World Wide Words -- 27 Sep 03

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS        ISSUE 360        Saturday 27 September 2003
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Free-running.
3. Weird Words: Higgledy-piggledy.
4. Q&A: Until, till and 'til.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Contact addresses.
C. FAQ of the week.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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E-MAIL PROBLEMS  If you send me a message and fail to get any sort
of response, it might not be because of my incorrigible indolence
but because your service provider has bounced my reply. My Internet
connection comes via broadband cable; because computers linked to
such systems are notoriously insecure and spammers frequently use
them to relay mail, ISPs are increasingly banning any e-mail that
comes from anybody on cable systems. There's little I can do about
this, I'm afraid.

MORE FAME  It's been a busy week for World Wide Words on the media
front. Patricia T O'Connor very kindly mentioned the site during
her regular slot on the Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC; David Kipen
flagged up my treatment of "snollygoster" in a piece in the San
Francisco Chronicle. Welcome to the many new subscribers who have
joined as a result.


2. Turns of Phrase: Free-running
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Free-running treats the urban landscape as an adult playground. It
treats man-made structures as an obstacle course that participants
negotiate by daring feats of graceful gymnastics. It was invented
by a group of childhood friends in Lisses, near Paris - as in so
many suburban towns, there was little for young people to do, so
Sebastien Foucan, David Belle and others created what they call "le
parkour".

Anybody in Britain who has been watching BBC1 in recent months will
have seen this most recent example of an extreme sport in action;
David Belle was filmed for a promotional trailer in which he rushed
home across London's rooftops to catch his favourite TV programme.
More recently, a trio of free-runners were seen in a programme
called Jump London on Channel 4.

The sport grew out of attempts to imitate ninja feats. Unlike other
extreme activities, it has developed a philosophy. "It is not just
a game," Sebastien Foucan is quoted as saying, "it is a discipline
because it is a way of facing our fears and demons that you can
apply to the rest of your life."

Free-running is essentially cat-burglary without the larceny - and
with a hefty addition of Gallic philosophising.
                                        [Independent, 10 Sep. 2003]

A new urban sport which emerged from the southern suburbs of Paris,
free-running uses gymnastic skills to find alarming new ways of
navigating the urban landscape. It is the free-runners' fondness
for catapulting themselves at dangerous heights over anxiety-
inducing distances that has brought them notoriety - initially
within the confines of their mayor's office, but more recently on
an international level.
                                           [Guardian, 21 Aug. 2003]


3. Weird Words: Higgledy-piggledy
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In confusion or disorder.

Do you recall the 1962 song about the itsy-bitsy, teenie-weenie,
yellow polka-pot bikini? The English language loves this kind of
repetition. Linguists call them reduplicative compounds, but
they're also sometimes called ricochet words or vocal gestures.
They're paired words that differ either only in a vowel ("tittle-
tattle", "tick-tock", "pitter-patter", "mish-mash", "shilly-
shally") or a consonant ("hoity-toity", "lovey-dovey", "helter-
skelter", "argy-bargy", "pell-mell", and the infamous "nitty-
gritty"). There are dozens of them. Many, especially the rhyming
ones, seem to start out in childhood, perhaps because children find
them easy to remember.

Our word this week is a good example of this rhyming sort. It's
first recorded at the end of the fifteenth century in a number of
different forms. There was a simpler version recorded at the same
time, "higly-pigly", which suggests the second part may be from
"pig", with the word evolving through the sequence "pig" -> "pigly"
-> "higly-pigly", and so to our elaborated version with the extra
syllables inserted to create a jog-trotting rhythm.

But why pigs? Well, they are conventionally considered the most
dirty of animals, which would provide a sufficiently dismissive
description of disorder - if you're ever tempted to refer to a
teenager's room as a pigsty, you're using the same idea. It may
also have something to do, the Oxford English Dictionary suggests,
with "the disorderly and utterly irregular fashion in which a herd
of these animals huddle together" (Nathanial Hawthorne used that
image in his American Notebooks: "Pigs, on a march, do not subject
themselves to any leader among themselves, but pass on, higgledy-
piggledy, without regard to age or sex").


4. Q&A
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Q. I have always believed that the shortened form of "until" was
"'til". However, my father recently asked me for my thoughts, as
someone had tried to convince him it should be spelled "till" as in
"eight till late". On consulting his dictionary, that was indeed
the only definition that could be found. We would be very grateful
if you could clear up this situation for us. [Michael Kearns]

A. The status of "'til" versus "until" and "till" is often argued
about and most style guides have something to say on the matter.

The most common belief is that "till" is a shortened form of
"until". You can see how this could have grown up, but the truth of
the matter is that "till" is by far the older word, being recorded
from about the year 800, while it took another 400 years for
"until" to appear in the language (it's a compound of "till" with
the archaic Old Norse "und", as far as, which also survives in the
archaic "unto"). But the first sense of "till" was "to", as it
still can be, for example, in Scots and some dialects. Though the
modern sense of "till" in standard English is always connected with
time, this only appeared about 1300.

The current position is that "until" is the more common of the two
words and is generally considered to be slightly more formal, which
is why it turns up more often in edited prose. It is also rather
more likely to appear at the beginning of a sentence than is
"till". But "till" is perfectly good English and the choice of
whether to use it or "until" is often decided by the rhythm of the
sentence.

Your father's version, "'til", has been created within the past
century by people who believe that "till" is an abbreviation of
"until" and want to mark it as such. It has often been said by
style guides and dictionaries that it's a mistake and it arouses
passion in some people. Most recent writers on language prefer to
describe it as an informal version of "until" - it often turns up
in newspapers, advertising and song lyrics, for example, and in
informal set phrases like "shop 'til you drop", "It ain't over 'til
it's over" or "'Til we meet again". But to use the spelling "til"
without the preceding apostrophe is still regarded as wrong.


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