World Wide Words -- 21 Sep 02
Michael Quinion
DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Sep 20 10:43:03 UTC 2002
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 308 Saturday 21 September 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: Globesity.
3. Topical Words: Cooked.
4. Weird Words: Cancrine.
5. Q&A: Chew the scenery.
6. Endnote.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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APOSTROPHE APOLOGY Two weeks ago I was rude about the Guardian,
which had reproduced Wordsworth's Sonnet composed upon Westminster
Bridge with the third line shown as "A sight so touching in it's
majesty". The Reader's Editor has now responded, pointing out that
it appeared like that in the 1807 original publication, and that
the spelling has been retained in all the bicentennial literature.
Sorry, Guardian.
OOPS, I DID IT AGAIN Several subscribers, more observant than I
am, have written to point out that I've now produced two newsletter
editions numbered 306. This one has been renumbered 308 to bring
the sequence back right.
INVISIBLE AUTHORS In last week's piece about Yehudi, I quoted a
rhyme that begins "As I was walking up the stair" and attributed it
to Hughes Mearns. Many subscribers said they thought it was really
written by somebody else, though there was no agreement on who that
might have been. The New Oxford Book of Children's Verse and the
Bloomsbury Biographical Dictionary of Quotations both attribute it
to Hughes Mearns; other works I have since looked at contain a
slightly different version, said to be a traditional children's
rhyme. Perhaps it's really by invisible Yehudi?
YEHUDI Speaking of him, many subscribers wrote to point out that
the name means "I am a Jew", with the implication in some cases
that the term might be a racial slur. While "Yehudi", meaning Jew,
is known (a little) in the US, it didn't become so until after
World War Two. The Jerry Colonna story is earlier and is much
better known.
SHOSHKELE This is the correct spelling of the online advertising
technique I gave incorrectly last week as "showskele".
2. Turns of Phrase: Globesity
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This is a blend of "global" with "obesity" and refers to the
looming international public health crisis caused by excessive
weight gain. A writer at the World Health Organisation coined it in
a report in February 2001 on the increasing risk caused by obesity
worldwide, which is classed by many health professionals as much
more serious a problem than smoking. The fat epidemic - mainly the
result of poor diet - is often thought to be peculiarly a US
problem (61% of Americans are categorised as overweight and 26% as
obese), or more generally of the developed world (a European Union
conference in Copenhagen last week heard that that within 15 years
at least 75% of British men and women will be overweight), but it
is a problem increasingly shared by developing countries (WHO says
that 18% of the global population is obese and that malnutrition
and obesity often now both occur within the same countries). The
problem of obesity is particularly worrying because it is affecting
children even more than adults, leading for example to the early
onset of Type Two diabetes, at one time unknown in childhood.
"Globesity" is fast becoming more of a problem than famine and
under-nutrition, and has now reached a point where it is becoming a
serious threat to the health of every nation striving for economic
development, scientists said yesterday.
[Independent, Feb. 2002]
The Lancet's cancer journal, Lancet Oncology ... warns that the
obesity epidemic - or "globesity" as the World Health Organisation
termed it recently - threatens a public health crisis.
[Guardian, Aug. 2002]
3. Topical Words: Cooked
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A headline on the back page of the Guardian last week read "Wenger
denies 'cooked' Vieira extra time off". In translation this says
that Arsène Wenger, manager of the British football team Arsenal,
was denying that his French captain Patrick Vieira was really tired
enough to need a rest. I'd never encountered the word "cooked"
before, either in the sense of "exhausted" or in any other
idiomatic way.
A small detective investigation followed, with the assistance of
Nicholas Shearing at the Oxford English Dictionary and the slang
lexicographer Jonathon Green, who shared the examples they had of
the word. It turns out that "cooked" has been in English since the
nineteenth century in the sense of being in a bad situation or in
serious trouble. It looks as though it is an elliptical form of "to
cook someone's goose", meaning to spoil someone's plans or cause
someone's downfall (before you ask, nobody knows where this comes
from). It isn't much known any more, though it does still pop up
from time to time - in 1995 the Globe and Mail in Toronto had this:
"If you began an election with an eight-point lead, you were home
free. If you were eight points behind, you were cooked". Some of
the examples down the years suggest that the bad situation may have
come about through exhaustion. For example, in 1913 the Harrow
school magazine contained: "They were utterly cooked. They had
ceased to have any conscious control of their muscles".
Vieira was quoted in the Guardian as making his comments to the
Paris newspaper L'Equipe, so presumably he had actually used the
French idiom "Je suis cuit" that can have the same sense and which
is in wide use by French sportsmen (there are much older senses in
French of "cuit" meaning drunk or being done for), though it
doesn't seem to have yet reached dictionaries in France. So did the
Guardian translate Patrick Vieira's words with the known English
sense in mind? The obvious assumption was that it did. But it turns
out that L'Equipe had actually translated a comment that had
appeared in English in the previous day's Evening Standard in
London (professional rivalry presumably explains why the Guardian
hadn't quoted the Evening Standard directly). One must assume that
either Patrick Vieira had mentally translated "Je suis cuit" into
literal English or that somebody on the Evening Standard had done
so for him. It looks as though the word "cooked" has been borrowed
anew from French and isn't a new sense of the older English slang
term.
The results of some online searches support this. A glossary of
cyclists' slang says "cooked" means "Running out of energy while
riding". There are many examples from bike racing of its being used
in this way. Knowing France's influence in professional cycling, it
seems possible that cyclists have likewise borrowed the phrase from
French. Further evidence online suggests that it may be moving from
cycling into sport in general (its appearances in the Guardian and
Evening Standard may help that along).
It shows once again that language can change in ways that are often
more complicated and mysterious than one might think - especially
with slang - and that one can't take anything for granted.
4. Weird Words: Cancrine
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Palindromic.
This one is about as defunct a word as you are likely to meet in
this section, since its sense of something that reads the same
backwards as forwards has entirely been taken over by the much more
common "palindromic" and I can find only one recent example. It
really contains within itself more of an idea of going sideways
than backwards, since it derives from the Latin "cancrinus",
relating to a crab. But it has been used in particular to refer to
a type of Latin verse that is the same in either direction; the
example usually quoted is "Signa te signa. Temere me tangis et
angis. / Roma tibi subito motibus ibit amor", each half of which is
cancrine (It was supposedly said by the Devil to St Martin, who had
changed him into a donkey and ridden him to Rome. In translation:
"Cross thyself, you plague and vex me without need. For by my
efforts you are about to reach Rome, the object of your travel".)
It doesn't refer only to verse though: Bach's Crab Canon, which is
a musical palindrome, has also been described as cancrine.
5. Q&A
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Q. While the mental image of a well-known movie star snacking on
the props around him is amusing, I imagine the origin of the term
"chewing the scenery" is more metaphorical. Could you elaborate?
[Anne]
A. It's from the acting profession, all right, and means to over-
act, over-emote, or ham it up in a synthetic frenzy so great that
you might even start biting chunks out of the set. You may also see
it as "chew up the scenery". Note that the phrase talks about the
scenery - referring to the backdrop to the action - rather than the
furniture, costumes and props that are the immediate concerns of
the actors.
It's so common in reviews, especially in America, that it has long
since become a cliché that should be permanently extracted from
writers' lexicons without benefit of anaesthetic. Here's a recent
example, from the Calgary Sun, commenting on The Divine Secrets of
the Ya-Ya Sisterhood: "This is not something Vivi wants to hear,
and so begins a hilarious feud between mother and daughter, with
Burstyn and Bullock getting to chew up the scenery through a series
of phone calls, temper tantrums and letter exchanges". Sometimes it
is used almost as praise, suggesting an actor who is energetic and
active.
Brewer's Twentieth Century Phrase and Fable says it was invented by
the New York columnist and wit Dorothy Parker in one of her
reviews. But Professor Jonathan Lighter, in The Random House
Historical Dictionary of American Slang records an example from the
end of the nineteenth century: "Lads, did ye hear him chewin' the
scenery, givin' himself away like a play-actor?"
So it is firmly pre-cinema and originally referred to the theatre.
Which is only reasonable, when you think about it, since scenery
that is close enough to you that you can chew on it, even
figuratively, is usually found only on the stage.
6. Endnote
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"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a
gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it
were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a
cuttlefish squirting out ink." [George Orwell, "Politics and the
English Language" (1950), quoted in the "Oxford Dictionary of
Literary Quotations" (1997)]
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