World Wide Words -- 21 Jun 03

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 346           Saturday 21 June 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: Café Scientifique.
2. Weird Words: Cachinnatory.
3. Sic!
4. Q&A: Chance your arm; Know one's onions.
5. Endnote.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.
C. FAQ of the week.


1. Turns of Phrase: Café Scientifique
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It sounds a dauntingly highbrow term, but the intention is just the
opposite - to demystify science and help people engage with it. The
technique is based on the discussion of topical scientific ideas
with interested people in determinedly non-academic surroundings.
The Cafés sum up their intentions with a maxim, too long to be
considered a slogan, "We want people to be as opinionated about
science as they are about football". Informal meetings are usually
held in cafés or bars; a guest speaker talks briefly on a topic and
then leads a discussion. The first Café Scientifique was held in
Leeds in 1998; its name was invented by the man who started it,
Duncan Dallas. "I was reading the paper's obituary of Marc Sautet,
the man who founded the cafés philosophiques in France," he
recalls, "and I thought 'I'd like to do that'. But the British
don't think philosophy is a real subject, so I opted for science
instead." The scheme has extended with the help of funding from the
Wellcome Trust from 2001 onwards. Most Cafés are in university
towns and cities - the fifteenth, in Bristol, was inaugurated in
April 2003.

Organiser Duncan Dallas said the Café Scientifique sessions
attracted a very mixed audience, half of them women and half with
no professional science connections. "They ask good questions -
that's why the speakers enjoy it. They are not nit-picking
questions, people really want to know the answers and they are
often quite difficult to answer."
                                           [Guardian, 18 Nov. 2002]

Science in the Pub is an Australian format that does exactly what
the name suggests. Last year I found myself in the Harlequin Inn in
Sydney discussing Fermat's last theorem - which turned out to be
easier to explain after a few pints. Britain's Café Scientifique is
a more genteel version of the Australian format. There are now nine
cafés, from Newcastle to London. And hopes are high that moving
science out of the lecture theatre will get a broader range of
people involved.
                                      [New Scientist, 13 Apr. 2002]


2. Weird Words: Cachinnatory  /'kak@,neIt at rI/
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Relating to loud or immoderate laughter.

Though this may seem to be celebrating boisterous high spirits, it
dates from the early nineteenth century, at a time when gentlemen
in England did not laugh out loud, at least not in public. It has
about it a sense of the distaste we feel when persons nearby are
carousing too loudly for comfort. That master of the second-rate
novel, Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, was a great user of the word and
illustrated its exuberance in his Paul Clifford of 1842: "If Paul's
comrade laughed at first, he now laughed ten times more merrily
than ever. He threw his full length of limb upon a neighbouring
sofa, and literally rolled with cachinnatory convulsions". It also
appears in Fan by Henry Harford, published in 1892, in which the
heroine is visiting London Zoo: "The laughing jackasses laughed
their loudest, almost frightening her with their weird cachinnatory
chorus". The Romans clearly knew of this unrestrained outpouring of
immoderate humour, since the word is from Latin "cachinnare" with
the same sense.


3. Sic!
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"Chicken shoots upset children". John MacDonald found that headline
in the Cape Times. He comments, "Closer inspection showed the story
was not about a gun-slinging fowl intent on eliminating snivelling
brats, but concerned complaints about a Chinese nature park that
allows visitors to use real guns to kill chickens, to the dismay of
the juvenile spectators".

David Alexander e-mailed from Zeist in the Netherlands: "On page
191 of the Picador edition of A Small Place in Italy (1994), Eric
Newby devotes twelve lines to a list of items one could buy at
Borgo Giannotti in Lucca. These included 'chairs with rush seats,
some of them for children with a trap door and a secret place
underneath'". No chairs for ladies with Queen Anne legs?

And from Mark Miller: "When I lived in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, I
used to go to a laundromat in which a sign read, 'No dying in
machines'". Sensible advice, however you spell it!

Mike Reilly e-mailed on Friday: "National Public Radio this morning
tells us that a newspaper in Lexington, KY carried the following
headline: 'Depression Hits More People Than Thought'. The truth is
out ..."


4. Q&A
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Q. Do you have the background to the expression "chance your arm"?
[Patricia Reid]

A. Only up to a point. The phrase is mainly British and means to
take a risk in the hope of achieving something worthwhile; it has
been recorded since the 1880s. In its early decades it was most
common as a soldier's term. A good example is in The Middle Parts
of Fortune of 1916, by Frederic Manning, about the fighting on the
Somme and Ancre fronts in World War I: "What does it matter if
y'are killed? You've got to die some day. You've got to chance your
arm in this life, an' a dam' sight more 'n your arm too sometimes".

Quite where it comes from, though, is an open question. Military
men used it to refer to the stripes on the arm of one's uniform, so
that to chance one arm meant to take a calculated risk, which might
end in a court martial and demotion. Some writers see an origin in
a tailors' term, largely because that origin is given in Barrère &
Leland's dictionary of slang of 1889, but the authors gave no
details of why this should be so (apart from the assumption of a
slightly strained link between arms and tailoring). Modern writers
tend towards a link with boxing or prize fighting, in which to
extend your arm to land a blow might leave your guard down and give
your opponent a chance to retaliate.

It's often said that the origin lies in a famous incident during a
feud between two prominent Irish families, the Ormonds and the
Kildares, in 1492. At one point, Sir James Butler, the Earl of
Ormond, took refuge with his followers in the chapter house of St
Patrick's cathedral in Dublin. After a while, Gerald Fitzgerald,
the Earl of Kildare, came to realise that the feud was nonsense and
tried to make peace. In order to prove that no villainy was
intended and that his desire for reconciliation was genuine, he cut
a hole in the door and thrust his arm through. In doing this, of
course, he was placing himself at the mercy of those inside, who
could easily have cut it off. However, his hand was grasped by
Butler and his peace overtures were accepted.

When this incident is retold, it's often said that it's the origin
of "chancing your arm". It's relevant enough, but - as we've seen -
the dates are all wrong. If that was where it came from, we should
expect to find examples in the four centuries between the feud and
its first known appearance in the 1880s. You can see how the story
might have grown up, though. There are parallels with one in Galway
about Lynch law (see http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-lyn1.htm),
which also dates from 1492 (an eventful year). Though we can't pin
it down absolutely, all the evidence suggests an origin in late
Victorian British slang.

                        -----------

Q. A group of friends were talking about work and someone said "He
knows his onions", meaning that he knows all about a particular
subject. One of the gang asked where it came from and I said I
would find out, as I know this wonderful Web site that'll let me
know. Imagine my dismay when, checking it out this morning, I
couldn't find it. So, over to you. Where does "know your onions"
come from? [Gary Pentland, UK]

A. Sorry to have disappointed you. Though the site is getting big,
it sometimes surprises people to learn that I've not yet written
about every word and phrase in the language. Let me repair this
particular omission without further delay.

As it happens, I am writing this reply having a few minutes ago
heard a BBC radio programme, You and Yours on BBC Radio 4, give an
answer to this question. Based on e-mails from a couple of
listeners, the presenters said that it came from the name of the
noted British lexicographer and grammarian C T Onions, who worked
on the Oxford English Dictionary (he wrote the last entry in the
first edition of that monumental work, a cross reference for
"zyxt", a Kentish dialect form of part of the verb "to see"). His
best known work is the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology,
published in 1966, a year after his death. The presenters said
Onions was so well regarded that he became the epitome of the well-
regarded expert.

Don't believe a word of it. However erudite a lexicographer C T
Onions was, he certainly wasn't the source of the saying. No matter
that he was eminent in his own field, he never gained the kind of
wide public recognition that would have caused such a phrase to
gain and retain recognition (I find to my chagrin that this is
often the case for writers on word histories).

The crucial fact is that the expression isn't British but American,
first recorded in the magazine Harper's Bazaar in March 1922. It
was one of a set of such phrases, all with the sense of knowing
one's stuff, or being highly knowledgeable in a particular field,
that circulated in the 1920s. Others were "to know one's oats", "to
know one's oil", "to know one's apples", "to know one's eggs", and
even "to know one's sweet potatoes" (which appeared in a cartoon by
T A Dorgan in 1928).  You may notice certain similarities between
the substances mentioned, most being foods and most having names
that start with a vowel.

They contain much of the verbal inventiveness and mildly juvenile
wordplay that characterises another American linguistic fad of the
flapper period, that of describing something excellent of its kind
in terms of an area of an animal's anatomy ("bee's knees",
"elephant's instep", "gnat's elbows" and about a hundred others -
see <http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-bee1.htm> for some more).

As with "bee's knees", one of these multifarious forms eventually
triumphed and became a catchphrase that has survived to the present
day. Sadly it has provided an opportunity for a couple of people to
provide what seems like an erudite explanation but which is really
no more than a popular etymology.


5. Endnote
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"One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs
constant fertilizing or it will die." [Evelyn Waugh; quoted in the
Cassell Dictionary of Contemporary Quotations (1996)]


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