World Wide Words -- 10 Nov 01

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS        ISSUE 262         Saturday 10 November 2001
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Skulduggery.
3. Review: Language and the Internet, by David Crystal.
4. Q & A: Embuggerance.
5. Over To You: Sleeping one's head into train oil.
6. Subscription commands and information.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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CORRECTIONS  In the Weird Words piece on 'cyborg' last week, I
misspelled the name of Norbert Wiener. I often do. And the ISBN of
the Verbatim book lost a digit in transcription - the correct code
is 0-15-601209-X. Apologies.

SEMIOPATHY  This word was described by the Feedback column of the
New Scientist on Thursday as meaning "empathy with objects such as
'alarmed doors'". The column independently quotes variant forms of
several of the Misplaced Modifiers featured last week, including a
road sign that warns of "Dead Slow Children Playing". See the
column at: <http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opfeedback.jsp?
id=ns231699#29>.


2. Weird Words: Skulduggery
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Underhand or unscrupulous behaviour; trickery.

There is doubtless no more activity of this kind in the USA than
anywhere else, but it was in that country that the word was coined,
sometime in the 1860s. The first recorded instance appeared in 1867
in Beyond the Mississippi by Albert D Richardson: "From Minnesota
had been imported the mysterious term 'scull-duggery', used to
signify political or other trickery". (Do I detect a hint of "These
Minnesotans, you know how *they* are ..."?)

The word was still mysterious a few years later. One of its very
early sightings is in this splendid political exchange, which I
have gleaned from the Official Report of the Proceedings and
Debates of the Third Constitutional Convention of Ohio, 1873-1874:

Mr. WEST. It is urged upon the assumption that there has been
what some gentlemen here have characterized as "smouzling".
Mr. HOADLY. What is that?
Mr. WEST. Skulduggery.
Mr. HOADLY. Well, what does that mean?
Mr. WEST. I do not know what it means, but that is what I heard
talked about here.

We are hardly the wiser as a result, except that in 1873 members of
the Ohio legislature didn't know what "skulduggery" meant, except
that it was something vaguely disreputable (they may be forgiven
for not knowing "smouzling", as it has defeated every expert and
reference book I have tested it against). "Skulduggery" seems to
have caught on in the US quite slowly, and was imported into
Britain only much later.

Though we now know pretty well what it means, its origin remains
unclear. Experts think that it is probably Scots, most likely from
"sculduddery". In the eighteenth century, "sculduddery" meant
fornication, adultery, unchastity. In the nineteenth century it
seems to have shifted to a sense of obscenity and indecency in
language. Later it was respelled and changed again to its current
meaning. Unfortunately, nobody seems to have the slightest idea
where "sculduddery" comes from, so here the trail runs into the
sand.


3. Review: Language and the Internet, by David Crystal
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It is not entirely unknown for World Wide Words subscribers to e-
mail me, receive a reply, and then respond suggesting that my reply
was terse or rude. That false perception arises because people new
to the Internet are more familiar with the conventions of letter-
writing. They regard the comparative brevity of e-mail, its lack of
formal salutations and the inclusion of "framing" devices such as
selective quoting from their messages as indications of a lack of
courtesy. This is a good example of one way that online and offline
communications differ, and one to which David Crystal pays special
attention.

He gives a linguist's appraisal of the Net, which he points out is
not a monolithic creation, but rather a set of disparate methods of
communications that include e-mail, chatrooms (a term he uses to
cover media such as mailing lists, Internet Relay Chat and Usenet
newsgroups), World Wide Web pages, and virtual worlds such as MUDs
and MOOs. His book is aimed more to readers who are unfamiliar with
these mechanisms than to those who are, so there are detailed
explanations of the characteristics of each communication method.
As a result, much description will be obvious enough to anybody
familiar with a given technique, though few people are conversant
with all of them.

He largely dismisses the common view that online communication (he
calls it "Netspeak") is illiterate and dumbed-down language. He
agrees that much of it is non-standard, playful, highly deviant in
bending the usual rules of language, tolerant of typographic and
spelling errors, and full of new words. But he is fascinated by its
variety and innovation and devotes much space to describing its
special (and evolving) character. He takes a very positive view,
suggesting that "The phenomenon of Netspeak is going to change the
way we think about language in a fundamental way, because it is a
linguistic singularity - a genuine new medium".

He argues that the analogy of online communications with speech
rather than formal writing is too simple: chatrooms, IRC and the
like are too constrained by their response times and the slow speed
of typing to be considered as a good analogy of speech; Web pages,
e-mail and other mechanisms are too transient or easily modified to
be equivalent to the printed word. "On the whole," he says,
"Netspeak is better seen as written language which has been pulled
some way in the direction of speech than as spoken language which
has been written down." He suggests that online language is best
viewed as neither of these things, but rather as a new species of
interaction, a "third medium", which is evolving its own systematic
rules to suit new circumstances.

David Crystal writes as accessibly as ever. But by the nature of
his theme his book is academically oriented and its readers need to
know some basic linguistics. It will appeal especially to someone
with a professional or informed interest in linguistics who wants
to explore the special nature of language on the Net.

[Crystal, David; Language and the Internet; published by Cambridge
University Press; pp272; ISBN 0-521-80212-1; publisher's price
GBP13.95. Professor Crystal is editor of - amongst others - the
Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language and the Cambridge Encyclopedia
of the English Language.]


4. Q&A
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Q. In a weak moment at work, I used the word "embuggerance" in
formal writing. To my amazement, not an eyebrow has lifted (yet).
The word is one of many words and phrases used around here, in the
Australian Department of Defence, which seem to come from military
slang. Others I can recall off the cuff are "a poofteenth of stuff-
all" (for a negligible proportion), and "oh-dark-hundred" (for a
very early hour). I wonder how far abroad this word exists, and how
deeply it is (or isn't) embedded in the language. [Mark Raymond,
Australia]

A. Love your other examples. "Embuggerance", it would be fair to
remark, has had very little impact on the linguistic world at
large. You're right to assert that it's military slang, especially
in the phrase "embuggerance factor". It hasn't moved much outside
that area, no doubt because it's considered to be rather too rude
for general consumption.

Eric Partridge, a noted recorder of military slang, included it in
his Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English and defined it
as "a natural or artificial hazard that complicates any proposed
course of action". ("Embuggerance" may be defined in closely
similar terms.) He says it was British Army slang, dating from
about 1950, which feels about right.

It's clearly a development of an older British transitive verb "to
bugger about", to cause someone trouble and irritation. This
appears, for example, in exclamations like "stop buggering me
about!". An "embuggerance", then, is an instance of trouble or
interference so caused.

It does seem that it has been taken up especially enthusiastically
in Australia, since of all the reference works I have here, only
the Macquarie Dictionary includes it. I've been told by researchers
at the Oxford English Dictionary that it has recently appeared in
Inside the British Army by Antony Beevor and also in Andy McNab's
Bravo Two Zero, about the SAS: unsurprising places to encounter it.

It made a rare appearance outside a direct military context in the
Guardian newspaper earlier in 2001, in an interview with Louis de
Bernières: "In fact, he has had to put up with so much 'brainless
and trivial embuggerance' he says, that he has come to regret
having written Corelli in the first place". In view of the World
War Two setting of Captain Corelli's Mandolin, even that is hardly
outside the services ambit (de Bernières once spent what he calls
"four disastrous months" in the British Army; whether he picked up
the word there is unknown, but it seems likely).

Definitely a term to be used sparingly, and with careful selection
of audience.


5. Over To You: Sleeping one's head into train oil
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Two weeks ago Chester Graham's asked: "Is anyone familiar with the
expression 'sleeping her head into train oil' for someone who is
sleeping longer than usual? I have only one family as a source for
it, as a Scots use in Australia".

Jill Williams commented that she knew the saying, either in that
form or as "Sleeping your brains into train oil". She commented:
"Not one family's expression, but certainly a Scottish one in my
experience. I've heard it from my Scots husband and others here in
the Glasgow area to mean sleeping for so long that one is really
dopey and lethargic as a result". Roy Pugh remembers "Time to wake
up - or you'll sleep your brains to train oil". He says: "The
saying is quite familiar to me; I have used it myself, and probably
still would if I could wake up in time. I believe it was used in my
family (who had no Scottish roots) in Sydney in the early 1950s".
So it wasn't just one family's saying, but a more widely known one
in both Scotland and Australia.

What is certain is that the term "train oil" itself was once very
common, and that it has nothing to do with railways. It's the
formal name for whale oil, originally that from the Greenland right
whale. From the fifteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth
century much was burnt to light the houses and streets of cities on
both sides of the Atlantic (in the eighteenth century, London's
reputation as the best-lit city in Europe was partly the result of
its easy access to train oil brought in by the whaling fleet based
in the city's docks). Whale oil was also used to make soap and for
other purposes. The word comes from an Old High German one for a
droplet or tear, because the oil was originally extracted drop by
drop by pressing the whale blubber.

So the saying presumably contained the idea that sleeping too much
turned one's brains to mush, a fair enough description. But how
this strange expression came about, or when, or exactly where, is
still wholly mysterious.


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--
Michael Quinion
Editor, World Wide Words
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<http://www.worldwidewords.org/>