World Wide Words -- 01 Mar 03

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 330          Saturday 1 March 2003
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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: Geosequestration.
3. Topical Words: Tiddlywinks.
4. Weird Words: Ha-ha.
5. Sic!
6. Q&A: True facts.
7. Endnote.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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BONE OF CONTENTION  And other phrases that connect dissension with
bones, such as "I've got a bone to pick with you", were the subject
of many messages following last week's issue. The evidence, such as
it is for expressions that are so old, is that these are not linked
to "make no bones about it" but come from an image of dogs fighting
over a meaty bone.

TRUE FACTS  This phrase in last week's issue provoked more messages
than any other. I've written about it below.

WILLY-NILLY  Many subscribers pointed out that an equivalent Latin
phrase exists, "nolens volens" and that the English phrase may have
been derived from it. The evidence is unclear, but it does seem to
be likely that the Latin influenced the English.

SERENDIPITY, I HOPE  June Brierley was trawling the Web and typed
the words "weird rubbish" more or less at random into her search
engine. It offered her World Wide Words. If the cap fits ...


2. Turns of Phrase: Geosequestration
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One of the principal causes of global warming is the vast amount of
carbon dioxide we pump into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels
such as coal, natural gas and oil. One approach to mitigating the
effects of climate change is to find ways to remove carbon dioxide
from the atmosphere by storing it away in places such as the ocean
depths, disused oil wells, or suitable geological formations. The
general term for the technique is "carbon sequestration". It is as
yet experimental, with only one test project - in the North Sea off
Britain.

The federal government in Australia is keen on the idea, under the
more specific title of "geosequestration" to indicate that the
carbon dioxide will be stored in suitable rock strata and not in
the oceans. Sites are described by the acronym ESSCI, which stands
for "Environmentally Sustainable Site for CO2 Injection", a pun on
the Esky, an Australian trademark for a container to keep food or
drink cool. The proposal has aroused controversy, partly because
one possible site, at Barrow Island off the north-west coast, is a
nature reserve, but also because the scheme may be diverting funds
and attention away from ways to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in
the first place.

The green lobby was concerned that geosequestration - the process
planned to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from Australian Power
and Energy Limited's proposed $6billion plant - was an infant
technology that it said had not been tried on land before.
                                   [The Age (Melbourne), Jul. 2002]

Increasingly, industry is interested in exploring geosequestration
activities as options for long-term greenhouse gas disposal.
                                [Greenhouse News (newsletter of the
                        Australian Greenhouse Office), Winter 2002]


3. Topical Words: Tiddlywinks
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The BBC regional television weather forecast map for the south-west
of England last Friday marked the usual cities such as Bristol and
Exeter, but also added Tiddleywink in Wiltshire, an obscure hamlet
ignored by gazetteers and all maps except those of largest scale.
The BBC was having fun over its inhabitants' success in persuading
the local council to put up road signs to mark this cluster of
eight cottages, as up to now people driving past would miss it if
they blinked. Those in favour of perpetuating the name did so not
only out of local (very local) pride, but because of the name's
associations with word history.

Local historians say that the occupant of one of the cottages used
to sell beer to passing cattle drovers. At the time - presumably
the eighteenth or early nineteenth century - the slang term for an
unlicensed beer-house of this sort was "tiddlywink" (sometimes
"kiddlywink") and the name came in time to be attached to the
hamlet as a whole.

John Ayto, in the Oxford Dictionary of Rhyming Slang, and Jonathon
Green, in the Cassell Dictionary of Slang, both suggest that it was
originally rhyming slang ("tiddlywink" = "drink"). In the way of
such slang, it soon became shortened to "tiddly" as the name for an
alcoholic drink, which by the early twentieth century had become
the adjective "tiddly" for the state of being drunk.

It may be that the first element is a variation on an even older
term "tiddy" for something small, which would make a tiddlywink a
small drink (I was side-tracked at this point in my investigation
by finding another sense in the OED for "tiddy": "In the game of
gleek, the four of trumps". Let's not go there, at least not at the
moment.) Jonathon Green points to yet another form, "titley", as in
the slang phrase "titley and binder", for a glass of beer and a
lump of bread and cheese, known from the middle of the nineteenth
century.

Some writers suggest (for which read guess) that the second part
comes from phrases like "to tip the wink", to give somebody a
private signal, so suggesting a tiddlywink was a place to which a
man slipped off quietly with close friends to have a quick one.

The name of the game of tiddlywinks is even more obscure and turns
up in print only in 1857, later than the drink sense. The first few
references, named as "tiddlywink" in the singular, are to a game
played with dominoes. "Tiddlywinks", for the game played by
flicking counters into a pot (aficionados of the modern adult game
should not write: I know there's more to it), is not recorded
before a trademark application by Joseph Fincher in 1889, though
writers at the end of the century claimed it was a traditional
English game (and authorities agree it was indeed invented in
England).

If there is any connection between the slang name for a low beer-
house and these children's games, the printed record is entirely
silent. I can hardly imagine that the two are directly connected.
There's another story here, but nobody seems to know what it is.


4. Weird Words: Ha-ha
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A boundary to a park or garden that doesn't interrupt the view.

You can still often see ha-has in the gardens of British stately
homes. They usually consist of a sunken wall with its top at garden
ground level, bounded with a ditch on the outer side. This stops
cattle or sheep getting into the gardens without interrupting the
view from the house. An older - more usefully descriptive - name
was "sunken fence". The class-related implication of this boundary
is obvious from Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers: "Two marquees
had been erected for these two banquets: that for the quality on
the esoteric or garden side of a certain deep ha-ha; and that for
the non-quality on the exoteric or paddock side of the same". So
far as we can tell, the word was originally French. When it crossed
the Channel into Britain, it was variously spelled at first, often
as "ah ah", and it seems certain that the idea of a surprise was
intimately associated with it. If you stumbled across it in the
dark you certainly wouldn't think it at all funny.


5. Sic!
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Mike LaBrier recently received an e-mail, with a subject line that
said "stop annoying creditors". "Up to then," he says, "I wasn't
aware that I had ever annoyed a creditor". My business experience
suggests that it's the creditors that usually do the annoying.


6. Q&A
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Q. I was surprised that you used the phrase "true facts" in last
week's issue. Can there be false facts? [Lorna Earnshaw, Australia;
related queries came from Bruce Janson, Alan D Gray, Ed Ver Hoef,
Michael Gerchufsky, Mike Weaver, Roy C Zukerman, and others.]

A. There can, for one particular sense of "fact".

As the list of questioners shows, this phrase of mine raised many
queries from the logical thinkers among subscribers. It is indeed
sometimes argued that "true facts" is a tautology, since facts are
facts and need no qualification. That opinion is firmly stated by -
among others - Bergen Evans and Cornelia Evans in A Dictionary of
Contemporary American Usage (1975) and by Roy Copperud in American
Usage and Style (1980).

More recent style guides disagree. They assert that "fact" can be
used in the sense of an allegation of fact, or of some statement
that is open to doubt. An example is in a footnote in Volume Four
of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire of 1788:
"He gives some curious and probable facts; but his numbers are
rather too high". Many statements that purport to be facts turn out
on closer examination not to be true, so it's useful to have a
phrase like "true facts" that specifically says "these facts are
the correct versions; all previous statements are inoperative".
Writers often use it when denying or refuting some prior statement
or belief.

As it happens, the phrase "false facts" is often found in
respectable rhetoric. Thomas Jefferson's Second Inaugural Address
of 1805 has: "Since truth and reason have maintained their ground
against false opinions in league with false facts, the press,
confined to truth, needs no other legal restraint". And Oliver
Wendell Holmes wrote: "False facts, false reasoning, bad rhetoric,
bad grammar, stale images, borrowed passages, if not borrowed
sermons, are listened to without a word of comment or a look of
disapprobation".

The earliest example of "true facts" I know of is in a letter by
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu of February 1752, quoted in Merriam-
Webster's Dictionary of English Usage: "I flung it aside after
fifty pages and laid hold of 'Mrs. Philips', where I expected to
find at least probable, if not true, facts". P G Wodehouse, a
master of English prose, used it in a short story in 1928: "The
prospect of getting the true facts - straight, as it were, from the
horse's mouth - held him fascinated". It would be easy to quote
another hundred examples, from authors such as Charles Darwin, H G
Wells and George Orwell.

A rapid search of American and British newspapers found several
hundred instances from the last few months alone, though I notice
that it is rather more common in British newspapers than American
ones. Here's one recent instance from the Daily Telegraph, quoting
a judge in a court case: "He knew that the vendor would not have
sold to him if he had disclosed the true facts". The evidence
suggests that it is approaching, if it hasn't already reached, the
status of an idiom.


7. Endnote
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"I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic
fascism, and it sends shivers down the spine of my generation who
went to war against fascism." [P D James, in the "Paris Review",
(1995); quoted in the "Oxford Dictionary of Thematic Quotations"
(2000)]


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