World Wide Words -- 24 Feb 01

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS        ISSUE 225         Saturday 24 February 2001
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Deep Web.
3. Weird Words: Boscage.
4. Q & A: Brand spanking new, Mad as a hatter.
5. List commands; pronunciation guide; copyright.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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WRONGLY FORMATTED MAILING  Apologies for sending out last week's
mailing with all that HTML code in it. I write the newsletters with
the code in place, so pieces can be copied straight into Web pages,
but then run (er, usually run) a macro that strips the code out for
transmission. Last week, in my muzzy state, I forgot.

RETRONYMS REDUX  And I wrote in the rubric to the duplicate mailing
that I was suffering a virus attack, but then realised that in the
circumstances that would be ambiguous, so added 'biological' in
front, comprehending only later that I'd just created a retronym!

OTHERS ALSO NOD  This apology appeared in the Corrections and
Clarifications column of the _Guardian_ on Wednesday: "The article
headed Wanna be a pop star? Education, pages 10 and 11, yesterday,
does make sense but only if the columns are read in the following
order: 1,4,2,3,5,6,7". At least that's one problem from which this
newsletter cannot suffer ...

BODGER  The query last week about the Flanders and Swann song that
mentioned the rhinoceros's "bodger on his bonce" produced several
interesting replies.

Doug Dew wrote: "From my childhood in Surrey, I have a vague memory
of the use of the word 'bodger' to mean a blunt stick or tool used
to make holes in the ground for seeds". Alan Harrison added:
"'Bodge' is certainly in use in Black Country dialect for poking or
making a hole. I have heard my father use 'bodger' of an instrument
used to make holes, as for example when making an extra hole in a
belt when the wearer has gained or lost weight". Tony Chadwick,
Professor of French at the Memorial University of Newfoundland,
remembers the late Dr George Storey, co-editor of the Dictionary of
Newfoundland English, applying 'bodger' to one of those pointed
sticks for picking up litter.

These replies suggested that 'bodger' is a term for a pointed
instrument of some kind, which would explain the Flanders and Swann
reference. But it's not in any dictionary I know of (not even the
_Dictionary of Newfoundland English_), nor is it in Joseph Wright's
_English Dialect Dictionary_ of 1906, though that does admit of the
verb 'to bodge', "to prod, or pierce with a pointed instrument".

So I turned to Michael Proffitt, one of the senior editors at the
_Oxford English Dictionary_, who kindly trawled through the
records. He reports that there is evidence of 'bodger' being used
as a colloquial term for an awl or bradawl: "the contemporary
reading programme has picked up a couple of examples, attesting
both to its rarity and diversity". One was from the _National
Geographic_ magazine, suggesting it was the name for a pointed
stick used to ward off seals, presumably somewhere in the Arctic.
The other was from the _Independent_ newspaper, where it was used
in an article about a garden in Sussex in the same sense as Doug
Dew remembers.

So it really does seem that 'bodger' has been lurking in the
language for a long time, in Britain and Canada at least, as a
generic term for a pointed instrument, without ever attracting the
attention of lexicographers. That, I hope, will now change!


2. Turns of Phrase: Deep Web
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The World Wide Web has not only become so big that search engines
can't index it all (in fact, they manage only a small proportion),
but there's lots of stuff out there - mostly in databases - that
can't be reached at all by the conventional search technologies in
use since the Web began. The firm BrightPlanet has estimated that
this 'deep Web' (a term it seems to have invented) contains 7,500
terabytes of data, compared with about 19 terabytes of data on what
it calls the 'surface Web', numbers impossible to visual in other
than the vaguest way. Even if these figures are overestimates, it
still suggests that there is a lot of material out there that would
be useful if only one could find it. The firm also points out that
the deep data is usually of excellent quality, and that most of it
is publicly accessible without charge. Now all we have to do is
find a way of getting at it.

BrightPlanet estimates that this so-called 'deep Web' could be 500
times larger than the surface Web that most search engines try to
cover.
                                      [_NewsScan Daily_, Jan. 2001]

The FAA database is part of the invisible Web, sometimes called the
"deep Web" – a vast repository of information hidden in databases
that general-purpose search engines don't reach.
                               [_The Industry Standard_, Sep. 2000]


3. Weird Words: Boscage  /'bQskIdZ/
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A mass of trees or shrubs.

This rather literary and semi-archaic word for woody undergrowth
ultimately comes from the same prehistoric German source as does
our 'bush'. In the case of 'boscage' it travelled through Frankish
into Old French 'bos' or 'bosc', both variants of 'bois', a wood,
from which English acquired it about 1400. There is disagreement
here, however, with some dictionaries pointing to a connection with
the Latin 'boscum' instead. A dialect variant of 'bos' eventually
transmogrified itself into the French 'bouquet', which was borrowed
into English in the eighteenth century. 'Boscage' could also refer
to ornamental plantations. As an example, here is Thomas Carlyle in
Volume Seven of his monumental _History of Friedrich II of
Prussia_, which ran to an indigestible 21 volumes: "We were all
dancing in the fine saloons of Monbijou, with pretty intervals in
the cool boscages and orangeries of the place".


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. I've heard the expression 'brand spanking new' many times and am
curious about its origin. Any ideas? [Ruth A Halfon, Israel]

A. These days, 'spanking' in expressions like that can be said to
mean something like "extremely, strikingly, or remarkably", but
really it's no more than a flag to give extra force or emphasis to
what you're saying.

The word appears in English about the middle of the seventeenth
century, but then implied something that was exceptionally good or
especially fine, often something showy or smart. It may have come
from a Danish or Norwegian word 'spanke', to strut (it seems not to
be connected with the more usual sense of 'spank', to slap, which
may be imitative). Later on horses often had the word applied to
them, to mean one capable of moving very fast, but particularly in
a smart way.

Later still, it could mean no more than moving fast in any kind of
conveyance, with no link to horses. Frank T Bullen wrote in _The
Log of a Sea-waif_ in 1899: "A large canoe ... was coming off to us
at a spanking rate". H G Wells used it in 1904: "The char-a-banc
... was clattering along at a spanking pace" ['char-a-banc', an
early form of bus, used for pleasure trips].

The idea behind the modern sense in 'brand spanking new' is not so
very different from its first use. The phrase itself is first
recorded from the middle of the nineteenth century.

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Q. Can you enlighten me about the origins of 'mad as a hatter'? [A
Hansen]

A. These days we associate 'mad as a hatter' with a bit of whimsy
in Lewis Carroll's famous children's book _Alice in Wonderland_ of
1865. Carroll didn't invent the phrase, though. By the time he
wrote the book it was already well known; the first example I can
find is from a work by Thomas Haliburton (Judge Haliburton), of
Nova Scotia, who was well-known in the 1830s for his comic writings
about the character Sam Slick; in _The Clockmaker; or the Sayings
and Doings of Samuel Slick of Slickville_ of 1836, he wrote:
"Father he larfed out like any thing; I thought he would never stop
- and sister Sall got right up and walked out of the room, as mad
as a hatter". As the author felt no need to explain it, by then it
was clearly well known in his part of North America. Whether it was
invented there, I don't know, but it seems likely. An early British
reference is in _Pendennis_ by Thackeray, serialised between 1848-
50: "We were talking about it at mess, yesterday, and chaffing
Derby Oaks - until he was as mad as a hatter".

Note, by the way, that 'mad' is being used in both these cases in
the sense of being angry rather than insane, so these examples
better fit the sense of phrases like 'mad as a wet hen', 'mad as a
hornet', 'mad as a cut snake', 'mad as a meat axe', and other
wonderful similes, of which the first two are American and the last
two from Australia or New Zealand. But Thomas Hughes, in _Tom
Brown's Schooldays_, used it in the same way that Lewis Carroll was
later to do: "He's a very good fellow, but as mad as a hatter".

Few people who use the phrase today realise that there's a story of
human suffering behind it; the term actually derives from an early
industrial occupational disease. Felt hats were popular in North
America and Europe from about 1550 to 1850; an example from the
latter part of the period is the top hat. The best sorts were made
from beaver fur, but a complicated set of processes was needed to
turn it into a finished hat. An early step was to brush a solution
of a mercury compound - usually mercurous nitrate - on to the fur
to roughen the fibres and make them mat more easily, a process
called 'carroting' because it made the fur turn orange. The fibres
were then shaved off the skin and turned into felt; this was later
immersed in a boiling acid solution to thicken and harden it.
Finishing processes included steaming the hat to shape and ironing
it. In all these steps, hatters working in poorly ventilated
workshops would breathe in the mercury compounds and accumulate the
metal in their bodies.

We now know that mercury is a cumulative poison that causes kidney
and brain damage. Physical symptoms include trembling (known at the
time as 'hatter's shakes'), loosening of teeth, loss of co-
ordination, and slurred speech; mental ones include irritability,
loss of memory, depression, anxiety, and other personality changes.
This was called 'mad hatter syndrome'.

It's been a very long time since mercury was used in making hats,
and now all that remains is a relic phrase that links to a nasty
period in manufacturing history. But 'mad hatter syndrome' remains
common as a description of the symptoms of mercury poisoning.


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