World Wide Words -- 20 Jan 01

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 220         Saturday 20 January 2001
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Geocaching.
3. Weird Words: Onychophagist.
4. Q & A: Stool pigeon, Hat trick, Spiv.
5. Administration: How to join and leave the list, Copyright.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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COMPETITION  You may have gathered, from the update I sent out last
Saturday, that not everyone seemed to understand the competition
rules. In addition, about one entry in five was sent to the wrong
address. With this in mind, I was glad to find a sympathetic soul
in David Parr, who wrote suggesting we needed a word to describe
individuals who misinterpret unambiguous directions. (There's scope
there for a future competition, you may feel.) His message put me
in a sufficiently good mood all week that I've accepted entries
from everyone who did send them to the wrong address - no need to
write again. If you plan to enter but haven't yet done so, please
see <http://www.worldwidewords.org/competition.htm> for details -
you have until Monday next, 22 January.


2. Turns of Phrase: Geocaching
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When I was working down in Devon years ago, I learned of a long-
established game played by hikers on Dartmoor, who used compass and
map to identify one of a set of letterboxes in remote locations on
the moor, such as Cranmere Pool. If you found one, you left a
message in a book in the box to prove you had been there. In recent
decades, this has been updated to a form of orienteering called
'letterboxing', to the extent that the five boxes I knew about in
the early 1970s have now grown to many times that number.

Geocaching (a conflation of 'geo', earth, plus 'cache') is a
recently invented high-tech equivalent. Someone hides a box with
treasure in it, treasure being defined very loosely to include
items like maps, books, software, videos, pictures, money, tickets,
antiques, tools, and the like. The hider publicises the Global
Positioning System (GPS) co-ordinates for it (on a Web site, where
else?), inviting others using GPS receivers to find it.

Though the GPS system is accurate to within a few metres, finding
the cache can still require a lot of hard work, especially in an
urban area, or if the evil-minded concealer has placed it under
water, halfway up a cliff, or in some especially remote spot. You
are supposed to record your success in a logbook in the cache, take
out only one bit of treasure, and add something else in its place.

Geocaching is a new Web-based fad that could have Alaskans flying
to Finland to find treasure hidden under fallen trees. Players
stash the goods - anything from native art to sunglasses - and
leave directions at www.geocaching.com.
                                                [_Time_, Oct. 2000]

Rather than keeping the booty for themselves, successful geocachers
are meant to keep the game going by taking just one item and
replacing it with a new treasure, adding their details to the
logbook for posterity.
                                       [_New Scientist_, Jan. 2001]


3. Weird Words: Onychophagist
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A person who bites his or her nails.

This comes from Greek 'onux'/'onukh-', a nail or claw, plus the
ending '-phagia', eating or devouring. It should not be confused
with 'onychotillomania', which is a nervous habit of picking at
the fingernails to the extent of destroying them.

Other words that begin the same way include 'onychogryphosis', a
claw-like overgrowth of a nail, and 'onychodystrophy', a condition
in which the finger or toe nails are malformed or discoloured.
Though 'onychophagist' (and 'onychophagia', for the condition) are
recorded, they seem not to be used even in the academic medical
literature, the English 'nail biter' being preferred.

The same Greek source gave us 'onyx' for the stone, a variety of
chalcedony that is often used for carving cameos, because some
kinds of it resemble the pink and white of a human fingernail.


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 am interested in the historical origins of the phrase 'stool
pigeon'. [Phil Potter]

A. These days a 'stool pigeon' is an informer, but when the phrase
first appeared - in the US in the 1830s or thereabouts - it meant a
person used as a decoy to entice criminals into a trap. In that
sense, it's not far from the French 'agent provocateur'.

Most modern dictionaries say the phrase came from the practice in
hunting of tying or nailing a dead pigeon to a stool to act as a
decoy. Why a pigeon? More importantly, why a stool? Presumably the
reference is to a tree stump rather than the backless seat with
short legs (though as the tree stump sense of the word is rather
uncommon, it does make one wonder; would a hunter actually carry a
stool out into the field specifically for the purpose?). To add to
my suspicions about this definition, it seems from the evidence
that 'stool pigeon' has always been used for a person, never for a
hunter's decoy.

The phrase starts to make sense when you delve into the history of
words for decoys, of which there are a surprising number. The one
to focus on is the archaic term 'stale', which probably comes from
the French 'estale', applied to a pigeon (aha!) used to entice a
hawk into a net. 'Stale' appears in English from the early
fifteenth century; by the end of the following century it was being
used for a person who acted to entrap another.

Another spelling was 'stall'. At the end of the fifteenth century
this began to be recorded as a bit of thieves' jargon for a
pickpocket's accomplice, who acted as a decoy to distract the
attention of the victim. The verb for this action evolved into our
modern sense in phrases like 'to stall for time'.

It seems pretty clear from all this that the Americans who started
to employ 'stool' for a decoy bird were using yet another version
of this old word. The use of 'stool' in this sense is older than
that of 'stool pigeon' - the earliest reference in the OED is to
the town records of Huntington, New York, in 1825: "No person shall
be permitted to gun with macheanes [machines] or stools in said
Town". It was also a verb: 'stooling' was decoying ducks or other
birds by the use of stools.

The other half of the expression, 'pigeon', has been used in slang
since at least the sixteenth century for a person who allows
himself to be swindled, a simpleton or fool, a sucker. It seems
that this idea formed part of the genesis of 'stool pigeon', so you
might explain the term as "a fool used as a decoy", though with a
nod to the literal sense of the word. By the 1840s, 'stool pigeon'
had shifted from being a decoy to being an informer.

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Q. What is the origin of the term 'hat trick', used to describe a
series of three victories in sports? [Carol Farrell and others]

A. It comes from the English game of cricket and refers to a bowler
who takes three wickets with three successive balls. For those more
familiar with baseball, this is an impressive achievement, similar
to a baseball pitcher striking out three batters in a row, but much
less common.

It seems to have been the custom in the nineteenth century for such
a paragon of the art to be awarded a new hat by his club as a mark
of his success. However, it is sometimes also said that the phrase
alludes to a distinctly more plebeian reward in which the bowler
was permitted to take his hat around the crowd for a collection
(not necessarily a bowler hat, of course: that was named after a
couple of completely different chaps, Messrs Thomas and William
Bowler, hatmakers).

'Hat trick' was first recorded in print in the 1870s, but has since
been widened to apply to any sport in which the person competing
carries off some feat three times in quick succession, such as
scoring three goals in one game of soccer.

                        -----------

Q. I have just been discussing with my son the origin of the word
'spiv'. I am well aware of the meaning of the word - my late uncle
Arthur made his living depicting a loveable spiv in the 1940's and
early 1950's - but until now I have never even thought about the
origin of the word. My son, who is studying early 20th century
history, claims that he had seen a suggestion that it was back-
slang derived from 'VIPs' but I thought that this acronym was more
recent than WW2. In any case, I couldn't see that a spiv was
necessarily the opposite of a Very Important Person; indeed, I
suspect that a spiv was a VIP to many customers during the war and
just afterwards. [Richard English]

A. Let's put the footnotes first on this one, because 'spiv' is a
characteristically British English colloquial term whose meaning
and cultural implications will be obscure to anyone outside the
country.

A spiv was typically a flashily dressed man (velvet collars and
lurid kipper ties) who made a living by various disreputable
dealings, existing by his wits rather than holding down any job.
(Another name was 'wide boy', with 'wide' having the old slang
sense of sharp-witted, or skilled in sharp practice.) He was a
small-time crook, living on the fringes of real criminality. He is
most strongly associated with the period during and immediately
after the Second World War in Britain; he always seemed able to get
those coveted luxury items that were unobtainable in that period of
austerity except on the black market, such as nylons. Private
Walker in the BBC television series _Dad's Army_ was a typical
spiv; Arthur Daly, the second-hand car dealer in _Minder_, was a
linear descendent of the breed.

Having explained all that, I now have to tell you that nobody knows
for certain where the word comes from. Its first known use in print
was in 1934: "Spiv, petty crook who will turn his hand to anything
so long as it does not involve honest work". It has indeed been
said that it is 'VIPs' backwards; also that it was a police acronym
for 'Suspected Persons and Itinerant Vagrants'. VIP does date from
the same period, but it would be very surprising if it was the
source. Apart from the sense being wrong, as you point out,
inverted acronyms based on word play were uncommon then. The police
story is just a well-meaning attempt at making sense of the matter.

The more usual explanation is that it comes from a dialect word
'spiving', meaning smart, or 'spiff', a well-dressed man. This
developed into the adjective 'spiffy', smart or spruce, recorded
from the 1850s, and into 'spiffed up', smartly dressed. But
Jonathon Green, in _The Cassell Dictionary of Slang_ suggests a
source in the Romany 'spiv', a sparrow, which was used by gypsies,
he says "as a derogatory reference to those who existed by picking
up the leavings of their betters, criminal or legitimate".

It's possible, of course, that both origins are right, the one
reinforcing the other. We may never know for sure, a maddening
state in which to have to leave matters.


5. Administration
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