World Wide Words -- 05 Jul 03

Fri Jul 4 18:51:22 UTC 2003

WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 348           Saturday 5 July 2003
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Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK      ISSN 1470-1448
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Contents
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1. Turns of Phrase: Metrosexual.
2. Weird Words: Slubberdegullion.
3. Sic!
4. Q&A: Camp; Besmitten.
5. Endnote.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.
C. FAQ of the week.

1. Turns of Phrase: Metrosexual
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This word has been around since at least the mid-1990s, and was
first used to describe urban (and urbane) young men who were self-
indulgent, even narcissistic, and who were interested in fashion
and beauty. It has been reinvented with a twist. The story is that
21st-century man has become neutered and insecure as a result of
the rise of female power in the workplace. Straight men, happily
married but confused by the new gender equality (and by a barrage
of comment saying they're useless and obsolete), are turning to
methods more traditionally associated with women, such as power
dressing and beauty treatments, to assert themselves. Metrosexual
man, the theory goes, wants to be thought of as caring, nurturing
and open-minded, while rejecting many traditional male virtues. At
least, this is what Marian Salzman, American guru of futurology, is
suggesting, although her thesis is derided by other futurologists,
who say that the way that some men feel at the moment is merely
part of a realignment of gender roles that hasn't yet worked its
way to a conclusion.

Last week ace trend spotter Marian Salzman of the advertising
agency Euro RCSG Worldwide identified Beckham - who likes to say
how comfortable he is with his feminine side and who has been known
to wear a sarong - as the epitome of "metrosexuality," which, since
you ask, is the characteristic of heterosexual men who spend time
and money on their appearance and enjoy shopping.
                                               [Time, 30 June 2003]

According to the experts, this guy lives near the city, uses beauty
products, fancies Kylie Minogue but would never cheat on his
partner. How do you spot this paragon of virtue? The Metrosexual
will, they say, possess at least one salmon pink shirt.
                                             [Mirror, 19 June 2003]

2. Weird Words: Slubberdegullion
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A filthy, slobbering person.

English, whatever its other merits, has as many disparaging words
as one would possibly desire. The example that follows is from Sir
Thomas Urquhart's 1653 translation of Rabelais' work Gargantua and
Pantagruel, a translation that draws heavily on vocabulary used in
Scotland in his time:

  The bun-sellers or cake-makers were in nothing inclinable
  to their request; but, which was worse, did injure them
  most outrageously, called them prattling gabblers, lickorous
  gluttons, freckled bittors, mangy rascals, shite-a-bed
  scoundrels, drunken roysters, sly knaves, drowsy loiterers,
  slapsauce fellows, slabberdegullion druggels, lubberly louts,
  cozening foxes, ruffian rogues, paltry customers, sycophant-
  varlets, drawlatch hoydens, flouting milksops, jeering
  companions, staring clowns, forlorn snakes, ninny lobcocks,
  scurvy sneaksbies, fondling fops, base loons, saucy coxcombs,
  idle lusks, scoffing braggarts, noddy meacocks, blockish
  grutnols, doddipol-joltheads, jobbernol goosecaps, foolish
  loggerheads, flutch calf-lollies, grouthead gnat-snappers,
  lob-dotterels, gaping changelings, codshead loobies, woodcock
  slangams, ninny-hammer flycatchers, noddypeak simpletons,
  turdy gut, shitten shepherds, and other suchlike defamatory
  epithets; saying further, that it was not for them to eat
  of these dainty cakes, but might very well content themselves
  with the coarse unranged bread, or to eat of the great brown
  household loaf.

You don't hear invective like that any more, and few of us would
understand it if we did. There's enough material there for a year
of Weird Words, but I've picked out "slabberdegullion" (a rare
spelling of "slubberdegullion"), a word which nobody hearing it
could possibly consider a compliment. There are examples of it on
record from the seventeenth century down to the early twentieth but
it appears now only as a deliberate archaism.

The experts disagree about where it came from. The first part is
clearly English "slobber", but the rest is less certain. It is most
likely from "cullion", an old word for a testicle (it's related to
Spanish "cojones"), which by the sixteenth century was a term of
contempt for a man.

3. Sic!
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EMBARRASSING DOMAIN NAMES  It turns out that PowerGen has nothing
to do with the site I mentioned last week, www.powergenitalia.com,
which has actually been set up by an Italian firm - presumably one
with poor English - that charges batteries. Douglas Yates provided
two other nice examples, one being http://www.classicalbums.co.uk/,
but his favourite is a company that sells mobile phone ring tones
based on hit tunes, http://www.ringtoneshits.com/.

Mark Mandel wrote on the ADS-L list: "A text I copied a day or two
ago was across the top of the windshield of a fire truck in Upper
Darby, Penn. Unlike the ornate inscriptions in gold announcing the
truck's number, affiliations, and fire company motto, this was made
of white stick-on letters, evidently by the proud members of the
company instead of any official source:

    WHERE THE EAST REACHES IT'S HEIGHT'S".

When in doubt, apostrophise ... That aphorism is no doubt behind
the sign that Howard Pryce-Jones spotted in a car in Glasgow the
other day: "My father say's condom's don't work".

4. Q&A
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Q. Why is someone who acts in an effeminate or over dramatic way
referred to as "camp"? [Sid Crawford]

A. Blessed if I know. That's an inadequate response, I do realise,
but it sums up pretty accurately the etymological state of play. I
can give the background, though, plus some theories.

The adjective first appears in print in 1909, in J Redding Ware's
Passing English of the Victorian Era, in which he says it refers to
"actions and gestures of exaggerated emphasis", which are used by
"persons of exceptional want of character", by which I take it he
means homosexuals.

He suggested it came from the French, perhaps because all things
risqué were considered to be imports from across the Channel. Eric
Partridge, on the other hand, was sure that it was natively
English, from a dialect word "camp" or "kemp", meaning rough or
uncouth. Anthony Burgess has argued that it might be derived from a
literal camp, as in a military or mining camp, in which the all-
male society might lead gay men to advertise their availability
through an exaggerated pseudo-femininity. It might be from a slang
use of "camp" to mean a male brothel, though that term is probably
of later date and derived from it. Those theories take you as near
to the true origin as you're likely to get.

As a side note, though "camp" still has close associations with the
gay world, another sense has grown up in the past half-century or
so. It can now mean a sophisticated and knowing type of amusement,
based on something deliberately artistically unsophisticated or
self-consciously exaggerated and artificial in style. It's an
obvious extension of the older sense. Christopher Isherwood called
it "high camp" in his novel The World in the Evening of 1954, in
which he emphasised that "you're not making fun of it; you're
making fun out of it". Susan Sontag famously wrote about this type
in the Partisan Review in 1964; she said that the ultimate camp
statement was "It's good because it's awful".

                        -----------

Q. Is there such a word as "besmitten"? [Paul Mills]

A. Interesting question. I can find 100+ examples online (and even
a few in newspaper archives), my wife remembers her aunt saying it
50 years ago, and I'd be happy with it if it turned up in something
I was reading. The examples I found show people using it naturally,
not marking it as a strange or unusual word. On the other hand, I
can't find any examples in my collection of historical electronic
texts and it's not in any dictionary I've consulted.

It obviously means "strongly attracted to (someone)", as in the
Palm Beach Post of 12 August 2001: "At home, the practical man's
fiancée was equally besmitten with BS Boy inside of three minutes".
And it has turned up twice recently in the Guardian, as this from
the issue of 13 April 2002: "Dogs have 78 chromosomes - twice the
number of human beings - which accounts for their infinite-seeming
variety since the first one was found 14,000 years ago, buried with
some besmitten pet-owner".

Putting all that together, what seems to be happening is that users
are unconsciously creating it from "smitten" by analogy, most
probably on the model of "beguiled", "bedazzled", or "besotted",
the last of these being very close in sense. They unconsciously
know that one use of the prefix "be-" is to intensify the action of
an existing verb or participle, so making "besmitten" a more
powerful version of "smitten".

What I find intriguing is that "be-" is almost totally defunct as a
word-forming prefix, so that if "besmitten" really is new, it's a
rare type of formation. Actually, it isn't really new, since
"besmitan" was very common in Old English more than a thousand
years ago. However, it went out of use so long ago that modern
users are recreating it anew.

Is there such a word? Well, logically yes, since there's evidence
of its existence. But what you're really asking, I presume, is
whether it's OK to use it. I'd be cautious - in conversation or
informal writing it would probably pass unnoticed, but in more
formal situations you lay yourself open to people classing it as an
error rather than as a creative reinvention of an archaic form.

5. Endnote
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"In language, the ignorant have prescribed laws to the learned."
[Richard Duppa, Maxims (1830); quoted in the Oxford Dictionary of
Thematic Quotations (2000)]

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