World Wide Words -- 21 Dec 02
Michael Quinion
DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Dec 20 19:08:54 UTC 2002
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 321 Saturday 21 December 2002
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Sent each Saturday to 16,000+ subscribers in at least 119 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Costard.
3. Q&A: Boxing day; Orange; Cocktail; Grapefruit.
4. Questions I haven't answered.
5. Endnote.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.
C. Help support World Wide Words.
See the very end for copyright information.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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HOLIDAY BREAK To confirm - there will be no issue next Saturday,
28 December; the next is due on 4 January 2003. As a consolation
prize, this issue is rather longer than usual (though not quite a
double issue) and you will see that all the pieces refer either to
the season or to food and drink. All good wishes to our readers for
the holiday season and the new year.
GREAT SCOTT It's a good thing I live 3000 miles away (and on the
other side of an ocean from) inhabitants of the US. To misspell the
first name of a famous American historical character like General
Winfield Scott, twice, was to invite opprobrium. Apologies.
GIFT Several subscribers nearly had apoplectic fits on seeing the
phrase "you can gift a subscription" in recent issues. "What is
wrong with 'give'?", was the main thrust of messages. Nothing, of
course. But I'd argue there's nothing wrong with using 'gift' as a
transitive verb, either - examples are known from the seventeenth
century onwards. The Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage
concisely lays out the battle lines on this disputed form: "Most of
the criticism of this verb has been from American sources. Usage
panellists in particular cannot abide it - the major panels have
consistently rejected it by better than a nine to one margin. The
British seem to regard it with somewhat greater tolerance, perhaps
because of its long history of reputable use in Scotland".
2. Weird Words: Costard
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An old variety of apple.
All Shakespeare scholars will know Costard as a clown in Love's
Labour's Lost. I guess he was given that name because it was then a
slang term for the head. Shakespeare puts the same word into the
mouth of the First Murderer in Richard III when giving instructions
for the disposal of the ill-fated George, Duke of Clarence: "Take
him on the costard with the hilts of thy sword, and then chop him
in the malmsey-butt in the next room". [George, brother of Richard
III, is traditionally said to have been drowned in a butt (a large
barrel) of malmsey wine (a strong sweet wine from Madeira and other
places); what must originally have been a sarcastic quip on the
death of a drunkard has now become fixed in legend.]
A costard was originally a native English apple, a large medieval
variety that no longer exists. Nobody knows why it got that name,
though there is a suspicion that it comes from an Old French word
"coste" for a rib, as the costard was described as angular in shape
with pronounced ridges.
The word was still around in both senses at the beginning of the
nineteenth century. By then, though, it most commonly appeared in
disguise in the name of sellers of fruit: costermongers, so called
because they originally sold this type of apple, though by that
date they sold all manner of fruit and vegetables and also fish.
Even in such lowly occupations there was a hierarchy: a person who
sold fruit from a basket was a mere hawker, but a costermonger had
the dignity of a handcart or sometimes a cart pulled by a donkey.
Costermongers had the reputation of being tough, hard-living, foul-
spoken, often drunk, and always ready for a fight.
3. Q&A
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Q. As an American, I've always wondered about the origin of the
term "Boxing Day". [Burt Rubin; a related question came from Keith
Denham]
A. Let me first explain that in Britain Boxing Day is the day after
Christmas Day, 26 December, a public holiday. (Strictly, the public
holiday is the first working day after Christmas Day, but the name
Boxing Day is always reserved for the 26th.)
We have to go back to the early seventeenth century to find the
basis for the name. The term "Christmas box" appeared about then
for an earthenware box, something like a piggy bank, which
apprentices took around at Christmas to collect money. When it was
full, or the round complete, the box was broken and the money
distributed among the company. By the eighteenth century,
"Christmas box" had become a figurative term for any seasonal
gratuity. I cannot resist quoting the First Edition of the Oxford
English Dictionary, which has a splendid lip-curling, drawing-away-
of-skirts, how-awful-these-lower-orders-are description of this
sense that suggests James Murray, who compiled the entry, had been
importuned once too often:
A present or gratuity given at Christmas: in Great Britain,
usually confined to gratuities given to those who are supposed
to have a vague claim upon the donor for services rendered to
him as one of the general public by whom they are employed and
paid, or as a customer of their legal employer; the undefined
theory being that as they have done offices for this person,
for which he has not directly paid them, some direct
acknowledgement is becoming at Christmas. These gratuities have
traditionally been asked from householders by letter-carriers,
policemen, lamp-lighters, scavengers, butchers' and bakers'
boys, tradesmen's carmen, etc, and from tradesmen by the
servants of households that deal with them, etc. They are thus
practically identical with the Christmas-box collected by
apprentices from their masters' customers, except that the name
is now given to the individual donation; and hence, vulgarly and
in dialect use it is often equivalent to "Christmas present".
Some time after the beginning of the nineteenth century, the word
"box" of "Christmas box" shifted to refer to the day after
Christmas day, on which such gratuities were often requested and on
which the original Christmas box was taken round. The first
recorded use of Boxing Day for the 26th December is in 1833. By
1853 at the latest it had become a scourge that justified Murray's
later acerbic comments, at least to judge from these comments by
Charles Manby Smith in his Curiosities of London Life:
We can hardly close these desultory sketches of Christmas-time
without some brief allusion to the day after Christmas, which,
through every nook and cranny of the great Babel, is known and
recognised as "Boxing Day," - the day consecrated to baksheesh,
when nobody, it would almost seem, is too proud to beg, and
when everybody who does not beg is expected to play the almoner.
"Tie up the knocker - say you're sick, you are dead," is the
best advice perhaps that could be given in such cases to any
man who has a street-door and a knocker upon it.
This custom, seasonal visitors to Britain may be assured, has now
died out, though solicitations for Christmas tips continue to some
extent, especially from the deliverers of newspapers. Instead, on
Boxing Day people now rush to the first post-Christmas sales.
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Q. Which named which? Did the fruit called an orange give rise to
the name of the colour orange, or vice versa? [Evan Parry]
A. This is an easy one for me to answer, since a quick look at the
big Oxford English Dictionary gives the historical details. The
fruit definitely came first - it is recorded in English in the
fourteenth century, while the application of its name to the colour
only appeared at the beginning of the seventeenth. This raises the
question of what people called the colour before they had a word
for it: either they didn't (few things in nature are that colour
and there was no bright orange pigment available to artists and
dyers until the early nineteenth century) or they borrowed terms
like yellow, gold, amber, or red to describe various shades.
By the way, the word "orange" is interesting, etymologically
speaking, because it's an excellent example of a change called
metanalysis in which the first letter of a word shifts to the end
of the preceding word. So "a numpire" became "an umpire", "a
napron" became "an apron", and so on. In Arabic, the fruit was
named "naranj" (from Persian "narang" and Sanskrit "naranga" - the
orange may have originated in northern India) and this name came
with the fruit into Italian and also into Spanish, in which the
fruit is still called "naranja". The initial letter dropped off
before the word reached English, possibly in Italian but more
probably in French.
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Q. Being a keen creator and imbiber of these wonderful refreshments
called cocktails, I would love to track down the origins of the
word. Some research has suggested that early mixed drinks may have
been decorated with feathers (unlike today's umbrellas!) but surely
there is more to it than that? [David Coe; related questions came
from Marlena Von Kazmier and others]
A. There is certainly more to the matter than that, though almost
all that is written about the origin of the name for this great
American institution is spurious. H L Mencken wrote in 1946 that he
had found forty supposed etymologies, and a quick look at a few
current books on drinks (and, alas, etymology) show that many of
them are healthy and still going the rounds.
The problem is that the word "cocktail" suddenly appears in print
in 1806, with no trail of earlier forms that would enable us to
determine its provenance. It's as though some alien had suddenly
put it into men's minds in that year. The result has been a vast
flowering of speculation, most of it way out in "here be dragons"
territory:
* Betsy (or Betty) Flannigan, an innkeeper of Pennsylvania (or
possibly Virginia), used cock tail feathers as swizzle sticks
when serving drinks during the American Revolution. Or the same
lady served a soldier a mixed drink containing all the colours
of a cock's tail, to which he gave the name. Or she roasted a
rooster stolen from a supporter of the English and in triumph
decorated the accompanying drinks with the cock's feathers.
* A meal of bread fortified with mixed spirits, named cock-ale,
that was given to fighting cocks before a contest, and which
was later taken up by humans and renamed. Or, from the practice
of toasting the victor in a cockfight, the one that had most
feathers left in its tail; feathers to the number remaining
would be inserted into the drinks. (Cock-ale was indeed an
English drink at one time, made by a recipe that really did
include a chicken, but that isn't the source, either.)
* An old French recipe of mixed wines, called "coquetel", was
perhaps carried to America by General Lafayette in 1777.
* It comes from "cock tailings", the dregs or tailings of casks
of spirits, which would be drained out through their cocks
(spigots), mixed together, and sold as a cheap drink.
* A cock-tailed horse in the same period was not a thoroughbred,
so of mixed blood. The name was transferred to the drink, which
was also a mixture.
* From a West African word "kaketal" for a scorpion, which was
transferred to the drink because of its sting.
* The drink cocked your tail like a crowing rooster.
* A Louisiana apothecary in New Orleans named Antoine Peychaud
(who also invented Peychaud bitters) is said in the 1790s to
have served drinks of brandy, sugar, and water, plus his crucial
new ingredient of bitters. He served them to his guests in a
sort of double egg-cup, whose name in French was "coquetier",
in time corrupted to cocktail. (The name Sazerac has also been
given to this drink, though it's now made with rye whiskey.)
If you hunt around online you can find lots of wild elaborations of
many of these stories, plus many others. There's no evidence that
supports any one of them in particular, though some are obviously
more silly than others. If I were a betting man, I'd plump for the
New Orleans story, because it's supported by more circumstantial
references as to name, place and date; I might perhaps put a saver
on the last but one story. In the current (and the likely future)
state of etymological knowledge, however, anybody taking up the bet
will probably never learn whether they have won or not.
One intriguing point about the cocktail is that the first reference
to it says that it is "a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of
any kind, sugar, water, and bitters". Charles Dickens wrote in his
"Martin Chuzzlewit" in 1844 (he was versed in American ways by this
time): "He could ... smoke more tobacco, drink more rum-toddy,
mint-julep, gin-sling, and cocktail, than any private gentleman of
his acquaintance". A little later still, in 1857, Thomas Hughes
wrote "Here, Bill, drink some cocktail" in Tom Brown's Schooldays.
All these suggest that the original cocktail was a specific drink,
not a generic name for a type of drink. From the description in the
1806 example, it sounds as though it was something like what is now
called an Old-Fashioned.
-----------
Q. Why is a grapefruit called that when it looks nothing like a
grape? [Tom Williams]
A. This question is indeed a bit of a puzzle, but the grapefruit is
a strange plant even without the problem of its name. It appeared
in Barbados in the middle of the eighteenth century as a natural
cross between the orange and the pummelo. The latter is also known
by its Dutch name pompelmoose and as a shaddock, because a Captain
Shaddock of the East India Company brought it halfway around the
world from the East Indies late in the seventeenth century.
The grapefruit was first described in 1750 by the Reverend Griffith
Hughes and was then and often afterwards called the "forbidden
fruit", because it was seized upon by those searching for the
identity of the original tree of good and evil in the Garden of
Eden. John Lunan, in whose botanical work of 1814 about Jamaica,
Hortus Jamaicensis, the word "grapefruit" first appeared in
English, said of it: "There is a variety known by the name of
grape-fruit, on account of its resemblance in flavour to the grape;
this fruit is not near so large as the shaddock". Mr Lunan had
either never tasted one, or grapefruit of the period were sweeter
than they are now, or he was suffering from sour grapes.
It's certain his idea about the name was wrong. It turns out the
grapefruit was really so called because it grows in groups that
when small, green and unripe look to a vivid imagination a bit like
a bunch of grapes.
4. Questions I never answered
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I get many questions every week. I do my best to find something to
say for as many as time permits (which is often fewer than either
questioners or I would like).
I ignore the ones that are obviously from students, whose deadlines
for homework or projects seem always imminent. Typical examples,
with their original spelling: "i would like you to help me find the
difiniton of the word CONNOTATION. Please include some examples and
a discuccion on how is the word or device is used"; "Please can you
tell me how to do an organogram on the computer and what programme
do I use as I would like to do a project for my work", "Can you
please give me 10 words that have not been put in the dictonary
please and can you please reply ASAP please before Friday the 18th
of October"; "I'm doing a research paper on the origin of a word,
but I can't find a word with enough INTERESTING information about
it to write a GREAT paper! Can you help?". I sometimes wonder what
happens to them all.
As for the rest, I have to confess that questioners sometimes ask
me to venture into areas which I am unwilling or ill-equipped to
explore:
* What is the distance from the wall to the centre line of the
drain for a standard bathtub?
* Is there a way to impeach the Governor and if so could you
tell me the steps?
* In the nursery rhyme, why did the third little piggy have roast
beef? Wouldn't it make more sense if the little piggy that went
to market had it?
* I am wanting to research words and phrases that you would find
children asking, like why is it called a car, or why is it
called a watermelon. Basically I'm looking to find every word.
So where do I start?
* In phrases like "the wrong side of forty" (or thirty, or fifty,
or almost any age, really), which is the wrong side?
* If a veterinarian is asked to put a healthy animal to sleep
because the owner is bored with it, is it a moral issue only
if the doctor believes in a higher power?
* What do movers and shakers move and shake?
* Do you know the origin of the physicians' custom of not working
on Wednesdays?
* I'm trying to name my motel. The idea is to capture the look
and feel of the 50's. Anyone have any ideas?
* I want to know what program in university I have to do. Biology
or music?
* Who invented the foot-long hot dog?
* Is it true that WWW, the abbreviation of World Wide Web, is
by gematria a representation of the number of the beast, 666?
* Where did xoxo come from and which ones are hugs and which ones
are kisses?
* When we move into the future, do we move forward or backward?
5. Endnote
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"There even are places where English completely disappears. / In
America, they haven't used it for years! / Why can't the English
teach their children how to speak?" [Alan Jay Lerner, Why Can't the
English? (1956); quoted in the Oxford Dictionary of Thematic
Quotations (2000)]
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