World Wide Words -- 08 Sep 01

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS        ISSUE 253         Saturday 8 September 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. Book Review: Mind the Gaffe.
3. Weird Words: Gomer.
4. Out There: The American Language.
5. Q & A: Nosy parker.
6. Over to You: Pay the black penny.
7. Subscription commands, pronunciation guide, copyright notice.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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NOSE TO GRINDSTONE TIME  Holidays over, book written, nothing to do
now (he said, lying through his teeth) but work on improving World
Wide Words. New features will be appearing during the Autumn, of
which the first this week are called 'Over To You' and 'Out There'.
The former asks for help on topics on which I've drawn a blank, the
latter features a Web site that's likely to be of interest to Words
subscribers.

SCREAMING ABDABS  Several subscribers - including Sherwin Cogan,
Dick Kovar, Sharon Villines, Carol Cunningham, and Steven Price -
mentioned an song called _Abba Dabba Honeymoon_ (from my extreme
youth I vaguely remember Debbie Reynolds singing it in the film
_Two Weeks With Love_, which appeared in 1950 and became a hit song
in its own right later). Its refrain went:

   "Aba, daba, daba, daba, daba, daba, dab,"
     Said the Chimpie to the Monk,
   "Baba, daba, daba, daba, daba, daba, dab,"
     Said the Monkey to the Chimp.

(See <http://www.kididdles.com/mouseum/a051.html> for the full
lyric.) Though it might be a complete coincidence, the similarity
between the 'abba dabba' of the title and 'abdab' is too striking
to be ruled out as a possible source. This ragtime song was
actually written by Arthur Fields and Walter Donovan way back in
1914, so the dates fit.

Until Gordon Paterson e-mailed me from Richmond, Virginia, I hadn't
considered possible American usage, but he remarked that "In my
homeland of Dixie (aka the southern USA), the term 'abba-dabba' is
a common one with strong negative overtones denoting persons of
such limited capacities that they are unable to properly form
words". That sent me to the Random House Historical Dictionary of
American Slang; John Lighter doesn't mention that sense, but says
it's an American slang term for (I was surprised to see) dessert.
Interestingly, he also suggests an origin for it in _Abba Dabba
Honeymoon_.

The plot thickens, Watson ...

[An updated version of the piece is at <http://www.worldwidewords.
org/qa/qa-scr1.htm>.]

PERSONAL REQUEST  If any subscriber living in south-east Australia
or New Zealand would feel able to help my wife and me with some
simple queries regarding a forthcoming holiday, would they contact
me at <michael at quinion.com>?


2. Book Review: Mind the Gaffe
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This book's subtitle is _The Penguin Guide to Common Errors in
English_. Its author is Larry Trask, Professor of Linguistics at
the University of Sussex. If those two sentences make you think of
some dry, academic treatise, you could not be more wrong.

Professor Trask says he wrote his book after marking exam papers;
he was so riled by the mistakes he found that he started to collect
the most common ones. Many have been down the same path, but few
have ended up publishing a book full of corrections, particularly
one so simultaneously accessible and acerbic as this. Most of what
he writes is straightforward good sense, expressed in pithy but
plain English. But to judge by some entries, his marking pen must
more than once have stabbed a hole in the page:

*Empowerment*  "A vogue word of somewhat fuzzy meaning, almost
entirely confined to the trendier kinds of social commentary."

*Feminism*  "Sadly, the name has been appropriated by an array of
irresponsible and self-serving people who promote every kind of
ignorant and vicious but apparently career-advancing drivel in the
name of feminism. So much sludge now appears in print ... that real
feminism is in some danger of being submerged."

*Hermeneutic*  "It has become a favourite of post-modernist
writers, who cannot resist slipping it into every second page. Like
most post-modernist habits, this is not one you should imitate. If
you mean 'interpretive', then write 'interpretive', and forget
about this silly word."

*Prior to*  "This ghastly thing has recently become almost a
disease. .. You should make every effort to avoid this Latinate
monstrosity in favour of plain old English 'before'."

He is also dismissive of 'aforementioned': "sounds ridiculous
outside legal language"; 'communicate': "often pretentious";
'synergy': "often an empty and foolish term"; 'feedback': "now
almost devoid of meaning"; 'input': "unquestionably vastly overused
and lacking in explicitness", and so on. It must be hard surviving
one of his tutorials unscathed.

The title, by the way, is a pun on a notice used on the London
Underground to warn passengers at stations where the track curves
steeply and gaps appear between platform and train. It is often
announced in a stentorian monotone over the station PA system:
'Mind the Gap'.

[Trask, R L, _Mind the Gaffe_, published by Penguin Books on 30
August 2001; pp302; publisher's price GBP12.99; ISBN 0-14-029237-3]


3. Weird Words: Gomer
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An undesirable hospital patient.

There is dispute both about the origin and the meaning of this odd
term. Some dictionaries say it refers especially to a patient of
any age who is dirty or undesirable, or somebody elderly who is
suffering from dementia or confusion. However, some doctors would
specifically limit it to a poor or old person with some chronic
condition whose need isn't urgent but who is keeping somebody with
a more serious problem from getting treatment. The term often
appears in glossaries of the sort of medical jargon that never
appears, or should never appear, in patients' notes. Much of this
is created by hard-pressed medical types who use gallows humour to
distance themselves enough from human suffering to remain sane. It
is often said to be an acronym of "Get Out of My Emergency Room!".

It's more likely that it actually comes from a character played by
Jim Nabor in the _Andy Griffith Show_ on CBS television in the US
in 1963-64. The name of his character was Gomer Pyle, a mechanic
with a pleasant character but dim-witted, as thick as two planks, a
real local yokel. From 1964 to 1970 Jim Nabors had his own spin-off
show _Gomer Pyle USMC_, in which Gomer joined the Marine Corps.
'Gomer', of course, is itself an inoffensive first name of Biblical
ancestry (the original was one of the sons of Japheth in Genesis).
Quite how the name shifted from the world of motor repairs and
military life to medical matters is far from clear, and it's this
gap in understanding that stops more careful dictionaries from
citing these TV shows as the source.


4. Out There
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H L Mencken, the Sage of Baltimore, was an American writer, critic
and essayist. His greatest contribution to letters was his "The
American Language", first published in 1918 but eventually running
to four editions. His aim was to make it clear that the American
language existed in its own right and to analyse its character. He
said in the preface: "Its chief excuse is its human interest, for
it prods deeply into national idiosyncrasies and ways of mind, and
that sort of prodding is always entertaining". Indeed it is. The
second edition of 1921 is online at <http://www.bartleby.com/185/>.


5. Q&A
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[Send your questions to <qa at worldwidewords.org>. All messages will
be acknowledged, but I can't guarantee to reply, as time is very
limited. If I can reply, a response will appear here and on the Web
site. If you wish to comment on a reply below, please do NOT use
that address, but e-mail <editor at worldwidewords.org> instead.]

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Q. I am a language arts teacher and I often use word etymology to
pique my students' interest in the development of language. We all
enjoy discussing the origin of slang phrases. One in particular has
us stumped, so I submit it to you for any help you may be able to
give us. The term in question is 'nosy Parker'. Any ideas? [Jo Ann
Larkin]

A. The short answer is that nobody knows where it comes from, but
that hardly seems like an adequate response. Some pointers, then.

The most usual origin suggested is the late (the very late) Matthew
Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury in the reign of Elizabeth I in the
sixteenth century. He was a reforming cleric, noted for sending out
detailed enquiries and instructions relating to the conduct of his
diocese. Like many reformers, he was regarded as a busybody.

However, the huge flaw in this suggestion is that the term 'nosey
Parker' isn't recorded until 1907. The term 'nosey' for someone
inquisitive, figuratively always sticking their nose into other
people's affairs, is a little older, but even that only dates back
to the 1880s. Before then, anyone called nosey was just somebody
with a big nose, like the Duke of Wellington, who had the nickname
'Old Nosey'.

One suggestion, put forward by Eric Partridge in his _Dictionary of
Slang and Unconventional English_, was that the saying dates from
the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park in 1851. Very large numbers of
people attended the Exhibition, so there would have been lots of
opportunities for peeping Toms and eavesdroppers in the grounds.
The word 'parker' has since medieval times been used for an
official in charge of a park, a park-keeper; I've read that the
term was used informally for the royal park-keepers who supervised
Hyde Park at the time of the Great Exhibition. So the saying might
conceivably have been applied to a nosey park-keeper. It would
require the inquisitive sense of 'nosey' to have originated about
30 years before it is first recorded - not impossible.

Another idea, put forward in _Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and
Fable_, is that the phrase 'nosey Parker' was originally 'nose-
poker'. 'Poker', in the sense of somebody who pries into another's
affairs, certainly has a long history, well pre-dating the
nineteenth century appearance of 'nosey Parker'. It's not
impossible that 'nose-poker' became modified with the second
element being converted into a proper name. Stranger things have
happened. But evidence is suspiciously lacking: the _Oxford English
Dictionary_ has no record of 'nose-poker' anywhere and I can't find
an example.

But all this is the purest supposition. The evidence isn't on
record, and the truth will probably will never be found.


6. Over to You
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Despite my appearance of omniscience, questions sometimes come in
for which explanations look as though they ought to exist, but on
which I can find nothing useful to say. Time for subscribers to
tell me and the questioner what they know. Send your comments and
stories to me at <editor at worldwidewords.org>.

Judith Rascoe writes: "A friend of mine from New York City, third-
generation Irish-American of the genuine New York variety, will say
she'll 'pay the black penny' when she resigns herself to paying the
full retail price for something - a practice abhorrent to all real
New Yorkers. She says her mother, a virtuoso shopper, uses the
phrase but only remembers that her own mother used it. Is this an
Irish-ism, an American-Irishism, or something else entirely?"

I've no idea. Does anybody know?


7. Subscription commands
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