World Wide Words -- 12 Jul 03
Michael Quinion
DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jul 11 18:53:25 UTC 2003
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 348 Saturday 12 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: Polypill.
2. Over to You: Horbgorble.
3. Weird Words: Groze.
4. Sic!
5. Q&A: Teetotaller; While versus wile.
6. Endnote.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.
C. FAQ of the week.
1. Turns of Phrase: Polypill
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Two researchers made a controversial proposal in the British
Medical Journal on 28 June. They suggested that everybody over the
age of 55 should be given a pill every day to reduce the risk of
heart disease and strokes. Each pill would contain a set of six
generic drugs (hence polypill), including aspirin, folic acid and
four other as yet unspecified drugs at reduced doses to lower blood
pressure and cholesterol. The researchers - Professor Nicholas Wald
of the Wolfson Institute of Preventative Medicine in London, and
Professor Malcolm Law of the University of Auckland in New Zealand
- estimated it would save about 200,000 lives a year in Britain
alone. The proposal has had a mixed reception, not only because of
the cost, but because of the ethical problems associated with
medicating healthy people who don't need the drugs, a dilemma which
echoes that surrounding the adding of fluoride to tap water in the
UK to reduce tooth decay.
Although it's an enticing idea, the Polypill should not be a
licence for people to lead unhealthy lifestyles that contribute to
heart disease and stroke, says Charles George, medical director of
the British Heart Foundation.
[Nature, 27 June 2003]
Prof Wald admitted it could be difficult to get the required
backing from the drug industry for the pill to be produced and
marketed. "Pharmaceutical companies need to make money and the
concept of the polypill for some will erode their existing market,"
he said.
[Guardian, 26 June 2003]
2. Over to You: Horbgorble
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Mick Eastwood wrote: "I have always used the word horbgorble to
mean to wander around aimlessly. Unfortunately I can not find a
dictionary to back me up - even to the extent that the word exists.
Have I been using a word that is just made up?" A search on Google
finds three examples of it, so the word is certainly out there and
not some personal idiosyncrasy. Do you know more about this strange
term? Do you perhaps use it yourself?
3. Weird Words: Groze
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To nibble away the edges of a brittle material, especially glass.
This is in one respect the inverse of the usual Weird Word. Most
featured in this section are in reference works but are rarely
used; this one, though, appears in no dictionary I have here, but
is a relatively common word among craftspeople who work in glass.
It refers to the action of taking small bites from the edge of a
piece of glass with nippers or pliers to trim it to shape. Since no
etymological information is directly available, I have to assume
it's derived from the same source as "grozing-iron", a term which
the Oxford English Dictionary says is long obsolete but which in
the nineteenth century was the name for a tool with which glaziers
cut glass. This came from the Dutch "gruizen", to crush or grind.
It looks very probable that the English verb has been around for at
least a century, but as it's a term limited to one pursuit (not so
much jargon as a term of craft or trade) it hasn't achieved enough
circulation for publishers to justify adding it to dictionaries.
4. Sic!
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John Saffer wrote: "On an insurance renewal form for Preferential
Insurance (a UK annual travel insurance company) you are asked to
enter 'Your current date of birth'. One can only wonder what sort
of a mind asked that question."
5. Q&A
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Q. I'm a non-drinker and often refer to myself as "teetotal", or a
"teetotaller", but I have no idea why. Can you help? [Richard
Mulholland, South Africa]
A. It's an odd-looking word. The first part makes no obvious sense,
and as a result some people have assumed that it's a misspelling,
suggesting that those who abstained from alcohol turned to tea for
their refreshment, on which they became totally reliant - hence
"tea-total".
Where it comes from has puzzled people to the extent that other odd
stories exist. It has been argued that those who signed the pledge
at temperance meetings had their names marked with the letter T to
indicate their total abstention. Lansing, New York, is often quoted
here, where it is said to have first happened in January 1827, but
there's no contemporary evidence for it - the story only surfaced
much later in the century.
However, this story is not too far from the truth of the matter. It's
accepted that the word, at least in the abstinence sense, was coined
by Richard "Dicky" Turner in a speech he gave to a temperance meeting
in Preston, Lancashire, in September 1833. Turner was an illiterate
working man, a fish hawker, who had visited one of the early Preston
temperance meetings in 1832 as a joke while half-drunk, but who came
out of the meeting a convert. He was one of the founding Seven Men of
Preston who signed the pledge and became a fervent advocate of that
form of temperance that demanded total abstention from all forms of
alcoholic drink, not just spirits as some more moderate reformers
urged. There's no formal record of what he said at the meeting - one
report had it that his words were "nothing but the tee-total would
do"
but it is also claimed that he said in his strong local accent, "I'll
be reet down out-and-out t-t-total for ever and ever".
Here's where it all gets a bit murky. Did Dicky Turner stutter, did
he
invent a new word by adding "t" as an intensifier to the front of
"total", or was he using one already known? We will probably never be
entirely sure. What is certain, though, is that his word caught on in
the local temperance movement, was often quoted in its journal, the
Preston Temperance Advocate, giving the credit to him as inventor,
and
soon became a standard word in the language. Richard Turner died in
1846 and is buried in St Peter's churchyard in Preston; he may be the
only person in the world whose claim to have invented a new word is
cited on his tombstone.
What confuses the issue is that a related word, "teetotally", already
existed. That certainly did use an extra "t" at the front to
emphasise
what followed, so the first form would have been "t-totally". It's
first recorded in North America in 1832, the year before Dicky
Turner's speech, and is common there throughout the following
decades.
The sense, though, is "completely; utterly", with no link to alcohol.
The Nova Scotian writer Thomas Chandler Haliburton put it into his
book The Clockmaker of 1836: "I hope I may be tee-totally ruinated,
if
I'd take eight hundred dollars for him". There's a strong suspicion
that this was an Irish dialect form that had been exported to North
America some time earlier, since it also appears in British writing
at
the same period and with the same sense, and there is anecdotal
evidence that it was known in Ireland much earlier. It appears, for
example, in a story by Thomas de Quincey in 1839: "An ugly little
parenthesis between two still uglier clauses of a teetotally ugly
sentence".
However, no evidence has been put forward that "teetotally" was known
at the time in the Lancashire dialect. If they were, Dicky Turner
would hardly have been given the credit for "teetotal" that he
received from Preston people during his lifetime. He does seem to
have
created the word anew.
-----------
Q. Some friends are currently debating whether it should be "wile"
or "while" in phrases like "we whiled (or wiled) away the time". A
Google search produces 699 hits for "wile" and 6,290 for "while"
but no information as to which is correct. Can you help with an
answer? [Craig Miller]
A. Historically and formally, "while" is the right answer. But I
must qualify that because "wile" is not only found today but has
been used in the past by some good writers. As a result, some
British dictionaries allow "wile" as a variant, and several
American ones I have here offer it as valid without any comment.
I can see why you had trouble looking it up. The construction isn't
mentioned often in style guides: the only one I can find that does
so is the Second Edition of Fowler's Modern English Usage (of
1965), which says that "while the time away" is now the standard
form but that "wile" was formerly not uncommon.
A little delving into word history might be helpful to make that
comment clearer. Writers in the early sixteenth century borrowed
the conjunction "while" and turned it into a verb. The first known
user of it in the modern sense of passing time leisurely or idly
was Francis Quarles, in a poem of 1635 called Emblems: "Nor do I
beg this slender inch, to while The time away, or falsely to
beguile My thoughts with joy".
So far, so good. The problem began at the end of the following
century, when writers started to spell it "wile" instead. The OED's
editors suggested this might have been because people were thinking
of "beguile the time", a related phrase that goes back to
Shakespeare, though I'm not at all sure I understand their reasons
for thinking this caused the spelling change. The first recorded
user was Fanny Burney, in her novel Camilla of 1796: "He persuaded
his sisters, therefore, to walk out with him, to wile away at once
expectation and retrospection". In the following century, it was
used by writers such as Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens and Rider
Haggard. Rather later, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had Sherlock Holmes
say, in The Adventure of the Second Stain: "Yes; I will wile away
the morning at Godolphin Street with our friends of the regular
establishment".
With that phalanx of worthies in the background, it's hard for
modern works on language to assert that "wile" is absolutely wrong.
But my advice would be to stick with "while", since you can't be
faulted spelling it that way.
6. Endnote
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Others for language all their care express, / And value books, as
women men, for dress. / Their praise is still - 'the style is
excellent,' / The sense they humbly take upon content. / Words are
like leaves, and where they most abound / Much fruit of sense
beneath is rarely found. [Alexander Pope, An Essay On Criticism
(1711)]
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