World Wide Words -- 01 May 04
Michael Quinion
TheEditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Apr 30 18:59:35 UTC 2004
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 390 Saturday 1 May 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. Turns of Phrase: Angiogenesis inhibitor.
3. Weird Words: Higgler.
4. Noted this week.
5. Q&A: Pleased as Punch.
6. Sic!
7. Q&A: Brass ring.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Useful URLs.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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SUBSCRIPTION UPDATES I'm always more than willing to help out if
problems arise with subscriptions. However, if you just want to
change your e-mail address or (heaven forbid) leave the list, it's
much better if you can sort matters out for yourself by e-mail, not
least because that gives me more time for writing World Wide Words.
Instructions are posted at the end of every newsletter.
FOR PETE'S SAKE Following last week's item on this phrase, many
subscribers suggested that it, and its relative "for the love of
Mike", derive from appeals respectively to St Peter and to the
Archangel Michael. Plausible, but probably not. Those who argued
that the invention of "for Pete's sake" was influenced by "for
pity's sake" are almost certainly nearer the mark, though we can't
be absolutely sure.
2. Turns of Phrase: Angiogenesis inhibitor
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Angiogenesis is the medical term for the production of new blood
vessels (from Greek "angeion", a vessel), so an "angiogenesis
inhibitor" is one that stops them forming. They've been studied in
the laboratory for many years in the hope that one will be found
that chokes off the blood supply to cancers in the body and so
makes them shrink. A great advantage of such drugs is that they are
likely to be much less toxic than the existing chemotherapy agents.
The first drug to treat a cancer by this means has recently been
approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. It is suggested
now that they might also be useful in treating obesity, since the
stores of fat in the body are served by active blood supplies.
However, fears have been expressed that they might damage immune
reactions in the body and they are a long way from being a
practical therapy for this purpose.
>>> From New Scientist, 10 Apr. 2004: The irony, says Li, is that
many of us already take angiogenesis inhibitors every day without
even knowing it, and they could be protecting us from cancer and
keeping us thin into the bargain. A long list of dietary factors
strongly inhibit blood vessel growth, among them resveratrol in red
wine, as well as genistein in soya, catechins in green tea and
brassinin in Chinese cabbage.
>>> From Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News, 26 Feb. 2004:
Novartis ... Bayer, and Pfizer are among the big companies with
angiogenesis inhibitors in final testing for colon, kidney, and
gastrointestinal cancers, among others.
3. Weird Words: Higgler
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An itinerant dealer or peddler.
"Higgler" has survived in the West Indies, especially Jamaica, in
the sense of a market trader, but has disappeared everywhere else.
But only a century ago, most English market towns had higglers.
They were middlemen - they went round the farms of the local area,
buying up produce such as poultry, rabbits, eggs and cheese to sell
in the market. In return they supplied goods the household needed.
Some of the trade was done by barter rather than by money changing
hands, but all of it involved haggling - which is where the name
came from, as it's just a variant spelling of "haggler".
In The Surgeon's Daughter (1827), Sir Walter Scott spoke of: "The
labours of a higgler, who travels scores of miles to barter pins,
ribbons, snuff and tobacco, against the housewife's private stock
of eggs, mort-skins, and tallow" ["mort-skin": the skin of a sheep
or lamb that has died a natural death].
In some places, higglers had a bad reputation, because they were
thought to manipulate prices to their own benefit. The "Times" of
London dated 10 June 1800 reports a small-scale consumer revolt
against them:
A Meeting was held at Poole, on Friday last, to take into
consideration the propriety of the Inhabitants in general
refraining from the use of Butter, till the price is reduced
to One Shilling a pound; when it was unanimously resolved by
all present, not to purchase any till the price shall be so
reduced, and even then, to use it in their families with great
economy and moderation ... and proper people are appointed to
keep a constant watch on the Higglers on Market-day, who are
the principal cause of the great prices of many of the
necessaries of life.
4. Noted this week
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TOOTHER Quinion's fourth law of invention (memo to self: must get
around to writing the first three sometime) says that there's no
new technology that cannot be perverted for immoral uses. This deep
thought was provoked by an item in Computer Weekly this week about
"toothing" (whose practitioners are called "toothers", both words
being formed from "Bluetooth", the wireless system that connects
mobile devices together). It's the next step on from "bluejacking",
in which passers-by send unexpected and anonymous text messages to
your PDA or mobile phone (see my piece at http://quinion.com?S49L
). Now people are sending messages to set up illicit romantic
interludes. You give your Bluetooth device a suggestive name that
indicates you're open for offers. Another user sees this, and sends
a message that invites you to join them briefly in some nearby
place of concealment. Back in 1973, Erica Jong famously described
such encounters as "zipless", but she didn't have a mobile phone to
facilitate them.
BIOHISTORY Every now and then, a controversy highlights a term
known to specialists but which the general public has never heard
of and which isn't in the dictionaries. An article in Science
recently discussed the ethical problems associated with
"biohistory", the exhumation of historical figures in order to use
DNA analysis and other techniques to answer unsolved questions
about their life or death. (Was Napoleon poisoned by arsenic? Did
Thomas Jefferson father a child with Sally Hemings? Had Beethoven
been affected by lead poisoning?) It turns out that the term has
been known for decades in this sense: the earliest example I can
find is in the title of a 1984 book by Arno Karlen: Napoleon's
Glands and Other Ventures in Biohistory. But the word has also been
used to refer to the evolution of the interplay between human
societies and their biological environments - in this sense it's
recorded from the 1950s. One day, it may even reach the
dictionaries.
5. Q&A
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Q. I am curious as to the origin of the phrase "as pleased as
Punch". It has been suggested to me that it must come from the
puppet in Punch and Judy, but I am not entirely happy with this
explanation, as no one can tell me why it should have originated
there. Can you help? [Rab Spence, UK]
A. Perhaps some cultural footnotes might be in order. Though Punch
and Judy puppet shows are by no means unknown outside the UK, and
the term "pleased as punch" is also common, the tradition of the
entertainment of that name is mainly a British one, associated in
most people's minds with childhood memories of sitting on the sand
during summer holidays at the seaside, watching the antics of
puppet Mr Punch in his candy-striped booth.
Though no two shows are quite alike and the story has evolved a lot
in the last four centuries, the traditional plot has Mr Punch kill
his infant child, then beat his wife Judy to death. He is thrown in
prison but escapes using a golden key. He then kills a policeman, a
doctor, a lawyer, the hangman, death and the Devil. He murders
everyone with huge pleasure, each time squeakily repeating his
catchphrase, "That's the way to do it!"
It's the enormous satisfaction of Punch with his awful deeds that
led to the idiom "as pleased as Punch" appearing at the beginning
of the nineteenth century for somebody who was delighted. Punch's
pride in outwitting every figure of authority also led to "as proud
as Punch" as an alternative.
Incidentally, the puppet shows started to appear in Britain at the
restoration of the monarchy in the 1660s (Samuel Pepys mentions
going to see one in October 1662). The puppets were string ones,
not the hand ones of modern days, and the entertainment was very
much designed for adults rather than children. Its name then was
Punchinello, of which Punch is the short form. The show had been
imported from the commedia dell'arte in Italy, where its original
was known in the Neapolitan dialect as "Polecenella", perhaps a
diminutive of "pollecena", a young turkey cock, in reference to its
beak, which looked a bit like the puppet's long red hooked nose.
6. Sic!
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Greg Carter was listening to KMZT, a classical music station in Los
Angeles, and heard an advertisement for a forthcoming event. The
announcer read, "This once-in-a-lifetime event sells out every
time!"
Michael Learmond came across a customer recommendation prominently
placed on the home page of ukphonesales.com: "Brilliant I will
defiantly deal with this company again." It's good to see consumer
power in action.
Is it just my rather warped sense of humour, or is there something
intrinsically ridiculous about a report in Friday's Guardian that
close aides to Tony Blair in the British Labour Party are currently
discussing whether the next election manifesto should be a "ground-
breaking platform"?
7. Q&A
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Q. When people "go for the brass ring", what exactly are they going
for? Why is a brass ring a symbol of success? Wouldn't a platinum
ring be even better? [Liam]
A. This one stumped me, as my cultural background doesn't include
grabbing a brass ring as a measure of success. But even a cursory
glance at American newspaper archives shows that the expression is
common; a recent example is in Ebony for 1 April 2004: "If you're
like the millions of women who are on the go - grabbing for the
brass ring, focusing on the family or trying to shatter that glass
ceiling - it's past time for you to take a step back and
concentrate on finding the real you." In response to a plea for
help, John Baker of the American Dialect Society made the key
connection and from then on it was plain sailing.
We are in the fairground, specifically on a carousel or merry-go-
round. At one time, the riders on the outside row of horses were
often given a little challenge. Once the ride started moving, a
metal arm was swung out - on some rides this held a single brass
ring, which riders could try to grab as they passed. Anyone who
managed to retrieve it could redeem it for a free ride. Another
system had a dispenser of rings, most of which were steel and had
no value, but one per ride was the brass one that won the prize.
"Brass ring" came to have the figurative sense of a prize, in
particular one that was hard to gain. "Grabbing the brass ring",
"going for the brass ring" or "reaching for the brass ring" were
all used to refer to the opportunity to compete for a grand prize.
Quite when it started to be used in this way isn't clear. The
earliest example of the expression I can find, and that already an
elliptical one that shows the writer expected everybody to know
what was meant, appeared in the Daily Northwestern of Oshkosh,
Wisconsin, on 3 August 1931: "The current anonymous volume 'The
Merry-Go-Round' ... pokes fun - not nice gentle fun - at our
supposed mad round of reaching-for-the-brass-ring-existence."
But references to a literal brass ring go back into the 1890s, as
in this from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle of 24 September 1899 about
the famous Coney Island amusement park: "This big place has been
the rendezvous for thousands of children who have spent their
nickels and have enjoyed a ride on the ponies, besides trying their
best to capture the brass ring, which the boy drops in the big iron
arm that is swung out at the side of the merry-go-round."
Several fairground history sites online suggest that the game fell
out of favour in this more careful and litigious age because of the
number of young people who hurt themselves reaching for the rings.
Though the expression is still common, as time passes the knowledge
of where it comes from is falling out of public memory.
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