World Wide Words -- 03 May 03

Fri May 2 17:42:41 UTC 2003

WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 339            Saturday 3 May 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. Topical Words: Billy-o.
3. Weird Words: Cheat-bread.
4. Sic!
5. Q&A: Chaise lounge; Cock a snook.
6. Endnote.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.

1. Feedback, notes and comments
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SWING THE LEAD  Many people have written to say, following the item
last week, that there may be a direct link between this expression
and the sailor taking depth soundings. It seems that, because it
was such arduous work, lazy sailors who were not being directly
supervised would pretend to cast the lead by swinging it - hence
the expression. I can't prove its veracity, and if it were true it
would be surprising that the term first appeared not among sailors
but in the army, but it appears to be a common explanation among
modern historians of sailing-ship days.

POPINJAY  During the editing of this piece, I accidentally dropped
letters from the Arabic term from which our name derives. The more
correct transliteration is "babbaga" or "babbagha". The Arabic word
in turn was most likely taken from a West African language.

2. Topical Words: Billy-o
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Though I've had cause to write about this word before, a revisit is
timely. This week, the town of Maldon in Essex began a scheme of a
type common in heritage-minded towns throughout Britain, in which
blue plaques are attached to buildings to commemorate significant
events in local history.

One of a set of four was placed on the United Reformed Church in
Market Hill. This marked the arrival in 1696 of a nonconformist
minister named Joseph Billio, who built a chapel to hold 400 and
filled it with a congregation that heard his impassioned - and,
it's rumoured, lengthy - sermons. His enthusiasm, the plaque says,
introduced a new phrase into the language, "like billio".

Unfortunately, the word is first recorded only from the end of the
nineteenth century, which makes it much too recent to be linked
with Mr Billio, who otherwise is a minor figure even in Maldon
history. It's not often a folk etymology comes with a blue plaque
attached - it will be a permanent record that the civic pride of
Maldon people exceeds their etymological knowledge, though there's
nothing new in that - see my piece on "lynch law" (which you will
find at http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-lyn1.htm).

For reasons unconnected with World Wide Words, I've been looking in
some detail in recent months into the stories people tell about the
history of words. A good tale will resist any number of attempts to
refute it - the story is everything and evidence is nothing. For
many people, history is all of a piece: everything before their own
lifetimes is lumped together into an undifferentiated mass called
the past, in which anything is potentially able to be connected to
anything else. And, it goes without saying, nobody does even the
most elementary checking of a story before putting up a plaque.

A good sign that a folk etymology is present is that stories about an
origin come in sets, like delayed buses on city streets. In this case,
you can instead choose a link with Lieutenant Nino Biglio, an Italian
soldier at the time of Garibaldi; it's said that he would enter battle
encouraging his men to follow him and "fight like Biglio" (presumably
in Italian). You can go with Stephenson’s early steam engine, Puffing
Billy, or with Good King Billy, William III, if you don't like these.

Nobody knows where the idiom really comes from, though the first part
might in fact be from "Billy", a pet form of "William", which has been
a common generic term for a man in parts of Scotland and the north of
England for centuries. The first recorded use is in the phrase "Shure
it'll rain like billy-oh!", from The Record of 1885, in which the
spelling of "sure" hints at an Irish origin. If it is Irish it might
indeed be thought to have something to do with William III, who burned
his name into Irish memory at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. But two
centuries is a long time, even in Irish history.

It's rather more probable that it's a euphemistic reformulation of the
phrase "like the devil", which dates back to Shakespearean times.
There are expressions, older than "billy-o", in which "Billy" is a
euphemism for the devil: "billy-be-damned" and giving somebody "all
billy hell", so there’s probably a devilish connection there.

But not to a man of God in Maldon.

3. Weird Words: Cheat-bread
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The second quality of bread.

In Elizabethan England, to take a representative moment in English
history, bread came in many types, each with its own name. The very
best, made of finely sieved flour, was "manchet". This was also
called "paindemaine" or "demeine" (from Latin "panis dominicus"
"Lord's bread", hence "maine bread" and various other forms); a
more generic term was "white bread". A "roll" was at first a type
of manchet that was doubled over, or rolled, before being baked.

The second quality was "cheat-bread" (we have no idea where the
name comes from), also called "trencher bread" and other names. I
refer you to William Harrison's A Description of Elizabethan
England of 1577: "The second is the cheat or wheaten bread, so
named because the colour thereof resembleth the grey or yellowish
wheat, being clean and well dressed, and out of this is the
coarsest of the bran (usually called gurgeons or pollard) taken". A
book of household management of 1526 described the daily allowance,
or "bouche" to be given to the attendants in a great house: "For
their Bouch in the morning, one chet loafe, one manchet, one gallon
of ale".

4. Sic!
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Sally Thomas reports that a restaurant in Victoria, Australia, has
a sign warning that "food and drink should not be consummated at
these tables".

Bill Scott mentioned that for the past few years there has been a
road sign on the highway between Asheville, North Carolina and
Johnson City, Tennessee, at a point where the road narrows from
four lanes to two: "Permitted Trucks Not Allowed".

A subscriber who prefers to be known by her initials, BJ, e-mailed
to say that she thought of Sic! when her horoscope this week told
her to "ignore all things superstitious". Could this be from the
pen of a modern soothsayer with a self-referential sense of humour?

Two metaphors messily collided in an article by Will Hutton in the
Observer last Sunday. He was discussing a possible plan for Britain
to join the Euro currency zone, for which he borrowed "road map", a
figurative term currently in vogue for an Israeli-Palestinian peace
initiative. But such a plan, he said, had to be real and visible -
there had to exist "a concrete road-map".

5. Q&A
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Q. My American friend insists that in American English, the
recliner he has on his deck is called a "chaise lounge", and that
all Americans pronounce it that way. I pointed out to him that all
Americans are pronouncing it incorrectly, but he is unconvinced.
Would you care to comment? [Tony van Heerden]

A. Many visitors to the US are surprised to find that the name for
the article of furniture is not only still known (in Britain, for
example, it is now virtually obsolete outside historical contexts),
but is indeed usually called a "chaise lounge". This spelling and
pronunciation appears in dictionaries of American English and is
now so established that no amount of remonstration, condemnation or
ridicule will affect its status one jot.

The original form, "chaise longue", is French, meaning "long
chair". Though the "chaise lounge" form is a classic example of
folk etymology's changing an odd foreign word into something more
meaningful, in one way it's hard to criticise - it is, after all, a
seat that one lounges on.

And it's an old error - I've found examples in American literature
back into the 1850s. In the issue of Scribners Monthly for April
1876 appears this sentence, which suggests the confusion had even
by then become common enough to need noting: "This particular
'chaise longue', or lounge, is said to be the one on which George
Fox slept".

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Q.  Any idea on the origins of the phrase "cock a snook". I can see
the "cock" side of it, but why "snook" which is, I believe, a fish?
[Mike Pringle]

A. Ah. Wrong sort of snook. Possibly the wrong sort of cock, too, I
could guess, though to investigate more deeply might sully the
chaste reputation of this newsletter.

The truth is, we have no idea at all where this phrase comes from.
The gesture of derision it encapsulates is that of putting one's
thumb to one's nose and extending the fingers. Waggling them is
optional but greatly improves the effectiveness of the insult. The
gesture is widespread but names for it vary: "cocking a snook" is
mainly the British name for what Americans, I think, sometimes
describe as a "five-fingered salute". Heaven knows what the notably
blunt Australians call it.

"Cock" here is a verb with the sense of sticking something out
stiffly in an attitude of defiance, as the cockerel's neck, crest
or tail is erect when he crows. So we have expressions like "to
cock the nose", to turn one's nose up in contempt or indifference.
A "cocked hat" is one whose brim has been turned up; a "cocked gun"
is one whose hammer has been raised, ready for firing. And so on.

So far so good. But "snook" is not so easily explainable, since the
word turns up only in this phrase. There's an example known from
1794, but the phrase doesn't become widely recorded until the last
years of the nineteenth century. There is some suggestion that it
is a variant form of "snout", which would make sense.

Because "snook" isn't known now, folk etymology often turns the
phrase in "cock a snoot", since "snoot" is known as a slang name
for the nose. (It's another variant of "snout".)

6. Endnote
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"Writing is the only profession where no one considers you
ridiculous if you earn no money." [Attributed to Jules Renard in
the "Penguin Dictionary of Modern Humorous Quotations" (2001)]

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