World Wide Words -- 29 Sep 01

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS        ISSUE 256        Saturday 29 September 2001
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sent each Saturday to 13,000+ subscribers in at least 113 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK      ISSN 1470-1448
<http://www.worldwidewords.org>   Mail: <editor at worldwidewords.org>
-------------------------------------------------------------------
If you want to leave the list, please do not reply to this message.
 Instructions on how to leave are at the end of this newsletter.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
       This newsletter is best viewed in a monospaced font.


Contents
--------
1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Gowpen.
3. In Passing? War driving.
4. Out There: Uptalk.
5. Q & A: Funk.
6. Over to You.
7. Subscription commands, pronunciation guide, copyright notice.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
-------------------------------------------------------------------
MOLLYCODDLE  David Harrison e-mailed from Bristol to report: "One
use of 'molly' you won't have come across is a 1928 record by one
Moses Mason who went under the interesting pseudonym of Red Hot Ole
Mose. It is called 'Molly Man', which seems a trifle dubious until
you hear it: it turns out to be a collection of Southern American
street trader cries set to simple guitar accompaniment. A Molly Man
in this case is a mishearing for 'Male Man - a seller of tamales!"

A compound term that I'd not before encountered, and which isn't in
any of my dictionaries, is 'molly lamb'. Anthony Stevens e-mailed
me to say he knew it as an orphaned lamb that has been raised by
humans: "This term was common with my Uncle's tribe of farming
families on the hills between Maidstone and Sittingbourne in Kent".
It would seem plausible that it is related to 'mollycoddle'.

GREY GOO  Following up last week's Turns of Phrase piece, I've been
told that, by an odd coincidence, _Scientific American_ this month
has an article on self-replicating nano-assemblers, which concludes
that "For the foreseeable future, we have nothing to fear from gray
goo". That must be a relief for all of us. For the full article,
see <http://www.sciam.com/2001/0901issue/0901whitesides.html>.

SPONDULICKS  Doug Wilson pointed out that the Greek stem suggested
as the origin of this term in last week's Weird Words piece is also
the source of various English words beginning in 'spondylo-' that
refer to the spine or vertebrae. He suggested that a stack of coins
may have been likened to the spine, with each coin a vertebra. He
found a supporting reference in an 1867 book, _A Manual of the Art
of Prose Composition: for the Use of Colleges and Schools_, by John
Mitchell Bonnell. A list of provincialisms included: "Spondulics -
coin piled for counting".


2. Weird Words: Gowpen  /'gaUp at n/
-------------------------------------------------------------------
A double handful.

Put your hands together, cupped. Now consider the bowl shape you
have created. How much would it hold? If you say a double handful,
you will be right, but how much more interesting it would be to
call it a 'gowpen' instead. Not that you are likely to hear the
word much, nor should you expect many people to understand you. Its
active use is now restricted to parts of Scotland - you might for
example come across it in the old Scots' proverb: "A hanfu' o'
trade is worth a gowpen o' gold" (even a little knowledge of a
trade is worth a good deal of money).

Originally the word came from Old Norse and I'm told it still
exists in some modern Scandinavian dialects. When it first came
into Britain, probably with Viking settlers before the Norman
Conquest, it seems to have referred to a single cupped hand, the
idea of a double handful being indicated by 'gowpens'. Some writers
continued to distinguish between one and two cupped hands in this
way almost down to modern times, though the word now seems to be
used only in the singular to refer to both hands.

With anything Scots, the instinct is to fly to Sir Walter Scott,
and he does not disappoint. This is from _The Black Dwarf_: "A bag
was suspended in the mill for David Ritchie's benefit; and those
who were carrying home a melder of meal, seldom failed to add a
gowpen to the alms-bag of the deformed cripple".

If you'd like to be even more obscure, you might try 'yepsen', a
related form that is recorded in various English dialects - it
never seems to have been spelled the same way twice: 'ipson',
'espin', 'yaspin', and 'yepsintle', among others.


3. In Passing? War driving
-------------------------------------------------------------------
The introduction of wireless networks, particularly those using a
system called WiFi, has been a boon for many organisations, as it
saves them a lot of money on cabling. However, unless they set the
networks up carefully, anybody with a portable computer with WiFi
installed can connect to your network, provided they are within
range of the transmitters. Hence the newest Silicon Valley hacker
craze: driving around with a portable computer until you find an
unguarded WiFi network to hack into. 'War driving' they call it, a
term derived from the older 'war dialling' for repeated attempts to
find a telephone number with an idle modem on it that can be used
to hack into a computer system.


4. Out There: Uptalk
-------------------------------------------------------------------
This is a curious phenomenon in the spoken language that has grown
up in the past decade or so. People - mainly young - end sentences
with an upward inflection, as though asking a question. This shift
is of great interest to linguists, though its origin is still being
argued about. For a recent non-technical article on the topic, see
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4261622,00.html>.


5. Q&A
-------------------------------------------------------------------
[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.]

                        -----------

Q. Why does the word 'funk' have so many different meanings? Are
they at all related in some distant past, or have they just grown
up spontaneously and independently? I first learned of 'funk' when
I was growing up (I was born in America in '63), and then it was
'funky', meaning cool or groovy (I thought). Then I learned 'funk'
was a style of music, and only a few years ago I learned (from
Julia Louis-Dreyfus on TV's _Seinfeld_) that it can also mean
smelly. It didn't help to look it up in the dictionary; there I
learned that 'funk' can be a state of abject terror. Groovy.
Stench. Blues. Horror. Are there any connections that can be drawn
between these diverse meanings? [Tim McGowan, Minneapolis, USA]

A. Truly a word for all seasons.

Let's start with 'smell', which is the oldest sense of 'funk',
dating from the early seventeenth century. It's suggested it may
come from the French dialect verb 'funkier', to blow smoke on a
person or annoy them with smoke, a word that's probably based on
Latin 'fumus', smoke (and is yet another example of a useful term
that's missing from English). Instances usually refer to air thick
with tobacco smoke (some readers may think of 'fug' in the same
sense, but the two words are not connected). Though it was known in
Britain, early examples came from America, and it stayed active
there long after it had gone out of use over here.

The sense of abject fear or cowardice is about a century less old,
first being recorded in 1743. It may have appeared first as Oxford
University slang. It is usually said that it is a distinct word to
the earlier sense, deriving instead from an obsolete Flemish word
'fonck', fear. (Despite the weight of authority behind this, I
can't help feeling that there was some association with the smell
of fear in there somewhere.) Whatever its source, that sense stands
alone and isn't connected with any of the others, though 'blue
funk' is directly linked. (In Britain a 'blue funk' is a state of
panic or great fear, while in the US it refers more to a state of
dejection or depression.)

However, the modern sense of a musical genre and the Black English
term 'funky' for something excellent both derive from the surviving
American sense of 'funk' for a bad smell. The progression seems to
have been that 'funky' was invented in the 1920s to refer to an
obnoxious smell, especially in reference to a person who smelled
bad, say of sweat. That was soon after transferred in Black English
to somebody or something objectionable or worthless. By a process
common in Black English, by the end of the 1930s 'funky' was being
applied to things that were satisfying, impressive, or generally
approved of (think of 'wicked' and 'bad', two other examples of
this kind of deliberate inversion). The music sense -
unpretentious, down to earth, rooted in the blues - turns up in the
early 1950s as a further evolution of meaning. The noun 'funk' in
this sense is a back formation from 'funky'.


6. Over to You
-------------------------------------------------------------------
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 <editor at worldwidewords.org>.

  Tom Mac Dougall asked about the expression 'fiddler's bitch',
  as in "drunk as a fiddler's bitch". There are many expressions
  that refer to fiddlers, and this one is quite well known,
  with 'as a fiddler's bitch' being used to indicate a number
  of things taken to extremes. But nowhere can I find any
  information about its origin. Any ideas, anyone?

THE LAST QUERY asked about "wing-wong for a goose's bridle". Many
subscribers knew the answer to this one and were able to supply
examples of the way it is used. The original form was "whim-wham
for a goose's bridle", a version that is still remembered by some
older people in Britain. It turns out to be a well-known Australian
expression (though not used as much as it once was), a traditional
way of deflecting a question from an inquisitive child. "What are
you doing, daddy?" "I'm making a whim-wham for a goose's bridle."
In other words, "go away", "stop bothering me".

'Whim-wham' is an old English term for a trivial or frivolous
thing, such as an ornament or trinket. It is now not much known,
though not obsolete. Its origin is mysterious, though it's clearly
a reduplicated word, like 'flim-flam', and may derive from 'whimsy'
in the same way that 'flim-flam' is related to 'flimsy'.

Don Esslemont wrote, as have others, to point out that it has also
been used for a small object whose true name is not known, in much
the same way as 'gizmo' or 'thingummy'. He wrote: "I heard it
during my service in the Royal Navy in the 1950s. I first saw it in
print in a catalogue produced by Thomas Foulkes, a London yacht
chandler, in the early 1960s, applied to a wire attached to a snap-
hook".

As 'whim-wham' is only known in Australia as part of this set
phrase, folk etymology has often turned it into 'wigwam', and also
to other forms, such as the questioner's 'wing-wong', and also as
'wig-wog'. And 'bridle' has sometimes been converted to 'bridal',
which adds another layer of confusion to an already mysterious
saying.

It is clear that there has been a long history of nonsense phrases
intended to silence intrusive enquiries about what one was doing,
such as telling someone that your job was "weaving leather aprons".
Other forms of our expression that have been recorded in Britain
include "a whim-wham for ducks to perch on", "a whim-wham for a
treacle mill", and "a whim-wham to wind the sun up".


7. Subscription commands
-------------------------------------------------------------------
* All messages relating to subscriptions MUST be sent to the list
  server address <listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org>. DO NOT REPLY
  TO THIS MESSAGE. Instructions must be in the body of e-mails -
  subject lines are ignored.

* To leave the list, send <listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org> the
  instruction

     SIGNOFF WORLDWIDEWORDS

* To join the list, send <listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org> the
  instruction

     SUBSCRIBE WORLDWIDEWORDS Your-first-name Your-last-name

* For a complete list of commands, including instructions on how
  to change your e-mail address, send the list server the message

     INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS

-------------------------------------------------------------------
* For a key to the IPA pronunciations used in these mailings, see
  <http://www.worldwidewords.org/pronguide.htm>, or send a blank
  e-mail message to <pronguide at worldwidewords.org>.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
* WORLD WIDE WORDS is copyright (c) Michael B Quinion 2001. You
  may reproduce this mailing in whole or in part in other free
  media provided that you don't alter the text in any way, you give
  the source as World Wide Words, and you quote the site address
  of <http://www.worldwidewords.org>.
-------------------------------------------------------------------