World Wide Words -- 24 Aug 02
Michael Quinion
DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Aug 23 12:35:41 UTC 2002
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 304 Saturday 24 August 2002
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Sent each Saturday to 15,000+ subscribers in at least 119 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
<http://www.worldwidewords.org> <TheEditor at worldwidewords.org>
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Palermo scale.
3. Weird Words: Will-o'-the-wisp.
4. Q&A: Happy as a sandboy; Shank's mare; Zilch.
5. Endnote.
World Wide Words Frequently Asked Questions.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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MISTAKE OF THE WEEK This is clearly becoming a regular feature. I
misplaced the tilde on "mañana" in the Endnote section last week.
My thanks to the dozens of subscribers who took time out to tell
me about it.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS This has previously been sent out as a
separate mailing about every three months. I am experimenting with
adding it to the end of a newsletter instead. The FAQ contains more
detailed information than the usual note at the end of newsletters
can provide. For example, it tells you how to temporarily suspend
mailings if you are away. Please read it, as it will help to reduce
unnecessary housekeeping messages to me. You may like to keep it
for future reference.
2. Turns of Phrase: Palermo scale
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If you were paying close attention recently, you may have heard a
report flash past that the Earth was going to be hit by an asteroid
named 2002 NT7 on 1 February 2019. Within days, this had been put
back to possibly sometime in 2060, or possibly never. The orbits of
newly-discovered asteroids need time to be worked out in detail,
but the press latched on to early reports without waiting for more
accurate later figures.
For some years, there has been a rating scheme, the Torino scale,
that estimates the risk of a body like this knocking us back into
the Stone Age: it runs from 0 (no risk) to 10 (global catastrophe).
That isn't helpful for the great mass of asteroids, for whom the
Torino figure is zero, but for which there may be risk of impact.
So astronomers have just invented the Palermo scale, a more complex
and subtle measure, which rates the impact risk of a cosmic body
against the average risk of an impact by a body of the same size
over a long period of time.
Unfortunately, it gives newspapers yet another incomprehensible
number to quote, especially as it can become negative, somehow
implying a less than zero chance of impact. Values less than -2
reflect events for which there are no likely consequences; values
between -2 and 0 indicate situations that merit careful monitoring.
Positive values suggest that some level of concern is merited.
"2002 CU11 has been rated as less threatening than the general, or
background, risk of any other impact; as of last week, it had a
value of minus 1.28 on the Palermo scale."
["Dallas Morning News", Apr. 2002]
"That gave 2002 NT7 the highest ever score on the Palermo scale, a
rating system developed to help astronomers categorise impact
risks."
["New Scientist", Aug. 2002]
3. Weird Words: Will-o'-the-wisp
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A phosphorescent light seen at night on marshy ground.
To see faint lights hovering and slipping about near the ground on
a dark night would be enough to scare anybody travelling through a
marsh. No wonder the sightings gave rise to superstitious beliefs
everywhere that they have appeared. There are many words for them,
including the old sense of "jack-o'-lantern" and the learned Latin
"ignis fatuus", the foolish fire. Attempts to approach the lights
result in them seeming to recede or vanish, sometimes to appear
somewhere else. So people thought they were the work of a
mischievous sprite trying to lead unwary travellers astray. That is
why there are personal names involved - Will and Jack. "Will-o'-
the-wisp" was originally "Will with the wisp", "wisp" here meaning
a handful of hay, presumed to be alight. We know now that the
flames are methane (marsh gas), ignited by the traces of hydrogen
phosphide sometimes found near decaying organic matter. Both "will-
o'-the-wisp" and "ignis fatuus" are used figuratively for some
false idea or influence that leads people astray.
4. Q&A
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Q. Our family recently discussed the expression "happy as a
sandboy", and wondered where and how it originated. My dictionary
informs me that a sandboy is a kind of flea - but why a boy, and
why is it happy? [Niki Wessels, South Africa; a related question
came from Robert Metcalf in Singapore.]
A. Let me add an explanatory note to your question, as American
readers have probably never heard this saying. It is mostly known
in Britain and the Commonwealth, though it is not so common these
days even in those countries. The first examples we know about are
from London at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Another
form current at the time was "as jolly as a sandboy". Both are
proverbial sayings that suggest a carefree and untroubled state of
mind.
None of my reference works hint at a connection with fleas (sand
fleas exist, of course, but they hardly seem relevant). However, a
writer in "Notes & Queries" in 1866, answering much the same
query as yours, comments that: "Sandboy is the vulgar name of a
small insect which may be found in the loose sand so common on the
seashore. This insect hops and leaps in a manner strongly
suggestive of jollity, and hence I imagine the simile arises". So
your dictionary is part-right: it was once a colloquial or dialect
word for a sandfly.
The usual explanation is mundane in the extreme: sandboys sold
sand. The word "boy" here was a common term for a male worker of
lower class (as in "bellboy", "cowboy", and "stableboy"), which
comes from an old sense of a servant. It doesn't imply the sellers
were necessarily young, though one early description does mention
urchins doing the selling. There's no link, by the way, with the
"sandman", the personification of sleep, which came into English
several decades later in translations of Hans Christian Andersen's
stories.
The selling of sand wasn't such a peculiar occupation as you might
think, as there was once quite a need for it. It was used to scour
pans and tools and was sprinkled on floors. By the time that Henry
Mayhew wrote about it in his "London Labour and the London Poor" in
1861 he had to say that "The trade is inconsiderable to what it
was, saw-dust having greatly superseded it in the gin-palace, the
tap-room, and the butcher's shop". The sand was dug out from pits
on Hampstead Heath and taken down in horse-drawn carts to be hawked
through the streets. Early records also supply an image of sandboys
selling their wares from panniers carried on donkeys.
The job was hard work and badly paid. Mayhew records these comments
from one of the excavators on Hampstead Heath: "My men work very
hard for their money, sir; they are up at 3 o'clock of the morning,
and are knocking about the streets, perhaps till 5 or 6 o'clock in
the evening".
Their prime characteristic, it seems, was an inexhaustible desire
for beer. Charles Dickens referred to the saying, already by then
proverbial, in "The Old Curiosity Shop" in 1841: "The Jolly
Sandboys was a small road-side inn of pretty ancient date, with a
sign, representing three Sandboys increasing their jollity with as
many jugs of ale". A writer in Appleton's Journal in the USA in
1872 remarked that the saying presumably arose because "as sand-
boys follow a very dry and dusty trade, they are traditionally
believed to require a great deal of liquor to moisten their clay".
Quite so. But I suspect that the long hours and hard work involved
in carrying and shovelling sand, plus the poor returns, meant that
sandboys didn't have much cause to look happy in the normal run of
things, improving only when they'd had a pint or two, when they
became tipsily cheerful. My guess is that at first the saying was
meant ironically. Only when the trade of sandboy had died out
around the middle of the century could it be taken as a figurative
reference to happiness. Certainly, to judge from the answers to the
question in "Notes & Queries" in 1866, even by then its origin
was unknown.
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Q. "Shank's mare": I'm intrigued by this term for walking. However,
my reference books, and a cursory AOL internet search, provide
scant information on its derivation. I know you'll be much better
informed. [Barry Nordin; related questions came from Anne Cox, Nick
Carrington, and William Hale]
A. I am better informed, but it took more work than I expected, as
it isn't in some of my standard references.
It's Scottish, dating from the eighteenth century. There was a
verb, "to shank" or "to shank it", meaning to go on foot. This is
from standard English "shank" for the part of the leg from the knee
to the ankle, which comes from Old English "sceanca", the leg bone.
This verb developed into "shank's naig" or "shank's naigie" (where
the second words are local forms of "nag", a horse) and later into
"shank's mare". It was a wry joke: I haven't got a horse of my own
for the journey, so I'll use Shank's mare to get there, meaning
I'll go on my own two feet. This supposed link with a person called
Shank explains why the first word is often capitalised.
Another form, now more common in Britain, is "shank's pony".
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Q. My source books give me a totally unsatisfactory background on
the word "zilch". (Please note I resisted saying the books gave me
zilch on zilch.) Can you help? [Bill Penn]
A. There goes a chance for a pun. Spoilsport ...
You're right that dictionaries are almost uniformly cautious about
the origin of this word, which means "nothing; zero". It appears
first in print in the mid 1960s (the first example in the big
"Oxford English Dictionary" is from a slang collection at the
University of South Dakota dated Winter 1966).
Some reference books suggest the "Ballyhoo" humour magazine, first
published in 1931, was a possible source. This had as one of its
characters a Mr Zilch (actually there were several of them: the
front page of the first issue advertised "President Henry P. Zilch.
Chairman of the Board Charles D. Zilch. Treasurer Otto Zilch"). The
character was not actually pictured in cartoons in the magazine,
but was obviously present, so he was "the little man who wasn't
there".
This name may have come from college slang of the 1920s, in which
Joe Zilsch was the archetypal average student - the average Joe, in
fact, marching in the same column as Joe Blow, Joe Doakes and the
more recent Joe Sixpack. That sense is still around and sometimes
used in the same way as John Doe, to refer to an individual who is
otherwise unidentified. In the 1920s, however, Joe Zilsch could
also be an insignificant person or (in modern terms) a loser. The
spelling suggests a European origin (and "Zilsch" is a real German
surname of Slavic origin). The name was probably borrowed with
"zero" and "nil" in the back of the creator's mind.
But the years between the 1930s and the 1960s are a complete blank
as far as the development of the word is concerned, so we have no
way of confirming that this is the source. Indeed, the long gap
might be indirect evidence that it isn't. Alas, etymology is not an
exact science, so this is yet another occasion on which I just have
to say "Origin unknown."
5. Endnote
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"The English-speaking world may be divided into (1) those who
neither know nor care what a split infinitive is; (2) those who do
not know, but care very much; (3) those who know and condemn; (4)
those who know and distinguish. Those who neither know nor care are
the vast majority, and are a happy folk, to be envied by most of
the minority classes." [H W Fowler, "Modern English Usage" (1926)]
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World Wide Words Frequently Asked Questions
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Contents
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