World Wide Words -- 01 Sep 01

Sat Sep 1 05:32:42 UTC 2001

WORLD WIDE WORDS        ISSUE 252         Saturday 1 September 2001
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Sent each Saturday to 13,000+ subscribers in at least 113 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK      ISSN 1470-1448
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Bathykolpian.
3. Q & A: Enthuse, Screaming abdabs.
4. Subscription commands and copyright notice.

1. Feedback, notes and comments
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FARRAGO  Many subscribers have written to make the plausible point
that people are confusing this word either with 'fiasco' or with
'furore'. It does look as though those may have been unconscious
influences on usage.

SPOTTED RICHARD  The little item about a proposal to rename the
pudding called spotted dick produced many comments, including a
couple from men called Richard, saying that they have increasingly
found it difficult to use the abbreviated form of their names. And,
as a further pointer to its unpopularity, that issue of World Wide
Words was bounced by profanity filters because it included that
sexually explicit word 'dick' (this issue will go the same way).

TCHOTCHKE  Aharon Eviatar and others wrote from Israel to say that
the word, in its 'tsatske' form, appears in modern Hebrew slang to
mean "a sexually loose and provocative young woman", rather similar
to one sense that Leo Rosen gives in The Joys of Yiddish. According
to The World Dictionary of Hebrew Slang, which Arnon Gunders very
helpfully looked up, it can also mean a crafty, sly, or dangerous
person.

2. Weird Words: Bathykolpian
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Deep-bosomed.

This word may be described as a companion to 'callipygian', which I
investigated some time ago (see <www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/
ww-cal3.htm>). Even more than that, it is a rare and learned term.
One of the few writers to have used it was Oliver Wendell Homes,
who wrote in his _Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table_ in 1858 that
"The bathycolpian Heré ... sent down Iris". The word derives from
Greek 'bathus', deep, and 'kolpos', bosom or gulf. It is sometimes
written 'bathukolpian' in an attempt to more closely represent the
Greek spelling.

3. Q&A
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Q.  I was taught in high school that there is no such word as
'enthuse', I hear people using it in sentences such as, "I am
enthused about the ballgame". Shouldn't it just be 'enthusiastic'?
'Enthuse' is in the dictionary, so was my high school teacher wrong
years ago, or was the word added because it is so commonly used?
[Harry Sayle]

A. 'Enthuse' is one of those words that once made traditionalists
quiver with rage. Even now it has not been fully accepted by
everyone.

Your teacher was going too far in saying that the word didn't
exist, though this vehement denial may just have been a way of
impressing on young minds that it was a word to be avoided. As you
say, it's now in every dictionary. It also has a long history in
the language - it was used first as long ago as 1827 by a Scots
traveller in North America: "My humble exertions will I trust
convey and enthuse, and draw attention to the beautifully varied
verdure of N.W. America".

Grammarians disliked it at the time because it's a back-formation.
If a word looks as though it might be a derivative, sometimes
people will take the ending off, thereby accidentally creating a
word that didn't previously exist. In the case of 'enthusiasm', it
looks as though it might derive from a verb 'enthuse', though it
doesn't. To experts in the nineteenth and early twentieth century,
the process looked like an ignorant mistake. These days it is
recognised as a common and legitimate method of word formation
(verbs like 'classify', 'commentate' and 'edit' were formed from
nouns in this way).

Even now, nearly two centuries after 'enthuse' was created, the
usual advice in style guides is to be careful about using it,
because an aura of non-respectability still hangs about it and it
is regarded in some quarters as a brash and gushy informal word.
However, it is much more accepted now than it was even a few years
ago, and is in fairly common use - for example, in broadsheet
American newspapers, usually as the adjective 'enthused' rather
than the verb itself. It is still avoided in formal prose, but then
an emotion like 'enthuse' is hardly likely to appear in formal
writing anyway.

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Q. A friend said during a recent discussion on cinema that horror
films gave her 'the screaming ab-dabs'. What are 'ab-dabs' and
where do I find them? [Rob Ewen, UK]

A. To 'give someone the screaming abdabs' (or 'habdabs') is a very
British expression for inducing an attack of extreme anxiety or
irritation in someone. It's recorded in print from the middle
1940s.

We don't know much about its origin. Eric Partridge, in his
_Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English_, says that the
'screaming abdabs' was a late 1930s expression for an attack of
delirium tremens, but he doesn't provide any evidence and that
sense is otherwise unrecorded. He also claims that two phrases
existed: 'don't give me the old abdabs' and 'don't come the old
abdabs with me', both meaning don't try to fool somebody or tell
them some fictitious story to excuse an action, which he records as
services slang from World War Two. The version with the added 'h'
on the front looks like a hypercorrection, in which users assume
that the speaker must be dropping his 'h's.

Jonathon Green, in the _Cassell Dictionary of Slang_, suggests the
word could imitate the stuttering noise that somebody might produce
when in a state of funk or incoherent frustration. The second
element 'dab' might then be an echoic duplication.

4. Subscription commands
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