World Wide Words -- 07 Jul 01

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 244           Saturday 7 July 2001
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Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK      ISSN 1470-1448
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Triacle.
3. Q & A: Doolally tap.
4. Subscription commands, IPA, and copyright.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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DEPRECATED  Having been rather rude last week about the author of
the online glossary who defined this word as "no longer part of the
current specification", I have since received many politely worded
messages telling me that a sense of "deprecated" not so far removed
from this is actually common in the computer business. It is used
as a way of warning users that a feature, though not yet actually
obsolete, is likely to become so soon and should be avoided.

In fact, to my mild chagrin, this entry appears in the current
edition of the _Jargon File_:

 Said of a program or feature that is considered obsolescent
 and in the process of being phased out, usually in favor of
 a specified replacement. Deprecated features can, unfortunately,
 linger on for many years. This term appears with distressing
 frequency in standards documents when the committees writing
 the documents realize that large amounts of extant (and
 presumably happily working) code depend on the feature(s)
 that have passed out of favor.

And this appears in an Internet standards document (_Requests for
Comments_ 1158 of May 1990):

 In order to better prepare implementors for future changes ...
 a new term "deprecated" may be used when describing an object.
 A deprecated object ... is one which must be supported, but
 one which will most likely be removed from the next version ...

I'd argue - being in a last-ditcher mood this week - that the word
still has essentially the same sense in context as it does in the
standard language. It's OK to explain that this is what it can be
taken to mean, but not to *define* it as "no longer part of the
current specification", as the glossary writer did. But a large
dictionary might consider adding the idea of obsolescence as a
subsidiary sense.

SHORT SHRIFT  A reminder that for the next two months, due to
pressures of deadlines elsewhere, issues of World Wide Words will
be rather shorter than usual. Newsletters will return to their
normal length in September.


2. Weird Words: Triacle
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An old name for treacle or molasses.

Treacle is the usual British name for what Americans prefer to call
molasses (remember the treacle well in Lewis Carroll's _Alice in
Wonderland_). The apothecaries' term 'triacle' is an older form of
the word, but it was originally used for something very different -
an antidote to the venom of a snake or insect.

This word came through French and Latin from Greek 'theriake',
meaning an antidote against a poisonous bite, which has its origin
in 'therion', a wild beast. Herbal remedies against such bites
often contained alkaloids and so tasted bitter - it was common to
sweeten them with honey to make them easier to swallow. English
apothecaries changed over to black treacle as the sweetener when it
began to be available in the Middle Ages.

The word was often used in a sense not so very different to that of
'balm' or 'salve', some fragrant ointment or preparation used to
heal or soothe the skin. In fact, the question in the book of
Jeremiah in the Bible: "Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no
physician there?" was translated by Miles Coverdale in 1535 using
'triacle' instead of 'balm'. Even earlier, Chaucer uses 'triacle'
in the sense of a salve in his _Canterbury Tales_: "Christ, which
that is to every harm triacle".

By the end of the seventeenth century, 'triacle' had come to mean
the molasses itself rather than the herbal remedy; by then the
vowel had became slurred, the word dropped from three syllables to
two, and it was respelled in the modern form, 'treacle'.


3. Q&A
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[Send your questions to <qa at worldwidewords.org>. All messages will
be acknowledged, but I can't guarantee to reply, as time is very
limited. If I can, a response will appear here and on the Web site.
If you wish to comment on one of the replies below, please do NOT
use that address, but e-mail <editor at worldwidewords.org> instead.]

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Q. What is the origin of 'doolally tap'? A phrase I used to hear as
a youngster in London 50 years ago and used in the context of
someone being rather simple. [John Hinton, Western Australia]

A. This is an excellent illustration of the reach, not only of the
Internet, but of the English language itself. The expression is
certainly a British one (though now not heard in that form) but to
find its origins we must travel to India.

Near the end of the nineteenth century, the British army had a
military sanatorium at Deolali, about 100 miles north-east of
Bombay. One of its functions was to act as a transit camp for
soldiers who had finished their tours of duty ("time-expired", in
the jargon of the time) and were waiting for a troop ship to take
them back to Britain. Ships only left Bombay between November and
March, so a soldier ending his tour outside those dates might have
a long wait for transport.

The effects are best explained in the words of Frank Richards, who
knew the camp well. He wrote in _Old Soldier Sahib_ in 1936:

    The time-expired men at Deolalie had no arms or equipment;
    they showed kit now and again and occasionally went on a
    route-march, but time hung heavily on their hands and in
    some cases men who had been exemplary soldiers got into
    serious trouble and were awarded terms of imprisonment
    before they were sent home. Others contracted venereal
    disease and had to go to hospital. The well-known saying
    among soldiers when speaking of a man who does queer
    things, "Oh, he's got the Doo-lally tap," originated,
    I think, in the peculiar way men behaved owing to the
    boredom of that camp.

To say someone was 'doolally tap' meant he was mad, or at least
very eccentric. The first bit is obviously the result of the
standard British soldier's way of hacking foreign-sounding names
into something that sounded English. The second part is from a
Persian or Urdu word 'tap', a malarial fever (ultimately from
Sanskrit 'tapa', heat or torment). So the whole expression might be
loosely translated as "camp fever".

The full expression must have already been becoming rare when you
heard it, since most reference books imply that by the 1940s it had
already been shortened to 'doolally' ('tap' didn't long survive the
journey from India). That's the way people like me learned it at
about that period, often as "he's gone doolally", meaning that
somebody's showing signs of odd behaviour. You can still often hear
it, though not one speaker in a thousand can connect it to a town
in India.


4. Subscription commands
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