World Wide Words -- 24 Mar 01

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 229          Saturday 24 March 2001
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Contents
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1. Topical Words: Replica.
2. Weird Words: Atrabilious.
3. Q & A: Woebegone, Cold shoulder, Time out of mind.
4. Subscription commands, IPA, and copyright.


1. Topical Words: Replica
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It's easy to blunt the cutting edge of words; it's much harder to
sharpen them again. It was the advertisement on the back of the
television pages of the _Daily Telegraph_ that brought this to
mind. "Own a replica of a famous football stadium", it enticed its
readers.

Many people - and many dictionaries - still regard 'replica' in the
same way as does the 1965 edition of Fowler's _Modern English
Usage_. That says firmly that a 'replica' is properly an exact copy
of a work of art made by the original artist, and adds: "It is this
proper sense that alone makes the foreign word 'replica' worth
maintaining in English by the side of the abundant English words
for copies or duplicates".

In particular, the definition implies that a 'replica' is the same
size as the original, which is why - in common, I would guess, with
other readers - the advertisement brought me to a dead stop. How
many of us, after all, have the rolling acres to accommodate a
replica football stadium, even at the knock-down price of sixty
quid?

The current edition of _Chambers_ agrees with Fowler, as do the
_Encarta World Dictionary_, the _Penguin English Dictionary_ and
several American works. But the _New Oxford Dictionary of English_
supports the advertisement copywriter all the way. It says with its
usual authority that a 'replica' "is an exact copy or model of
something, especially on a smaller scale". Note 'model' and
'smaller scale'. To emphasise the point, it cites "a replica of the
Empire State Building" as an example of the sense. Readers with an
over-developed sense of logic might contest 'exact', since no model
can ever be a truly exact copy of an original so much larger, but
the idea is clear enough.

Oxford Dictionaries may be unusual at the moment in giving this
changed sense, but they are very much in touch with current usage.
A recent report about banning replica guns in Britain pointed out a
problem with definition: did the ban include small-scale replicas
as well as full-sized ones? This sense of 'replica' is being seen
more and more, and a word that once had a precise meaning and
function is reduced by sloppy writers to an elegant alternative to
'model'.


2. Weird Words: Atrabilious  /,atr@'bIlI at s/
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Gloomy or morose; bad-tempered or irritable.

This is now literary or poetic, so anyone you stumble across using
it is probably exposing their erudition. It came into English in
the seventeenth century from Latin 'atra bilis', black bile. This
is the direct Latin equivalent (what linguists call a loan
translation) of the Greek word that gave us 'melancholy', which
comes from Greek 'melas', black, plus 'khole', bile. (Incidentally,
'atrabilious' is the only word in English that uses this Latin word
for black rather than the better-known 'niger').

Black bile was one of the four humours of ancient medicine that in
their relative proportions determined one's underlying disposition.
The others were blood, phlegm, and yellow bile or choler. These
gave rise respectively to the adjectives 'sanguine' (cheerfully
optimistic, from the French word 'sang', blood), 'phlegmatic'
(unemotional and stolidly calm), and 'choleric' (bad-tempered or
irritable).

However, 'atrabilious' took on some of the idea behind the choleric
sort of bile (and one sense of 'bilious') to mean bad-tempered as
well as melancholy.


3. Q&A
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Q. I have long been puzzled by the fact that 'woebegone' is used in
a sense exactly opposite to what the word seemingly means. I grew
up with the expression "a woebegone face" meaning a sad, woeful,
unhappy face. But if you take the word as it is spelled, it should
mean "a happy, cheerful, optimistic face full of determined good
cheer". Why is this (and why does the dictionary give the
contradictory meaning)? [John David Hamilton, Ontario, Canada]

A. It does look as though it's from a wish or desire: "let woe be
gone". But the story is rather more complicated, and to answer it,
we have to delve into medieval English.

'Woebegone' is first recorded in _The Romance of Guy of Warwick_
which appeared about 1300. At that date, people would say things
like "me is woe begon", grief has beset me. Notice the word order,
with 'me' as the object of the sentence, but put first. The verb
here is 'bego', which has been obsolete for something like four
hundred years, but which in medieval times had a variety of senses,
such as to go round, surround or beset.

Over time, the link between 'woe' and 'begone', the past participle
of 'bego', became so close that they fused into a single adjective,
so tightly linked that they survived shifts in language and the
loss of the verb 'bego'.

For some centuries it retained this sense of "afflicted by grief",
oppressed with misfortune, distress, sorrow or grief. Shakespeare
uses it this way in _Henry IV_:

    Even such a man, so faint, so spiritless,
    So dull, so dread in look, so woe-begone,
    Drew Priam's curtain in the dead of night
    And would have told him half his Troy was burnt.

This quotation in particular was so well known that it contributed
to a revival of 'woebegone' in a subtly altered sense at the
beginning of the nineteenth century, not meaning somebody actually
beset by woes, but somebody whose appearance makes them look as
though they are.

We're now a long way from that medieval romance, but in continuing
to use the word we retain a small vestige of middle English as a
linguistic fossil. Several other archaic forms in 'woe' have also
survived, such as "woe is me" and "woe betide you", presumably
because there's a continuing need for formulaic lamentatory
utterances.

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Q. I was told that if you were served 'cold shoulder' meat in a
medieval castle, it was a sign that you were not welcome there. Is
this true? [Ken Blose; a related question came from Marc Foorman]

A. This explanation and variations on it are very common. I know of
at least two supposedly reputable books of word histories that give
detailed stories based on the presumption that unwelcome guests in
olden times got cold food. These are surely mistaken, no more than
well-meant attempts to explain a puzzling phrase - in other words,
we're back to our old friend folk etymology.

Let me give you the facts. The first recorded use of the phrase is
in a novel by Sir Walter Scott, _The Antiquary_, in 1816: "The
Countess's dislike didna gang farther at first than just showing o'
the cauld shouther". (If you find the Scots dialect to be hard
going, you may prefer this, from another of his works, _St Ronan's
Well_ of 1824: "I must tip him the cold shoulder, or he will be
pestering me eternally".)

Within a decade or two of that date it was being seen all over the
place in Britain - it appears in works by Charlotte and Emily
Brontë, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope and John Galsworthy,
among other authors. The first reference I can find in American
works is in a book of 1844; later it became at least as common as
in Britain and can be found, for example, in works by Louisa May
Alcott and Mark Twain.

The sudden popularity of the phrase from the 1820s on, and the
total absence of it in literature before Sir Walter Scott used it,
suggests strongly that he either invented it or he popularised a
saying that beforehand had been uncommon. As he takes the trouble
to define it in the glossary to _The Antiquary_, it is very likely
that it was an existing Scots expression that he happened to find
useful (though it isn't in the _Concise Scots Dictionary_). It's
difficult nowadays, when Scott's novels are by no means commonly
read, to remember how popular and successful he was and the
influence his writing had. It is entirely possible that those two
uses I've quoted were enough to establish 'cold shoulder' in the
public mind.

It also seems highly likely that the phrase never referred to meat.
It is much more probable that the cold shoulder was always a direct
reference to that dismissive jerk of one side of the upper body to
indicate a studied rejection or indifference. Scott's use of "tip
the cold shoulder" and "show the cold shoulder" suggest this is so.

The _Oxford English Dictionary_ points out that there were many
puns created around the phrase in the nineteenth century. One of
these was 'cold shoulder of mutton', but the move is undoubtedly
from the shorter phrase to the longer, not the other way about. But
the existence of that version gave unwarranted support to people
thinking it had something to do with offhand and perfunctory
hospitality.

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Q. I have been unable to satisfy myself about the origin of the
phrase 'time out of mind' despite the fact I keep using it. I know
it is C19th but where did it originate? [P J Gilder]

A. You may be surprised to hear that it's much older than that.
It's first recorded from the British Rolls of Parliament in 1414
and in 1432 in the modern form. The second example refers to a
petition by the inhabitants of the little fishing port of Lymington
in Hampshire and says (in modernised spelling): "That through time
out of mind there were wont many diverse ships to come in to the
said haven". It is almost identical in meaning to another phrase
"from time immemorial". Both may be variant versions of the phrase
"beyond legal memory", which refers to the year 1189, fixed by a
statute in 1275 as being the oldest date that English law can take
account of. By the time Edmund Burke was writing, in 1782, the
phrase had pretty well become a cliché: "Our constitution is a
prescriptive constitution; it is a constitution, whose sole
authority is, that it has existed time out of mind".


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