newspaper recently. It was referring
to an art movement based on body modification, linked especially to
the French artist Orlan, who invented the term in 1990 as <i>L'Art
Charnel</i>. The English version is rather a poor translation. A
better term might have been <i>body art</i>, but that had already
been grabbed for art on the body, not art that transforms the body.
Orlan is best known for gruesome films of plastic surgery being
carried out on her face while she discusses the details to camera.
The word has also been applied to other artists who, in the words
of one critic of the movement, "exploit, plunder or injure their
own bodies to seduce the contemporary art market". Seduce - we're
back to sex again.
<p>
Strictly speaking, <i>carnal</i> means "of flesh", from Latin
<i>caro</i>, flesh. It's a close relative of <i>carnage</i>,
<i>carnivorous</i>, <i>charnel</i>, <i>carrion</i>, <i>carnival</i>
(literally, "leaving off meat", a pre-Lenten festival), and even
<i>carnation</i>, whose flowers were described as the colour of
European flesh (English didn't have the word <i>pink</i> then).
<p>
English early on used <i>carnal</i> for anything corporeal or
material: <i>carnal things</i> or <i>carnals</i> were one's worldly
goods. It was also the opposite or antagonist of spiritual things,
unregenerate, unsanctified, worldly (it was used in that sense in
the authorised version of the Bible, in <em>Romans</em>, Chapter 8,
Verse 7: "The carnal mind is enmity against God", in which St Paul
is referring that what the <em>New English Bible</em>, for example,
translates as our "lower nature"). Another sense was "related in
flesh", that is, of one's blood relatives - long ago you could
mention one's <i>carnal mother</i> or <i>carnal brothers</i>
without anybody being tempted to snigger.
<p>
Unsurprisingly, it also had the idea of fleshly matters, in
reference to the body as the seat of passions or appetites. As late
as 1670, more than two centuries after it had first appeared,
William Walton could write of "The visible carnal sins of gluttony
and drunkenness, and the like". The sexual sense was a pretty
obvious next step, taken in the fifteenth century. It turns out to
have been one from which we have since not been able to retreat.

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 Words Web site. If
you wish to comment, please e-mail <editor at worldwidewords.org>.]

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Q. In your January 27 issue, your Q&A section included a letter
from a Ms Marden asking about Old Blighty (see <http://www.
worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-bli1.htm>). She referred to being asked
its origin by "an Ocker". Of course that prompted me to wonder
about Ocker. I assume it to be a slang reference to an Australian.
But whence? [Bob McGill, Texas; Kimberly Phelps, New Jersey]

A. An Ocker is certainly an Australian, but one of a particular
type: a rough and uncultivated working man. Think of the Australian
characters in the Crocodile Dundee films, especially the
Paul Hogan one, all stereotypical Ockers. An Ocker can be boorish
and aggressive, blinkered, often strongly nationalistic in speech
and outlook, though my impression is that tolerance and good humour
are as common.

The archetypal Ocker may be pictured in shearer's singlet, shorts
and thongs, leaning against a bar, sinking large quantities of
beer. He will certainly be speaking in a characteristically slurred
and mangled Australian accent with lots of slang, a lingo parodied
as Strine, from an Ocker way of saying Australian. (The word
Strine, incidentally, was invented by Alistair Morrison in
1964. He used it the following year in the title of his book,
Let Stalk Strine, under the superb pseudonym of Afferbeck
Lauder, whose name needs to be said with a Strine accent to fully
savour its flavour.)

The original Ocker was a character of that name played by the
Australian comedian, actor and writer Ron Frazer, in a late-night
satirical television series The Mavis Bramston Show aired
between 1965 and 1968. However, the peak in popularity of
Ocker seems to have been a little later, during the period
of the Labour government of Gough Whitlam (1972-75).

The name is a variant on Oscar. It's actually much older
than the television programme, since anyone in Australia with the
first names of Harold or Oscar might in earlier times have been
nicknamed Ocker, for no very obvious reason that I can discover.
(In the 1920s, a cartoon called Ginger Meggs included a
character called Ocker Stevens, so anyone with the surname Stevens
was also likely to be called Ocker.)

It's now rather out of fashion, since Australians have shrugged off
the "cultural cringe" of earlier days and now prefer to think of
themselves as more sophisticated than Paul Hogan's characters.
 
[I'm grateful to Martin Mullin for his help with this answer.]

5. List commands and copyright
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