World Wide Words -- 07 Sep 02

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS        ISSUE 306         Saturday 7 September 2002
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Meldrew.
3. Topical Words: Braggadocious.
4. Sic!
5. Weird Words: Obnubilate.
6. Q&A: Exception that proves the rule.
7. Endnote.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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DUCK SOUP  Thanks to everyone who responded following my admission
of defeat on this phrase last week, not least to all those who sent
me recipes for duck soup to support their assertion that it wasn't
so easy to make as I had thought. However, we're no nearer finding
an answer, so this one will just have to be put in the bin marked
"Origin unknown".


2. Turns of Phrase: Meldrew
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Heaven knows whether this one is a short-lived linguistic firework
or a new star in the language firmament. Those who have followed a
British television series called "One Foot in the Grave" will know
about Mr Victor Meldrew, the retired security officer who is the
epitome of grump, a miserable sod who feels that everything and
everyone is out to get him. The series ended its 10-year run with
Meldrew being killed in the last episode by a hit-and-run driver,
who wasn't actually out to get him, but who got him all the same.
Last week a poll by the survey firm MORI identified Meldrews as a
new social type - aged between 35 and 54, rebellious and with
little time for authority, unhappy with their lives and the world
around them, whose attitude can be summed up by "life's a bitch and
then you die". A possible sign of vitality for the term itself is
the number of compounds that have instantly appeared, such as
"Meldrewism", "Meldrewian", and "Meldrewesque".

What's really interesting about the MORI research is the fact that
today's Meldrews are not pensioners, as was the star of the
television sitcom One Foot in the Grave, but are in the 35 to 54
age group. Fed up with their lot, disillusioned with the
Government, worried about money, pessimistic about the future and
generally sick to death of the shallow, something-for-nothing
society we have become, they see years of misery ahead and then
death.
                                       [Birmingham Post, Aug. 2002]

Millions of people aged 35-55 are Meldrews, that is unhappy about
society and deeply frustrated that they are powerless to change
things. They are Meldrews in that they do not regard Cool Britannia
as the Utopia they were told it was.
                           [Church of England Newspaper, Sep. 2002]


3. Topical Words: Braggadocious
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Victor Recchia is the man who designed, built, and still lives in
the house that often features in The Sopranos television series
about a Mafia boss. (One American newspaper described its style as
"mob contemporary".) He was recently reported to be selling sets of
architectural plans to people who want to live in one just like it.
Let us pass over this desire for second-hand, reach-me-down
celebrity, and instead concentrate on Mr Recchia's choice of words:
"I don't want to seem braggadocious, but people keep telling me
it's the most famous house in the country, after the White House".

Braggadocious? That word hasn't yet entered any dictionary that I
know of, though you can find many examples online and it sometimes
turns up in American newspapers. As far back as 1987, presidential
contender Jack Kemp was thus described in Time: "He is proud of his
erudition, using French phrases like elan vital, but he sometimes
tosses out strange neologisms, like 'braggadocious'". We can
forgive the writer of this piece for not having come across the
word before. I've found earlier examples, though, so it's clear
that Mr Kemp didn't coin it.

It's a very Sopranos sort of word, as it happens, because it's a
derivative of the mock-Italian "braggadocio", meaning an idle
boaster. The Daily Telegraph obituary of John Gotti, the Mafia boss
who died in June, described him as being "full of swaggering
braggadocio and brimming with cocksure self-confidence". That's the
idea in a nutshell.

"Braggadocio" looks so Italian that people automatically feel it's
the right word to apply in such cases. But it's really as English
as roast beef, being no more than a tarted-up and semi-disguised
version of "brag", to boast. It was invented by Edmund Spenser as
the name of one of his characters in The Faerie Queene in 1590.

It has such a powerfully descriptive ring to it - you can hear the
vainglorious boastfulness of the character in every syllable - that
it soon joined the set of fictional names that have become words in
the language. It is still quite common, especially in journalistic
prose. It is especially useful when - as in the Telegraph obituary
- it sounds so obviously the right word in the right place.


4. Sic!
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Much play was made this week in London of the 200th anniversary of
the composition by William Wordsworth of his Sonnet Composed Upon
Westminster Bridge, which he wrote on 3 September 1802. That's the
one which begins, "Earth has not anything to shew more fair". The
Guardian succeeded in transcribing the third line of the poem as,
"A sight so touching in it's majesty", rather than "its majesty".
The whirring noise is Wordsworth spinning in his grave ...


5. Weird Words: Obnubilate
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To darken, dim, cloud over, or obscure.

This is as high-flown a Latinate word as the clouds it figuratively
evokes (it comes from "nubes", a cloud). It's not the kind of word
to be wasted on everyday conversation, but on its rare outings
seems to be the special province of the more ponderous political
speeches and newspaper editorials. It's now hard to find, however,
so I had to turn to nineteenth-century writers for examples.
Reviewers might use it in those days to suggest a writer had been
less than transparently clear in his exposition, as here in a squib
in The Princeton review in 1832 concerning a book of essays by
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: "There is here fine criticism, classic
wit, poetic dreaming, and some grains of sound doctrine, but so
obnubilated with the fumes of German metaphysics, that we become
giddy, and lose all power of comprehension". And here it appears as
an adjective in a waspish put-down of Walt Whitman in the Southern
Literary Messenger in 1860: "Here is the sample of his obnubilate,
incoherent, convulsive, flub-drub". They don't write criticism like
that any more (and they spell that last word as "flubdub", too).


6. Q&A
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Q. How did the phrase, "the exception that proves the rule" come
about? Would an exception to some pattern or consistency not prove
the need for a rule, not the existence of one? [Dave Dewhurst,
British Columbia]

A. You're right to query the expression. It has caused as much
confusion as any other in the language and is still often argued
about. The misunderstanding has been amplified by well-meaning but
incorrect attempts going back a century to explain it.

These days it is often used sweepingly to justify an inconsistency.
Those who use it seem to be saying that the existence of a case
that doesn't follow a rule proves that the rule applies in all
other cases and so is generally correct, notwithstanding the
exception. This is nonsense, because the logical implication of
finding that something doesn't follow a rule is that there must be
something wrong with the rule. As the old maxim has it, you need
find only one white crow to disprove the rule that all crows are
black.

It has often been suggested in reference works that "prove" here is
really being used in the sense of "test" (as it does in terms like
"proving ground" or "the proof of the pudding is in the eating", or
in the printer's proof, which is a test page run off to see that
all is correct with the typesetting). It is said that the real idea
behind the saying is that the presence of what looks like an
exception tests whether a rule is really valid or not. If you
cannot reconcile the supposed exception with the rule, there must
indeed be something wrong with the rule. The expression is indeed
used in this sense, but that's not where it comes from or what it
strictly means.

The problem with that attempted explanation is that those putting
it forward have picked on the wrong word to challenge. It's not a
false sense of "proof" that causes the problem, but "exception". We
think of it as meaning some case that doesn't follow the rule,
whereas the original sense was of someone or something that is
being granted permission not to follow a rule that otherwise
applies. The true origin of the phrase lies in a medieval Latin
legal principle: "exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis",
which may be translated as "the exception confirms the rule in the
cases not excepted".

Let us say that you drive down a street somewhere and find a notice
which says "Parking prohibited on Sundays". You may reasonably
infer from this that parking is allowed on the other six days of
the week. A sign on a museum door which says "Entry free today"
leads logically to the implication that entry is not free on other
days (unless it's a marketing ploy like the never-ending sales that
some stores have, but let's not get sidetracked). H W Fowler gave
an example from his wartime experience: "Special leave is given for
men to be out of barracks tonight until 11pm", which implies a rule
that in other cases men must be in barracks before that time. So,
in its strict sense, the principle is arguing that the existence of
an allowed exception to a rule reaffirms the existence of the rule.

Despite the number of reference books which carefully explain the
origin and true meaning of the expression, it is unlikely that it
will ever be restored to strict correctness. The usual rule in
lexicography is that sayings progress towards corruption and decay,
never the reverse. Unless this one proves to be an exception ...


7. Endnote
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"Every sentence he manages to utter scatters its component parts
like pond water from a verb chasing its own tail." [Clive James,
writing about George Bush Senior in "The Dreaming Swimmer" (1992);
quoted in the "Oxford Dictionary of Thematic Quotations" (2000)]


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