World Wide Words -- 26 May 01

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 238           Saturday 26 May 2001
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Dress-up Thursday.
3. Weird Words: Petrichor.
4. Q & A: Forms of the possessive, Bog-standard.
5. Subscription commands, IPA, and copyright.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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FAIR TO MIDDLING.  Bob Leeds wrote to point out that "there is a
city in Texas named Midland, and in Texas the expression 'fair to
Midland' is jocularly used as a substitute for the commoner, 'fair
to middling'". So the questioner had not misheard the phrase.

Edward Teague e-mailed to say that fair to middling "Is a well used
and well understood term to describe raw cotton fibre in the
Lancashire cotton trade and equated with average quality i.e. not
good, but not bad". This supports my argument that the phrase came
out of the American cotton trade, since much American cotton was
imported into Liverpool for the Lancashire trade, and presumably
the term came with it. Several British subscribers reported that
the phrase is well known to them, as indeed it is to me. It seems
that, as in the US, the phrase spread out from the cotton trade
into wider usage.


2. Turns of Phrase: Dress-up Thursday
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This has become - dare I say it? - a fashionable term in recent
months in the US, and the phrase has now crossed the Atlantic to
Britain. It's a reaction against 'dress-down Friday', which started
out as a well-meaning attempt to inject informality into office
life, but which seems to have led to more stress than ever.
Employees could no longer hide behind uniform business dress, but
had to start thinking about what to wear. In the way of things,
this informal Friday clothing has itself become stylised into
'business casual'. 'Dress-up Thursday' seems to have been invented
by enterprising American menswear firms last year to try to revive
the popularity of the suit, though industry pundits predict that
the move towards more casual work dress styles is going to continue
inexorably. 'Dress-up Thursday' is causing some employers to tear
their hair out. One said: "We have workplace dress-up and workplace
dress-down. Why don't we dress normal and get the work done?"

Some companies, finding that casual sometimes means sloppy, are now
testing a novel idea: Dress-up Monday or Dress-up Thursday.
                    [_Christian Science Monitor_, Apr. 2001]

Leading chains such as Mens Wearhouse now promote themselves as
guides helping baffled men navigate the new dress codes. But the
industry is also trying to fight the casual trend, last year
launching a campaign to promote dress-up Thursdays.
               [_The Record_ (Bergen County, NJ), Apr. 2001]


3. Weird Words: Petrichor  /'pEtrik@(r)/
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The smell of rain on dry ground.

More specifically, it's the pleasant smell that often accompanies
the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather in certain
regions. Didn't you always want a word for it? It was named by two
Australian researchers in an article in _Nature_ in 1964, who
discovered that the smell is an oily essence that comes from rocks
or soil that are often (but not always) clay-based. The oil is a
complicated set of at least fifty different compounds, rather like
a perfume. It turned out that the oils are given off by vegetation
during dry spells and are adsorbed on to the surface of rocks and
soil particles, to be released into the air again by the next
rains. I can't find any record of anybody having tried to bottle
and sell it, but can't help thinking it would be a hot item (my
agent's fee will be the usual modest 10%). The word comes from
Greek 'petros', a stone, plus 'ichor', from the Greek word for the
fluid that flows like blood in the veins of the gods. So the word
means something like "essence of rock". Alas, it is rarely
encountered.


4. Q&A
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Q. I was reading a novel the other day (_The Great Roxhythe_, by
Georgette Heyer), set in the 17th century and written apparently in
the style of that time. I was struck by the lack of contractions in
the dialogue. For instance, a character might say "I am the King
his servant" instead of "I am the King's servant" or "It is the
Queen her diary" and so on. Was this strictly formal court use or
common speech for the time, and if common, when did contractions
begin to be used? [Kim Thornton]

A. In her attempt to set the period flavour, Ms Heyer's use of
'his' and 'her' for the possessive does sounds a tiny bit overdone.
But that needs some explanation, because the story of the
possessive in English is more than a little complicated.

Back before the Norman Conquest, most English nouns marked the
possessive form by changing the ending (modern German, to take just
one example among many, does exactly the same thing). We've lost
nearly all of these endings in modern English, the only survivor
being 's' for the plural. The standard singular possessive ending
in Old English was also usually 's' or 'es' ('hundes', of the
hound).

But there was sometimes a problem with adding the ending to nouns
that weren't of English origin, or to names, or to words that had a
final 's' on them already. In such cases, writers occasionally used
possessive pronouns instead: "The Nile her source", "Enac his
kindred". The earliest examples are from King Alfred's translation
of Orosius's history of the world, dated to the late ninth century.

Centuries later the possessive using 'his' and its relatives came
to be used more and more even when a perfectly good possessive
ending was available. The 'his' form became especially popular
during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, so much so that
people began to think that the final 's' in the old possessive
ending was actually an abbreviation of 'his', and so started to
spell it with an apostrophe, as we still do. For example, the OED
has this example from 1555: "Before I should make the king's
majesty privy unto it". This was a much smaller step than you might
think, since the unstressed pronunciations of the two forms are not
that different - "Tom his book" said quickly is close to "Tom's
book", especially as the initial 'h' of 'his' was often missing in
normal speech anyway.

One characteristic of the his/her/their form of the possessive was
that it appeared when people were being especially formal, so you
found phrases like "for Jesus Christ his sake". Sometimes you got
mixed usages, like "in the Queen her Majesty's name", which is from
1574. What was especially odd was that people occasionally used
'his' even when 'her' would have been right, because the influence
of the final 's' on 'his' was just too strong to resist. There's an
example from 1607 in the _Oxford English Dictionary_: "Mrs. Sands
his maid", meaning "Mrs Sands' maid".

So, to finally get back to your point, the possessive form with a
final 's' was common right from Old English times onwards. The only
substantial change was that in later centuries the apostrophe crept
in. The form using the possessive pronouns mainly appeared when
people were being formal or when nouns resisted having a final 's'
attached. So Ms Heyer was over-simplifying if she only ever used
the possessive form with 'his' or 'her'.

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Q. Any thoughts on the origin of 'bog-standard', as in 'bog-
standard' comprehensive? [Paul Gretton, The Netherlands; similar
questions came from Bernie Booth and Pete Shaw in Sheffield]

A. First some background for readers not close to British affairs.
The comment about "bog-standard comprehensives" was produced at a
briefing in February 2001 by the Prime Minister's press spokesman,
Alastair Campbell. In Britain a comprehensive school is one for
children from 11 to 16 that caters for both sexes and all ranges of
abilities.

'Bog-standard' is a well-known informal term, which originated in
Britain; it means something ordinary or basic, but in a dismissive
or derogatory way. Mr Campbell used it like that and caused offence
to those who support the comprehensive system. (It had sufficient
impact, though probably only temporarily, that I've seen one writer
refer to a young man "just out of the local bog standard",
expecting to be understood.)

'Bog-standard' is a puzzling phrase and nobody knows where it came
from. It first appeared in the 1980s, seemingly out of the air.

The most obvious suggestion is that it has a link with 'bog'. This
has long been a British slang term for a lavatory or toilet. It's a
shortened form of the older 'bog-house' for a latrine, privy, or
place of ease, which is seventeenth century and is a variation on
an even older term, 'boggard'. (This doesn't seem to have any
connection with the other sense of 'boggard' or 'boggart' for a
goblin or sprite.) The slangy 'bog' definitely has a negative edge
to it, so it might just be the origin, though how it came about is
far from clear.

Despite the obvious association of ideas, the set of words for
privy places doesn't seem to link directly with 'bog' for a marshy
area (though the association no doubt helped it along). There are
derogatory terms associated with bogs, such as 'bog-trotter', an
eighteenth-century term of abuse for an Irish person. But words
like these hardly seem like a source for 'bog-standard'.

The only other suggestion I've seen for the origin of the term is
that it's a corruption or variant form of 'box-standard', for
something that is just the way it comes out of the box, with no
customisation or improvements. There's a big problem with this, in
that there's almost no written evidence for anybody using 'box-
standard' in this way.

The exception is a comment by the British computer inventor and
all-round genius Sir Clive Sinclair. In February 1983, he said in
an interview with the magazine _Computerworld_: "Luckily, we cannot
foresee the day when a computer becomes just a standard box. There
will be box-standard machines along the road, but we do not simply
have to make those".

In the same way that one swallow doesn't make a summer, one sight
of the phrase is hardly conclusive evidence, but it does suggest
that there just conceivably might have been a jargon phrase in the
electronics business at the time, which has since been appropriated
and generalised. Or Sir Clive may just have made it up on the spur
of the moment as a pun on 'bog-standard', and the true history of
the phrase lies elsewhere.


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