World Wide Words -- 30 Nov 02

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 318        Saturday 30 November 2002
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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: Otpotss.
3. Weird Words: Fantods.
4. Q&A: Head over heels; Cackhanded; Fro.
5. Endnote.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.
C. Help support World Wide Words.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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TO BE LEFT HOLDING THE BAG  Several subscribers, including Richard
Kahane, Liza Weissler and Ken Owens, explained that I'd missed the
significance of the example I quoted from the Mark Twain biography
about snipe hunting. Professor W Douglas Maurer wrote: "This is a
malicious joke that used to be played on innocents by their more
worldly-wise friends. 'We're going on a snipe hunt,' they would say
to a young lad one evening. 'Come on.' And they would all go deep
out into the woods. 'Now, here's how it works,' they would say to
him. 'Snipe are not too intelligent. You hold this bag here, and
we'll go out and beat around the bushes. The snipe will get scared
and they'll run straight into the bag. Okay?' And if they've chosen
their mark well, he will actually believe this fantastic story. So
he stands there holding the bag, and the others beat around the
bushes, and get further and further away and eventually make their
way home, while the mark, who can't find his way out of the woods
by himself, has to stay there all night. Presumably he learns a
lesson about not being too gullible". However, although he is
literally left holding the bag, he is also left holding it
figuratively!

ITEM NUMBERING  I confused many subscribers last week by leaving
out item 3. Be reassured you weren't short-changed - I just forgot
to renumber the items after moving items around during editing. I
also left a word out of a sentence in the piece on glycomics, which
should read: "Decoding the DNA is one step towards understanding,
but by itself it DOESN'T specify everything that happens within the
organism".

-OMICS  In mentioning several words ("genomics", "proteomics") that
contained what seems likely to be a new ending "-omics", perhaps I
should have mentioned that this has nothing to do with the ending
"-nomics" that turns up in terms like "Reaganomics" and which comes
from the final element of the words "economics" and "ergonomics".
The final "n" of the stem in most cases disguises the "n" of the
ending (it's more obvious in "Thatchernomics" and "Rogernomics").
See http://www.worldwidewords.org/topicalwords/tw-nom1.htm for more
on "-nomics".

CROCODILE TEARS  Several subscribers mentioned that there might be
a real physiological explanation. Malcolm Ross-Macdonald summed it
up so: "I have heard that the eye-moistening glands in a crocodile
are so close to the pharynx that the pressure of chomped-up food
passing down into the gullet forces moisture from them, giving the
appearance of tears. There must be a Crocodile Dundee somewhere
among your vast readership who can confirm or explode the tale".
And Terry Karney wrote: "There are some crocodilians which seem to
weep. Salt-water crocodiles (and perhaps fresh-water ones, which
happen to drift to sea) use ducts near the eyes to rid themselves
of excess salt. The same is true of sea-birds".


2. Turns of Phrase: Otpotss
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Labels for minority groups are a problem. It's good that attempts
should be made to find names that are both accurately descriptive
and also neutral and inoffensive. However, that's often harder to
do than the casual observer might think. Take "homosexual", for
example: that's really a medical term, implying that those so
described have a disease (not something those so labelled would
agree with); "gay" is all very well, but it lacks style and many
younger homosexuals dislike it, especially as a noun.

The British Department of Trade and Industry is drafting new anti-
discrimination laws and similarly feels that "homosexual" is "no
longer the way forward in defining sexual orientation". It is
reported this week to have decided instead to use "OTPOTSS", which
stands for "orientation towards people of the same sex". Any
abbreviation that saves having to say that mouthful is probably an
improvement, but not by much. And somebody's bound to point out
pretty soon that it's an anagram of "tosspot".

The British press has been having some mildly satirical fun with
it, as the "Guardian" quote below suggests. Philip Hensher, in his
piece in the "Independent" on Tuesday, suggested with tongue firmly
in cheek that the DTI should go back to its roots and use
"sodomite" instead.

(My own feeling is that it's going to have a niche existence, like
the term introduced by the US Bureau of the Census in the late
1970s: POSSLQ, "Person of Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters".)

Otpotss? I suppose it could catch on, given time.
                                         ["Independent", Nov. 2002]

We otposses and our otpotss-hag friends spend much of our time
thinking up our own new - and often rather insulting - ways of
describing homosexuals.
                                            ["Guardian", Nov. 2002]


3. Weird Words: Fantods
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A state of extreme nervousness or restlessness.

Many Americans will know this word, though it's rare in other parts
of the English-speaking world. It seems one can't have just the one
fantod - they always arrive in multiples. Modern writers may speak
of somebody having "a case of the fantods", or hyperbolically "the
flaming fantods" or "the swiveling fantods", descriptions of
somebody in a state of extreme nervous hysteria or unreasonable
excitement (as in the "Atlanta Journal" in March 1999: "He is
beside himself, in flaming fantods, screeching histrionics in the
direst of foreboding and doom").

The word is known in America from the nineteenth century: the first
recorded user was Charles Briggs in his two-volume book "The
Adventures of Harry Franco" in 1839: "You have got strong symptoms
of the fantods; your skin is so tight you can't shut your eyes
without opening your mouth". It was a favourite of Mark Twain, as
here in "Huckleberry Finn": "These was all nice pictures, I reckon,
but I didn't somehow seem to take to them, because if ever I was
down a little they always give me the fan-tods".

Where it comes from is mostly a mystery. Of the singular form, the
"Chambers Dictionary" says, "a fidgety, fussy person, especially a
ship's officer", which is intriguing but doesn't get us very far.
Some etymological works point to its presence in Dorset, Kentish
and Lincolnshire dialects, and suggest it probably arose from
dialect "fantique" (which turns up in a different spelling in "The
Pickwick Papers" by Charles Dickens, to mean an escapade: "'You're
a amiably-disposed young man, Sir, I don't think,' resumed Mr.
Weller, in a tone of moral reproof, 'to go inwolving our precious
governor in all sorts o' fanteegs, wen he's made up his mind to go
through everythink for principle'"; Dickens is here faithfully
recording the London pronunciation of the period, which often
turned "v"s into "w"s). It may ultimately be from "fantastic" or
"fantasy".

By one of those oddities of transmission, having been taken to the
US and shifted sense, it then returned to Britain around 1900. For
a couple of decades at the beginning of the twentieth century it is
found in works by British authors, such as Rudyard Kipling, John
Galsworthy, and E C Bentley (in "Trent's Last Case": "'John
Masefield has written a very remarkable play about it,' said Trent,
'and if it ever comes on again in London, you should go and see it,
if you like having the fan-tods'").


4. Q&A
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Q. I'd like to know how the phrase "head over heels" came about, as
in, "I've fallen head over heels in love with you". [Eddie Sng]

A. That's pretty much a set phrase these days, so that "to be head
over heels" almost always means that one has fallen madly in love
in an impetuous and unconstrained way. But by itself it can also
refer to one's state while turning a somersault or cartwheel. It's
more than a little weird when you think about it - what's so
strange about having one's head over one's heels? After all, we do
spend most of our waking lives in that position.

It looks so odd because during its history it got turned upside
down, just like the idea it represents. When it first appeared,
back in the fourteenth century, it was written as "heels over
head", which makes a lot more sense. Logically, it meant to be
upside down, or, as "to turn heels over head", to turn a
somersault.

It became inverted around the end of the eighteenth century, it
seems as the result of a series of mistakes by authors who didn't
stop to think about the conventional phrase they were writing. The
two forms lived alongside each other for most of the next century -
the famous Davy Crockett was an early user of the modern form in
1834: "I soon found myself head over heels in love with this girl",
but as late as the beginning of the twentieth century L Frank Baum
consistently used the older form in his Oz books: "But suddenly he
came flying from the nearest mountain and tumbled heels over head
beside them". And Lucy Maud Montgomery stayed with it in her "Anne
of Windy Poplars", published as late as 1936: "Gerald's pole, which
he had stuck rather deep in the mud, came away with unexpected ease
at his third tug and Gerald promptly shot heels over head backward
into the water".

                        -----------

Q. This is from the "Economist" so I assume it must be some
obscure Briticism: "And most recently, Mr Pitt has been stunningly
cackhanded over the appointment of William Webster as head of the
new Public Company Accounting Oversight Board". What does
"cackhanded" mean? [Larry Nordell]

A. It's certainly a Briticism. It's only obscure, though, if you're
from somewhere else, since it's a well-known British informal term
for somebody who is inept or clumsy. By extension, as I know to my
cost, being of the sinistral variety myself, it means somebody who
is left-handed, who does everything "backwards" and so looks clumsy
or awkward. It first appeared in the middle of the nineteenth
century.

The American Heritage Dictionary suggests it comes from Old Norse
"keikr", bent backwards. I disagree, as do most other works of
reference. The direct association is with "cack", another fine Old
English term, for excrement or dung. "Cachus" was Old English for a
privy, and both words come from Latin "cacare", to defecate.

It almost certainly comes from the very ancient tradition, which
has developed among peoples who were mainly right-handed, that one
reserved the left hand for cleaning oneself after defecating and
used the right hand for all other purposes. At various times this
has been known in most cultures. Some consider it rude even to be
given something using the left hand. So to be left-handed was to
use the cack hand or be cack-handed.

There are similar terms in other languages, such as the French
"main de merde" for somebody awkward or butter-fingered.

                        -----------

Q. We never seem to encounter the word, "fro", except when used
along with "to", as in the phrase: "to and fro". What happened to
the "m" that is usually on the end of "from" to make it "fro"?
[Edwin Kiser]

A. It's not that "fro" is a truncated version of "from", but that
we have here two distinct and differently spelled words. At one
time, we had both of them in the language simultaneously with
essentially the same senses, except that "fro" could also mean
"back" in the sense of returning.

They came into the language from slightly different sources at
different times: "from" has been around since the very earliest
days of English, having come over with the Saxons from continental
Europe; "fro" seems to have travelled south from Scotland in the
early fourteenth century, having probably been borrowed from a
Scandinavian language. But they can be traced back far enough that
it's clear they have a common ancestor in a Greek word of the
Classical period.

These days "to and fro", back and forth, is a fossil phrase that
has to be explained in dictionaries because we have completely lost
"fro" in mainstream English. However, "fro" is still around in
Scottish and Northern English dialect, though usually spelled and
said "fra"; it isn't a dialectal pronunciation of "from".


5. Endnote
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"The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of
order." [Attributed to Jean Cocteau; from the "Oxford Dictionary of
Thematic Quotations" (2000)]


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