World Wide Words -- 08 Feb 03

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 327         Saturday 8 February 2003
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Book Review: Depraved and Insulting English.
3. Topical Words: Faze.
4. Weird Words: Jackalope.
5. Q&A: High Street.
6. Endnote.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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GUISER  This Weird Word last week provoked e-mails from subscribers
who know guisers from first-hand experience. Chris Smith wrote: "In
Shetland it's always 'guizer'. Children go guizing at Hallowe'en,
but the most important guizing takes place at Up-Helly-A'. The
torch-lit parade is led by the Guizer Jarl's squad (who get to grow
enormous beards and dress up as Vikings), followed by other squads
of just plain guizers. This year's Up-Helly-A' was last week; maybe
that prompted your choice of this weird word, but as you didn't
mention it, I thought I would". Jane Brown wrote: "I lived in an
Aberdeenshire village some 20 years ago and I remember the guisers
who came round on Halloween night. They were the local youngsters,
dressed up in ghoulish attire, who performed a song, dance or told
a joke in exchange for sweets or a small amount of money. Before I
left the area, the custom had begun to be taken over by the
American 'Trick or Treat' which was not as popular with the
residents".

SPELL CHECKER  A number of gently sarcastic comments arrived after
I used this term last week. Don Constance wrote: "What manner of
magic is it that you practise that requires you to have someone
check your spells? Do you have a spelling checker as well?" My son
wrote one of these useful bits of software some ten years ago, and
even then called it a spell checker without fear of correction. In
Britain, we did have a tendency to prefer "spelling checker" when
that software first appeared, because we prefer to use participles
as modifiers of action rather than the nouns that Americans like to
use, but that version has been largely overtaken by the American
one: even the conservative Daily Telegraph uses it as standard.


2. Book Review: Depraved and Insulting English
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This is a compendious book in more than one way, since it not only
brings together several hundred obscure terms with which to charm
and entertain you, but combines within its soft covers two previous
hardcover books by the authors with the titles Depraved English and
Insulting English.

The authors claim that every one of the terms it contains is a real
English word. This is presumably for some special value of "real",
since few dictionaries contain "ozoamblyrosis", the loss of sexual
desire due to the unpleasant body odour of one's partner;
"martext", a blundering preacher; "klazomaniac", a compulsive
shouter; "psaphonic", seeking fame or fortune for oneself; "liffy",
to seduce a woman with promises of fidelity, and then desert her;
"insiliarius", an evil advisor; "groak", to stare silently at
someone while they are eating, in the hope that they will offer
some food; or "apophallation", among slugs, the practice of chewing
off a partner's penis following sex.

As we know from other compendia of weird words, such as Jeffrey
Kacirk's Forgotten English, trawling ancient lists of defunct
dialect words can turn up some gems. And the pace of word invention
is such that there are thousands of jargon terms and hopeful
creations that never make it to the mainstream, let alone to the
pages of a dictionary. I leave it to the philosophers of language
to determine whether these are really words.

However, though rare, many other terms in the book have found their
place in the pages of the Oxford English Dictionary, such as the
invaluable and unjustly neglected "egrote", to feign sickness in
order to avoid work, and "nihilarian", a person with a meaningless
job. Others with some track record are "gubbertush", a bucktoothed
person; "snivelard", someone who speaks through their nose, a whiny
person; "boodler", one who happily offers or accepts bribes; and
"syndyasmian", pertaining to promiscuous sexual pairing, or the
temporary cohabitation of couples. And the title is not wholly
correct, as not all the terms are insulting: for example, you will
encounter "callypygian" for a person with nicely shaped buttocks.

You should use the words in this book with some care, not only
because of their subject matter, but because you run the risk of
being accused of making them up. The definitions given for those
words that I've been able to find in the big Oxford English
Dictionary seem sometimes to have been enhanced to give them a
sexual or condemnatory spin not present in that work.

It's definitely not to be taken seriously. But it's an entertaining
listing, with each entry accompanied by a paragraph of text that
often includes an illustrative quotation (in each case invented by
the authors, it would seem from internal linguistic evidence).

A fun book for an idle hour ...

[Novovatzky, Peter & Shea, Ammon, Depraved and Insulting English,
paperback, pp256, published by Harvest Books (an imprint of
Harcourt Inc, New York), ISBN 0-15-601149-2. Publisher's price,
US$13.00.]

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3. Topical Words: Faze
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An article in the Guardian newspaper last week described a tea-
growing venture in the extreme south-western English county of
Cornwall. That's not so silly an idea as you might think, with the
mild local climate being allied to global warming. (If successful,
one day people may say that they wouldn't do something "for all the
tea in Cornwall".) The writer said that the group involved wasn't
at all "phased" by the complicated harvesting process.

We British have been having trouble with this word ever since it
began to colonise us back in the 1960s. Americans have known it for
the better part of a couple of centuries as a verb (usually spelled
"faze") that means to become disturbed or discommoded by some event
or occurrence. It's a dialect version of a very old English verb
"to feeze", to drive off, put to flight, or frighten away. This
older spelling survived a long time: it's in Bartlett's Dictionary
of Americanisms of 1848, for example (where it is defined as "to be
in a state of excitement"). It also turns up as late as 1921 in The
Mucker by Edgar Rice Burroughs, by which date the "faze" spelling
had become standard:

  Battling Dago Pete landed a few more before the fight was
  over, but as any old fighter will tell you there is nothing
  more discouraging than to discover that your most effective
  blows do not feeze your opponent, and only the knowledge of
  what a defeat at the hands of a new sparring partner would
  mean to his future, kept him plugging away at the hopeless
  task of attempting to knock out this mountain of bone and
  muscle.

Why the shift of spelling to "phase"? It's very common and is not
by any means confined to British users, though it's generally
regarded as wrong. It looks odd and doesn't seem to be connected
with any other; such words are susceptible to shifts in spelling
under the influence of popular etymology. It's temping to blame
Star Trek and its phaser pistols, but it's more likely that it has
changed in imitation of common expressions such as "to phase out"
or "phased withdrawal".

The historical record shows, however, that it was often spelled as
"pheese". Bartlett has it as a variant form in his dictionary and
Shakespeare used that spelling several times. There is dialect
evidence in Britain that it was sometimes spelled as "phaze". So
the Guardian writer, and anybody else who spells it "phase", have
some useful antecedents on their side.


4. Weird Words: Jackalope
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A mythical horned rabbit.

That's the problem with putting the definition first - it takes all
the mystery out of an anecdote. The "jackalope" is indeed a totally
mythical beast, one that belongs with the Loch Ness Monster and
Bigfoot as a greater contributor to the local tourist trade than to
biological science. The citizens of some western states of the USA
have long had fun convincing credulous visitors that the animal is
real. Where it comes from is open to doubt, and even controversy,
but in a report last month of the death of Douglas Herrick it was
stated as fact that he was its true inventor. The story goes that
he and his brothers, who ran a taxidermy shop in Douglas, Wyoming,
once mounted the horns of a pronghorn antelope on to the body of a
jackrabbit sometime in the 1930s and exhibited it straight-faced,
naming it by an equally ingenious conflation of the constituent
animals' names. In the decades since, the firm has made several
thousands of them, so much so that Douglas has become the jackalope
capital of the USA. In 1965, the state of Wyoming trademarked the
name and you can even buy hunting licences, good between midnight
and 2am on 31 June any year. The odd thing is that, as the result
of a virus, jackrabbits can sometimes grow what really do look like
horns, sometimes up to five inches in length, and this may be the
source of several ancient stories about horned rabbits on which the
invented legend may rest. Truth really can sometimes be stranger
than fiction.


5. Q&A
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Q. Why in the UK, is the main street called "High Street" [Peter
Thomson].

A. We have for so long in Britain called the main shopping street
of a town by this name that it is now a generic term to describe
shops that cater to the needs of the ordinary public: "With juice
bars springing up everywhere, juicing seems to have hit the high
street"; "To make a high street shop look like a Prada shop you
have to spend a lot of money".

We have to go back a very long way to search out its origin. In Old
English, the word "high" meant something excellent of its type or
of elevated rank or degree (we still have terms like "high priest",
"high society" and "high sheriff" that are based on it). The word
in this sense can be traced back to the writings of King Alfred at
the end of the ninth century.

Around the year 1000 "high street" started to be used in the sense
of a main highway, whether in country or town ("street" has rather
gone down in the world - it used to refer to a road or highway of
some consequence, usually one so important it was paved, a rarity
at the time). As medieval towns often grew up (or were deliberately
created) alongside such main highways in order to provide lodgings
and otherwise tap the possibilities for trade presented by passers-
by, the name "High Street" in time became the name of urban roads
containing shops, and hence the main retail centre of a town.


6. Endnote
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"If a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have
read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end and
then have loaned it to someone who needs it. There are only certain
words which are valid and similes (bring me my dictionary) are like
defective ammunition (the lowest thing I can think of at this
time)." [Ernest Hemingway (1953); quoted in the "Cassell Dictionary
of Contemporary Quotations" (1996)]


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