World Wide Words -- 01 Jun 02

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 291           Saturday 1 June 2002
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sent each Saturday to 15,000+ subscribers in at least 119 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK      ISSN 1470-1448
<http://www.worldwidewords.org>   Mail: <editor at worldwidewords.org>
-------------------------------------------------------------------
 IF YOU RESPOND TO THIS MAILING, REMEMBER TO CHANGE THE OUTGOING
   ADDRESS TO ONE OF THOSE IN THE 'CONTACT ADDRESSES' SECTION.
       *** PLEASE NOTE, THESE ADDRESSES HAVE CHANGED! ***


Contents
-------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Topical Words: Jubilee.
3. Weird Words: Boondoggle.
4. Review: Oxford Guide to World English.
5. Q&A: Give it some welly.
6. Endnote.
7. Subscription commands.
8. Contact addresses.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
-------------------------------------------------------------------
AMTI-SPAM MEASURES  As part of my continuing battle against spam
and viruses (currently about 60% of all incoming mail is in these
categories), I have changed the contacts page on the Web site to a
submission form, which will stop spam robots grabbing the e-mail
addresses off the page. At the same time, I have amended the e-mail
addresses for contacting me to make the old ones invalid. See the
end of this newsletter for the new addresses. Apologies for the
inevitable inconvenience.

KATIE, BAR THE DOOR!  A quick education in Scots history followed
my fumbling attempts last week to explain this saying. Many e-mails
arrived pointing out the story of Catherine Douglas. King James I
of Scotland, a cultured and firm ruler, was seen by some of his
countrymen as a tyrant. Under attack by his enemies while staying
at the Dominican chapter house in Perth on 20 February 1437, he was
holed up in a room whose door had the usual metal staples for a
wooden bar, but whose bar had been taken away. The legend is that
Catherine Douglas, one of the queen's ladies-in-waiting, tried
heroically to save James I by barring the door with her naked arm.
Her attempt failed, her arm being broken in the process, and the
King was murdered, but she was thereafter known as Catherine
Barlass. Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote a poem about her in 1881,
entitled "The King’s Tragedy", of which one stanza is:

  Like iron felt my arm, as through
  The staple I made it pass:—
  Alack! it was flesh and bone — no more!
  ’Twas Catherine Douglas sprang to the door,
  But I fell back Kate Barlass.

This is as circumstantial a basis for the expression "Katie bar the
door" as the one I gave, but it is much stronger in its romantic
associations and therefore rather more probable a source. However,
the nearest that Rossetti comes to the conventional expression in
the poem is "Catherine, keep the door!". In its favour as a source
is that the first example of "Katy, bar the door!" is from 1894,
only 13 years after the poem was published. But why it should have
appeared first in the USA rather than Britain is unclear, as is why
it should have appeared at all!


2. Topical Words: Jubilee
-------------------------------------------------------------------
This weekend, Britain is celebrating a jubilee, the fiftieth
anniversary of the accession of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. If
we were to follow the original sense of the word, we ought to be
announcing it with a blast on a ram's horn and be taking the whole
year off, not just four days.

"Jubilee" looks as though it comes from the Latin word that also
gave us "jubilation" and its relatives. In truth they're not
connected, but we have the Romans to blame for getting them mixed
up. "Jubilee" is actually from the ancient Hebrew "yobel" for a ram
and, by extension, a ram's horn (the word used today for the ram's
horn, "shofar", is unconnected). Every fifty years a special year
of emancipation and restoration was set aside, in which fields were
left uncultivated and slaves were freed (for the details, see the
Old Testament book of Leviticus, chapter 25). As the ram's horn
announced it, the word was transferred to the year itself.

It travelled via Greek to Latin, where it became confused with
"jubilare", to shout or cry out (used by early Christians in the
sense of shouting for joy). By the time the word had arrived in
English, the two senses of celebration and of something happening
every fifty years had become so mixed up that it was used for a
fiftieth anniversary or its celebration. So it is strictly correct
to refer to the current event as a jubilee, with no qualification.

Until the end of the nineteenth century the word could only be used
in this way: for a fiftieth anniversary. Queen Victoria changed all
that. She reigned for so long that her subjects had to find a way
of distinguishing between the dates of her 50 years and 60 years on
the throne, in 1887 and 1897. The term "Diamond Jubilee" was
invented specifically for the 1897 celebration.

The "diamond" modifier was borrowed from its existing use to
describe a sixtieth wedding anniversary. This - plus "silver",
"golden" and some others - had appeared in the language at about
the middle of the nineteenth century, introduced via American
English from German.

Even after the 1897 celebration became known as the "Diamond
Jubilee", the 1887 one was still called "The Jubilee" or "The Royal
Jubilee"; only later did it become known as the "Golden Jubilee",
so people could unambiguously distinguish it from the later one.
And then "jubilee" started to be used with other qualifiers, such
as "silver" for a 25th anniversary, so losing its link to the
fiftieth year altogether and changing its sense to little more than
"special anniversary". "Golden jubilee", the official name for the
current royal celebrations, is therefore a retronym, derived from a
term whose scope has changed so much that its original meaning has
to be qualified (other examples are "manual typewriter" and
"acoustic guitar": see <http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/
ww-ret1.htm>).

Since her mother lived to be almost 102, there seems every chance
that we shall be celebrating Her Majesty's Diamond Jubilee in 2012.
Thanks to Queen Victoria, we already have a name for it.


3. Weird Words: Boondoggle
-------------------------------------------------------------------
An unnecessary or wasteful project.

This typically North American term is often applied in two specific
ways, either to describe work of little or no value done merely to
appear busy, or in reference to a government-funded project with no
purpose other than political patronage. It can also be used for an
unnecessary journey by a government official at public expense.

Part of its oddity lies in its sudden emergence into public view in
an article in the "New York Times" on 4 April 1935. This had the
headline "$3,187,000 Relief is Spent to Teach Jobless to Play ...
Boon Doggles Made". The "boon doggles" of the headline turn out to
be small items of leather, rope and canvas, which were being
crafted by the jobless during the Great Depression as a form of
make-work. The article said that the word was "simply a term
applied back in the pioneer days to what we call gadgets today". It
was suggested that boondoggles were small items of leatherwork
which were made by cowboys on idle days as decorations for their
saddles.

The name of Robert H Link, a scoutmaster of Rochester, also often
turns up when people write about this word. It is sometimes said
that he invented it, certainly that he used it for the braided
leather lanyards made and worn by Boy Scouts, or for other small
craft projects intended to keep Scouts out of mischief.

Whatever its origin, it was the article in the "New York Times"
that converted "boondoggle" from a word existing quietly in its own
little world to one of public importance.


4. Review: Oxford Guide to World English
-------------------------------------------------------------------
The author, Tom McArthur, is perhaps best known for being editor of
the journal "English Today: The International Review of the English
Language" and of the "Oxford Companion to the English Language". He
has also published, amongst other works, "The English Languages".
So this book is very much in a continuing line of his writings on
English as a global language resource.

In the introduction to the "Oxford Companion to the English
Language" he set out a list of what he didn't want that book to be,
among them "a gazetteer of the international language". That's as
good a description of the "Oxford Guide to World English" as one
could come up with. Indeed, in his introduction he describes this
book as being an enlargement and reordering of the material on the
world's Englishes in the "Companion".

He sets out the key characteristics of the various forms of English
used worldwide in the first seven chapters. He covers not only the
main regional varieties, but also the more significant dialects and
local variations within each variety, ranging from the Appalachians
to Antarctica. Despite such a broad canvas, the level of detail on
each topic is astonishingly wide, even on some of the less well-
known dialects. Each section has an introduction that lays out the
history, geopolitics, and cultural qualities of the variety; notes
on the characteristic vocabulary, pronunciation, and syntax follow.

Not only does he treat varieties of English, he also looks in some
detail at other languages which have had an impact on English (such
as Latin and Greek) and on the influence which English is having on
other languages, for example with the development of hybrids like
Denglish, Singlish, and Spanglish, as well as pidgins and creoles
such as Tok Pisin. A final chapter looks at general factors, such
as gender and political correctness, worldwide English teaching,
the nature and role of "fractured" English, and the extent to which
there is a world-standard language.

Tom McArthur argues that English now has no centre, because it has
a significant presence on every continent, and that it is now a
commodity, a global resource owned by everybody and nobody. Reading
the descriptions in the text, English seems to be going the way of
Latin after the fall of the Roman Empire: changing in different
places until regional varieties become mutually unintelligible, but
with a modified form of the "classical" language forming a lingua
franca between countries. On a global scale, the evidence from this
book suggests that English is the new Latin.

Its style and format lie somewhere between a reference book and a
textbook. The text is always clearly written but is often dry and
rather formal, frequently using numbered paragraphs to lay out key
points. It's not a book for curling up with by the fireside, but
one to keep on the shelf for easy access.

[McArthur, Tom "Oxford Guide to World English", published by Oxford
University Press in the UK on 30 May 2002 (local publication dates
may vary); ISBN 0-19-866248-3; hardback, 501pp; publisher's list
price GBP19.99.]


5. Q&A
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. I came across the phrase "with some welly" in a BBC report
today. I've not seen it before and am curious about its meaning.
Can you help? [Jennie Booth, Australia]

A. It's a fine bit of British English slang, usually in the form
"give it some welly". This instruction, often shouted to a person
as encouragement or criticism, asks for more effort to be put into
whatever he or she is doing. English soccer supporters will
undoubtedly be yelling it at their team during World Cup matches.

It dates from the 1970s. The last word in the phrase is a common
British abbreviation for the equally British term "wellington
boots" ("It's wet out; best wear your wellies"), these being
waterproof rubber boots named after the First Duke of Wellington.
The slang sense seems to have come about through mental links with
various of the senses of "boot" or "foot" - one of the earliest
appearances was in motor racing, in which the reference was putting
the foot more firmly on the accelerator; another was in football,
for a powerful kick. There doesn't seem to be a direct association
of ideas with the minor British sport of welly-throwing, but you
never know.

I always hear it mentally with a Glasgow accent, perhaps because
the Big Yin, the comedian Billy Connolly, was one of those who
popularised it.


6. Endnote
-------------------------------------------------------------------
"Proper words in proper places, makes the true definition of a
style." [Jonathan Swift, "Letter to a Young Gentleman lately
entered into Holy Orders" (1720)]


7. Subscription commands
-------------------------------------------------------------------
To leave the list, change your subscription address, or subscribe,
please visit <http://www.worldwidewords.org/wordlist.htm>.

Or, you can send a message to <listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org>
from the address at which you are subscribed:

  To leave, send: SIGNOFF WORLDWIDEWORDS
  To join, send: SUBSCRIBE WORLDWIDEWORDS First-name Last-name


8. Contact addresses
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Do not use the address that comes up when you hit 'Reply' on this
mailing, or your message will be sent to an electronic dead-letter
office. Either create a new message, or change the outgoing 'To:'
address to one of these:

  For general comments: <TheEditor at worldwidewords.org>.
  For Q&A section questions: <QandA at worldwidewords.org>.

-------------------------------------------------------------------
World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2002.  All rights
reserved. The Words Web site is at <http://www.worldwidewords.org>.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
You may reproduce this newsletter in whole or in part in other free
media online provided that you include the copyright notice above.
-------------------------------------------------------------------