World Wide Words -- 27 Dec 03
Michael Quinion
DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Dec 26 21:45:02 UTC 2003
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 373 Saturday 27 December 2003
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Sent each Saturday to 18,000+ subscribers in at least 120 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: Bluejacking.
3. Weird Words: Daft-days.
4. Sic!
5. Topical Words: Tabloid.
6. Q&A: Kilkenny cats.
A. FAQ of the week.
B. Subscription commands.
C. Useful URLs.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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EGG ON ONE'S FACE Cal Clifford put a possible new perspective on
this expression when he mentioned egg-sucking dogs: "Occasionally,
a trusted, working farm dog would develop the bad habit of taking
eggs from nests and eating them, turning himself from asset into
liability." I found several examples of the term, including this
from Glengarry School Days by Ralph Connor, dated 1902: "His chief
business was the doing away with dogs of ill-repute in the country;
vicious dogs, sheep-killing dogs, egg-sucking dogs, were committed
to Alan's dread custody, and often he would be seen leading off his
wretched victims to his den in the woods, whence they never
returned." And in Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp, by Annie Roe Carr (of
about 1919) appeared: "He's a miserable, fox-faced scoundrel, and
I've no more use for him than I have for an egg-sucking dog". So it
is just possible that the expression might be a figurative
extension from that of a dog found with egg around its muzzle, mute
evidence of the most wicked depravity.
EGG ON MY FACE Many subscribers had an e-mail message from the
list server yesterday to tell them I had changed their subscription
options. Sorry about that; actually I changed everybody's options,
but for arcane technical reasons only a proportion of subscribers
got a message telling them so (which was a good thing, because the
server sent me a copy of each message, so I might have received
18,300 copy messages instead of the 2,283 that actually arrived).
The change was for administrative purposes only, because I wanted
to track some defunct subscribers, and doesn't affect your ability
to receive newsletters. I'll change the options back again later
today, this time more quietly!
2. Turns of Phrase: Bluejacking
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One thing we've learned about modern technology is that there's no
limit to the inventive ways ordinary people can subvert or take
advantage of it. Take the Bluetooth radio communication system (see
http://www.worldwidewords.org/turnsofphrase/tp-blu1.htm) used in
many current mobile phones; this is designed to allow you, for
example, to use a wireless, hands-free headset while the phone is
safely in your pocket. But any Bluetooth device is capable of
talking to any other device over a range of a few metres. A phone
with Bluetooth enabled will tell you about any devices nearby that
you can communicate with. Mischievous people have started to
exploit this by sending cheeky messages to some stranger they see
in a public place, usually personalised ones such as "I like your
tie". Most victims will have no idea how the message arrived on
their phones, and their startled expressions are reward enough.
Fears that the technique might represent a security flaw seem to be
unsubstantiated.
>>> From the International Herald Tribune, 17 Nov. 2003: A lanky
young woman with long brown hair was waiting to take a train at
London's Waterloo Station when she got a surprising message on her
mobile phone from a complete stranger. "I like your pink stripey
top." The woman who looked around in confusion had just been
'bluejacked' by a 13-year-old British girl named Ellie who goes by
the nickname jellyellie.
>> From Znet UK, 6 Nov 2003: But why would somebody bluejack a
stranger's phone? The motive behind the craze is to freak out other
Bluetooth users that you might encounter in public - for example, a
bluejacker will check out other Bluetooth users on the tube and
drop them a message that only someone in the same place will
appreciate, for example, their choice of newspaper or colour of
their top or just a message to let them know that they've been
bluejacked.
3. Weird Words: Daft-days
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The days of mirth and amusement at Christmas.
We are in the "daft-days" at the moment, and shall be for a little
while yet.
It's a Scots term. In the Middle Ages it was a period of misrule
and revelry, of mock masses and masquerades, of celebration and not
a little gluttony, that lasted the whole twelve days of Christmas,
through the New Year (or Hogmanay) to Twelfth Night or Uphaliday.
The celebration has since become more sedate, Hogmanay surviving as
the main winter festival (at one time, Christmas Day was hardly
observed in Scotland). For much of the twentieth century the phrase
seemed to be dying out, but it's now enjoying a revival.
The Scots writer J M Barrie (of The Admirable Crichton and Peter
Pan fame) described it in his book Auld Licht Idylls of 1888 as
"the black week of glum debauch that ushered in the year". If ever
there was a description of people taking their pleasures sadly,
that was it.
"Daft" in modern English means silly, foolish or mad, but here it
has an older sense - which survives in Scots - of somebody who is
thoughtless or giddy in their mirth, so "daft-days" is an exact
translation of the French "fêtes de fou".
4. Sic!
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RoseAnne Mussar spotted this in her children's school newsletter:
"The University of Ottawa Faculty of Science presents one hour
lectures for young people and their parents. 'Earthquakes - How
Safe Are We?' - Earth is very much alive, shaking and rattling from
time to time on Tuesday December 30th at 1:30 p.m". You have been
warned ...
This appeared in the Review section of last Sunday's Observer: "In
the 1970s, the recently deceased Spanish writer Manuel Vazquez
Montalban created Spain's best-known detective, Pepe Carvalho."
Death is no bar to the really creative writer.
An Associated Press despatch carried in The Gazette, Montreal, on
23 December was noticed by Alan D Gray and Marc Picard: "A Quebec
man was awarded a Carnegie Medal for bravery yesterday for saving
two friends by fighting off a polar bear that was mauling them with
a pocket knife two years ago on Baffin Island". It's rough when
they come armed as well as dangerous.
5. Topical Words: Tabloid
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Quiet amusement is being felt by those of us who keep an eye on the
vocabulary of the British newspaper industry. In recent weeks, the
Times and the Independent have been experimenting with smaller
formats and it looks as though their success may lead other
newspapers to emulate them.
There has long been a cultural divide in the British press. To
paraphrase the view of the culturati of our country: the big-format
broadsheet ones, like the Telegraph, Times and Guardian, are
serious and responsible papers that appeal to an intelligent and
cultured audience, while the smaller-format tabloid ones,
especially the Sun and Daily Star, are for people who move their
lips while reading and who are only interested in sex and
sensationalism.
The distaste of many opinion-formers for the tabloids may in part
be ill-informed and misguided, but it's a potent force. So when the
Independent brought out a tabloid-sized version in September and
the Times followed suit in November, what were they to call the
format? The Independent came up with "compact", which may have the
disadvantage of confusing the paper with something in a woman's
handbag or a disc you listen to, but which avoided the dreaded T-
word.
Objections to "tabloid" started a century ago. It's a rare example
of an invented word that made it big, rather too much so for its
inventor, Henry Wellcome. He went into partnership in 1878 with his
fellow American Silas Burroughs to set up a pharmaceutical business
in London. They needed a word for the highly compressed pills that
his firm produced. "Tablet" wouldn't serve, as it was a much older
term (literally a little table) used since the sixteenth century to
mean any kind of solid medicine made up in small flat rectangles.
Wellcome created "tabloid" from "tablet" plus the ending "-oid"
that meant "having the form or likeness of"; this was registered as
a trademark in 1884. As well as drugs, the company used the brand
name for other products, such as photographic chemicals and tea
(though presumably not sold in tablet form).
The problem came near the end of the century when people started to
use the word for anything of compressed compass, for example for
the Daily Mail, a newspaper in half-pint format that had been first
published in May 1896 under the slogan "The penny newspaper for one
halfpenny". This was the precursor of all modern tabloids, with an
emphasis on short stories simply told, on sport and human interest
topics, and with the innovation of a women's page. The first
recorded use of "tabloid" for this style of journalism is from the
very beginning of the twentieth century, from the Westminster
Gazette of 1 January 1901.
In 1903, Burroughs Wellcome sued Thompson and Capper, a Manchester
firm, for using their trademark without permission. In its defence,
that firm pointed out that "tabloid" was by then widely used,
mentioning recent issues of Punch, Tatler, Nature, and the Daily
Mirror (another tabloid, founded that year), which had employed
phrases such as "opera in tabloid", "tabloid melodrama", "knowledge
in tabloid form", "tabloid missives" and "modern art in tabloid".
Burroughs Wellcome, it was argued, had thereby lost all rights to
"tabloid" and that the action was "an attempt on the part of the
plaintiff to prevent the proper development of the English
language". Burroughs Wellcome won; the judge agreed that the word
had indeed acquired a secondary sense of "a compressed form or dose
of anything", but that it didn't interfere with the firm's
trademark rights.
These days, of course, the sense of a type of tablet has long since
passed out of use and "tabloid" refers solely to a small-format
popular newspaper. Except, of course, when it's a broadsheet in
disguise.
6. Q&A
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Q. Could you please tell me what the expression "play Kilkenny
cats" means? [Steve Cohen, Virginia, USA]
A. I know it in the form "fight like Kilkenny cats". This refers to
an old story about two cats that fought to the death and ate each
other up so that only their tails were left. It's a battle that
goes on until both sides have been destroyed, an all-out, no-holds-
barred fight to the finish. It's often used figuratively of two
people who are vehemently opposed in attitudes or opinions to the
extent that they will never agree and will spark fire off each
other whenever they meet.
Where it comes from in one sense is easy enough: everyone's agreed
that it refers to the ancient town of Kilkenny, on the River Nore
in south-east Ireland. There are three stories in modern books
about how the expression grew up in connection with the town; all
of them repeat submissions to the British publication Notes &
Queries in the Victorian period.
One version was told in detail in Notes & Queries in 1864. This
said it was the result of the stationing of a group of German
soldiers in Kilkenny, either during the revolution of 1798 or
possibly that of 1803. To relieve the boredom in barracks, soldiers
would tie two cats together by their tails, hang them over a
washing line and leave them to fight. One day an officer was
alerted by the caterwauling and the look-out man failed to give
warning of his approach in time. In great haste, a soldier cut off
the cats' tails to let them escape, but wasn't able to hide the
evidence left behind. The officer was told blandly that two cats
had been fighting each other so savagely it had proved impossible
to separate them and that they had fought so desperately that they
had devoured each other, with the exception of their tails.
A second story is even more clearly fiction, since it refers to a
legendary battle on a plain near Kilkenny, supposedly sometime in
the eighteenth century, between a thousand cats of that city and a
thousand cats that had gathered from all other parts of the island.
This left the field of battle strewn with dead moggies, they having
fought so viciously that they had all killed each other. This may
be a parable based on dissents of the period between the people of
the Kilkenny area and other parts of Ireland.
Another entry, in an issue dated 1850, argues that it may indeed be
a kind of parable, but one based in factional disputes in Kilkenny
between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. The town then was
divided into two townships called Irishtown and Englishtown, a
situation that wasn't uncommon in a country occupied for so long by
the English. For religious, cultural and political reasons there
were deep divisions between the two groups. These were made worse,
the writer said, because the rights and duties of the two townships
hadn't been made clear by statute. This led to three centuries of
dispute between the rival municipal bodies that ended in beggaring
both of them.
Nobody seems to have added anything to these entries in the 150
years since. If I had to plump for a story, I'd point to the last
of these, which seems rather more plausible. But, as so often, in
the absence of evidence, we can only guess.
A. FAQ of the week
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