World Wide Words -- 23 Jun 01

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 242          Saturday 23 June 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. Turns of Phrase: E-day.
3. Topical Words: Doh!
4. Weird Words: Thelemic.
5. Q & A: Won't.
6. Subscription commands, IPA, and copyright.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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SALAD DAYS  Jan Freeman, who writes a well-known word column for
the Boston Globe, e-mailed me to say that she had written a piece
back in April to explain how this expression has shifted sense in
the US in the past twenty years or so. It now often refers to a
period in the past when somebody was at the peak of their abilities
or earning power, in their heyday, not necessarily when they were
young. The shift from the older sense of being inexperienced or
immature isn't so hard to understand when you think how few people
actually know their Shakespeare well. For Jan Freeman's piece, see
<http://www.boston.com/globe/columns/freeman/salad_days.htm>.

ALL MY EYE AND BETTY MARTIN  Several Latin scholars pointed out in
response to the Q&A piece on this phrase last week that "Ora pro
mihi, beate Martine" could never have turned up in a prayer, as it
is ungrammatical. And many others mentioned the version of the
original saying, "my eye!", commonly used at one time - in the US
as well as Britain - as a scornful rebuke to something that was
considered nonsense. This variant is actually quite old, being
first recorded in the early 1820s.


2. Turns of Phrase: E-day
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Just for once, the 'e' doesn't stand for 'electronic'. E-day is
Euro Day: 1 January 2002, when the twelve countries of the European
Union that have signed up to adopt the single currency (Britain not
among them) change over to the Euro. Large-scale logistical
problems are inevitable: the European Central Bank will have to
distribute 16 billion Euro notes and 56 billion Euro coins - enough
paper bills, it is claimed, to circle the equator 50 times and
enough metal to replicate 35 Eiffel Towers. As there will be a
changeover period of a month or two, retailers predict chaos as
people pay for things in old currencies and receive change in the
new, or try to pay in a mixture of old and new. The impending loss
of national currencies is causing agonising problems for people who
prefer to keep their money in the mattress rather than in the bank.
It is particularly affecting criminal gangs, such as prostitution
rings and drug smugglers in eastern Europe, who are having to shift
large sums of illicit funds into other currencies, especially the
American dollar. It is said that this is one of the main forces
tending to distort exchange rates at the moment and keep the dollar
high.

To prepare, businesses and banks can begin buying euro banknotes
and coins in September but must sign contracts that prohibit
circulating them to the public before E-Day.
                 [_International Herald Tribune_, Jan. 2001]

Prodi said his greatest fear is not that people will continue to
flee from the euro, but rather that so many investors will jump
back into the euro once E-Day passes with relative tranquillity.
                               [_Washington Post_, May 2001]


3. Topical Words: Doh!
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This expressive monosyllable hit the news last week when the Oxford
English Dictionary published its usual quarterly update of the OED
web site.

For the first time, it included a set of 250 new words and senses
from across the alphabet, as well as updating the letter M, its
current preoccupation. Many of these words may not be new to you
and me - the list includes Internet, lifestyle drug, road rage and
World Wide Web - but they are new in the sense that they're too
recent to have been featured in the 1989 Second Edition. It was
good to see some of the entries appear for which I've helped to
acquire evidence.

The one that has attracted press attention is 'doh'. Most of us
would associate it - or 'd'oh' as Matt Groening would write it and
Dan Castellaneta would say it - with that famous American cartoon
export _The Simpsons_, which has broadcast it across the world.

But, as the OED's entry shows, this little exclamation, with its
candid admission of foolishness on the part of the speaker (or of
frustration at the way things have turned out), has been around
rather longer than the Simpsons. The first example in the entry is
from a British school story of 1952 by Anthony Buckeridge. After
lurking for a couple more decades, the little noise really burst
forth in print from the early nineties on. Hey, that's just after
the Simpsons appeared! Doh!

The OED also published an entry for 'duh'. This is probably the
original of which 'doh' is a variation, but they have distinct
senses. The OED defines 'duh' as "Expressing inarticulacy or
incomprehension. Also implying that another person has said
something foolish or extremely obvious". Their first example was
actually first recorded in the _Random House Historical Dictionary
of American Slang_; editor John Lighter found it in a Merrie
Melodies cartoon of 1943: "Duh... Well, he can't outsmart me,
'cause I'm a moron".

It seems to have become playground slang in the late 1950s, as kids
realised it was a neat way to express the idea that something just
said was either totally banal or really, really stupid. It was a
great way to score off someone - there's no good come-back to a
scornful 'duh!'. This school usage gained rare public notice in the
_New York Times_ magazine in November 1963: "A favorite expression
is 'duh.' ... This is the standard retort when someone makes a
conversational contribution bordering on the banal. For example,
the first child says, 'The Russians were first in space.'
Unimpressed, the second child replies (or rather grunts), 'Duh.'"

In the nineties, it turned up more widely, joining 'not!' as a
sentence stopper. Whereas 'not!' means that something isn't so
despite the writer just having pretended it was, 'duh!' means
"That's so stupid!", or "How silly of me not to realise that!".
Sometimes it's tongue-in-cheek, as here from the _Guardian_
newspaper in 1998: "He did it by proving the Taniyama-Shimura
conjecture, which posits the pairing of elliptic equations and
modular forms. (Well, 'duh')".

It's not the first dictionary 'duh' has hit. But it has now
received the Oxford seal of approval and with 'doh' joins an
illustrious set that includes ah, ahem, gee, ha, oho, ouch, ow,
tsk, tut and um. Others will no doubt follow - there's already a
draft entry for 'aargh!', which the researchers have traced back to
1787.

[The OED web site is at <http://www.oed.com>. It is a subscription
service only, though you can get access to newsletters and a word
of the day.]


4. Weird Words: Thelemic  /TEl'i:mIK/
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Permitting people to do as they like.

This refers to the fictional abbey of Thélème in the first part of
Rabelais' sixteenth-century _Gargantua and Pantagruel_: "In all
their rule and strictest tie of their order there was but this one
clause to be observed, Do What Thou Wilt" (in the original French
'Fay ce que vouldras', usually now translated as "Do as you
please"). Rabelais believed that a rule as libertarian as this was
possible among men "that were free, well-born, well-bred, and
conversant in honest companies" because they have "naturally an
instinct and spur that prompts them unto virtuous actions". He took
the name of the abbey from the Greek word 'thelema', will.

Rabelais' ideas were distorted by the notorious Hell-fire Club of
the eighteenth century, founded by Sir Francis Dashwood at the
former Cistercian abbey at Medmenham, on the banks of the Thames
near Marlow. Rabelais' motto was placed over the entrance, but the
members indulged themselves not with virtuous actions but with
obscene parodies of the rites of the Christian religion. The word
was taken up in the early twentieth century by the occultist
Aleister Crowley in reference to what he called his "thelemic
power-zones".


5. 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. You discussed the missing apostrophe in 'shan't' recently, but
not the related contraction for 'will not' - 'won't' - which not
only has a missing apostrophe, but the substitute letter 'o'. How
so? [Donald Eckhardt; similar questions came from Joe Pallas, David
Beckham, Margaret Diamond, Lyle Wiedeman, and John Elliot]

A. OK, everyone, I know when I'm outnumbered! Apologies for having
taken so long to produce the answer to this one.

Actually 'willn't' is not unknown historically as a contracted form
of 'will not', though it has never been common; Charlotte Brontë
used it in _Shirley_ in 1849, as a representation of local
Yorkshire speech: "That willn't wash, Miss". It turns up also in
_Mary Barton_ by Elizabeth Gaskell: "No, indeed I willn't tell,
come what may".

So why the 'o' in the contraction when it should be 'i'? The answer
lies in the irregularity of the verb 'will': it varied a great deal
in different places and at different times. Though the present
tense was often 'wil' or 'wille', there was a period when it
appeared as 'wol' or 'wolle'; this was especially common in the
Midlands of England in the late medieval period, and may have been
an unconscious imitation of the simple past tense, which seems to
have been spelled and said with an 'o' as standard.

For some reason, though the present tense eventually standardised
on 'will', the contraction of the negative settled down to be
'won't', using the vowel from the other form. As several of you
have pointed out, there ought to be another apostrophe in there, as
there should be with 'shan't', marking the missing 'l' or 'll', but
it seems to have been extremely rare, even more so than the second
apostrophe in 'sha'n't'.


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