World Wide Words -- 03 Apr 04
Michael Quinion
TheEditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Apr 2 17:41:51 UTC 2004
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 386 Saturday 3 April 2004
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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. Weird Words: Destrier.
3. Noted this week.
4. Q&A: King Charles's Head.
5. Sic!
6. Q&A: Pine away.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Useful URLs.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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SITTING ON THE CATBIRD SEAT I was hampered in writing about this
American expression last week because Volume One of the Dictionary
of American Regional English (A-C) had then still not come after
five months on order. It has now arrived, in time for me to mention
a couple of points from its entry. The key one is that the phrase
is said to derive from the habit of the catbird of sitting on the
highest point it can find to deliver its song, thus suggesting an
effortless superiority. (Several subscribers confirmed the bird's
habit, Dan Lufkin among them: "If you lived in catbird country, as
I do, you would instantly recognize the catbird seat as the highest
point in your yard, from which a catbird - or its cousin, a
mockingbird - begins loudly staking its territorial claim at first
light, typically about 4:45 a.m. in the nesting season.") DARE also
quotes Red Barber, who said that he heard the expression during a
penny-ante poker game in Cincinnati, presumably in the 1930s, and
borrowed it for his broadcasts. I've rewritten the piece for the
Web site to include these and several other points; it will be at
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-cat2.htm later today. Thanks to
everybody who responded with local knowledge!
2. Weird Words: Destrier
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A knight's warhorse.
You may still on occasion encounter this word, though these days
it's most often employed by writers of historical novels.
A recent work which is a science-fictional variation on the theme
is Timeline by Michael Crichton (1999). The hero is sent back by
time machine to medieval France but misses the last bus home. As a
result he finds himself stranded in the middle of a civil war,
having to cope with the armour and equipment of the well-dressed
knight: "This horse was gigantic, and covered in more metal than he
was. There was a decorated plate over the head, and more plates on
the chest and sides. Even in armor, the animal was jumpy and high-
spirited, snorting and jerking at the reins the page held. This was
a true warhorse, a destrier, and it was far more spirited than any
horse he had ever ridden before."
The presence of the page is actually the clue to the name, since
the person who led the horse, often the knight's squire, always
stood on the left side of the horse's head and so held the horse
with his right hand (Latin "dexter", on the right).
Off-duty, knights preferred a less spirited and more comfortable
mount. This was the "palfrey", a short-legged, long-bodied horse
which proceeded at a gentle amble. A palfrey was also often ridden
by women. Its name comes from Latin "paraveredus", a bilingual
concoction of Greek "para", besides or extra, plus the Latin
"veredus", a light horse. It was the animal you kept as a secondary
mount.
3. Noted this week
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ROMZOMCOM My antennae tell me that this is a word that will pass
so fast that the linguistic radar will have only a few moments to
observe it. It's being used to describe and promote the new British
film Shaun of the Dead, which is tagged with the by-line "A
romantic comedy, with zombies". It's an everyday tale of life, love
and the living dead, in which the main character wakes up one
morning with a hangover, only to discover that the dead have risen
in the night and taken over the world.
4. Q&A
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Q. I came across the phrase "King Charles's Head" in the Peter
Whigham 1966 translation of Catullus in the Penguin Classics
series: "the phrase is the King Charles's Head of Catullan
biography". I must confess that it has me floored simply because
the only thing of note I can think of relating to King Charles'
head is that he lost it. Any chance of an exact meaning and
derivation? [Bob Coldwell]
A. As you say, King Charles I lost his head by being executed in
1649, though this historical fact has only a tangential link to the
phrase you're asking about. The allusion is to something that's an
obsession with a person, especially one that keeps intruding
irrelevantly into other matters.
It's a literary reference. Mr Dick, a gentle lunatic in Charles
Dickens' David Copperfield, lives with David's aunt, Betsy
Trotwood. For about ten years, Mr Dick had been trying to write a
petition, a memorial, to the Lord Chancellor on the subject of some
imagined dispute, exactly what the book never makes clear, but the
subject of King Charles's head keeps intruding into the text. Betsy
Trotwood discusses his affliction at one point with the young
David: "'Did he say anything to you about King Charles the First,
child?' 'Yes, aunt.' 'Ah!' said my aunt, rubbing her nose as if she
were a little vexed. 'That's his allegorical way of expressing it.
He connects his illness with great disturbance and agitation,
naturally, and that's the figure, or the simile, or whatever it's
called, which he chooses to use.'"
The allusion was picked up by other writers and by about the 1890s
had become common, as you can tell from a gently waspish comment by
George Gissing in Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1898): "The
craze about King Charles's head has been, and is likely to be, a
great resource to literary persons in search of a familiar
allusion."
Though less common now, that's still true.
5. Sic!
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Several subscribers have told me firmly that a sentence from last
week's piece on "jingoism" belongs in this section because of its
mixed metaphor: "This was taken up by what we would now call the
hawks of the London public, who were baying for the Russians'
blood."
Derek Skousen was intrigued to find this in Business Week for 29
March 2004: "Chris Lilik is a one-man political action committee.
Powered by a high-speed computer he assembled himself, the 24-year-
old law student at Pittsburgh's Duquesne University is working
madly to build grassroots support for the Senate candidacy of
Representative Patrick J. Toomey." Computer-powered humans are a
fine idea in principle, but it's best not to use Windows as your
operating system, as waiting for it to crash can be unnerving, and
rebooting afterwards can be painful.
Richard Gradie e-mailed this observation: "In a pet store in
Vernon, British Columbia, Canada, last week, I saw an intriguing
sign: 'Three pure bread puppies for sale'. Since my daughter loves
gingerbread men, I was seriously contemplating asking the pet store
for one of their farinaceous canines."
A story on the financial news site www.financeasia.com interested
subscriber Lisa Simone. It explains that a man named Rudi Pecker
has been appointed to the post of head of Asia Pacific sales in the
Misys Singapore office. The headline on the story reads: "Misys
gives Pecker head job". The story is dated 5 March, so in the past
month nobody in authority has spotted it just might be a good idea
to change it. ( see quinion.com?X11X )
6. Q&A
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Q. I have heard that "pining away" relates to an unrequited lover
who loses sleep or doesn't eat, all the while thinking about the
unavailable loved one. If it persists, the person will end up dead
in a pine box (that is, a coffin). Is this accurate? What is your
understanding of this phrase? [Geoffrey Zeger]
A. Though that story might start to sound plausible after a drink
or two in your local bar, it isn't true. It's a good example of
what linguists call folk etymology, in which people make what seem
sensible suggestions based on their understanding of words, but get
the wrong idea completely.
In this case there's some reason for the confusion, because the
verb "to pine" isn't common and only turns up in this set
expression and a very few other situations. The verb can mean to
yearn intensely and persistently for something unattainable, or to
suffer a decline because of grief or unrequited love. "Pine" in the
sense of yearn is actually a variation on "pain"; they form a
closely related pair of words that come from the same source - the
Latin "poena", a punishment or penalty. The name for the other sort
of pine, the coniferous tree, comes from a quite different source,
from Latin "pinus".
The pain type of pine seems to have been brought into the Germanic
languages (including early English) through Christianity, which
used the word to refer to the pains of Hell. The first sense in
English (which was written down by King Alfred in his translation
of Orosius' Histories Against the Pagans in about 893) is that of
causing someone to suffer, to torment them or to inflict pain on
them. Three centuries pass before we find the more modern senses,
the word having by then been influenced by Old French after the
Norman Conquest. The meaning of "pine" then became that of
undergoing pain or enduring suffering, which evolved into that of
being wasted or feeble from having endured pain, or languishing or
suffering as the result of intense emotion.
Incidentally, our modern word "pain" was also at first always used
in the sense of punishment, as in old legal phraseology such as "on
pain of death", meaning that that will be the punishment if the law
is broken. The idea of bodily suffering came along later.
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Michael Quinion
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