World Wide Words -- 02 Mar 02

Fri Mar 1 01:24:32 UTC 2002

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 278    Saturday 2 March 2002
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Sent each Saturday to 14,000+ subscribers in at least 116 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: Discombobulate.
3. Out there: The Economist Style Guide.
4. Q&A: Buy the farm, Drum and gaff, Pigs might fly.
5. Endnote.
6. Subscription commands.
7. Contact addresses.

1. Feedback, notes and comments
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HOLIDAY ARRANGEMENTS I am away till 4 April. Newsletters are being
sent from where I happen to be every Saturday, so transmission may
be somewhat erratic. If you would like to respond to anything in
this newsletter or ask a question for the Q&A section, please do so
in the usual way, but you will have to wait a while for an answer!

2. Weird Words: Discombobulate
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To confuse, upset or disconcert.

Another fine example of the speech of the wild frontier of the US
of A, this came to life sometime in the 1830s. Whose invention it
was nobody has any no idea, except that he shared the bombastic,
super-confident attitude towards language that also bequeathed us
(among others) "absquatulate", "bloviate", "hornswoggle" and
"sockdolager".

It has much about it of the itinerant peddler, whose qualifications
were principally a persuasive manner, the self-assurance of a man
who has seen every sort of reluctant customer and charmed them all,
and a vocabulary he had enlarged by gross disfigurement of innocent
elements of the English language. In this case, the original seems
to have been "discompose" or "discomfit". In the early days, it
sometimes appeared as "discombobracate" or "discomboberate".

Here's an example of a snake-oil salesman at work in 1860 (except
that he was praising the water from the Louisville artesian well
rather than any manufactured remedy). It was said to have been
taken down verbatim: "It discomboberates inflammatory rheumatism,
sore eyes, scrofula, dyspepsia, and leaves you harmonious without
any defalcation, as harmonious systematically as a young dove".

Worth a dollar a drop ...

3. Out there: The Economist Style Guide
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The Economist, the British weekly news and financial magazine, has
long made its in-house style guide more widely available; it was
first published in 1986. A version of the text is available online
at <http://www.economist.com/library/styleGuide/>. It's a practical
and witty overview of the kinds of problems faced every day by sub-
editors and journalists on newspapers and magazines - where to put
the punctuation in quoted speech; when to capitalise the names of
ranks and titles; how to avoid slang and jargon; how to spell the
name of foreign cities. A printed version of the guide is available
and can be ordered from the site.

4. Q&A
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Q. Where does the US phrase "to buy the farm", meaning to die, come
from? [Roger Beale, UK]

A. That specific phrase turns out to be surprisingly recent, being
first recorded only in the 1950s. From the evidence that Professor
Jonathan Lighter gives in the Random House Historical Dictionary of
American Slang, the first clear written evidence comes from the US
Air Force, where it was slang for a fatal crash.

This seems to be related to several older British slang sayings,
like "buy it" or "buy one" (usually in the form "He's bought
one!"). These are known to be RAF slang from the time of the First
World War for being wounded or killed, particularly for being shot
down in combat. Both seem to be ironic references to something that
one could not possibly want to buy. There was also the fuller
phrase "to buy a packet" with the same sense (which is probably a
combination of the RAF sayings with a British Army expression, "to
stop a packet", where the "packet" is a bullet, so meaning to be
shot - either wounded or killed).

In USAF usage, there were other forms around in the early 1950s,
like "buy the plot" and "buy the lot", but "buy the farm"
prevailed. A story about its origin was told in an issue of
American Speech in 1955:

Jet pilots say that when a jet crashes on a farm the farmer
usually sues the government for damages done to his farm by
the crash, and the amount demanded is always more than enough
to pay off the mortgage and then buy the farm outright. Since
this type of crash is nearly always fatal to the pilot, the
pilot pays for the farm with his life.

This sounds suspiciously neat, not to say improbable, and the
lifting of my back hairs tell me this is folk etymology. Also,
Professor Lighter records people saying that they remember "buy the
farm" from the US Air Force and the US Army at the time of the
Korean War a few years earlier, when the idea of compensation could
not apply. So there's still some doubt about its origins.

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Q. What is the origin of the Cockney expressions "drum" and "gaff"
("gaffe"?) for one's place of residence? [Neil King, UK]

A. The origins of neither of these is well enough established for
anyone to be able to give you a really firm answer. However,
there's a good case to be made for an origin in the Gypsy (Rom)
language, Romany.

One possible source for "drum" might lie in some idea of its being
an enclosed space, like the inside of a drum. But it's suggestive
that from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries the
same word was used by English Rom for a road or street - it's
thought to come from Greek "dromos" for a road. It is very possible
that the word shifted sense somewhat to refer to a place of
habitation alongside a road.

The second one is certainly "gaff" (not "gaffe", which means a
blunder or embarrassing mistake; and <http://www.worldwidewords.
org/qa/qa-blo1.htm> has "blow the gaff" and other senses). This
comes almost certainly from the use of "gaff" in the eighteenth-
century to mean a fair, and later a cheap music-hall or theatre (as
in the famous "penny gaff"). Again, this probably comes from a
Romany word, this time for a town, especially a country town that
holds a regular market, where such a fair might be held.

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Q. Do you know where the phrase "when pigs fly" came from? [Tom
Young]

A. There are lots of variations on sayings associated with the idea
of pigs flying, as an example of something obviously nonsensical or
of some event that is extremely unlikely to occur. "Things might
improve if the other party gets elected," one person might say.
"And pigs might fly," comes the sarcastic rejoinder. My own
favourite way of enlivening meetings was to wait until somebody
produced a choice bit of wishful thinking disguised as a strategy
proposal and then point out of the window in a surprised sort of
way. "Oh, look," I would say, "there's a pig flying by!". (As
Dilbert once said, I'm not anti-management, I'm just anti-idiot.)

Let us return to our muttons, or rather our porks. We have to go
back a long way to find the original of this idea. It seems to have
been a traditional Scottish proverb, which was first written down
in 1586 in an edition of John Withal's English-Latin dictionary for
children. This had an appendix of proverbs rendered into Latin, of
which one was the usual form of the proverb in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries: "pigs fly in the air with their tails
forward". If they did indeed fly, the proverb seems to argue,
flying backwards would seem a small extra feat.

Another version is more famous, because it appears in Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll: "I've a right to think,"
said Alice sharply... "Just about as much right," said the Duchess,
"as pigs have to fly." Other forms that have appeared at various
times include "and pigs could fly if they had wings", and "pigs may
fly, but they are very unlikely birds".

5. Endnote
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What I have most at heart is that some method should be thought on
for ascertaining and fixing our language for ever, after such
alterations are made in it as shall be thought requisite. For I am
of opinion, it is better a language should not be wholly perfect,
than that it should be perpetually changing. [Jonathan Swift, "A
proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English
Language" (1712)]

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