World Wide Words -- 30 Mar 02

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 282           Saturday 30 March 2002
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Barmecide.
3. Out There: Mondegreens.
4. Q&A: Sand, Crush, On your uppers.
5. Endnote.
6. Subscription commands.
7. Contact addresses.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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HOLIDAY ARRANGEMENTS  I am away till 3 April. 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: Barmecide
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Something illusory or imaginary and therefore disappointing, or a
person who offers something of this kind.

For a change, we know exactly where this comes from: The Arabian
Nights, more properly entitled The Book of the Thousand Nights and
a Night, a collection of stories in Arabic derived from Indian,
Persian and Arabic sources.

In The Barber's Tale of his Sixth Brother the storyteller speaks of
his brother Shakashik, who had once been rich but became poor. He
asked for alms at a grand house and was welcomed by its owner,
Barmecide, who proceeded to put a series of imaginary dishes before
him, pretending they contained the most sumptuous feast: "Presently
he cried out again, 'Ho boy, serve up the marinated stew with the
fatted sand grouse in it;' and he said to my brother, 'Up and eat,
O my guest, for truly thou art hungry and needest food.' So my
brother began wagging his jaws and made as if champing and chewing,
whilst the host continued calling for one dish after another and
yet produced nothing save orders to eat".

The beggar played along, but after his host had pretended to serve
him some excellent wine, he pretended to get drunk and gave him a
hard blow. Barmecide took this in excellent part, praising him for
entering into the jape. He gave him a real feast and, as the story
says: "Next morning the two fell again to feasting and carousing,
and ceased not to lead this life for a term of twenty years".

The stories first appeared in an English translation at the start
of the eighteenth century, immediately took the public's fancy, and
"Barmecide" appeared in the language almost instantly. A "Barmecide
feast" or "Barmecide meal" is one that looks good but doesn't live
up to expectations. The adjective is "barmecidal".


3. Out There: Mondegreens
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See <http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/carroll/mondegreens.shtml>. A
mondegreen is a misheard lyric to a song or poem - see my piece at
<http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/monde.htm> for the basics.
Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle has been writing about
them for years - doing much in the process to get the word more
widely known - and presents a collection of his pieces.


4. Q&A
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Q. What does Huckleberry Finn mean when he says that Mary Jane "had
more sand in her than any girl I ever see"? I see it means courage,
resolve, but how did it get to mean that? [Philip Madell]

A. "Sand" here has just the same sense as the older "grit", "clear
grit", or "true grit", that refer to a person who has strength of
character, pluck, stamina, the ability to see things through to the
end. The reference here, presumably is to the toughness of grit,
especially that in gritstone, a common name for the material that
made up the stones of a corn mill.

Why "sand" should suddenly pop up in its place - sometime near the
end of the 1860s - is hard to say, though it is an obvious enough
synonym. In its earliest appearances, it forms part of expressions
such as "sand in his gizzard" or "sand in his craw", references to
the small stones that some birds swallow into their gizzards to
help grind their food. (The second of these expressions is still
sometimes used by older people in the US, though it is unknown to
most young ones, I am told.)

Mark Twain uses both "grit" and "sand" in successive sentences in
that place in Huckleberry Finn: "She had the grit to pray for Judus
if she took the notion - there warn't no backdown to her, I judge.
You may say what you want to, but in my opinion she had more sand
in her than any girl I ever see; in my opinion she was just full of
sand".

How these became interchangeable terms is a small mystery that
needs to be resolved, but don't bank on anyone finding the solution
anytime soon!

                        -----------

Q. I'm interested in the origin of the usage of "crush" as in "she
had a crush on him". [John Anunti]

A. This is yet another expression, originally American, which is
now known all round the world. It's first recorded from the 1880s,
but I can't give you the full story of where it came from.

There was an older usage of "crush", now obsolete, for a social
gathering such as a dance or reception. It was a colloquial use of
the standard English sense - such gatherings were often extremely
hot and crowded and the prevailing women's fashion for large skirts
could hardly have helped matters. It's known from Britain in the
earlier part of the nineteenth century: the first known written
example was in a letter of 1832 by the historian Thomas Babbington
Macaulay: "I fell in with her at Lady Grey's great crush". By the
1860s, the same word was being used in the US - an early example
appears in the Southern Literary Messenger in August 1862: "In the
hatroom at a 'crush,' is the air freer from taint, because the men
are fresh and young?".

It seems possible that the word was borrowed again to refer to a
romantic entanglement that originated at such a crowded social
gathering, not because the couple were literally thrown together,
but because such events were among the most common ways at the time
for young men and women to meet. But don't quote me ...

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Q. Can you tell me what the expression "on your uppers" refers to?
I saw it used to signify someone in dire straits and would think
being down more appropriate than being up. [Eleonora Corvin]

A. The uppers here are the bits that cover the upper part of a boot
or shoe. The implication is that the soles have worn out and that
the person concerned is reduced to a pair that consists only of
uppers - quite useless, of course - and that he or she is too poor
to be able to replace them.

The saying appeared in the eastern US in the 1880s. To judge from
the early examples, it was originally a bit of actors' slang
(hardly surprising, as it is a notoriously uncertain profession,
more full of people down on their luck than almost any other). The
first form was "walking on my uppers", which gives the sense behind
the saying more clearly than the later abbreviated version. Here's
an actor in a story by Brander Matthews, in Harper's New Monthly
Magazine of October 1896: "I was going to give my two weeks'
notice; and I'd have done it, too, but ... I didn't want to come
back here walking on my uppers".

The incongruity between "uppers" and being "down" must have been a
large part of the inspiration for the saying. One version, in fact,
makes this explicit by describing somebody who is impoverished as
being "down on his uppers".


5. Endnote
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Let the dictionary (for example) mark a good word as "obsolete" or
"obsolescent" and few men thereafter venture to use it, whatever
their need of it and however desirable its restoration to favor -
whereby the process of impoverishment is accelerated and speech
decays. [Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary" (1906)].


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