World Wide Words -- 20 Apr 02

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 285          Saturday 20 April 2002
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sent each Saturday to 14,000+ subscribers in at least 116 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK      ISSN 1470-1448
<http://www.worldwidewords.org>   Mail: <editor at worldwidewords.org>
-------------------------------------------------------------------
  IF YOU REPLY TO THIS MAILING, REMEMBER TO CHANGE THE OUTGOING
   ADDRESS TO ONE OF THOSE IN THE 'CONTACT ADDRESSES' SECTION.


Contents
-------------------------------------------------------------------
 1. Feedback, notes and comments.
 2. Turns of Phrase: Allohistory.
 3. Misplaced Modifiers.
 4. Weird Words: Gobbledegook.
 5. Q&A: Sunday throat, Jolly hockey sticks.
 6. Endnote.
 7. Subscription commands.
 8. Contact addresses.


 1. Feedback, notes and comments
-------------------------------------------------------------------
TRACKS THAT SPEAK  Several New Zealand subscribers were quick off
the mark to point out that in last week's book review I added an
extra "h" to the Maori word "hangi". I inadvertently corrected the
letter count later in the review by leaving out the first "s" from
"pipsissewa". Apologies, twice.


 2. Turns of Phrase: Allohistory
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Other names for this idea are "virtual history", "uchronia", and
"counterfactualism", though the most common term is "alternative
history".

It's a "what if" approach, which works out what might have happened
if some nodal event in history had not occurred or had turned out
differently - what if Napoleon had won at Waterloo, for example (it
was "a damn close-run thing", you may recall). It has long been a
staple plot type for science fiction, from Ward Moore's Bring the
Jubilee, through Philip K Dick's The Man in the High Castle and
Keith Robert's Pavane, to Orson Scott Card's "Pastwatch" and Kim
Stanley Robinson's recent The Years of Rice and Salt.

In scholarly historical circles, "what if" speculation has in the
past been unpopular to the point of derision, though this is now
changing, in particular in the field of military history. The
British historian Niall Ferguson wrote a book in 1997 in which he
defended allohistory - he argued that if the study of history is
ever to be able to predict future events on the basis of past ones,
it is important to analyze what might (or should) have happened, as
well as what actually did.

The prefix "allo-" is from Greek "allos", "different, other", as in
"allegory" and "allergy".

In Virtual History, he debates those of his colleagues who dismiss
allohistory as mere science fiction.
                                 [Sydney Morning Herald, March 2002]


 3. Misplaced Modifiers
-------------------------------------------------------------------
And still they come ... Bill McGrail wrote: "Over the desk in the
lobby of a small hotel I occasionally visit, a sign reads 'No
Smoking Rooms Available'. Are there no rooms available in which one
may smoke, or are there, among all the smoking-permitted rooms,
some available in which one may not smoke?"


 4. Weird Words: Gobbledygook or Gobbledegook
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Unintelligible language, especially jargon or bureaucratese.

This is a truly maverick word, not only because it is surprisingly
modern and also one whose genesis we can pin down to the day, but
also because a maverick coined it  - Maury Maverick, a Texan lawyer
who was at various times a Democratic Congressman and mayor of San
Antonio.

He used the word in the New York Times Magazine on 21 May 1944,
while he was chairman of the US Smaller War Plants Committee in
Congress, as part of a complaint against the obscure language used
by his colleagues. His inspiration, he said, was the turkey,
"always gobbledy gobbling and strutting with ludicrous pomposity".
The word met a clear need and quickly became part of the language.
It is sometimes abbreviated slightly to "gobbledygoo".

Word coining runs in the Maverick family, since Maury Maverick's
grandfather, Samuel Maverick, a Texas rancher, was the inspiration
for "maverick", originally an animal not branded with its owner's
identification (because Sam Maverick didn't brand his own herds),
later an unconventional person, and later still a politician who
stands aside from the herd, refusing to conform to the party line.


 5. Q&A
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. A phrase remembered from my childhood: when one chokes, one
might say, "It must have gone down my Sunday throat!" That is,
something has been inhaled rather than swallowed. I didn't realise
this wasn't universally known until my husband questioned it. My
parents are mid-western US in origin. Is something like this in
general parlance? [Molly Walzer]

A. It's hardly common, to judge from the few references that have
turned up, though it does still seem to be known today, and it's
certainly American in origin.

The two places in which I've definitively managed to track it down
are both books from the early part of the twentieth century. One is
The Lure Of The Dim Trails by B M Bower, dated 1907: "Hank was
taken with a fit of strangling that turned his face a dark purple.
Afterward he explained brokenly that something had got down his
Sunday throat - and Thurston, who had never heard of a man's Sunday
throat, eyed him with suspicion". The other is from The Eskimo
Twins, by Lucy Perkins (1914): "The water went down his 'Sunday-
throat' and choked him!".

Apart from this, I was at a complete loss. So I turned to members
of the American Dialect Society. Douglas G Wilson suggested that
"Sunday" here might have started out with its figurative meaning of
"special" (as in "Sunday clothes", for one's best) but that could
have shifted to mean "alternative; other". It did so in the
American slang expression "Sunday face", which once meant a
sanctimonious expression, but which took on a slang sense of the
buttocks, that is, the "other" face. (Well, it does have two
cheeks.) So "Sunday throat" just means "the other throat", which is
clear enough, though anatomically inaccurate.

                        -----------

Q. My colleagues and I are puzzled as to the origins of the phrase
"jolly hockey-sticks", used, it seems, to describe old-school-tie-
type high jinks or behaviour. Can you elucidate how this phrase
began? [Kathy Sinclair, Australia]

A. It's not especially surprising that you're puzzled, since you
are half a world away from the British girls' schools that provoked
this parodic phrase, and in attitudes even further, if that were
possible.

It is a very British expression, gently dismissive of the hearty,
games-playing, unscholastic tone of many girls' public schools, in
which the game of hockey is a favourite sport. (Footnotes for non-
Brits: public schools in Britain are actually fee-charging private
schools separate from the state-run school system; they are
patronised by the moneyed middle and upper classes, and the popular
consciousness attributes an atmosphere of snobbery and privilege to
them, not without cause.)

Such schools for girls were late on the scene compared with their
counterparts for the male of the species. Early examples, in the
middle nineteenth century, set up in deliberate imitation of public
schools like Winchester and Eton, were the North London Collegiate
School and the Cheltenham Ladies' College. These institutions were
headed respectively by firm friends Miss Frances Buss and Miss
Dorothea Beale, thus provoking the anonymous rhyme:

  Miss Buss and Miss Beale
  Cupid's darts do not feel.
  How different from us,
  Miss Beale and Miss Buss.

By the early years of the twentieth century, there were enough such
girls' schools in existence for a new genre of writing to evolve,
of which the most celebrated early exponent was Angela Brazil. She
and her successors and imitators did much to further this hearty,
adventurous and sporting image.

A BBC radio comedy programme from 1950 was called Educating Archie
and featured the ventriloquist Peter Brough and his dummy Archie
Andrews. (Unkind people said that, as a ventriloquist, radio was
Peter Brough's ideal medium - when he appeared on TV people could
see his lips move. His American counterpart Edgar Bergen had
similar problems and he, too, was most successful on radio.) Though
the show, even viewed in rose-tinted retrospect, was fairly
dreadful, it was also extremely popular, in part because its
producer was a genius at spotting up-and-coming new talent. The
list of Archie's tutors and supporting cast reads like a Who's Who
of British talent from the fifties and sixties - Harry Secombe,
Hattie Jacques, Benny Hill, Sid James, Max Bygraves, Tony Hancock,
Alfred Marks, Dick Emery, Robert Moreton, Bernard Miles and Julie
Andrews, among others.

One of Archie's tutors was Beryl Reid, who played the part of a
ghastly schoolgirl named Monica, a parody of the sporty public-
school type. She invented the phrase "jolly hockey-sticks!" on the
show because, as she said once, "I know what sort of thing my
characters should say!" Her phrase struck a chord and it has passed
into the language.


 6. Endnote
-------------------------------------------------------------------
"Grannie used to talk of 'chaney' (china), 'laylocks' (lilac) and
'goold' (gold); of the 'Prooshians' and the 'Rooshians'; of things
being 'plaguey dear' and 'plaguey bad'. In my childhood, however,
half my elders used such expressions, which now seem to be almost
extinct. 'Obleege me by passing the cowcumber,' Uncle Julius always
used to say." [Augustus Hare, "The Story of My Life" (1896)]


 7. Subscription commands
-------------------------------------------------------------------
DO NOT REPLY TO THIS MAILING, or your request will be sent to an
electronic dead-letter office.

To leave the list, change your subscription address, or subscribe,
please visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/wordlist.htm.

Alternatively, you can contact the list server by sending an e-mail
message to listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org from the address at
which you are subscribed:

To leave the list, send:
     SIGNOFF WORLDWIDEWORDS

To subscribe, send:
     SUBSCRIBE WORLDWIDEWORDS First-name Last-name

To obtain a list of commands, send:
     INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS


 8. Contact addresses
-------------------------------------------------------------------
DO NOT REPLY TO THIS MAILING, or your message will vanish into the
ether!

Comments on newsletter mailings are always welcome. They should be
sent to <editor at worldwidewords.org>.

Questions intended to be answered in the Q&A section should go to
<qa at worldwidewords.org>.

For a key to the pronunciation symbols used in mailings, please see
<http://www.worldwidewords.org/pronguide.htm>, or send a blank e-
mail to our autoresponder at <pronguide at worldwidewords.org>.

-------------------------------------------------------------------
World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2002.  All rights
reserved. The Words Web site is at <http://www.worldwidewords.org>.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
You may reproduce this newsletter in whole or in part in other free
media online provided that you include the copyright notice above.
-------------------------------------------------------------------