World Wide Words -- 22 Sep 01

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS        ISSUE 255        Saturday 22 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. Turns of Phrase: Grey goo.
3. In passing? Divarriage.
4. Weird Words: Spondulicks.
5. Out There: Ask Oxford.
6. Q & A: Mollycoddling, Pinkie.
7. Subscription commands, pronunciation guide, copyright notice.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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APOLOGIES to the many people waiting for replies to messages, some
up to ten days old. Various matters have conspired against my being
able to respond. Also, the Over To You feature has been held over,
because there has been no time to collate the very large number of
interesting comments on last week's query. It must be hoped that
next week's issue is back to normal ...


2. Turns of Phrase: Grey goo
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This goes back to 1986 and Eric Drexler's book _The Engines of
Creation_. He is the guru of the world of nanotechnology, in which
individual molecules are manipulated as though they are snooker
balls. In fiction, semi-intelligent sub-microscopic machines do
extraordinary things like building spaceships from raw materials
without human intervention or circulate in the bloodstream to
monitor our bodily fitness and cure every ill. Bill Joy of Sun
Microsystems, hardly a techno-Luddite, has written about a negative
side to this magical molecular mystery that may one day be ours. He
argues that these nanotechnological auto-assemblers might get out
of control and convert the planet and every living thing on it to a
uniform but useless mass of bits and pieces: the 'grey goo'. Mr Joy
goes as far as saying that there are some areas of research we
ought not to pursue, because the consequences might be so dire.
Michael Lewis, who has just published thoughts on his own brand of
futurology in a book called _The Future Just Happened_ - and in the
process spawned a fresh set of sightings of the term - says that
concern about 'grey goo' is an allegory of mid-life personal
obsolescence. Or just possibly a fear that developing technology is
going to eat our bodies as well as our souls.

The nightmare is that combined with genetic materials and thereby
self-replicating, these nanobots would be able to multiply
themselves into a "gray goo" that could outperform photosynthesis
and usurp the entire biosphere, including all edible plants and
animals.
                                  [_American Spectator_, Feb. 2001]

Grey goo is a wonderful and totally imaginary feature of some
dystopian sci-fi future in which nanotechnology runs riot, and
microscopic earth-munching machines escape from a laboratory to eat
the world out from under our feet.
                                            [_Guardian_, July 2001]


3. In passing? Divarriage
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This word has been popping up in the reviews sections recently, as
it features in Karen Karbo's recent book _Generation Ex_, all about
life after divorce. She invented this ugly word, presumably as a
blend of 'divorce' and 'marriage', to describe a divorced couple
who continue to rely on each other as if they were still married.
She says a couple are in this condition when "one still pays the
other one's rent, where both still send each other birthday
presents, and shoulders are perpetually available to cry on".


4. Weird Words: Spondulicks  /spQn'd(j)u:lIks/
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Money, cash.

Though originally a bit of mid-nineteenth-century American slang,
this has travelled widely, being cast up on the shores of Britain
and Australia among other places. It's one of a set created in a
century-long fit of logographical exuberation which also gave the
world 'slumgullion', 'rambunctious', and 'absquatulate' (not to
mention, as Elsie L Warnock did in _Dialect Notes_ in 1913, such
otherwise lost treasures as 'scrumdifferous', 'hyperfirmatious',
and 'supergobosnoptious').

It would seem from the evidence that <ex>spondulicks</ex> (either
so spelled or as 'spondulix') was originally American college
slang. One of its earliest appearances was in a piece about college
life in the New York magazine _Vanity Fair_ in 1860: "My friend the
Senior got out of spondulix, and borrowed [my watch] to spout for
the purpose of bucking the Tiger" (to interpret, his friend had run
out of money and pawned the watch to get some more cash in order to
gamble on cards, probably faro). The word was used later by such
literary luminaries as O Henry and Bret Harte. From usage data, it
now looks to be much more common outside the US, to the extent that
the _New Oxford Dictionary of English_ marks it as "British slang".

Where does it come from? "A fanciful coinage", the big _Oxford
English Dictionary_ says. It has been described as a "perverted and
elaborated" form of 'greenback' (you may feel that to believe
'spondulicks' could come from 'greenback' requires a perverted
imagination all its own). Eric Partridge suggests it might derive
from Greek 'spondulikos', from 'spondulos', a species of shell once
used as money. If it is indeed college slang, that might well be
the kind of academic joke that would appeal. Otherwise, your guess
is as good as mine.


5. Out There
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As a companion to its Oxford English Dictionary site, which is alas
subscription only (though you can see the word of the day by going
to <http://oed.com/cgi/display/wotd>), Oxford University Press has
unveiled its Ask Oxford web site at <http://www.askoxford.com/>. It
is divided into areas: the Ask The Expert forum, for example, has,
among other elements, a list of collective terms for animals, FAQs
derived from queries sent to the Oxford Word and Language Service
(OWLS), and a Jargon Buster section that explains technical terms.
The site isn't the easiest to find your way around, and there are
errors in the coding, but it is worth a visit.


6. 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. Have you any idea where 'mollycoddling' originated? [Richard
Buttrey, UK]

A. Let's take it in its two parts. The second comes from the verb
to 'coddle', meaning to treat somebody in an overprotective way, as
though he or she were an invalid. The verb in this sense is not
recorded before the early part of the nineteenth century - its
first appearance is in Jane Austen's _Emma_: "Be satisfied with
doctoring and coddling yourself". It looks very much as though it
comes from an older sense of the verb meaning to boil gently, to
parboil. That sense is linked to 'caudle', an old word for a warm
drink of thin gruel mixed with sweetened and spiced wine or ale,
which was given chiefly to sick people. Hence, by association of
ideas, 'coddle' took on its modern sense.

The first bit is on the face of it easy enough, since it is from
the pet form of the given name 'Mary' (as in Sweet Molly Malone of
Dublin's fair city). But 'Molly' has also had a long history in
several different but related senses associated with low living.
(The name was popularised by Middleton and Dekker's play _The
Roaring Girl_ of 1611, which featured a criminal called 'Moll Cut-
purse'.) As either 'molly' or 'moll', from the early seventeenth
century on it was often used to describe a prostitute, hence, much
later, the American gangster's 'moll'. However, as 'molly', it was
a common eighteenth-century name for a homosexual man, often in the
form 'Miss Molly', and a 'molly house' was a male brothel (as in
Mark Ravenhill's new play at the National Theatre in London,
_Mother Clap's Molly House_).

It's sometimes said that the 'molly' in 'mollycoddle' comes from
the prostitute sense, but the usage evidence shows that it was
really linked to the gay one. It was used particularly of a man who
had been over-protected in childhood and so considered to have been
rendered effeminate or a milksop. For example, William Makepeace
Thackeray wrote in _Pendennis_ in 1849: "You have been bred up as a
molly-coddle, Pen, and spoilt by the women". The verb came along
much later in the nineteenth century and was used in a sense more
like the way we use it now.

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Q. I would like to know the origin of 'pinkie', and when was it
initially used in the U.S. I came across the term yesterday in
speaking to an American. Is it a slang term? She stated that it is
a term used to refer to the little finger. [Paul Mills, London]

A. Its sense of the little finger is actually quite old. Curiously,
though it is now thought of as characteristically American, it
began its life in Scotland - the first recorded example, from 1808,
is in John Jamieson's _An Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish
Language_.

You might think that it is called 'pinkie' because European little
fingers are usually coloured pink, but this isn't so (though its
modern survival might owe something to this idea). It derives from
a much older sense of 'pinkie' for something tiny, which in turn
comes from one meaning of the adjective 'pink'. This adjective came
into Scots from Dutch. It appeared first as part of the phrase
'pink eye' for a half-shut or peering eye (from old Dutch 'pinck
ooghen', which may well be the source of the modern Dutch verb
'pinkogen', to half close the eyes or squint).

In modern Dutch 'pink' means the little finger, so it might look as
though the American 'pinkie' comes directly from it. The evidence,
though, is that Scots played a key intermediate role.

The sense of the colour, by the way, came from the flower called
the 'pink', whose name probably derives from 'pink eye', perhaps
because of the folded petals that made the flower look a bit like a
half-closed eye.

[My thanks to Harry Lake for sorting out the Dutch word senses.]


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