World Wide Words -- 28 Feb 04
Michael Quinion
TheEditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Feb 27 17:43:39 UTC 2004
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 381 Saturday 28 February 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: Recreational grief.
3. Noted this week ...
4. Weird Words: Mimsy.
5. Sic!
6. Q&A: By and large; Dog-and-pony show.
A. FAQ of the week.
B. Subscription commands.
C. Useful URLs.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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WET DAY CENTRE In the piece under this title last week, I referred
to the British Government's Homeless Directorate. That should have
been Homelessness Directorate, an agency that comes under the aegis
of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.
2. Turns of Phrase: Recreational grief
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The British think tank Civitas published a report this week under
the title Conspicuous Compassion. Its author, Patrick West, argues
that public outpourings of grief, such as those after the death of
Diana, Princess of Wales and following a number of recent child
murders, show that society hasn't become more caring or altruistic,
but more selfish. He asserts that what seem to be public signs of
caring - such as wearing coloured ribbons, signing Internet
petitions, and carrying banners saying "Not In My Name" - are part
of a culture of ostentatious caring which is about feeling good,
not doing good; of projecting one's ego and thereby showing others
what a deeply caring individual you are, not actually doing
anything that makes a difference.
My reason for describing his thesis is not to promote discussion of
it, but to give the context for the language with which West girds
his polemic. He includes many emotive phrases that have been used
in recent years, both in the USA and the UK, to refer to such
public displays: the "conspicuous compassion" of his title, plus
"recreational grief", "grief-lite", "mourning sickness", "post-
emotional age", "passive victimhood", and the "lapel loutism" of
empathy ribbons; he talks about the "Three Cs" of modern life
(compassion, caring and crying in public) and the way that the
traditional one minute's silence has lengthened and so has
undergone "compassion inflation". Most of these phrases have been
independently reinvented several times, though "recreational grief"
and "grief-lite" seem to have been coined by Ian Jack in Granta
magazine in December 1997 in an article about the events in London
in the days after Princess Diana's death.
3. Noted this week ...
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PSYCHEDELIC The death was reported this week of the British-born,
Canadian-based psychiatrist and researcher Humphry Osmond, who in
the 1950s carried out many experiments in mood-altering substances
such as LSD and mescaline to find therapies to aid schizophrenics
(he helped Aldous Huxley to experience mescaline, whose effects the
author described in The Doors of Perception in 1954). Osmond coined
the word "psychedelic" for such substances in a letter to Huxley in
1956; he said it included "the concepts of enriching the mind and
enlarging the vision". He coined it irregularly from "psyche" +
Greek "delos" (clear, manifest).
ENGLISH IN DECLINE? A special issue of Science magazine discussing
the evolution of language features an article by David Graddol, a
language consultant at The English Company, in which he repeats his
conclusion that English worldwide is slipping in influence because
of demographic trends and new technology. He points in particular
to the rise in importance of Arabic, Hindi, Urdu and Chinese among
15-24 year-olds, which may lead to English dropping to fourth place
by 2050 in the numbers speaking it in this age group. See a paper
he has written for the British Council ( http://quinion.com?DG ).
YESTERSOL The Martian day is some 39 minutes longer than ours, and
has been officially named the "sol" (the Latin for sun, which is
also the official astronomical name for our star). NASA Workers on
the various Mars spacecraft projects have coined "yestersol" for
the sol before the current one. "Yestersol, all my troubles seemed
so far away ..."
4. Weird Words: Mimsy
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Prim or affected; over-refined; mincing.
Aficionados of Lewis Carroll will know a different meaning, which
appears in the poem called Jabberwocky in his Through the Looking-
Glass: "All mimsy were the borogoves". Later in the book, Humpty-
Dumpty explains its meaning as being a blend (he calls it a
portmanteau word) of "flimsy" and "miserable", so meaning
"unhappy". Carroll either invented it afresh or borrowed an
existing English dialect word and gave it a new meaning.
In the sense of affected or over-refined, "mimsy" has long been
known in the British Isles, especially in Scots and northern
dialects; an example is in A Rock in the Baltic, by Robert Barr
(1906): "In one corner of the room stood a sewing-machine, and on
the long table were piles of mimsy stuff out of which feminine
creations are constructed." It's known in other spellings, such as
"mimsey" and "mimzy"; "mimp" is closely related; an elaborated
version is "miminy-piminy" or "niminy-piminy".
All forms seem to be built on "mim". This little word may come from
an imitation of pursing up the mouth in prudishness (a related form
is "mim-mouthed", affectedly prim and proper in speech, which
appears in Virginibus Puerisque, by Robert Louis Stevenson,
published in 1881: "Mim-mouthed friends and relations hold up their
hands in quite a little elegiacal synod about his path: and what
cares he for all this?")
"Mimsy" is far from dead. I found it in the issue of The Medical
Post for 6 January 2004 (published in Toronto, but the writer was
remembering his childhood in Scotland): "Certainly if I had been
drafted into the Armed Forces I would have been streets ahead of
these mimsy Boy Scouts with their cowboy hats and their two-
fingered apology for a salute." It also appeared in an article by
Griff Rhys Jones in the Independent on 24 October 2003: "This is
food writing. Not mimsy pseudo-porn, but genuinely funny gastro-
investigation driven by a slavering appetite."
5. Sic!
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Jane Edwards received this message from an Internet book service:
"Unfortunately the book is no longer available. We apologize for
the incontinence. We will initiate a refund immediately."
Department of the Bleedin' Obvious. An advertisement in this week's
New Scientist states: "The Health Protection Agency is dedicated to
protecting people's health."
6. Q&A
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Q. Where does the term "by and large" come from? [Dave McClatchey]
A. It's a nautical expression, from sailing ship days.
With "by and large" the modern landlubber means "in general; on the
whole; everything considered; for the most part". When you start to
read up on the origin, it's easy to get confused because dictionary
editors and writers on word origins (this one included) have a lot
of trouble understanding the terminology. With the help of books
like William Falconer's Dictionary of the Marine of 1769, I think
I've sorted matters out.
Imagine a ship at sea travelling west. If the wind were blowing
from exactly north or south, sideways on, it was said to be "on the
beam", (the beam being the side of the ship at its widest point,
usually by the mainmast). If the wind was blowing from any point in
the half-circle eastward of the line from north to south, from
nearer the stern, the ship was said to be sailing "large". This
comes from the idea of something being unrestricted, allowing
considerable freedom (as in a fugitive being "at large"), because
ships sailing large were able to maintain their direction of travel
anywhere in a wide arc without needing to make continual changes to
the set of the sails.
To some extent sailing ships were able to make progress into the
wind, that is, with it blowing from forward of the beam. Those with
good handling capabilities could get within five or six points of
the wind (there are 32 compass points in a complete circle). In
such cases, the ship was said to be sailing "by the wind", "by"
here having the sense of "towards". If the ship were pointed as
closely into the wind as it could possibly manage, it was said to
be "full and by" (sailing by the wind with her sails full of wind),
or "close-hauled", because the lower corners of the main sails were
all drawn as close as possible down to her side to windward. If the
helmsman by mistake turned the ship closer to the direction of the
wind than it was capable of sailing, the wind would press the sails
back against the masts, stopping the ship dead in the water and
possibly breaking the masts off; in this case the ship was "taken
aback", the maritime source of another common metaphor.
You will appreciate that a ship could either sail large or it could
sail by the wind, but never both at the same time. The phrase "by
and large" in sailors' parlance referred to all possible points of
sailing, so it came to mean "in all possible circumstances". You
can see how that could have become converted in layman's language
into a sense of "all things being considered".
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Q. I'm doing a series of dog-and-pony shows (come and check out our
new training courses in a FREE 3-hour demo ...) and was wondering
about the origins of this expression. I've heard it only in context
of software demos, but there again, that's the world in which I am
immersed. [Christopher Greaves]
A. These days, your meaning of the phrase is the usual one: an
elaborate briefing or visual presentation, usually for promotional
purposes. Writers in recent decades have applied "dog and pony
show" pejoratively to military briefings, photo opportunities and
political speeches as well as to sales pitches.
To find the origin, we have to go back to the small towns of the
middle west of the USA at the end of the nineteenth century. Around
1890, reports start to appear in local newspapers of the arrival by
rail of small travelling troupes of performers billed without any
hint of sarcasm as "dog and pony shows". The earliest example I can
find is from the Decatur Daily Republican, Illinois, dated March
1889: "A small audience saw the last of the Johnson & Lovett dog
and pony shows last Saturday night".
The most famous was that run by "Professor" Gentry (actually four
brothers), but many others existed, including those of Sipe &
Dolman, the Harper Brothers, Stull & Miller, and the Norris
Brothers. They were in truth small circuses, many of them running
on a shoestring, with no more than a band and a ringmaster in
addition to the animal acts, which did consist only of dogs and
ponies. The Gentry operation was bigger than its rivals and around
1894 it had some 40 ponies and 80 dogs in each of two troupes
(later it would grow into a full-scale circus).
A further indication that the term was used literally in the early
days comes from Booth Tarkington's book Penrod, published in 1914,
which also gives a feel for the circus atmosphere: "Arrived upon
the populous and festive scene of the Dog and Pony Show, he first
turned his attention to the brightly decorated booths which
surrounded the tent. The cries of the peanut vendors, of the
popcorn men, of the toy-balloon sellers, the stirring music of the
band, playing before the performance to attract a crowd, the
shouting of excited children and the barking of the dogs within the
tent, all sounded exhilaratingly in Penrod's ears and set his blood
a-tingle."
My reference books suggest that, at least by the 1920s, the term
"dog-and-pony show" had begun to be used dismissively of any small-
scale or mom-and-pop operation, in the same way that dog and pony
shows were considered to be cut-down versions of "proper" circuses.
However, the literal term continued in use in parallel with it
right through into the 1950s; it was sometimes the name for one
part of a larger circus, perhaps designed as a sideshow for the
children, who were allowed to ride the ponies and pet the dogs.
It was in the 1950s that the term began to appear in print as a
metaphor for some event that was more pizzazz than substance, like
the tinsel and glitter of a circus ring. An early example of this
figurative sense appeared in the Great Bend Daily Tribune in April
1953: "I imagine there is an awful lot of quiet glee these days in
the ranks of the Democrats, who are watching a dog-and-pony show
that threatens to rival the hassle that rid the land of Democratic
influence for four years."
I suspect the pejorative sense was helped along by the suggestion
that the participants were like the performing animals at a circus;
it's likely that the expression "putting on dog" also had some
influence on its popularity.
A. FAQ of the week
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Michael Quinion
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