World Wide Words -- 05 Apr 03

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 335          Saturday 5 April 2003
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Blue revolution.
3. Weird Words: Brimborion.
4. Sic!
5. Q&A: Dog in the manger; Road metal; I should cocoa.
6. Endnote.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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GREEN-INK BRIGADE  Anelie Walsh e-mailed from Australia to tell me
of the association of green ink with eccentric correspondence in
Carl Sagan's book The Cosmic Connection (1973): "There came in the
post an eighty-five-page handwritten letter, written in green ball-
point ink, from a gentleman in a mental hospital in Ottawa. He had
read a report in a local newspaper that I had thought it possible
that life exists on other planets; he wished to reassure me that I
was entirely correct in this supposition, as he knew from his own
personal knowledge".

An earlier reference, less direct, is from Kingsley Amis's Lucky
Jim (1953), which was mentioned by Jane Halsey among others. The
hero gets letters from a person purporting to be an editor of a
learned journal, "ill-written in green ink". The implication seems
to be that the green ink is a sign of some abnormality (the writer
turns out to be an academic thief) but whether Amis invented it, or
was drawing on an existing folk belief about letters written in
green ink is as yet impossible to say.


2. Turns of Phrase: Blue revolution
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Some evidence suggests "blue" is joining "green" as a buzzword of
the environmental movement. The blue revolution is the equivalent
of the green revolution for water and primarily refers to the need
to get water for drinking and crop irrigation to the many millions
of people worldwide who do not have it. The phrase has been used
for some years, but it came to notice particularly in press reports
of the recent Third World Water Forum in Tokyo. Many environmental
activists believe that the need is not simply to provide water, but
to do so in ways that are ecologically sound and sustainable; for
example, they feel that building dams is not the right technique.
Solutions are desperately needed, since the UN estimates that 2.7
billion people face a critical shortage of drinkable water by 2025.

The grand ambitions of the World Water Forum trickled down the
drain at Kyoto this week - dashing any immediate hopes of a "blue
revolution" that might keep the world water crisis at bay.
                                         [New Scientist, Mar. 2003]

The institute hopes the "green revolution" in crop productivity
will soon be matched by the "blue revolution" in raising water
productivity in agriculture.
                                   [Africa News Service, Aug. 2002]


3. Weird Words: Brimborion
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A thing without value or use.

It's not a word that rises unbidden to the lips of English speakers
today, nor - if the record is to be trusted - at any time. It was
borrowed from French, where it may still be found in dictionaries,
though firmly marked as literary. According to the lexicographer
Emile Littré, who compiled a famous dictionary of French in the
middle decades of the nineteenth century, it's a bastardised form
of the Latin "breviarium", the source of "breviary" for the service
book used by Roman Catholic priests. The link had been explained by
another lexicographer two centuries earlier. Randall Cotgrave wrote
in his French-English dictionary of 1611 that the word came to mean
"foolish charms or superstitious prayers, used by old and simple
women against the toothache, and any such threadbare and musty rags
of blind devotion", hence something valueless. A rare appearance is
in a letter of 1786 by the writer Fanny Burney, in which she refers
to "Talking to your royal mistress, or handing jewels ... and
brimborions, baubles, knick-knacks, gewgaws".


4. Sic!
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Norman Lustig saw a headline on a news item in the New York Times
on 31 March that needed a moment to decode: "Seattle meters billed
as aiding homeless sow discord". The city has introduced what it
calls "giving meters" into which local people can put small change
instead of donating it to panhandlers. How appropriate that the
mayor who introduced the idea is Greg Nickels ...


5. Q&A
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Q. Can you explain the term dog in the manger? I have heard it used
referring to a person and gather it is derogatory - not sure what
it means exactly. [Melinda White]

A. Someone who has a dog-in-the-manger attitude has something of
value that he cannot or will not use himself but which he won't let
anybody else have either. An example might be an ex-husband who
takes steps to prevent his ex-wife from forming an attachment to
another man, out of an unreasonable feeling that "if I can't have
her, nobody shall". Other examples might be a driver who never
passes anybody else but also never allows anybody else to pass him,
or a man who has some bricks left over after a job on his house but
throws them away rather than give them to his neighbour. A recent
example appeared in an article from the Africa News Service: "I
have come to understand that he is the quintessential dog in the
manger. Either he gets his object of pursuit or it is destroyed. It
cannot go to any other contestant".

The allusion is to one of Aesop's fables, written about 600BC, in
which a dog was taking a nap in a manger. When an ox came and tried
to eat the hay in the manger, the dog barked furiously, snapped at
him and wouldn't let him get at his food, food that, of course, was
useless to the dog. At last the ox gave up and went away muttering,
"Ah, people often grudge others what they cannot enjoy themselves".

                        -----------

Q. Why is road metal called metal? [Martin Crowe]

A. We use "metal" these days in a specific technical sense, one
that's hard to define simply, but which we recognise when we see
it. The New Oxford Dictionary of English, for example, defines it
as "a solid material which is typically hard, shiny, malleable,
fusible, and ductile, with good electrical and thermal
conductivity".

The original sense was much broader. The English word comes from
Latin "metallum", a mine or quarry. So a metal was anything useful
that had been extracted from the ground. Since most of the
substances men searched for were what we now call metals (gold,
silver, tin, copper, and the like), the shift of sense is easy to
understand. Another shift of sense, to a figurative one, gave us
"mettle".

But the old sense survived for another class of substances that
were likewise extracted from the ground. Historically, these have
included sand, clay, rock and earthen matter in general. Near the
end of the eighteenth century, the word started to be used in
particular for the crushed rock that formed part of the system of
building a sealed and waterproof road surface pioneered by the
Scots engineer John McAdam. It's from that specific use of the word
that the term "road metal" derives.

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Q. Perhaps you can help Americans with a phrase, "I should cocoa",
that at least one of us finds rather bewildering. [Dudly]

A. Since few Americans know of or use rhyming slang, that isn't
surprising. It stands for "I should say so!", itself a sarcastic
exclamation to express disbelief or indignation. It appeared in
London in the 1930s.

It's an odd example of the type, since it's a straight rhyme of
"cocoa" with "say so" without the bipartite phrasing usual in terms
like "apples and pears" (for stairs), "daisy roots" (boots), or
"plates of meat" (feet) that leads to the phrases being abbreviated
as - for example - "plates", as a further level of obfuscation.
Though it has been recorded in the longer forms "coffee and cocoa"
and "tea and cocoa", these look like afterthoughts, attempts to
force an existing saying into the standard mould (if these were
genuinely the original forms, one would expect to hear "coffee" and
"tea" as short forms, but one never does).

I remember it from my own London childhood in the late 1940s. Even
then it was so far divorced from its origins that you sometimes saw
it written as "I should coco!" or "I should co-co!". Though "coco"
was centuries ago the spelling of the comestible we now call
"cocoa", I'm sure that wasn't in people's minds. I suspect the
influence of Coco the clown, well known in the Bertram Mills and
Billy Smart Circuses in England at the time.

Though it isn't defunct, these days "I should cocoa!" usually
appears in writing as a self-conscious way to evoke a period, place
or mood. This is well illustrated by this television review from
the Guardian newspaper in December 1999: "But one might ask how
well it will play, this comedy adventure about the conning of pin-
striped shits by blimey guv diamond geezers, 'arnessed in service
of a sentimental Variety Club plot about finding money for a
kiddie's operation. The author, once director of Barings and
Deutsche Morgan Grenfell, does the City drawl and the takeover
business with more conviction than life east of Canary Wharf. I
should cocoa".


6. Endnote
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Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs
and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois
which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when
I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay
split. [Raymond Chandler, 18 January 1947, in a letter to Edward
Weeks, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly; quoted in David and
Hilary Crystal's Words on Words (2000)]


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