World Wide Words -- 09 Jun 01

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 240           Saturday 9 June 2001
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: New Puritans.
3. Weird Words: Gurning.
4. Q & A: Salad days, Bumf, Play it by ear, Monkey's wedding.
5. Subscription commands, IPA, and copyright.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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SENSE OF HUMOUR  My comment in this section last week about humour,
with its accompanying old joke, produced many responses. They can
be divided into two broad groups: those who begged me never to tell
another joke, and those who sent me lots more examples.

ALL WOOL AND A YARD WIDE  Many American subscribers of various ages
commented that this saying is now much less common than it once
was. Several also pointed out that the expression's second half is
as important as the first, since inferior woollen cloth tended to
skimp on the width. Material that was a full yard wide, therefore,
was likely to be of better quality.


2. Turns of Phrase: New Puritans
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We're hardly short of names with 'new' on the front. They're
intended to suggest that an old idea has been revitalised, often
alas only to the extent of putting new wine in old bottles. In
recent decades we've had the New Age, the New Romantics, New Men,
the New World Order, and the British New Lads. And in only one
sense is 'New Puritans' a new tag, since there have been new
puritans for decades, with or without capitalisation, for example
as the name for a sexual backlash to AIDS in the USA in the
eighties. But these British New Puritans are newer than any other
new puritans.  It's the name for an artistic movement founded by
Nicholas Blincoe and Matt Thorne, whose founding philosophy
appeared in an anthology last autumn, called, with what you may
feel is a touch of hubris, _All Hail the New Puritans_. The rules
were made explicit in a ten-point manifesto: writers must be
dedicated to narrative, eschew poetic licence, aim at clarity, and
have a moral purpose. In other words - or at least the words of
Nicholas Blincoe - 'New Puritan' fiction is fiction in "its purest
and most immediate form". The movement has come in for a fair
amount of derision; in the nature of artistic movements that
suddenly burst on the scene, it's hard to be sure how long it will
survive.

Like the Dogme film-makers, the New Puritans seem to be guided by
the idea that because something is simpler in expression it is also
purer in content.
                              [_Independent on Sunday_, Sept. 2000]

But instant movements tend to be unreliable, and the New Puritans
were accused of being 'anti-literary' and opportunistic.
                                             [_Guardian_, May 2001]


3. Weird Words: Gurning
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The pulling of grotesque faces.

This British term - much better known in Britain and Commonwealth
countries than in the US - has at times been applied to the pulling
of faces as a competitive activity. A surviving example is that in
the Lake District, where the Egremont Crab-Apple Fair has an annual
contest, which they call the World Championship Gurning Competition
and which they say dates back to 1266. There is also an Australian
national competition that I know of, and there may be others, too.
At one time, such face-pulling contests were a common entertainment
at fairs and gatherings around Britain (before the days of radio
and television you had to get your fun where you could). The rules
at Egremont are simple: competitors put their heads through a horse
collar and then have a set time in which to contort their faces
into the most gruesome, scary or daft expressions possible. False
teeth may be left in or taken out, or even turned upside down if
desired. The winner is the person who gets the most audience
applause.

The word seems to have been originally Scottish, in the form
'girn', which - appropriately enough - may have been a contorted
form of 'grin'. It has had several meanings, of which the oldest -
from medieval times - is still current in Scots and Irish dialect,
and which is defined in the _Oxford English Dictionary_ as: "to
show the teeth in rage, pain, disappointment, etc; to snarl as a
dog; to complain persistently; to be fretful or peevish". These
days only the losers in the World Championship Gurning Competition
do much of that.


4. Q&A
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Q. The word 'bumf' or 'bumpf' refers to obvious or blatant
propaganda, usually issued by a government, an organization or a
large company, especially when you disagree with the content. Where
does this come from? [Dean Ogle, Canada]

A. It's an expressive and pithy word for all the dross that comes
in the mail. It's even more appropriate when you know where it
comes from.

It was originally British English, possibly public school slang, at
least according to Barrère and Leland's Dictionary of Slang of
1889. From there it dispersed to other parts of the former British
Empire, but it is less well known in the US, I believe.

Its source is usually taken to be the much older 'bum-fodder'. The
sense was the one that you give, of useless or tedious printed
information or documents - material whose only conceivable use was
to be torn up, hung up on a nail in the privy and used as toilet
paper. The full term was first recorded in the period of the
Commonwealth in Britain, about 1650 - I remember seeing a political
pamphlet of about that date which uses the word in its title. Its
first recorded appearance is in 1651, in the first volume of Sir
Thomas Urquhart's translation of the works of Rabelais. According
to the _Oxford English Dictionary_, it was also a transliteration
of the classical Latin 'anitergium'.

The slang abbreviation 'bumf' originally had a literal sense of
toilet paper, but quickly shifted its meaning back to the original.
The usual spelling is 'bumf' but 'bumph' is not unknown.

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Q.  Trying to explain the phrase 'play it by ear' is difficult to
the Japanese, especially when they ask you why the word 'ear' is
used. What is the origin of this phrase? [George]

A. The phrase 'by ear' goes back a long way in this figurative
sense. It's a metonym, the substitution of a word by another with
which it is closely associated (see http://www.world.widewords/qa/
qa-syn1.htm> for more on metonymy). It's in much the same style as
Antony's speech in Shakespeare's _Julius Caesar_: "Friends, Romans,
countrymen, lend me your ears". He mean this figuratively, asking
his audience to lend him the thing their ears contained, their
function - in other words to listen to him, to hear him out. In
phrases like 'by ear' the process is taken one stage further: not
merely the function of hearing but also being able to accurately
reproduce a melody one has learned, without needing written music.
So we have phrases like 'he has a good ear for music' and 'she can
play anything by ear'.

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Q. I wonder if you can shed some light on the phrase 'a monkey's
wedding'? When I was a child growing up in South Africa, my mother
would use the saying when we had rain and sunshine at the same
time. My wife tells me that she knows the saying from her family,
which is mainly of Irish blood. [Gary Williams]

A. It's certainly a well-known South African expression. A related
Afrikaans word, 'jakkalstrou', jackals wedding, also exists, which
I'm told is also known in Dutch. The South African English version
is the direct equivalent (what linguists call a loan translation)
of the Zulu 'umshado wezinkawu', a wedding for monkeys.

Back in 1998, Bert Vaux, Assistant Professor of Linguistics at
Harvard, asked members of the LINGUIST List about expressions for
this weather phenomenon (he called it a 'sunshower', a lovely name,
but one neither my dictionaries nor I have heard of). He was told
that similar sayings or proverbs exist in a surprising number of
languages. A great many of them have animal associations, often to
do with marriage (or, as one respondent commented, that activity
for which the word 'marriage' may be considered a suitable
euphemism).

In Arabic, it seems the term is "the rats are getting married",
while Bulgarians prefer to speak of bears doing so; Mr Vaux was
told that in Hindi it becomes "the jackal's wedding"; in Calabria,
it is said that "when it rains with sun, the foxes are getting
married", for which there's a similar phrase in Japanese; Koreans
refer to tigers likewise; there's even an English dialect term,
"the foxes' wedding", known from the south west, it seems. However,
in Polish, the saying is that "when the sun is shining and the rain
is raining, the witch is making butter". Several languages refer to
devils instead, as in Turkish: "the devils are getting married".

With so many examples from different languages, it is certainly
possible that there's also an Irish version, though I haven't come
across one.


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