World Wide Words -- 21 Feb 04
Michael Quinion
TheEditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Feb 20 20:31:03 UTC 2004
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 380 Saturday 21 February 2004
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Sent each Saturday to 18,000+ subscribers in at least 120 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
<http://www.worldwidewords.org> <TheEditor at worldwidewords.org>
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Wet day centre.
3. Weird Words: Oojah.
4. Sic!
5. Q&A: Duke's mixture; Mooch.
A. FAQ of the week.
B. Subscription commands.
C. Useful URLs.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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LONG JOHNS As one might guess, many World Wide Words subscribers
having memories that go back a long way, I have been firmly told
that the term "long johns" that I discussed last week is older than
World War Two. One subscriber claims to remember hearing it, aged
three, in 1928. Two other terms were given for the same garments,
"long handles" and "long-handle underwear". I can't find printed
examples of either before the 1950s, but again they are said to be
older. Spurgeon Smith and John Orford separately suggested that an
old African-American work song with the title Long John might be
its origin. One of the choruses is "He's John, John, / Old John,
John, / With his long clothes on, / Just a-skippin' through the
corn."
OCHE Peter Brooke e-mailed to suggest that this word for the line
behind which one must stand in playing darts, discussed two weeks
ago, might well come from the Victorian "hockey-dockies" for shoes,
an elaboration of "hock-dock", itself a nonsense reduplication of
"hock", a slang term for the foot.
SMALL CRY OF JOY The queue of unanswered e-mails is no more, it is
an ex-queue. If you haven't had a reply to a message you have sent
in the past three weeks that needs one, then I've thrown it out by
accident with all the viruses and spam that built up while I was
away, and you should send it again.
2. Turns of Phrase: Wet day centre
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You may tell from the spelling that this is, at least in this form,
a British term. It refers to a day centre which allows its users to
drink alcohol on the premises (hence "wet").
Such centres have been set up to reach and advise people who
habitually drink alcohol in public places. Street drinkers, as they
are known in social-work jargon, are mainly men in their 30s and
40s, addicted to alcohol, often homeless and with mental health
problems, who are frequently rejected by mainstream health or
social services because they are aggressive and disruptive and
unwilling to stop drinking.
The idea of wet day centres (also called "wet centres") is to
provide a safe place as an alternative to spending the day on the
street, where drinkers run the risk of arrest. Centres provide easy
access to support and advice aimed at solving all their problems,
not only to reducing their reliance on alcohol, which is usually a
symptom of deeper troubles.
Though the idea of "wet day centres" has been around since the
1970s, there are as yet only half a dozen or so of them in the UK.
It's not clear how old the term is, but it became more widely known
as the result of a survey on practical help for street drinkers
commissioned by the King's Fund and the Government's Homeless
Directorate and published in December 2003.
>>> From the Guardian, 4 Feb. 2004: The building is one of a
handful of wet day centres in Britain, open to help homeless and
vulnerable people by providing an area where chronic drinkers can
consume alcohol.
>>> From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 26 Mar. 2003: The goal of
the new "wet" center is to get chronic drinkers off the streets and
away from harm, and to reduce the enormous public resources they
use up in jail and emergency rooms, said Bill Hobson, executive
director of the Downtown Emergency Service Center.
3. Weird Words: Oojah
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A thingumabob, doohickey or whatchamacallit.
"Pass me that oojah," you might say. You might mean some useful
little device which doesn't have a name, or something which does
have a proper name but which you've temporarily forgotten.
The word is rather old-fashioned British English slang. Its heyday
was the First World War, when British soldiers created it as part
of a private vocabulary. An eyebrows-raised article about the slang
of an Army hospital that I found in the Washington Post of 22 July
1917 provides one of its earliest recorded appearances:
'Pass the oojah.' says the one-armed man who is playing
billiards. What is the oojah? The oojah is any object in
Heaven or earth; it is the thing which has no name or the
name of which you have temporarily forgotten. The one-armed
man, about to make his stroke, requires the little twisted
wire bridge, mounted on a lead pedestal, that forms the cue
rest which - poor chap! - he ought to have formed with his
lost hand. So he demands the oojah, which is army for what-
d'ye call-it.
It became greatly elaborated, especially after the war ended and
the word was transferred with its speakers to civilian life. It's
known in many forms, including "oojah capivvy", "oojah-cum-pivvy",
"ooja-ka-pivi", and "oojipoo". Another form is "oojah-cum-spiff",
which came to mean that something was all right, in order, or OK.
This turns up several times in the novels of P G Wodehouse, as here
in Right Ho, Jeeves: "Yes, I agree with you, Aunt Dahlia, that
things are not looking too oojah-cum-spiff at the moment, but be of
good cheer. A Wooster is seldom baffled for more than the nonce."
Woosters may not be, but etymologists often are. Though many of
these British Army slang terms of the period were imported from
India, "oojah" has no known origin. If it did come from that
country, nobody can tell from what word in which language.
4. Sic!
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Jane Brown reports an unsettling encounter: "In Australia a large
truck usually bears a sign on the rear - DO NOT OVERTAKE TURNING
VEHICLE. I was following one recently where the sign read - DO NOT
OVERTAKE OVERTURNING VEHICLE. I stayed well back!"
The Daily Mirror of 16 February featured an intriguing fashion note
seen by Chris Smith: "Scarlett Johansson was a sensational double
winner at the Baftas last night - clinching a Best Actress award
and stealing the show in a sexy backless dress aged just 19." But
then, retro fashion is so in ...
Laurie Camion saw a headline in the Sacramento Bee of 18 February:
"Police identify suspect in killing of beheaded Pasadena woman" and
commented, "Sounds like overkill to me ..."
The British Government's Home And Leisure Accident Surveillance
System announced on Thursday a steep rise in accidents in 2002 that
were caused by slipping on fashionable polished floors, though the
number caused by carpets also rose. Perhaps the main problem lies
with what the survey calls "trouser-related accidents", which rose
to 9,400. On the positive side, no accidents in the home were
reported to have been caused by wooden swords.
5. Q&A
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Q. Can you tell us anything about the phrase "duke's mixture",
apparently known to lovers of dogs? It may mean "mongrel", but
whether it refers to a particular duke; to the propensity of dukes
in times past to mate with various available women; "droit de
seigneur"; or simply the propensity of dukes' dogs to mate with any
bitch in heat, I know not. [N. A. Lindsey-Renton, California]
A. The expression "Duke's mixture" for an odd combination of things
or a strange mixture of items will be known to many older
Americans, though I believe it has now passed out of day-to-day
currency. Where it comes from is clearly puzzling, not only to you
but to others whose queries I've come across. Attempts are
sometimes made, for example, to connect it with "dukes" in the
sense of fists.
In The Agony of the Leaves in 1996, Helen Gustafson reported a
story that the name came from a brand of blended English tea,
created accidentally when the butler of King George V dropped
several containers of tea and swept their contents into one
container; the king approved of the taste but self-effacingly
refused to allow his name to be attached to the blend, so that it
was marketed under the name of an anonymous duke. You may not be
too surprised to learn that this story is incorrect.
The original Duke's Mixture was a brand of tobacco, which was
manufactured and sold by Washington Duke of Durham, North Carolina,
from the 1890s onwards. His firm, the Duke Tobacco Company, also
made and sold other brands, of which the most famous may be Bull
Durham. Mr Duke died in Durham in May 1905, by which time his
company had acquired many other firms, including the Lucky Strike
Company, and had been renamed the American Tobacco Company.
The expression "Duke's mixture" seems from anecdotal evidence to
have begun to be used as an elaborated form of "mixture" in the
1930s. However, the oldest example I have encountered in print is
from the sports pages of the Burlington Daily Times-News of North
Carolina, dated 4 April 1963: "Some people are born golfers. Others
are born duffers; some are a Duke's mixture of the two breeds,
remaining in the never-never land of 'so-so' talent." But the
earliest example specifically relating to breeds of dog I can turn
up is this small ad from the Placerville Mountain Democrat of
California, for 13 May 1971: "Help! Duke's mixture of 11 gd. pups
free to gd. home".
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Q. What is the origin of "mooch" and "mooching"? My understanding
is that a "mooch" is similar to a freerider; a person who uses
another's belongings or services without paying. [David Weiser,
Washington DC]
A. That's a common American sense, as in Cab Calloway's famous song
about Minnie the Moocher ("Folks, now here's the story 'bout Minnie
the Moocher, She was a red-hot hootchie-cootcher"). But there are
several others. For example, the one that comes to mind at once for
me, the most common British or Australian one, is the idea of
loitering about in a bored or listless way: "He did nothing but
mooch about the house, doing nothing and getting in the way".
It's actually a most interesting word, one which has been around on
the margins of the language since the fifteenth century with a set
of meanings, none of them pleasant. In its earliest days, "to
mooch" meant to pretend poverty or act the miser. That may come
from an even earlier word, "mitch", which by then had been in
existence for a couple of centuries with a similar meaning. The
latter is believed to derive from the Old French "muchier" or
"mucier", which meant to hide, or more pejoratively, to skulk or
lurk. Both "mitch" and "mooch" survived in several senses in local
dialects in Britain for centuries, with the latter becoming by far
the better known.
"Mooch" could variously mean to play truant (in particular to pick
blackberries, for some unknown reason), to "loaf, skulk, sneak, or
loiter" as the OED puts it, or to steal or pilfer. In the 1850s, it
look on the sense you mention - to sponge on others, to borrow
money or cadge things, or to slip away and let others pay for your
entertainment. This is clearly where the modern American sense that
you quote comes from.
But it has had other senses in North America, among them to troll
for fish, especially on the West Coast. In the 1920s, it was a
slang term among gamblers or on fairgrounds for a sucker or easy
mark. In the 1940s-50s, the noun could also refer to a drug addict,
so to be "on the mooch" was to be addicted and a "mooch pusher" was
a drug dealer.
A. FAQ of the week
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