World Wide Words -- 09 Mar 02
Michael Quinion
do_not_use at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Thu Mar 7 04:02:47 UTC 2002
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 279 Saturday 9 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: Anfractuosity.
3. Out there: A Word A Day.
4. Q&A: By the great horned spoon, Nothing like leather,
Big pond.
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: Anfractuosity /,anfraktju:'QsItI/
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A channel, crevice or passage full of windings and turnings.
Not quite describing a maze, though some mazes certainly take on an
anfractuous appearance, one that is sinuous or winding. The noun is
rare enough that it is hard to find examples, the adjective almost
equally so.
One sense is of a broken or jumbled landscape. T S Eliot used this
in his poem Sweeny Erect: "Paint me the bold anfractuous rocks /
Faced by the snarled and yelping seas". Another comes from the
nineteenth-century interest in phrenology, reading character by the
shape of the head, supposedly reflecting that of the brain beneath;
the anfractuosities in this case were the convolutions of the
surface of the brain.
A rare modern sighting is in A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage.
Here it refers to a certain kind of opaque and circuitous legal
prose, seemingly designed more to confuse than to clarify. Its
authors quote this splendid example of literary legal convolution
from New York in 1858:
Unless the code, by abolishing the distinction between
actions at law and suits in equity, and the forms of such
actions and suits, and of pleadings theretofore existing,
intended to initiate, and has initiated new principles of
law, by which a class of rights and of wrongs, not before
the proper subjects of judicial investigation and remedy,
can now be judicially investigated and remedied, the facts
stated in the plaintiff's complaint in this action, do not
constitute a cause of action, and the demurrer of the
defendant to that complaint is well taken.
The word comes from Latin "anfractus", a bending around, from the
verb "frangere", to break. So it is a close cousin of the much more
recent "fractal", as well as "fracture", "fragile", "refraction",
and, rather less obviously, "infringe" and "osprey" (the latter
ultimately derives from "ossifraga", bone breaker, originally
applied to the lammergeier).
3. Out there
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A Word A Day, run by Anu Garg since 1994, is the granddaddy site on
words online. It now has 500,000+ subscribers, which means it needs
little advertising from me. See <http://wordsmith.org/awad/>. The
site contains a chronological and alphabetic archive of previously
featured words, a bulletin board, and a feedback mail column, as
well as the opportunity to join the daily mailing list.
4. Q&A
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Q. A phrase my grandfather often used was "by the great horned
spoon" or possibly "by the great horn spoon". My family has no idea
if he made it up or it was a colloquialism. It may help to know
that his family came to the U.S. from Clare, Ireland, in the mid-
1870s. The family settled in south central New York State, within a
few miles of the Pennsylvania border. Can you find out where it
comes from? [Bart O'Brien]
A. The form of the phrase that was most common in its earliest
recorded days was your second one: "by the great horn spoon". It
was at one time a fairly common American oath or, at least, a way
to make some statement sound emphatic. The first recorded example
is in a song which appeared in the American National Songbook of
1842 under the title French Claim, "As sung by Mr Andrews at the
Tremont Theatre":
The more he thought on't it the madder he grew,
Until he vowed by the great horn spoon,
Unless they did the thing that was right,
He'd give them a licking, and that pretty soon.
There are other examples in American literature through the
nineteenth century, many of them associated with the sea, as here
in an article from Harper's New Monthly Magazine of September 1880:
"The two ends are brought together, and the net pursed up. "Bagged,
by the Great Horn Spoon!" cries an excited shareholder; and they go
to dipping the fish out with a scoop-net, and loading the dory as
full as it will hold". Another example, more famous, is from a poem
by Rudyard Kipling, The Rhyme of the Three Captains:
The skipper peered beneath his palm and swore by the Great
Horn Spoon: / "'Fore Gad, the Chaplain of the Fleet would
bless my picaroon!"
[picaroon = a pirate ship]
So far so good. Now here's the tricky bit: where does it come from?
A horn spoon, of course, is just a spoon made from cow's horn.
There are tantalising hints that horn spoons might have links with
Scottish folklore in some way, though exactly how is far from
clear. The saying is sometimes associated with the California Gold
Rush, mainly through a children's book of 1963 by Sid Fleischman
called By The Great Horn Spoon. That book has introduced the phrase
to generations of American schoolchildren, and is now pretty much
the only work in which anyone ever encounters it. Even though many
prospectors (including those in the book) reached the gold fields
by sea around Cape Horn, the phrase has no connection with that
wild and dangerous area of the South Atlantic.
My sources are completely silent on the origins of the saying, so I
turned to the experts at the American Dialect Society. No very
clear consensus emerged (they are almost, but not quite, as much in
the dark as the rest of us). The seafaring connections were thought
to be significant, possibly indicating an oath sworn by the Big
Dipper or Little Dipper (respectively Ursa Major, also called the
Plough, and Ursa Minor, or the Little Bear), both of them being
important constellations for navigation in northern latitudes. It
is certain that "horn" is an old Scottish name for Ursa Minor and a
"dipper", of course, is really just a big spoon. I've found it said
as fact that the phrase does indeed refer to the Big Dipper.
That sounds the most likely explanation, even though its early
history is unknown and there are some loose ends in the story.
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Q. I recently read a book set in England in the 1930s (Crime at
Guildford by Freeman Wills Crofts, first published 1935). One of
the characters uses the words, "It's probably a case of nothing
like leather". This is a phrase I've never come across before. From
the context it appears to refer to an action that someone performs
because he does so every day, and so it becomes his reaction to any
set of circumstances. Can you help with its meaning and its origin?
[Mick Potter]
A. You're in good company, Mr Potter, since I'd never encountered
"nothing like leather" before you mentioned it either. It turns out
to have been a common proverbial saying of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, both in North America and in Britain, but one
which is now hardly known.
There is a traditional story that is said to be the origin of the
saying, which is recorded in Daniel Fenning's The Universal
Spelling Book of 1767. Once upon a time, a town was in danger of
attack. A council of the chief inhabitants was called together to
decide how best to repel it. A mason on the council suggested that
a strong stone wall would be a good idea, while a shipbuilder
advised walls of wood. After some discussion a currier rose to his
feet and said that in his opinion "there was nothing like leather".
The phrase is a jokingly dismissive way of summarising the point of
the story, which comments on the tendency of people of rigid mind
to fit the solution to a problem to what they knew best how to do,
no matter what the circumstances were - very much as you describe
it. (A more modern parallel is the saying that "when your only tool
is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail".) An edition of
Roget's Thesaurus of 1911 gives these alternatives to "nothing like
leather": "unshakeable conviction; 'my mind is made up - don't
bother me with the facts'".
(Daniel Fenning's book, by the way, became a standard primer, which
went into at least thirty editions in the following hundred years,
so giving the story very wide circulation.)
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Q. Would you happen to know how the term "the big pond" came about
in reference to the Atlantic ocean? The inference obviously is
that it's a humorous and ironic label, but do you know the history?
[Ari]
A. For enlightenment here, I turned to the Second Edition of the
Oxford English Dictionary, which has quite a lot of notes on "big
pond" and its variations, such as "great pond" and "herring-pond".
The sayings are surprisingly old, with the first example of "great
pond" being recorded in 1641 and "herring-pond" in 1686. Early
examples are all from writers in various British North American
colonies and so it's reasonable to suppose that the expressions
originated there.
After all, aside from the comparatively few sailors who travelled
these waters, colonists would have been the people most aware of
the size of the Atlantic Ocean. After you had survived the stormy
and protracted sea crossing from Britain, you either tried to
forget about it or you made a joke of it.
5. Endnote
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I have lived to see great changes in this respect. I have known the
mute "h" to become audible, and the audible "h" to become mute. I
was taught to pronounce the words "humble", "hospital", "herbs",
and "honest" without an "h", and can't get out of my old fashion
without a struggle. Nevertheless people now talk of "hospital",
"humble", "herb", and I have heard people talk of a "honest" man.
[Samuel Lysons, "Our Vulgar Tongue" (1868)]
[Americans, of course, have preserved this older pronunciation of
"herb", which jars on the ears of British hearers, for whom losing
the "h" is a sign of poor education. (Let us not explore what
Americans find vexing about British English!)]
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