World Wide Words -- 23 Nov 02
Michael Quinion
DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Nov 22 16:45:54 UTC 2002
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 317 Saturday 23 November 2002
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Sent each Saturday to 15,000+ subscribers in at least 119 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. Turns of Phrase: Glycomics.
4. Weird Words: Haggard.
5. Q&A: Crocodile tears; Doozy; Left holding the bag.
6. Endnote.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.
C. Help support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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VERB NUMBER WITH NONE I was expecting a lot more messages on this
tricky point than actually came in. Almost nobody challenged me
directly, though several writers claimed to have found grammatical
errors in other parts of the piece!
2. Turns of Phrase: Glycomics
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The creation of this word only in very recent years is a pointer to
what might be a new suffix, "-omics". It has already appeared in
"genomics", the study of the genetic make-up of organisms, and
"proteomics", the study of the way proteins work inside cells, plus
several compounds such as "toxicogenomics". This new term refers to
the study of sugars within organisms.
The "glycome" is the set of sugars an organism or cell makes. What
is slowly becoming clear to biochemists is that these sugars play
as vital a role in making the cell work as do the proteins. They
combine to form giant molecules such as carbohydrates and
cellulose; they are already known to regulate hormones, organise
embryonic development, direct the movement of cells and proteins
throughout the body, and regulate the immune system. It shows yet
again that the DNA in the genome is only one aspect of the complex
mechanism that keeps the body running - decoding the DNA is one
step towards understanding, but by itself it specify everything
that happens within the organism.
The ending "-omics" is etymologically odd, since it doesn't have a
direct ancestor in the classical languages. It's actually "-ics",
for a branch of knowledge, added to "-ome" (as in "genome"). There
is an existing ending "-ome", "having a specified nature", but
"genome" doesn't use it. That word was created as a blend of "gene"
and "chromosome", so the ending is actually the last part of "-
some", which derives from Greek "soma", body. The prefix part of
"glycomics" is from Greek "glukus", sweet.
Scientists are saying that glycomics could fuel a revolution in
biology to rival that of the human genome.
["New Scientist", Oct. 2002]
But even as doctors and drug companies struggle to interpret and
exploit the recent explosion of data on genes and proteins, yet
another field of biology is waiting to break out: glycomics. This
emerging discipline seeks to do for sugars and carbohydrates what
genomics and proteomics have done for genes and proteins — move
them into the mainstream of biomedical research and drug discovery.
["Technology Review", Oct. 2001]
4. Weird Words: Haggard
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Looking exhausted and unwell.
Nothing strange about this, you may think, but it's a classic case
of a word which has changed its sense remarkably in the course of
its history. When it first came into the language in the sixteenth
century, a "haggard" was a hawk that had been caught for training
after it had taken on its adult plumage (this meaning is still
extant in falconry). Adult hawks are hard to tame, so it came to
mean anything wild or feral.
It was only about 1580 that we start to see it applied to people,
at first to wild-looking or intractable individuals. Shakespeare
uses both senses in a bit of wordplay in "Othello" in which Othello
is musing about the imagined unfaithfulness of his wife Desdemona:
"If I do prove her haggard, / Though that her jesses were my dear
heartstrings, / I'd whistle her off and let her down the wind / To
prey at fortune". Later still it was assumed that anybody who
looked wild was suffering the effects of privation, fatigue, terror
or worry - hence unwell.
The source of "haggard" isn't known for sure: it's certainly from
French "hagard", but where that comes from is open to some doubt.
We are pretty sure, though, that the English "hag" for an ugly old
woman had an influence on the shift to the modern meaning through
people thinking that "haggard" was somehow linked to it.
5. Q&A
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Q. When I used the phrase "crocodile tears" recently I was asked to
provide a derivation. My dictionary is not very enlightening; can
you help? [Gareth Cook]
A. To weep crocodile tears is to pretend a sorrow that one doesn't
in fact feel, to create a hypocritical show of emotion. The idea
comes from the ancient belief that crocodiles weep while luring or
devouring their prey.
This story seems to have been taken up by medieval French and
English writers and that's where we get it from. For example, in
1565 Sir John Hawkins wrote: "In this river we saw many Crocodils
.. His nature is ever when he would have his prey, to cry and sob
like a Christian body, to provoke them to come to him, and then he
snatcheth at them".
The first example known in English seems to be in a travel book of
about 1400, "The Voyage and Travail of Sir John Mandeville" (I've
modernised the spelling a lot): "In many places of Inde are many
crocodiles - that is, a manner of long serpent. These serpents slay
men and they eat them weeping". One version of the story says that
the beast weeps over the head after having eaten the body, not from
repentance but from frustrated gluttony: the head is simply too
bony to be worth consuming.
The story was taken up by Edmund Spenser in "The Fairie Queen" and
then by Shakespeare. Having such authorities on its side made it
almost inevitable that the reference would stay in the language.
For example, in the story of how the elephant got his trunk in the
"Just So Stories", by Rudyard Kipling: "'Come hither, Little One,'
said the Crocodile, 'for I am the Crocodile,' and he wept
crocodile-tears to show it was quite true".
My naturalist friends tell me that crocodiles can't cry, because
they have no tear ducts - they would be useless in an animal that
spends so much time in the water. The eyes can produce secretions
to moisten the lids if the animal is out of the water for a while,
but these are hardly tears. They might have given rise to the idea,
though.
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Q. What is the origin of the word "doozie" in the phrase "it's a
doozie", meaning something unique or outstanding? It is often said
it relates to the 1920s automobile, the Duesenberg, but it was used
in a letter by Carl Akeley at the Field Museum in the late 1890s so
it cannot be the car that the word derived from. [Dennis Kinzig]
A. It was John Ciardi, I think, who suggested that "doozy" (as some
dictionaries prefer to spell it) had something to do with the
famous Duesenberg automobile, a car named after the brothers who
developed it. Certainly the vehicles were known as Duesies in the
1920s and 1930s. But - as you have discovered - by the time Fred
and August Duesenberg manufactured their first car in 1920, the
noun "doozy" was already well established.
Your example actually predates those in the reference books, so it
looks as though you have advanced lexicography to a small extent by
finding this earlier usage. These reference books, especially the
"Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang", suggest it
first appeared about 1903.
You might think etymologists are slipping their mental gears if I
tell you that they are fairly sure that it comes from the flower
named "daisy". But that was once English slang, from the eighteenth
century on, for something particularly appealing or excellent. It
moved into North American English in the early nineteenth century
and turns up, for example, in Thomas Chandler Haliburton's "The
Clockmaker" of 1836: "I raised a four year old colt once, half
blood, a perfect picture of a horse, and a genuine clipper, could
gallop like the wind; a real daisy, a perfect doll, had an eye like
a weasel, and nostrils like Commodore Rodgers's speakin' trumpet".
Experts think that that sense - which was still around at the end
of the nineteenth century - might have been influenced by the name
of the famous Italian actress Eleonora Duse, who first appeared in
New York in 1893. Something "Dusey" was clearly excellent of its
kind, and it is very likely that it and "daisy" became amalgamated
in people's minds to create a new term.
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Q: It is a common phrase in the USA to say that someone was "left
holding the bag". And the general meaning is that someone ended up
getting the blame for a bad situation. I've done a little research
but have been unable to locate its origin. Where does the phrase
originate? [Cam Moore]
A. It actually dates back to the middle of the eighteenth century
in Britain. The original version was "to give somebody the bag to
hold", meaning to keep somebody occupied or distracted while you
slipped away. Hence, figuratively it meant to leave somebody in the
lurch, to let them stay around to take the blame for something that
had gone wrong.
You can imagine a criminal gang, about to be confronted by the
authorities, telling the most stupid - or expendable - member of
their company to hold on to the swag while they took appropriate
action, that action being to travel very quickly towards somewhere
safer. "To be left holding the bag" is the same idea, but viewed
from the victim's point of view.
A good example of the original sense is in Albert Bigelow Paine's
biography of Mark Twain (real name Samuel Clemens): "In every trade
tricks are played on the new apprentice, and Sam felt that it was
his turn to play them. With John Briggs to help him, tortures for
Jim Wolfe were invented and applied. They taught him to paddle a
canoe, and upset him. They took him sniping at night and left him
'holding the bag' in the old traditional fashion while they slipped
off home and went to bed".
There are other expressions of similar type and sense, especially
"to be left holding the baby", literally referring to a wronged
woman whose lover has disappeared to avoid parental
responsibilities.
6. Endnote
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There are two ways of speaking an audience will always like; one is
to tell them what they don't understand; and the other is to tell
them what they're used to. [George Eliot, "Felix Holt", quoted in
the "Penguin Dictionary of Epigrams".]
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