World Wide Words -- 22 Mar 03

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 333          Saturday 22 March 2003
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sent each Saturday to 16,000+ subscribers in at least 119 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK      ISSN 1470-1448
<http://www.worldwidewords.org>      <TheEditor at worldwidewords.org>
-------------------------------------------------------------------
 IF YOU RESPOND TO THIS MAILING, REMEMBER TO CHANGE THE OUTGOING
   ADDRESS TO ONE OF THOSE IN THE 'CONTACT ADDRESSES' SECTION.


Contents
-------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Book Review: The Grouchy Grammarian.
3. Weird Words: Maritorious.
4. Sic!
5. Q&A: Lynch law; Molly-dooker.
6. Endnote.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
-------------------------------------------------------------------
LIPOGRAMMATIST  The title of the work by Georges Perec mentioned in
this piece last week is correctly La Disparition.


2. Book Review: The Grouchy Grammarian
-------------------------------------------------------------------
If the title isn't enough to give you the idea, the wordy subtitle
certainly will: "A How-Not-To Guide to the 47 Most Common Mistakes
in English Made by Journalists, Broadcasters, and Others Who Should
Know Better". Though humorously written and very readable, the book
seems at times to consist of an extended catalogue of the errors of
writing and speech that have offended author Thomas Parrish (or, to
accept the book's conceit, his alter ego, the eponymous Grouchy
Grammarian).

He has rounded up the usual suspects: confusion between "it's" and
"its", "among" and "between", and "may" and "might"; between "lie"
and "lay", and between homophone pairs such as "lead" and "led". He
illustrates the dreadful things that people do with apostrophes,
problems with subject and verb agreement, the misuse of "former",
the incorrect use of "whom", dangling participles, malapropisms,
and more.

As his subtitle makes clear, his examples are mostly taken from the
media, which I feel sometimes shines the spotlight too brightly on
errors made by broadcasters and journalists. Theirs is a stressful
occupation with constantly looming deadlines in which it is all too
easy to make a slip that cannot be recalled and corrected. Mr
Parrish would, I suspect, argue that a more thorough knowledge of
the basics would prevent the most egregious errors. Perhaps so.

I disagree with a few things: "straight and narrow" is not just a
mistake for "strait and narrow" but is of independent formation
with a respectable ancestry (I've found examples going back into
the 1840s); "chaise lounge", though a folk etymology for the French
"chaise longue", is now too well established in the US for a book
on style to claim it as an error (it is, for example, included in
several current American dictionaries without comment); "ice tea"
for "iced tea" is not simply an error but a regional form that
parallels "ice cream" (nineteenth-century prescriptivists were
equally hard on this, arguing similarly that it ought to be "iced
cream"); "cut and dry" isn't necessarily a mistaken form of "cut
and dried" but a variant that's known from the eighteenth century
(Swift used it in 1730, for example).

But Thomas Parrish is no knee-jerk pedant. He is happy to dismiss
the old canard that "none" must always take a singular verb; he is
relaxed about the use of "like" to mean "as" (though not the
intrusive "like" that forms a meaningless sentence break in so many
conversations); he's very aware that language is not static. His
greatest concern is that whatever we write, we should say clearly
what we mean to say. This is summed up by his opening section,
which urges all writers to "Think!" - not, as the late Thomas J
Watson of IBM meant it, to exercise the little grey cells in the
direction of innovation and invention, but just to stop a moment
and reflect on what it is one is actually trying to communicate.

My largest concern about his efforts is that I'm not at all sure
what audience he is writing for. Most people who ought to read it
probably won't, or realise that they need to. It will be picked up
by some who know that their English could be improved (perhaps even
by some in the media), but I suspect that a sizeable proportion of
its readers will know most of the answers already and will read it
largely to have their prejudices about the degraded state of media
English confirmed.

[Thomas Parrish, "The Grouchy Grammarian", published by Wiley in
October 2002; ISBN 0-471-22383-2; hardback, pp186; publisher's
price US$19.95.]

AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
 UK: GBP11.21 (http://www.quinion.com/cgi-bin/r.pl?BT)
 US: US$13.97 (http://www.quinion.com/cgi-bin/r.pl?OJ)
 CA: CDN$25.17 (http://www.quinion.com/cgi-bin/r.pl?TB)
[Click on a link or paste it into your browser to order online. If
you do so you will supply World Wide Words with a small commission
that helps to pay for the Web site and general operating expenses.]


3. Weird Words: Maritorious
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Being fond of one's husband.

This is the partner to "uxorious", of a man who is fond of his wife
to the point of doting excess. It is much less well known, to the
extent that I have had no success in finding a modern example of
its use outside the books on words that cite it.

A Google search turned up what looked at first sight like a number
of examples, such as the surprising statement from a school that
"Medals and prizes are given to maritorious students". It took a
moment to realise that should have been "meritorious". As it
happens, that's oddly relevant, since the only example of the word
on record is in Bussy D'Ambois, a tragedy by George Chapman of
1607, in which he coins the word to make a bad pun: "Dames
maritorious ne're were meritorious".

(As asides: John Keats' poem, On First Looking into Chapman's
Homer, refers to the same man, who made a famous translation of the
Greek work. Dryden thought little of Chapman's play, finding in it
"a dwarfish thought dressed up in gigantic words, repetition in
abundance, looseness of expression, and gross hyperboles; the sense
of one line expanded prodigiously into ten; and, to sum up all,
incorrect English, and a hideous mingle of false poetry and true
nonsense". However, the Oxford English Dictionary has 116 citations
from it, and it has provided modern writers on words such as myself
some small subject matter, so it hasn't proved entirely valueless.)

The word is from Latin "maritus", husband.


4. Sic!
-------------------------------------------------------------------
>From The Age, Melbourne, 14 March, seen by Jim Hart: "De Stefano,
54, showed no reaction when [the judge] ordered him to serve a
minimum of seven years in a courtroom packed with family and
supporters, but a daughter burst into tears and sobbed loudly".
That's a cruel and unusual punishment, especially for the family
and supporters.


5. Q&A
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. According to Peter McCarthy in his hugely entertaining travel
book McCarthy's Bar, the word "lynch" may be derived from an event
in 1493 when James Lynch FitzStephen, the mayor of Galway, strung
up his own son from an upstairs window of his house for murdering a
young Spanish house guest, who the young Lynch FitzStephen feared
might become a rival for the attention of his girlfriend. Should we
give any credence to this story? [Michael Gould]

A. At the risk of offending the citizens of Galway, I have to say
the tradition is quite certainly false. Though the window is said
still to exist and to have a plaque that commemorates the event,
linguistic evidence alone is enough to scupper it. The tale seems
to have been invented by an enterprising local with an eye to the
tourist trade sometime in the nineteenth century, after the word
had become widely known.

"Lynch" is short for "lynch law", the punishment of a person for
some supposed crime without bothering with the niceties of a legal
trial. All the evidence points to its being an archetypal American
expression. For its origin we must look to Virginia in the 1780s,
during the American Revolution. There is some doubt about which
Lynch gave his name to the expression, since there were two:
Captain William Lynch of Pittsylvania County and Colonel James
Lynch of Bedford County. However, both were trying to bring order
and justice to an area notoriously lacking both. It's William Lynch
who is usually mentioned in scholarly discussions, mainly - it
seems - because documentary evidence survives of his efforts.

It was only later that the term took on its associations with mob
rule. And though it is now taken to refer to execution, usually by
hanging, and most commonly in the twentieth century to the killing
of black Americans in the South by whites, early examples suggest
it referred to punishments that were less terminal. The compact
drawn up with his neighbours by William Lynch in 1780 said of the
actions of the lawless men troubling the area: "if they will not
desist from their evil practices, we will inflict such corporeal
punishment on him or them, as to us shall seem adequate to the
crime committed or the damage sustained". "Corporeal punishment"
(an older form of "corporal punishment") suggests a good hiding
rather than capital punishment.

The first appearance in print of the term that I know of is in a
humorous article in The New-England Magazine of October 1835 under
the title The Inconveniences of Being Lynched; the storyteller
suffers being tarred and feathered on suspicion of being an
abolitionist. Similarly, a news item in the New York Daily Express
in 1843 refers to a man "lately taken from his house at night by
some of his neighbors and severely lynched", which sounds as though
a harsh punishment was inflicted, but one falling short of death,
since logic demands that it's difficult to severely execute
somebody.

Interestingly, some recent examples of the term in print have
returned to this older sense.

                        -----------

Q. A "molly-dooker" is an Australian expression for a left-handed
person. I'm curious to know the origin. [Mark Roome]

A. The answer divides neatly into two halves, one for each part of
the word.

One's "dukes" or "dooks" are one's hands, of course, as in the
American "to duke it out", to fight with the fists. There are two
stories about its origin, both of which take it back to London
slang of the early to middle part of the nineteenth century. One
theory is that an older slang term for the hand was "fork", in
reference to using the fingers like a pair of tweezers to slip
something surreptitiously out of a person's pocket without them
knowing about it. Cockney rhyming slang then converted "fork" into
"Duke of York" and so, by the usual process of abbreviation, to
"duke". (The spelling "dook" presumably reflects the way the word
was said in Australia, rather than the standard British English
"djook".) Some authorities regard this as an over-complex evolution
(and who can blame them?), and suggest that the word's actually
from Romany, the language of the Rom, or gypsies, in which "dukker"
means to tell fortunes, presumably by palmistry. This theory is
itself less than totally convincing.

The other half of your term, "molly", seems to be yet another
example of the use of that word to mean an effeminate male, as in
"mollycoddle", which was featured here some time ago. (See
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-mol1.htm). The implication
seems to have been that anybody left-handed was a bit queer in at
least one respect.

There are various spellings for the slang term, including "molly-
duker", and there's also a related form, "molly-hander". It's first
recorded in Australia in the 1920s.


5. Endnote
-------------------------------------------------------------------
"It was one of the dullest speeches I ever heard. The Agee woman
told us for three quarters of an hour how she came to write her
beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required."
[P G Wodehouse, The Girl in Blue (1960)]


A. Subscription commands
-------------------------------------------------------------------
To leave the list, change your subscription address, or subscribe,
please visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/index.htm. You
can also send a gift subscription: see the same page for the link.

Or, you can send a message to listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org
from the address at which you are (or want to be) subscribed:

  To leave, send: SIGNOFF WORLDWIDEWORDS
  To join, send: SUBSCRIBE WORLDWIDEWORDS First-name Last-name


B. Contact addresses
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Do not use the address that comes up when you hit 'Reply' on this
mailing, or your message will be sent to an electronic dead-letter
office. Either create a new message, or change the outgoing 'To:'
address to one of these:

  For general comments, especially responses to Q&A pieces:
      TheEditor at worldwidewords.org
  For questions intended for reply in a future Q&A feature:
      QandA at worldwidewords.org

-------------------------------------------------------------------
World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2003.  All rights
reserved. The Words Web site is at <http://www.worldwidewords.org>.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
You may reproduce this newsletter in whole or in part in other free
media online provided that you include this note and the copyright
notice above. Reproduction in print media or on Web sites requires
prior permission: contact TheEditor at worldwidewords.org .
-------------------------------------------------------------------