World Wide Words -- 29 Jun 02

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 295           Saturday 29 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. Weird Words: Clerihew.
4. Q&A: Whole ball of wax; Dogsbody.
5. Endnote.
6. Subscription commands.
7. Contact addresses.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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PIFFY ON A ROCK BUN  All very interesting, subscribers wrote, after
this piece last week, but do tell us - what is a rock bun? A good
question, it turns out, because the big Oxford English Dictionary,
among other works, doesn't admit that the term even exists. But it
does have "rock cake", another equally British term, but one that
is in much wider circulation. Both terms refer to the same item -
small currant cakes, made with minimal liquid, that have a hard,
rough surface that looks a bit rock-like.

GOOGLE  In a slightly mischievous spirit, I deliberately didn't
mention the use of this verb by Toni Savage in her question about
Piffy and his rock bun, being interested to see if anybody would
comment on it. It derives, of course, from the name of the leading
Web search engine, which comes itself from the mathematical term
"googol" for ten raised to the power of 100. It began to appear in
print about 18 months ago. This example is from "Newsday" in March
2001, about using Google to check up on people: "'I always Google
before dates. It is a must,' said a 24-year-old researcher at a
high-tech magazine in San Francisco, who asked not to be identified
for fear that someone would Google her."

SIC!  Several subscribers pointed out that I may have unreasonably
made fun of China Miéville last week. A few American dictionaries
do actually include a relevant sense of "hiss". The Oxford American
Dictionary, for instance, has "to whisper something in an urgent or
angry way" and even has the example "'Get back!' he hissed".

VACATION/HOLIDAY  For many subscribers, it's time to leave behind
the cares of daily life for a while. But you don't need to leave
the list as well, to stop messages filling your mailbox while you
are away. See Section 6 for a way to temporarily suspend mailings.


2. Weird Words: Clerihew
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A form of whimsically biographical comic verse.

G K Chesterton called it a "severe and stately form of free verse",
but then he had been a close friend from schooldays of the man who
invented it, Edmund Bentley. Indeed, Chesterton illustrated the
first book of whimsical verses, "Biography for Beginners", which
Bentley published in 1905 under the name of E. Clerihew.

The form is slight but not slighting, conventionally consisting of
a quatrain with the name of the biographee as the first line. The
lines are of unequal lengths, rhymed AABB, often written in a flat-
footed or mangled way more reminiscent of prose than verse. The
first, which Edmund Bentley composed at the age of 16 during a
boring science class at St Paul's School in 1901, was:

  Sir Humphry Davy
  Abominated gravy.
  He lived in the odium
  Of having discovered sodium.

"Clerihew" was Bentley's middle name, which was given him (and
which he in turn passed to his son Nicholas) to mark his mother's
maiden name, Margaret Richardson Clerihew, Clerihew being an old
Scottish surname. It was applied to the verse form by others and
seems to have first surfaced in its own right as the name in 1928.

Another example:

  Sir Christopher Wren
  Said, 'I am going to dine with some men.
  If anyone calls
  Say I am designing St. Paul's.'

Someone who creates clerihews is a "clerihewer", an appropriate
term for a person who hacks such verse out of the living language.


4. Q&A
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Q. What is the history and origin of the term "the whole ball of
wax"? I have heard explanations indicating that it is derived from
workers at Madame Tussauds, but this seems a bit contrived, not to
mention trite. I have also heard that it is derived from the term
"the whole bailiwick". This sounds more convincing to me, but it
may be just as contrived. I would appreciate your learned opinion.
[James Cameron, Australia]

A. If I had a learned opinion, you would be welcome to it, but my
view is almost as much based on ignorance as the next man's. But we
do know a few facts, and I can add one new one.

What we do know is that the expression means "everything" (and so
is essentially the same as other American expressions like "the
whole shooting match", "the whole megillah", "the whole shebang"
and "the whole enchilada"). It is first recorded in the Ninth
Edition of Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary of 1953, so it is
presumably somewhat older in the oral culture. It was most closely
associated in its early days with Madison Avenue advertising
people.

We can dismiss the Madame Tussaud's connection out of hand. It's
the product of an unoriginal mind which has linked "wax" with
"waxworks" and done the equivalent of making two and two equal
five.

The story tying it with "bailiwick" is even more stretched and
unconvincing. It appeared in William and Mary Morris's "The Morris
Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins". They reproduce an English
legal text from 1620 which describes the allocation of land among
the heirs to an estate by a process very much like a lottery. Each
parcel of land was listed on its own piece of paper, sealed inside
a small ball of wax, and placed in a hat. Each heir then pulled out
one of the balls to discover which part was his. But the text
doesn't mention a "bailiwick", which is an area of land all right,
but one superintended by a bailiff, and so nothing to do with
allotting land to heirs. The story presumably evolved because of
some supposed link between "bail" and "ball", and between "wick"
and candle wax. The Morrises were strangely credulous about this
story in view of the nearly 400-year and more than 3000-mile gap
between that description and the first appearance of the phrase.
Whatever the origin, this certainly isn't it.

However, I did find one real clue, in a disintegrating paperback in
my library - a science-fiction novel of 1954 by Shepherd Mead, who
two years before had written "How To Succeed in Business Without
Really Trying". Called "The Big Ball of Wax", it is a satire on big
business and advertising in America and contains this line from the
narrator, a market research man, about the story to come: "Well,
why don't we go back to the beginning and roll it all up, as the
fellows say, into one big ball of wax?", that is, put everything
together to make a coherent and complete whole. This sounds too
much like a fuller and less elliptical early version of the saying
to be a coincidence. It also matches the expansive and slightly
surreal type of catchphrase (such as "let's run it up the flagpole
and see who salutes") that was common in the advertising world in
the US at this period.

It's a small contribution to knowledge, but mine own ...

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Q. In browsing your biographic details on the World Wide Words
website I notice that you served as "dogsbody" at one time in your
career. What a great word! Whence came it? [Larry Stephan]

A. A "dogsbody" is a lowly person who gets all the dirty jobs, like
emptying the ashtrays or putting new toner in the photocopier.
Anything menial, disagreeable, or boring somehow makes it into the
job description. Americans might prefer "gofer" or "grunt" instead.

The word is a product of that great melting-pot and fount of
culture, the British Royal Navy. British sailors at the time of
Nelson were just about the worst-fed people around, living as they
did on a monotonous diet that included such culinary awfulnesses as
boiled salt beef and ship's biscuits (which after weeks at sea had
to be rapped on the table to persuade the weevils to leave before
you could eat them). One of their staple foodstuffs was dried peas
boiled in a bag. The official name for this concoction was pease
pudding, but jolly Jack Tars knew it for what it was, and called it
"dog's body". Perhaps it came from the shape of the bag after it
had been boiled.

In the early part of the twentieth century, the same term began to
be applied to lowly midshipmen, who got unloaded on to them all the
nasty jobs that more senior officers wanted to dodge. Presumably
the term was borrowed from the sailor's foodstuff, though we can't
be absolutely sure about that, since there's no evidence of a
direct link.

Anyway, the word seems to have escaped the Navy in the early 1930s
to become a more general term in the civilian world for the person
in a group who got stuck with all the rough jobs. And so it has
remained.


5. Endnote
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"The plain people, hereafter as in the past, will continue to make
their own language, and the best that grammarians can do is to
follow after it, haltingly, and not often with much insight into
it". [H L Mencken, "The American Language" (1936).]


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