World Wide Words -- 17 Nov 01

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS        ISSUE 263         Saturday 17 November 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. Topical Words: Spade.
3. Book notices.
4. Weird Words: Fogou.
5. Q & A: Jamoke, Ground Zero.
6. Formatted version of mailings.
7. Subscription commands.
8. Mailing addresses.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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BARKING MAD  After the Q&A piece on 3 November, subscriber Anne
Hegerty found an example of the expression from 1960. This has now
been trumped by the researchers at the Oxford English Dictionary,
who have taken it back to 1933, proving that it's by no means as
recent an expression as the pundits say it is. For more details,
see <http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-bar2.htm>.

MISPLACED MODIFIERS  The request three weeks ago for examples has
started a hare running that I can't stop. Julane Marx, editor of
the HumourNet mailing list (in her spare time she keeps World Wide
Words from making too many mistakes) yesterday quoted a message
from a subscriber: "Our local market advertised Free Range Turkeys.
Someone showed up and asked for his Range Turkey". Leaving hyphens
out runs the risk of being expensive.


2. Topical Words: Spade
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Every now and then, some dispute flares up in the United States
that reminds us that sensitivities over language in that country
run especially deep.

The specific occasion was a meeting of the Sacramento City Council
last week, reported in the "Sacramento Bee", in which one speaker,
to emphasise his point, said "I think we should call a spade a
spade". A Councilwoman, African-American, objected to this
vigorously, saying it was an "ethnically and racially derogatory
remark".

Most people know that "to call a spade a spade" means that we
should avoid euphemism, be straightforward, use blunt or plain
language. Most Americans also know that "spade" is a rather
outmoded derogatory slang term for an African-American. Putting the
two ideas together, though, requires a person whose sensitivity to
possibly offensive language is greater than their knowledge of word
history. (Nothing new about that, though: remember all the fuss in
Washington in 1999 over the word "niggardly".)

First of all, the spade in the expression isn't the same spade as
in the slang term. The first is undoubtedly the digging implement.
The second is the suit of cards. In the latter case, the allusion
was to the colour of the suit, and originally appeared in the
fuller form "as black as the ace of spades". The abbreviated form
"spade" seems to have grown up sometime in the early part of this
century (it first appears in print in the 1920s). Though they're
the same word historically - both derive from Greek "spathe" for a
blade or paddle - the one you dig with came into Old English from
an intermediate Germanic source, while the card sense arrived via
Italian "spade", the plural of "spada", a sword.

An oddity is that the expression "to call a spade a spade" is a
mistranslation. The original was a line that the classical Greek
writer Plutarch wrote some 2000 years ago about the Macedonians. He
intended much the same idea - suggesting that the Macedonians were
too crude and unsubtle a people to do anything other than use blunt
words - but he used the word "skathe", variously a trough, basin,
bowl, or boat. It seems the medieval scholar Erasmus misread it
when translating the line into Latin and Nicholas Udall copied him
when making his 1542 English version. The phrase has been in the
language ever since.

If Erasmus had got it right, we might now be telling people to
"call a trough a trough", and Sacramento would have been spared the
recent fuss.


3. Book notices
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The "Daily Telegraph" columnist John Morris has a second collection
of his Frantic Semantics pieces out under the sadly unsubtle title
of "More Frantic Semantics". Terms subjected to his scrutiny range
from "@" to "Xmas". See the review of his first collection at
<http://www.worldwidewords.org/reviews/frantic.htm> to get an idea
of the style of the contents. Published by Macmillan, ISBN 0-333-
90391-9, pp 145, publisher's price GBP9.99.

Cambridge University Press have published the sixth volume of the
"Cambridge History of the English Language" with the title "English
in North America". It's a thorough academic overview of the
development of American English from the earliest settlement period
to the present day. Chapters focus on Americanisms, African-
American English, dialect, slang, usage, and spelling. Editor: John
Algeo. ISBN 0-521-26479-0; pp 625; publisher's price in the UK
GBP80.00, in the US $120.00.


4. Weird Words: Fogou
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An artificial underground chamber or passage in Cornwall.

This has the sad distinction of being one of the very few words in
English that derive from the Cornish language (which died out in
the late eighteenth century, though enthusiasts have revived it).
It is mainly a term in archaeology for a kind of man-made stone-
lined underground passage found in Cornwall. Some are rather large,
opening out from a narrow entrance to a long chamber that can
sometimes hold a substantial group of people. They are of Iron Age
date and seem always to have been built on the edge of settlements.

Nobody knows what they were for. They're little use as defensive
structures, because they would have been a death trap for anybody
sheltering inside (unlike underground structures elsewhere, which
do seem to have been designed as hiding places); they are too big
and too damp to be used for storage; they're the wrong shape and
their entrances are often too narrow for housing livestock. Some
people believe that they are ritual structures, perhaps associated
with an earth-mother religion or sun worship (some seem to be
aligned with midsummer sunrise or sunset).

The Cornish word from which their name comes originally meant a
cave. They have also been known as "vugs" or "vows", from the
related Cornish word "vooga" for a cavern. Dictionaries usually say
that "fogou" is pronounced /'f at Ugu:/ (FOE-goo), but archaeologists
seem to prefer /'fu:gu:/ (FOO-goo).


5. Q&A
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Q. What is the origin and derivation of the word "jamoke"? An
undergraduate from New York City used it to me in the mid 1960s to
describe unflatteringly people from the neighborhood, as in "Just a
coupla jamokes from down the street". However, I've noticed in
recent movies that Hollywood has corrupted the word twice: it has
been shortened to just "moke" and it now has gangster, mobster or
underworld connotations. As portrayed recently, it usually means a
guy who provides muscle for a local street boss. [Bob Sypek]

A. I'm not at all sure that "moke" is an abbreviated form of
"jamoke" in this sense. The two words have had independent
histories, and "moke" is actually a good deal older. But their
histories are tangled up together.

"Jamoke" is usually said to come from "Java" plus "Mocha". When it
first appeared, at the end of the nineteenth century, it literally
meant coffee, and was sometimes written as "Jamocha", which makes
the origin a bit clearer (despite the coffee associations,
linguists would say that the word is a clipped compound, not a
blend ...). An example, from a book called "Gay-Cat" of 1922:
"There ain't nothing stronger in the booze line than pure alky
mixed with jamocha".

John Lighter, in the "Random House Historical Dictionary of
American Slang", suggests that "jamoke" was probably a nautical
term to start with. He points out, too, that the evidence suggests
it was a World War I soldier's nickname, perhaps for somebody whose
colour or intellect resembled a cup of coffee. Sometime before 1946
it took on a sense of "a stupid, objectionable or inconsequential
fellow", as Mr Lighter puts it. This sense has further evolved in
some quarters into one for a dupe or sucker, and was a 1960s slang
term for the penis. It has also been used more neutrally for "guy"
or "man".

"Moke" has had several senses down the centuries: in Britain, it
meant a donkey or mule (first recorded in the 1830s but probably a
lot older); in Australia, rather later on, it could mean an
inferior horse. In the US, it became an offensive term for a black
person (obviously taken from the earlier animal meaning). By the
1850s, it had arrived at a meaning of some foolish or contemptible
person, or more simply, just somebody you dislike. Trying to pin
down the meaning more tightly is as difficult as it always is with
slang terms; Harvey Keitel was confused about it in the film "Mean
Streets" back in 1973 and a lot of people would have trouble
defining it even now. In this sense it is very much still around,
though usually said and written "mook".

Of all these forms, "mook" is currently the most common, at least
in print. Earlier this year, Douglas Rushkoff appeared in a
documentary on the US Public Broadcasting System called "The
Merchants of Cool", in which he explained a sense of "mook" used by
advertisers, what "USA Today" reported to be "the testosterone-
crazed, perpetually adolescent male represented by Howard Stern".
Another writer described "mook" recently as "a boorish, screw-you
pacesetter for cravings".

It wouldn't be altogether surprising to hear that "jamoke" has
evolved further and been abbreviated to "moke" and then "mook".
It's also likely that the two terms have influenced each other. But
certainly they started out independent.

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Q. What do you know about the origin of the term "ground zero"?
[Ryan Bass]

A. It was used first about the dropping of the atomic bombs on
Japan at the end of World War II; at least, its first appearance -
in the "New York Times" on 7 July 1946, about a year after the
events - is in this connection: "The intense heat of the blast
started fires as far as 3,500 feet from 'ground zero' (the point on
the ground directly under the bomb's explosion in the air)". The
term looks as though it has been borrowed from a bit of existing
military jargon, though I can't find an earlier example.

The devastating effects of the attacks on the twin towers of the
World Trade Center on 11 September reminded people of the aftermath
of a nuclear attack. The term was instantly applied to the site, to
the extent that it looked for a while as though it would displace
the older meaning entirely.

However, the site of the air crash in New York this week was also
described in some newspapers as "ground zero", suggesting that the
term may be shifting instead to refer to any place in which massive
destruction has been caused from the air. But it's too early to be
sure.


6. Formatted version of mailings
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--
Michael Quinion
Editor, World Wide Words
<editor at worldwidewords.org>
<http://www.worldwidewords.org/>