World Wide Words -- 16 Jun 01

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 241           Saturday 16 June 2001
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: PVR.
3. Weird Words: Lackadaisical.
4. Q & A: Salad days, All my eye and Betty Martin.
5. Subscription commands, IPA, and copyright.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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SALAD DAYS  A piece with this title was listed in the contents last
week, but wasn't present. The mailing got too long and I removed
it, but forgot about the contents list.

MONKEY'S WEDDING  Lots and lots of subscribers wrote in after last
week's piece, many of them in response to my passing comment that I
didn't know the word 'sunshower' and that it wasn't in any of my
dictionaries. The word is widely known among subscribers in the
USA, largely among people on the east coast. It was also reported
as being frequently found in Canada, New Zealand and Australia, and
also sometimes from Britain. The wide geographic spread of replies
suggests that the term has been carried to these countries from
Britain. It is certainly quite old: I've since found examples from
the 1850s in American writings, but - curiously - no British ones.

Many subscribers also wrote to say that they knew another saying to
describe the phenomenon: "the devil is beating his wife". Some told
of a longer version: "The devil's behind his kitchen door beating
his wife with a frying pan". It seems that the saying is well known
especially among older subscribers from the American South (roughly
the Carolinas to Texas) plus New York and New England.

Many correspondents were as puzzled as I am about the reasons for
sayings about weddings and devils to describe what is after all a
fairly mild and not unpleasant meteorological phenomenon. There's
clearly a common association that is understood by widely divergent
language communities, so it seems to be something at a level more
fundamental than superficial culture. But what is it?

Anne Virtue wrote: "In the 1940s when I was a child in Virginia, I
was taught to put my ear to the ground during a period when the
rain was coming down and the sun was shining. When I heard a
drumming from below, I was told that what I was hearing was the
sound of the devil beating his wife. I wonder if all those marrying
animals might be 'thumping' away below". David Howorth also
conjectured: "I'm now wondering whether 'beating' is a euphemism
for less vicious conjugal activity". Could this be it?


2. Turns of Phrase: PVR
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This currently fashionable abbreviation stands not for "Player
Value Rating" as American football fans might think, nor for the
medics' "Pulmonary Vascular Resistance", but for "Personal Video
Recorder". Readers in the US may be more familiar with this term
than those in Britain or elsewhere, since the US has three types on
sale at the moment - TiVo, UltimateTV and ReplayTV - while only
TiVo has so far made it to the UK. The concept marries a digital
video recorder with a computer and an electronic program guide,
downloaded via the telephone, that lets you look 14 days ahead. You
choose up to 35 hours of programmes, which are stored on the disk
as they are broadcast for you to watch when you like. One key
advance over the VCR is that you can browse, replay or skip at
will, and watch one programme while another is recording. Some of
the systems let you skip the commercials, are capable of learning
your viewing habits, and allow you to pause live programmes
temporarily while, say, you answer the telephone.

PVRs are interactive - as they play the selected program they also
collect data about viewing habits that advertisers can use to
target commercials at specific audiences.
                                 [_Time International_, Mar. 2001]

Still, PVRs promise sweeping new powers to this nation of tubers:
Save hours wasted watching commercials! Rearrange your viewing
schedule without limits! No more messy VCR tapes! There's always
something on TV that you might actually want to watch! This is why
PVR fans remain steadfast even after the unit fails to record that
crucial episode of their favorite show.
                                     [_Forbes Magazine_, June 2001]


3. Weird Words: Lackadaisical
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Lacking enthusiasm and determination; carelessly lazy.

This word is delightfully evocative, bringing to mind some languid
person lolling on a couch while all around goes to ruin. It owes
its origin, strangely enough, to an old saying of regret or dismay,
'lack-a-day!', a short form of 'alack-a-day!'. 'Alack' dates back
to medieval times, and probably comes from a dialect word 'lack',
variously interpreted as failure, fault, reproach, disgrace, or
shame. So 'alack-a-day!' originally meant "Shame or reproach to the
day!" (that it should have brought this upon me). But over time it
became weakened until it became no more than a vapid and vacuous
cry when some minor matter went awry. In the eighteenth century,
the form 'lackadaisy' appeared, with 'lackadaisical' coming along
shortly afterwards for somebody who regularly used the cry. At
first it meant that the person was feebly sentimental rather than
lazy. The first person recorded as using it was Laurence Sterne, in
his _Sentimental Journey_ of 1768: "I took hold of her fingers in
one hand, and applied the two forefingers of my other to the
artery. - Would to heaven! my dear Eugenius, thou hadst passed by,
and beheld me sitting in my black coat, and in my lack-a-day-sical
manner, counting the throbs of it, one by one, with as much true
devotion as if I had been watching the critical ebb or flow of her
fever". Later it moved towards the idea of somebody who was
affectedly languishing, and thence to someone merely lazy.


4. Q&A
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[Send your questions to <qa at worldwidewords.org>. All messages will
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If you wish to comment on one of the replies below, please do NOT
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Q. We here at work were tossing around hackneyed phrases this
morning. Two of us thought of the phrase 'salad days'. What
is the origin of this phrase? [Mike Bumbeck]

A. A nice easy one for a change. Unlike so many words and phrases
that people ask about, we know for certain where this one comes
from. It appears in Shakespeare's _Antony and Cleopatra_ of 1606,
in the speech at the end of Act One in which Cleopatra is
regretting her youthful dalliances with Julius Caesar: "My salad
days, When I was green in judgment". So the phrase came to meant "a
period of youthful inexperience or indiscretion", though it only
became popular from the middle of the nineteenth century on.

The link here is 'green', which had already had a meaning for a
couple of centuries at least before Shakespeare's day of someone
youthful, just like the young green shoots of spring, and also of
somebody who was as yet inexperienced or immature. Incidentally,
for Shakespeare a 'salad' wasn't just lettuce with some dressing,
but a much more complicated dish of chopped, mixed and seasoned
vegetables (its name comes from the Latin word for salt); the word
was also used for any vegetable that could be included in that
dish.

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Q. I was wondering about your opinion regarding the origin of the
phrase 'all my eye and Betty Martin'. A bit of research turns up
some rather spurious-sounding theories about derivation from a
possibly non-existent Latin prayer, but I've got my doubts about
that. Do you have any further suggestions? [Aquarius]

A. You're right to be sceptical. This is among the most puzzling
phrases in the language. Most authorities say firmly that the
stories about the Latin prayer are almost certainly off beam, but
having looked into it I'm less sceptical.

Footnotes first. The phrase or saying, 'all my eye and Betty
Martin' means that something is total and complete nonsense. It is
found in British English from the eighteenth century on, but is
hardly known today. It is first recorded in a letter of 1781 that
was collected in W H Hutton's _Burford Papers_. We also know that
'all my eye', with the same sense, is at least half a century
older.

By the 1780s, the phrase was clearly well established and well-
known. Jon Bee (a pseudonym for one John Badcock, about whom very
little is known) suggested in 1823 in his _Slang, a Dictionary of
the Turf, the Ring, the Chase_, that it came from a Latin prayer,
"Ora pro mihi, beate Martine" ("Pray for me, blessed Martin"),
presumably St Martin of Tours, the patron saint of innkeepers and
reformed drunkards. Most scholars reject this, since no trace of
this prayer has been found anywhere in the Latin liturgy. If you're
looking for an even more way-out suggestion, try Dr L A Waddell,
who in 1914 suggested in his book _The Phoenician Origins of
Britons, Scots, and Anglo-Saxons_ that the phrase came from "O
mihi, Brito Martis", or "Oh (bring help) to me, Brito Martis". She
was a goddess associated with Crete, whom Dr Waddell linked to
Britain via the Phoenicians who traded for Cornish tin. Don't
believe a word of it.

The truth is, nobody really knows anything much about where the
saying came from, except that "Betty Martin" was pretty obviously
tacked on to the end of the existing "all my eye" (in similar vein,
Londoners later created "all my eye and elbow", "all my eye and
grandmother", and "all my eye and Tommy", among others). Was Betty
Martin a real person in late eighteenth-century London? Eric
Partridge guessed so, but she remains a ghostly figure. Charles Lee
suggested in his memoirs in 1805 that there had once been an
abandoned woman named Grace who married a Mr Martin, but became
known as Betty Martin, and who was known for using "all my eye" a
lot. The letter I mentioned earlier said it was "a sea phrase that
Admiral Jemm frequently makes use of", which might make a "Betty
Martin" some long-defunct bit of nautical terminology or equipment.

It's even possible that there really was a Latin prayer, despite
the nay-saying of scholars. 'Beate Martine' would have been the
phrase used in calling on St Martin, and he was a popular saint
invoked in medieval times and later. I have found the phrase "Ora
pro nobis beate Martine" ("Pray for us, blessed Martin") in a
prayer for intercession in a French book of hours of about 1500 in
the Royal Library in Copenhagen. That may have been a once-off, but
there just might have been others, enough that 'beate Martine' was
common enough to be corrupted and tacked on to 'all my eye'.

There we must leave matters, deeply unsatisfactorily, I know.


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