World Wide Words -- 08 Jun 02

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 292           Saturday 8 June 2002
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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. Review: Language in Danger.
3. Weird Words: Honorificabilitudinitatibus.
4. Misplaced Modifiers.
5. Q&A: Nick of time; Big girl's blouse.
6. Endnote.
7. Subscription commands.
8. Contact addresses.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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IT'S ALL GONE QUIET  Surely not everybody is immersed in the World
Cup (or the Royal Jubilee)? Perhaps the outstanding quality of the
newsletter last week has stunned you all into an admiring silence?
Or could it be that my recent changes to e-mail addressing has made
sending a message just too onerous a task? For whatever reason,
this week has been the quietest on record for incoming mail.


2. Review: Language in Danger.
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This is the third in a group of books on the future of languages
that have come out this year (the others are "The Power of Babel",
by John McWhorter and "Speak: A Short History of Languages", by
Tore Janson (follow the links from <http://www.worldwidewords.org/
reviews/>). This one is by the linguist and historian Andrew Dalby,
who has also written "A Dictionary of Languages", as well as an
entertaining book on the history of spices.

Much of the thesis of Mr Dalby's book is common to that of the two
earlier works: everywhere languages are in danger of oblivion (one
estimate is that half of the 6,000 or so languages will have gone
by the end of this century, a rate of extinction that works out at
one every two weeks on average). He sets out to answer the obvious
questions that arise: why are they dying? and does it matter?

Languages die out through a complex equation of forces. Invasion,
subjugation and colonisation lead to minority groups either being
forced to give up their languages by government (as has happened at
various times with Welsh, Hawaiian, and Native American tongues) or
to the groups being pressured by economic factors into switching to
the dominant tongue. Once the number of speakers drops below a
threshold level, nothing will bring a language back (Hebrew is the
one very special exception to this rule).

His answer to the second question is the more interesting. He is
sure the loss represents a disaster for humanity. It isn't merely a
reduction in diversity (like the loss of plant and animal species
that is occurring at the same time and often for similar commercial
reasons), or the destruction of culture that goes with destruction
of language, but that we lose something more fundamental: the ways
of looking at the world that each language represents. And because
much traditional information about topics such as herbal medicine
is passed along only in these dying languages, he argues that the
loss of the languages will mean the irretrievable loss of this
knowledge, hard won over many generations.

[Dalby, Andrew, "Language in Danger: How Language Loss Threatens
Our Future", published by Allen Lane The Penguin Press on 6 June
2002; ISBN 0-71-399443-6; hardback, pp329; publisher's price
GBP18.99.]

LINKS
* Foundation for Endangered Languages: <http://www.ogmios.org/>.
* Linguists at Manchester University recently held a conference on
endangered languages, which highlighted some of those that will
disappear soon. For a brief report, see <http://www.guardian.co.uk/
Archive/Article/0,4273,4421317,00.html>.


3. Weird Words: Honorificabilitudinitatibus
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With honour.

We are in the arena of sesquipedalian words - those a foot and a
half long, whose prime characteristic is their length rather than
their sense or usefulness. Any word used both by James Joyce (in
"Ulysses") and by William Shakespeare (in "Love's Labour Lost")
can't be entirely dismissed from the canon of English, even though
the former borrowed it from the latter, who in turn borrowed it
from Latin, and it doesn't seem to have been used by anybody else,
ever.

Shakespeare's wondrous creation appears in Act 5, Scene 1:

   I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word;
   for thou art not so long by the head as
   honorificabilitudinitatibus: thou art easier
   swallowed than a flap-dragon.

(Somebody's now sure to ask me about "flap-dragon". It was the name
given to a game in which the players snatched raisins out of a dish
of burning brandy and extinguished them in their mouths before
eating them. By extension, it was the burning raisins used in the
game.)

"Honorificabilitudinitatibus" is the ablative plural of the Latin
"honorificabilitudo", honourableness, a long-enough tongue-twister
of a word to satisfy most palates by itself. If you're a glutton
for punishment, you could also try "honorificabilitudinity", which
also means "honourableness".


4. Misplaced Modifiers
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My wife saw a hand-written sign in the window of the RSPCA charity
shop in the High Street last week. It read "All the items in this
window are not for sale". Hardly worth all the trouble of putting
them on display, you may feel.


5. Q&A
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Q. What is the origin of the phrase "in the nick of time"? [Jack
Latimer]

A. It's definitely one of the stranger idioms in the language. The
language experts are sure that "nick" here is the same word as that
for a small cut or notch.

Sometime round about the 1580s the phrase "in the nick" or "in the
very nick" began to be used for the critical moment, the exact
instant at which something has to take place. The idea seems to
have been that a nick was a narrow and precise marker, so that if
something was in the nick it was precisely where it should be (at
several removes, the relatively modern US expression "in the
groove", derived from those old-fashioned records you play with a
stylus, has something of the same idea about it).

It seems that users of the expression pretty soon afterwards found
this association of ideas needed some elaboration, so started to
add "of time" to the expression, and that's the way it has stayed
ever since. These days, the phrase more usually refers to something
that only just happens in time, at the last possible moment.

There are a number of other expressions involving "nick", as in yet
another name for the devil (this time from the personal name
"Nicholas"). There are the British slang terms for theft ("my car's
been nicked!") or for a police station ("the nick"), or the act of
being arrested ("you're nicked!"). There's also the American sense
of defrauding a person of money, and the Australian ideas of moving
quickly or furtively, or of being in the nude ("in the nick"). Most
of these, except perhaps the last, come from senses of "nick" that
may derive from an old and defunct colloquial sense of seizing an
advantage or grabbing an opportunity, which isn't far from the idea
of being in the nick of time.

But the history of the word is confused and complicated (there's
also the animal breeders' sense of a mating that has had excellent
results, for example, as well as the old sporting sense of a
winning throw at dice) to the extent that you'd need half a book to
explain them all.

                        -----------

Q. "Big girl's blouse". How did this extraordinary pejorative come
about? It is usually applied to males and seems to mean a
milquetoast, but how? [Colin Alexander, New Zealand]

A. For those in other parts of the English-speaking world who have
never heard of this astonishing idiom, let me explain that it is
heard now quite widely in Britain (and elsewhere, too, it seems),
though it originated in the North of England.

I've been vaguely dreading somebody asking this question, because
it is one of a set of Northern idioms that are quite impenetrable
in their origins. Others are the exclamation of surprise, "well,
I'll go to the foot of our stairs!" and the dismissive "all mouth
and trousers" (for the latter, see <http://www.worldwidewords.org/
qa/qa-all1.htm>.

People do indeed use it to mean an ineffectual or effeminate male,
a weakling, though it is often used in a bantering or teasing way
rather than as an out-and-out insult ("You can't drink Coke in a
pub, you big girl's blouse!"; "Blokes who don't take on dares are
big girl's blouses"). The American "milquetoast" isn't quite
equivalent (since it has a greater emphasis on meekness rather than
on an unmanly nature), but it's close.

It seems to have been first noticed in the 1960s. The first example
in print we know of is from 1969, in a script of the British ITV
network sitcom "Nearest and Dearest" (which ran from 1969 to 1972).
This starred Jimmy Jewel as Eli Pledge and Hylda Baker as his
spinster sister Nellie, who inherit a pickle-bottling factory in
Colne, Lancashire. It was rough-and-ready northern humour, of the
type conventionalised as gritty, and full of innuendo (plus
malapropisms from Nellie).

It has been suggested that Hylda Baker invented the phrase in her
stage act. If she didn't, where "big girl's blouse" came from is
likely to remain a mystery. Coincidentally, Brian Edmondson e-
mailed me to comment that his Liverpudlian father, who died in
1979, always said "he's flapping like a big girl's blouse". This
conjures up an image of ineffectualness that is plausible as a
extended idea from which the current version could have derived.

Other than that, your guess is as good as mine ...


6. Endnote
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"The life of the journalist is poor, nasty, brutish and short. So
is his style." [Stella Gibbons, in the preface to "Cold Comfort
Farm" (1932), quoted in David Crystal and Hilary Crystal "Words on
Words" (2000).]


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