World Wide Words -- 11 Dec 04
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Dec 10 18:54:38 UTC 2004
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 422 Saturday 11 December 2004
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Sent each Saturday to 21,000+ subscribers in at least 120 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
http://www.worldwidewords.org US advisory editor: Julane Marx
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Topical Words: Making Love.
3. Sic!
4. Weird Words: Pall-mall.
5. Noted this week.
6. Q&A: Long chalk.
A. Subscription commands.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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HOLIDAY BREAK The next issue will be the last before the Christmas
holiday. No issue will be sent on 25 December, but World Wide Words
will be back on 1 January 2005.
BRITISH CALIFORNIA I need the break. You all rightly made fun of
my accidentally creating this outpost of the UK in a Sic! item last
week. Be assured this wasn't a political statement, nor a sudden
irrational desire to see Britain annex the state, nor a sideslip
into an alternate universe in which Paul Revere fell off his horse
one vital night, but an error, a senior moment. Many comments were
wittily yearning, wanting to know where it was so they could move
to it. If such seekers after perfect living hope for the British
political system plus the Californian climate, be warned that (to
echo the story about Bernard Shaw and his unknown female admirer)
you might get the British climate and American politics.
LIGHTNING BUGS While I'm listing the errors in last week's issue,
I should mention the chorus of Americans who told me that lightning
bugs are easy to catch and so are unlikely to be the source of the
phrase "(catch) lightning in a bottle", in its sense of achieving
something very difficult.
APTONYM Though the form "aptonym" that I used last week is used,
the more common spelling, the one that's in some dictionaries, is
"aptronym". Both derive from "apt", of course. Some works say the
"r" is an unetymological intrusion (or epenthetic, as they say in
linguistic circles) but the word is believed to have been coined by
the American newspaper columnist Franklin P Adams as a rather neat
anagram of "patronym", so that the "r" belongs there. It's recorded
by 1920 but only became at all common much more recently.
2. Topical Words: Making Love
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A producer from the Radio 4 Today programme rang last week to ask
me to talk about this phrase. They'd run an item the previous day
about the discovery of a diary of a 17-year-old named Ilene Powell.
The item caused many critical messages to arrive and they wanted me
to salvage the long-dead lady's reputation.
The diary, for the first three months of 1925, had been handed in
to a Bristol charity shop. It attracted press attention because she
sounded a bit like a flapper Bridget Jones: single and worried
about her weight, but with a more lively social life and lots of
boy friends. On 14 January 1925 she records that she breakfasted on
dry toast and weak tea and says "if this doesn't get my fat down,
I'll stop dieting". The entry that caused all the fuss was the one
for Saturday 7 February 1925: "Jack... took me to the White Ladies.
Danced with all the lads as usual... Ticked off JG for making love
to me on the roof garden. Home at 1.30." [To tick off: to scold or
reprimand.]
It seems a lot of listeners assumed "making love" was meant in the
current sense of having sex, though a couple who tries it in a roof
garden around midnight in February has my admiration for their
fortitude, if nothing else. Of course, by the standards of the time
"making love" meant nothing very much had been attempted; the young
man had probably tried to steal a kiss and had been rebuffed.
The phrase was first recorded in a work by John Lely in 1590. From
then until about 1900 it could meant flirtation, or conversation
aimed at encouraging an amorous encounter, or verbal protestations
of love and devotion as part of courtship. For example, Anthony
Trollope wrote in his novel Nina Balatka of 1867: "Go into any
public dancing-room of Vienna, where the girls from the shops and
the young men from their desks congregate to waltz and make love."
Captain Frederick Marryat presumably meant the courtship sense when
he wrote in Poor Jack in 1840: "So the Governor's daughter's going
to be married; at least I suppose so, for I met her riding with a
young gentleman; and nowadays the quality always make love on
horseback."
Our modern sense seems to have arisen as slang around the beginning
of the twentieth century. The best examples I have for this are in
two D H Lawrence books, Sons and Lovers of 1913 and Lady
Chatterley's Lover of 1928. But Lawrence's books were regarded as
obscenely scandalous at the time and he was well ahead of accepted
public word usage in this respect. Miss Powell would not have known
it.
The evidence suggests, though, that in the following two decades
the phrase did steadily shift towards a description of the most
intimate physicality. By the 1940s, it was common to find it in
novels in the sense we now know it. It's in George Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty-Four of 1949, for example: "When you make love
you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't
give a damn for anything."
The effect was to make "making love" into a euphemism. It ceased
being a description of negotiations towards what was hoped to
become a more intimate relationship, and became a cliché for its
ultimate expression.
3. Sic!
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A friend of Bob Rosenberg's sent him a flyer for a mildly naughty
evening at a nightclub in Watchung, New Jersey, which advertised
sessions of dancing in nightwear, underwear and the like. Leaving
aside the inevitable misplaced apostrophes ("baby doll pajama's",
"one piece teddy's") the last paragraph was the reason he told me
about it: "No exposure of nipples or gentiles will be permitted at
any time". Oy vey!
Sally Thomas wrote from Melbourne, Australia: "Thought you would
like to hear about the sign that appeared on our local main road
this morning, it read 'Garage Sale. Moving Intestate'. I didn't
realise that you had to tell potential customers about the status
of your will!" Manuel Fernandes in Mumbai, met with the opposite
mistake in The Times of India. In reference to the late Dhirubhai
Ambani, who created Reliance Industries, India's largest private-
sector conglomerate, it regretted "the fact that Dhirubhai died
interstate".
Alas, the Times is not what it once was, as Bernard Robertson-Dunn
discovered in an online story dated 6 December: "Tillman was buried
with full military honours and posthumously awarded a Silver Star
after his death."
>From the Dominion Post (Wellington, New Zealand) for 3 December:
"Part of the engine from a Cathay Pacific Airways jet crashed on to
an astonished motorist's car after it took off from Bangkok airport
yesterday about 6pm." Brian Pearl, who sent it in, comments: "I
wonder what astonished the driver most - the crashing engine part
or his flying car?"
4. Weird Words: Pall-mall
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An old outdoor game.
Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary for 2 April 1661: "So I into St.
James's Park, where I saw the Duke of York playing at Pelemele, the
first time that ever I saw the sport." It's name was more usually
spelled "pall-mall", but he wrote it as he heard it in upper-class
speech. Pepys saw it played where London's Pall Mall now runs (the
game was the direct origin of the street name) but the course was
shifted later that same year, it is said because dust from royal
carriages disrupted games. The new course was about 800 yards (740
metres) long, laid out where The Mall now lies.
Pall-mall seems to have been a cross between croquet and golf,
using a mallet and a boxwood ball a foot (30 cms) in diameter. The
players drove the ball along the course by taking immense swings at
it with the mallet. To end the game they then had to shoot the ball
through a suspended hoop at one end. The person who required the
fewest shots won. The name literally means "ball and mallet" and
comes via the obsolete French "pallemaille" from Italian
"pallamaglio" ("palla", a ball + "maglio", a mallet).
Some writers have sought a connection between "pall-mall" and
"pell-mell", the latter meaning something that happens in a rushed,
confused, or disorderly manner, in part because of Pepys's spelling
and in part because of the supposed nature of the game. But this
has a quite different source: French "pêle-mêle", ultimately a
reduplication from "mesler", to mix.
5. Noted this week
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BEN JONES Some British newspapers, searching for a peg on which to
hang stories about the new Bridget Jones film, have been grateful
for reports that there are a lot more single men in their thirties
than there used to be, more indeed than single women of the same
age. His archetype is now called Ben Jones (wasn't he in the Dukes
of Hazzard years ago?) - good job, probably owns his own home, no
settled relationships and either fearful of making a long-term
commitment or not wanting one.
Follow-up links:
Observer: http://quinion.com?S2D4
IC Wales: http://quinion.com?S3R9
THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH A report with this title has had some press
coverage this week following its presentation at a British Council
conference in Edinburgh on international education. The survey, by
David Graddol of the Open University, used computer modelling to
predict that by 2015 two billion people could be learning English
as a second language, twice as many as in 2000. This compares with
his earlier prediction, in the journal Science in May, that the
number of native English speakers will decline as a proportion of
the world's population, from about 9% now to about 5% in 2050. If
these predictions prove accurate, it seems that English may go the
way of Latin in the centuries ahead, becoming a lingua franca for
people with no other language in common, but remaining the native
language of comparatively few.
Follow-up links:
BBC: http://quinion.com?S4G8
Guardian: http://quinion.com?S9Q7
HIP AND WOLOF A dispute has erupted this week over the supposed
West African origin of many terms that were coined in American
English, such as dig, banjo, honky, jive, juke, and jazz, which
John Leland includes in his new book, Hip: The History. In an
article in Slate, the US editor of the Oxford English Dictionary,
Jesse Sheidlower, argues that Leland is wrong in particular to
believe "hip" is from the West African language Wolof. It's easy to
see how African-Americans in particular would feel cultural pride
that their ancestors' servitude left its mark on the language. But
the experts are sure that the proponents of a West African origin
for these and other expressions are often driven more by wishful
thinking than scholarship. However, there is a good case for saying
that juke and banjo are African in origin.
Follow-up link:
Slate article: http://quinion.com?S4L5
DUDE The magazine American Speech, the journal of the American
Dialect Society, has received some unexpected press coverage this
week following the publication of a deeply scholarly article in the
Fall issue on the cultural implications of the word "dude" among
young Americans. The author, Scott Kiesling of the University of
Pittsburgh, says that it has become much more than a catch-all for
lazy, inarticulate slackers and teenagers. He argues it derives its
force from what he calls cool solidarity, which he describes as an
effortless kinship that's not too intimate, especially important to
young men who are under social pressure to be close to other young
men, but not enough to be suspected as gay. (As a follow-up point
not mentioned in the articles referenced below, Kiesling suggests
that "dude" at first meant "old rags", with a "dudesman" being a
scarecrow. However, his etymology has been challenged by two ADS
researchers, who argue - with evidence to support them - that it
instead derives from the title of the song "Yankee Doodle Dandy",
used in the American West in the nineteenth century as a sarcastic
and derogatory reference to sharply dressed Easterners; "doodle"
was later extracted and abbreviated.)
Follow-up links:
CNN: http://quinion.com?S8K3
Globe and Mail, Toronto: http://quinion.com?S5H2
6. Q&A
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Q. Where does the expression "not by a long chalk" come from?
[Kriss Buddle, UK]
A. This mainly British expression means "not by any means", "not at
all" and often turns up in conventional expressions such as "they
weren't beaten yet, not by a long chalk".
It goes back to the days in which a count or score of almost any
kind was marked up on a convenient surface using chalk. At a pub or
ale house this might be a note of the amount of credit you had been
given (often called "the chalk" in the early nineteenth century),
which Charles Dickens refers to in Great Expectations: "There was a
bar at the Jolly Bargemen, with some alarmingly long chalk scores
in it on the wall at the side of the door, which seemed to me to be
never paid off."
But the expression almost certainly comes from the habit of using
chalk in such establishments to mark the score in a game, a habit
which now survives in British pubs mainly in the game of darts. A
"chalk" was the name given a single mark or score, so that a person
might explain that somebody or other had lost a game of skittles by
four chalks or you needed 31 chalks to finish. If your opponent had
a "long chalk", a big score, he was doing well.
The expression indicates a determined intention to continue, though
the game is going against you. Your opponent may have a long chalk,
but you're not done for yet.
For the earliest example, we must turn yet again to Thomas Chandler
Haliburton of Nova Scotia, who included it several times in his
book The Clockmaker of 1835: "Depend on it, Sir, said he, with a
most philosophical air, this Province is much behind the
intelligence of the age. But if it is behind us in that respect, it
is a long chalk ahead on us in others."
A related expression is "not by a long shot". However, this is
originally a military idiom, based on the difficulty of hitting a
target at long range, hence an outside chance.
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