World Wide Words -- 19 May 01

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 237           Saturday 19 May 2001
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sent each Saturday to 12,500+ subscribers in at least 106 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK      ISSN 1470-1448
<http://www.worldwidewords.org>   Mail: <editor at worldwidewords.org>
-------------------------------------------------------------------
If you want to leave the list, please DO NOT reply to this message.
 Instead see the instructions at the very end of this newsletter.
-------------------------------------------------------------------


Contents
--------
1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Cyberchondria.
3. Weird Words: Hocus-pocus.
4. Q & A: Fair to middling, Shan't.
5. Subscription commands, IPA, and copyright.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
-------------------------------------------------------------------
HULLABALOO  Following the Q&A piece last week, several subscribers
have pointed out that there may be another strand to the story.

It requires us to go back a couple of centuries, to the origins of
'hurly-burly', boisterous activity, known from about 1540 and which
famously appears in the scene with the three witches at the start
of Shakespeare's _Macbeth_: "When the Hurly-burly's done, \ When
the battle's lost, and won". This seems to be a short form of the
older 'hurling and burling', where a 'hurling' is an even older
term for a commotion, disturbance or tumult. 'Burling' seems never
to have existed on its own, and is no more than a rhyming variation
on the first word, as has happened also in 'namby-pamby', 'itsy-
bitsy' and others.

The French 'hurluberlu' that I mentioned is rather older than I had
suggested, and appears to have been first used by Rabelais at about
the same time that 'hurly-burly' first appeared in English. There
is a suggestion that his usage might be linked both to it and to
the Scots words that eventually produced 'hullabaloo', through
related terms that shared the old idea of 'hurling'.


2. Turns of Phrase: Cyberchondria
-------------------------------------------------------------------
This is worth noting as a late entry to the group of words in the
prefix 'cyber-', so fashionable in the middle nineties for matters
related to online communications. The second element is clearly
enough from the word 'hypochondria', abnormal anxiety about one's
health. Medical professionals seem to have coined the word in
exasperation at people who frantically search online for detailed
information on their medical problems, real or imagined. There are
three difficulties with doing so - much online material is designed
for other professionals and is difficult to interpret unless you're
already well versed in the field, some is biased or wrong, and some
comes from unregulated sellers of pharmaceuticals who don't know
purchasers' medical histories and cannot predict possible side
effects. There's so much material available that a person with
unfocused worries about health can easily become convinced they're
suffering from any number of serious ailments.

There was a time when the internet fed and fuelled her health
concerns - and she has featured in a number of articles about
'cyberchondria', which occurs when an individual surfs the net in a
frenzy of health anxiety.
                                            [_Observer_, Mar. 2001]

Hypochondria, the excessive fear of illness, has now been overtaken
by cyberchondria - the same fear made much worse, fuelled by
volumes of easily-accessible material available on the Internet.
                                         [_Daily Record_, May 2001]


3. Weird Words: Hocus-pocus
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Meaningless talk or activity designed to distract attention.

The word is nowadays applied to anything, speech or action, that's
designed to stop you seeing what the politician or salesman is
really up to or what's actually happening. Pay no attention to the
man behind the curtain, Dorothy ...

It is known that the word appeared in the seventeenth century as a
mock-Latin formula or incantation used by conjurors. What that
formula was and where it came from is less certain.

Thomas Ady wrote in his book of 1655, _A Candle in the Dark; or, a
Treatise Concerning the Nature of Witches and Witchcraft_: "I will
speak of one man ... that went about in King James his time ... who
called himself, The Kings Majesties most excellent Hocus Pocus, and
so was called, because that at the playing of every Trick, he used
to say, 'Hocus pocus, tontus talontus, vade celeriter jubeo', a
dark composure of words, to blinde the eyes of the beholders, to
make his Trick pass the more currantly without discovery".

Many people today believe that the phrase originated in a corrupted
form of the words of the Latin mass at the point of communion: 'hoc
est corpus', "here is the body" (of Christ), an idea that was first
aired by John Tillotson, who was Archbishop of Canterbury between
1691 and 1694. But as this was part of an anti-Catholic sermon, it
may be taken with a fair-sized pinch of salt. Another possibility,
suggested in current Oxford dictionaries, is the nonsense Latin
phrase "hax pax max Deus adimax".

Whatever the source, 'hocus-pocus' was at first a general name for
jugglers and conjurers and then - later in the seventeenth century
- it became a term for a trick or deception. It's also the source
of another common English word, since at the end of the following
century it was contracted to make 'hoax'.


-------------------------------------------------------------------
             TELL A FRIEND ABOUT WORLD WIDE WORDS
     Do forward this issue to somebody you think will like it.
-------------------------------------------------------------------


4. Q&A
-------------------------------------------------------------------
[Send your queries to <qa at worldwidewords.org>. All messages will be
acknowledged, but I can't guarantee to reply, as time is 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.]

                        -----------

Q. I have often heard the phrase 'fair to Midland' (middlin'?) in
response to the inquiry "How are you doing?" Any ideas on the
origins of this phrase? [John Rupp, Dallas, Texas]

A. I do like "fair to Midland". It sounds like a weather forecast:
"fair to Midland, but the North will have rain". No, it's really
'middling', a common enough word for something that is moderate to
average in quality, sometimes written the way people often say it,
as 'middlin''.

All the early examples I can find in literary works - from authors
like Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott and Artemus Ward - suggest it
became common on the east coast of the US from the 1860s on. The
first example in the _Oxford English Dictionary_ is from _Artemus
Ward: His Travels_ of 1865: "The men are fair to middling". Another
is from Horace Greeley's _Recollections of a Busy Life_ of 1869 in
which he records seeing a play: "The night was intensely cold, in-
doors as well as out; the house was thin; the playing from fair to
middling; yet I was in raptures from first to last".

Hunting around, I've found an example three decades earlier, from
an article entitled _A Succinct Account of the Sandwich Islands_,
in the July 1837 issue of the _Southern Literary Messenger_ of
Richmond, Virginia: "A Dinner on the Plains, Tuesday, September
20th. - This was given 'at the country seat' of J. C. Jones, Esq.
to the officers of the Peacock and Enterprise. The viands were
'from fair to middling, we wish we could say more.'"

So the phrase is American, most probably early nineteenth century.
But where does it come from? There's a clue in one of the OED's
later citations, from the _Century Dictionary_ of 1889: "Fair to
middling, moderately good: a term designating a specific grade of
quality in the market". The term 'middling' turns out to have been
used as far back as the previous century for an intermediate grade
of various kinds of goods, both in the US and in Britain - there
are references to a middling grade of flour or meal, pins, cotton,
and other commodities.

Which market the _Century Dictionary_ was referring to is made
plain by the nineteenth-century American trade journals that I've
consulted. 'Fair' and 'middling' were terms in the cotton business
for specific grades - the sequence ran from the best quality
(fine), through good, fair, middling and ordinary to the least good
(inferior), with a number of intermediates, one being 'middling
fair'. The phrase 'fair to middling' sometimes appeared as a
reference to this grade, or to a range of intermediate qualities -
it was common to quote indicative prices, for example, for "fair to
middling grade". The reference was so well known in the cotton
trade that it seems to have eventually escaped into the wider
language.

                        -----------

Q. In World Wide Words last week you wrote about "My own tendency
to use forms like...'shan't'". Presuming that 'shan't' is an
abbreviation of 'shall not', why do we not write 'sha'n't'?
[Malcolm Pack]

A. The simple answer is that people once often used to do so. There
are examples in the _Oxford English Dictionary_ from the latter
part of the eighteenth century through to the early twentieth.
However, it seems it has always been more common to write 'shan't'
than 'sha'n't' - the OED has 123 examples of the former against
only 21 of the latter.

An early one is from a work by Fanny Burney in 1796: "He'll make
himself so spruce, he says, we sha'n't know him again". A late one
I've turned up is dated 1902, from _The Grand Babylon Hotel_ by
Arnold Bennett: "We sha'n't sell again, Prince, until we are tired
of our bargain". This spelling is now almost never seen.

What is a little peculiar is that 'shan't' is actually older, being
found in works from the end of the seventeenth century on, as in
this one from Colley Cibber's _Careless Husband_ of 1704: "Nay, you
shan't stir a step". Many well-known authors preferred it, like
Jane Austen, who wrote in _Sense and Sensibility_ in 1797: "You
shan't talk me out of my satisfaction".

I would guess that the 'sha'n't' form eventually lost out because
the double apostrophe was a nuisance to write and looked odd. The
abbreviation, as you say, strictly demands the extra apostrophe,
and it was probably the influence of logically minded eighteenth-
century grammarians who persuaded many people to put the extra one
in to start with - but whenever did logic ultimately matter in
language?


5. Subscription commands
-------------------------------------------------------------------
* All messages relating to subscriptions should be sent to the
  list server address <listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org>. Please
  DO NOT send them to any worldwidewords.org address.

* To leave the list, send the list server the message

     SIGNOFF WORLDWIDEWORDS

* To join the list, send the list server the message

     SUBSCRIBE WORLDWIDEWORDS First-name Last-name

* For a complete list of commands, including instructions on how
  to change your e-mail address, send the list server the message

     INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS

-------------------------------------------------------------------
* WORLD WIDE WORDS is copyright (c) Michael B Quinion 2001. You
  may reproduce this mailing in whole or in part in other free
  media provided that you don't alter the text in any way, you give
  the source as World Wide Words, and you quote the site address
  of <http://www.worldwidewords.org>.
-------------------------------------------------------------------