World Wide Words -- 28 Jul 01

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 247           Saturday 28 July 2001
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Review: The Warden of English.
3. Q & A: Gadget.
4. Subscription commands and copyright notice.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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TOE-RAG  Following my Q&A piece on this word last week, several
subscribers e-mailed me to say that they had been told, or come to
believe, that the word actually derives from Tuareg, a member of
the Berber peoples of western and central Sahara. How the Tuaregs
got involved I can't understand, unless the false derivation is
somehow linked with British troops in North Africa in World War
Two. Certainly, it's an interesting example of folk etymology.

SMACK IN THE MUSH / PUNCH UP THE BRACKET  Bob Richey wrote about my
inclusion of these phrases in the same piece: "If that is not an
obvious attempt to lure reader's comments, then I have never seen
another 'baiting' attempt". It might have read that way, but it
wasn't a lure, just me trying to give an extra bit of local colour.
If it had been bait it failed totally, as only two people have
mentioned it. The phrases are two examples of (rather outmoded)
English slang that seemed to fit with 'toe-rag'. 'Mush' is the
mouth; 'bracket' is an unspecified part of the body, usually taken
to be the nose.

VIRUS INFECTIONS  There is a particularly nasty virus going about,
called Sircam, that grabs a file at random from your hard disk and
sends it to everyone in your mailbox as an attachment to a message.
As a result, I am currently receiving a substantial number of large
messages each day (all, for some reason, about 200K). I am deleting
all such messages without downloading them, and any messages from
people I don't know that contain attachments. If you need to send
me a message that falls into these categories, e-mail me first!


2. Review: The Warden of English
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Most people in the English-speaking world who have an interest in
the way they use the language must at some point have looked into -
or at least heard of - _Modern English Usage_ in one of its various
incarnations. It was first published in 1926, issued in an edition
revised by Sir Earnest Gowers in 1965, and then updated again under
the editorship of Dr R W Burchfield in 1996.

Its author, who wrote the whole book single-handedly in a cottage
in Guernsey, was Henry Watson Fowler. This biography of him by
Jenny McMorris, the archivist for Oxford English Dictionaries, has
been published by the Oxford University Press to mark the 75th
anniversary of the first appearance of Fowler's most famous work.

Henry Fowler was one of the odder characters ever to be associated
with Oxford (even including the present writer). After 17 years as
a schoolmaster, he left to try his luck as a freelance writer in
London, but his shyness held him back from success. So in 1903 he
moved to join his younger brother Frank in Guernsey.

The brothers wrote a style guide, _The King's English_, which was
published in 1906 (still in print, and also available online from
Project Bartleby). Following the success of this book ("It took the
world by storm" the _Times_ wrote in its obituary of Henry Fowler),
they were commissioned to write two dictionaries, one of them
published in 1911 as _The Concise Oxford Dictionary_.

In these days of teams of professionally trained lexicographers,
with their computerised corpora and compendia of electronically
searchable texts, it is hardly imaginable that two individuals,
working on a small island with no access to primary sources, should
in five years have created a complete dictionary from scratch.
True, they had most of the first edition of the _Oxford English
Dictionary_ to work from, but parts of it hadn't even been
published at that time, and even by then some entries were already
out of date - the Fowlers had trouble with 'blouse', for example,
whose sense had changed substantially since the OED's entry had
been written (describing it only as a male garment).

When the First World War came, both Fowler brothers volunteered,
even though Henry was by then 56 and his brother 44. They should
not have been permitted to join up, and their advanced ages caused
embarrassment to the military authorities when they arrived in
France. Both served only briefly in the front line. Frank, alas,
was to die of tuberculosis in 1918 while still in uniform.

Henry returned to Guernsey, where he completed work on what was
finally called _Modern English Usage_ (though one of his earlier
suggestions was _Oxford Pedantics_). Even in its current much-
revised version it retains many of the idiosyncrasies that provoked
its readers to roughly equal parts of approval and exasperation.

This book is a straightforward account of the life and work of a
man who has rarely peeped out from behind the pages of his best-
known work; it will be of interest to anyone who wants to put a
human face on the person who probably did more to influence English
writing in the last century than any other.

[_The Warden of English_ by Jenny McMorris, published by Oxford
University Press on 28 June 2001; ISBN 0-19-866254-8; pp242;
publisher's price of GBP19.99]


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 reply, a response will appear here and on the Web
site. If you wish to comment on a reply below, please do NOT use
that address, but e-mail <editor at worldwidewords.org> instead.]

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Q. Where did 'gadget' come from? [Autymn Castleton]

A. This takes me back. As a callow young broadcaster, I was sent
one day to a small village behind Brighton to talk to an old man
who for many years had been Rudyard Kipling's chauffeur. Among many
other things, but for no good reason that I can now recall, he told
me with great emphasis that Kipling had invented the word 'gadget'
about the year 1904.

I now know better. However, his assertion isn't wholly wide of the
truth, since Kipling did popularise it, in his _Traffics and
Discoveries_ of 1904: "Steam gadgets always take him that way".
There's evidence, though, that the word had by then been around for
many years, most probably among seafarers. Kipling may have picked
it up during one of his journeys to India and back.

We now think of a gadget as being some small mechanical device,
ill-defined perhaps, but certainly ingenious or novel. The evidence
suggests that it was originally one of those hand-waving terms for
something one temporarily can't remember the technical name for - a
thingummy, a whatsit, a what's-his-name, a doohickey or dingus.
There is anecdotal evidence, according to the _Oxford English
Dictionary_, for this sense having been around since the 1850s.

The origin is rather obscure, but a plausible suggestion is that it
comes from French 'gâchette', a lock mechanism, or from the French
dialect word 'gagée' for a tool.

The writer who put 'gadget' on the written map was one Robert
Brown, whose _Spunyarn and Spindrift, A sailor boy's log of a
voyage out and home in a China tea-clipper_ appeared in 1886. He
wrote: "Then the names of all the other things on board a ship! I
don't know half of them yet; even the sailors forget at times, and
if the exact name of anything they want happens to slip from their
memory, they call it a chicken-fixing, or a gadjet, or a gill-guy,
or a timmey-noggy, or a wim-wom - just 'pro tem'., you know".


4. Subscription commands
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