World Wide Words -- 03 Jan 04
Michael Quinion
DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jan 2 16:01:08 UTC 2004
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 374 Saturday 3 January 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: Teetotum.
3. Q&A: Crackpot.
4. Book Review: Garner's Modern American Usage.
5. Sic!
6. Q&A: West Brit.
A. FAQ of the week.
B. Subscription commands.
C. Useful URLs.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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KILKENNY CATS Following this piece last week, several subscribers
regaled me with various old rhymes about these mutually destructive
felines, including this limerick:
There once were two cats from Kilkenny
Each thought there was one cat too many.
So they fought and they fit
And they scratched and they bit
And instead of two cats, there ain't any!
Since this is a language newsletter, allow me to point out the use
here of "fit", the dialectal past tense of "fight" ...
NEW FEATURE ON THE WEB SITE I've finally got around to installing
a feature people have been asking me about for years: a facility by
which visitors can send details of a page to a friend by e-mail.
Though it has been tested, it must be regarded as experimental for
the moment, until I get some feedback from users. If you'd like to
try it, visit the site, call up a page with an article on it (that
is, not one of the indexes or general pages) and click on the words
"E-MAIL PAGE DETAILS" near the bottom of the left-hand navigation
column. Try sending yourself the page details and let me know what
you think of the service.
2. Weird Words: Teetotum
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A small spinning top.
Strictly and originally, it wasn't just any spinning top, but one
with four sides, each with a letter on it that decided the outcome
of a player's turn in a game. The letters were conventionally TADN,
the initials of Latin words, one being "totum", take everything
from the pot. This supplied the old name of the device, the initial
"T", expanded to "tee", being added later. The other letters stood
for "aufer", take one stake from the pot, "depone", put one stake
into the pot, and "nihil", do nothing. The letters were later
changed to fit English words, but the old name remained, though it
can sometimes mean a four-sided die instead. Despite its form,
"teetotum" has no connection with "teetotal".
It is an ancient device, once common in adult gambling, but by the
nineteenth century was largely restricted to children's games. The
device was so familiar that it was commonly used to refer to the
act of spinning around, as Mary Kingsley did in her Travels in West
Africa: "We spun round and round for a few seconds, like a
teetotum, I steering the whole time for all I was worth, and then
the current dragged the canoe ignominiously down river, tail
foremost". It appears in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass:
"'Are you a child or a teetotum?' the Sheep said, as she took up
another pair of needles. 'You'll make me giddy soon, if you go on
turning round like that.'" It isn't surprising that the word should
have taken on the broader sense of spinning top, losing the
connection with a game of chance.
The toy has had many local or dialect names, such as "jenny-
spinner", "whirligig", and "scopperil", the last of these once
known in the Midlands and North of England; these names often
referred to an improvised top, perhaps made from a button with a
piece of wood through it, rather than to a method of playing a game
of chance. Jews will know "dreidel" (from a Yiddish word related to
German "drehen", to turn), similarly a four-sided spinning top that
was used especially for a children's game played at Hanukkah. This
has the Hebrew letters nun, gimel, he and shin on it. The letters
spell out the initials of the Hebrew phrase "a great miracle
happened there" (the miracle being the tiny amount of oil that
burned for eight days in the Temple in Jerusalem) but in the game
meant "do nothing", "take all", "take half" and "put in".
3. Q&A
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Q. My colleagues and I have wondered about the origin of the word
"crackpot". I have checked three dictionaries and they offer no
clue about the etymology. [Jim Swanson]
A. Few of mine say anything about it either. I would guess that the
assumption is that it's a moderately obvious compound. It suggests
that a person's brain is like a cracked pot, in other words that he
or she is in some way . "Pot" was once a slang term for the skull,
and something cracked was obviously defective - a older expression
with a similar meaning that used the same word was "crack-brain",
and of course we still have the slang term "cracked" for someone
who's thought to be crazy (a crackhead is something different, of
course).
"Crackpot" has been with us since the 1880s, though its first sense
was that of a stupid person. The London humorous writer F Anstey (a
pseudonym for Thomas Anstey Guthrie) recorded it in this sense in
1891 in a piece about farces of the period that were performed in
the more minor London music halls (I hope his attempt at recording
the London dialect of the period is understandable): "Colonel
Jinks's ill-used son discovered the will, whereupon his ecstasy was
quite lyrical. 'What!' he cried. 'All that mine? Five thousand
jimmy-oh goblets, five thousand good old golden sorcepin lids!
[i.e. gold sovereigns] To think I've bin sech a bloomin' crackpot
all this time and never tumbled on it! I'll be a gentleman now, and
live in stoyle.'"
Within a few years, the term had moved to its modern sense of a
person given to eccentric, senseless or lunatic notions.
4. Book Review: Garner's Modern American Usage
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This is the second edition of a work first published in 1998, now
more than a third larger in its scope and retitled to include the
author's name. It has a characteristically American directness that
contrasts favourably with another work from the same publisher,
Oxford University Press - Robert Burchfield's Third Edition of
Fowler's Modern English Usage, whose comments are more reserved and
balanced and which sometimes leave the reader unsure of what is
regarded as correct and what isn't.
One problem with usage guides is that to be useful they must row a
course against the current of modern lexicography and linguistics.
Those fields are descriptive scientific endeavours, investigating
and recording the state of the language. That's essential if we are
to know what's going on in the engine room of linguistic change and
invention. But the results often don't meet the day-to-day needs of
those users of English who want to speak and write in a way that is
acceptable to educated opinion. To give advice in that situation
must be to lay down rules and to say that some common usages are
simply wrong.
Mr Garner does this. However, he is not a believer in worn-out
shibboleths or language superstitions (indeed, he has a section
with that heading in which he demolishes the most egregious of
them). His article on the split infinitive, for example, the most
notorious example of the type, is magisterially even-handed while
at the same time practical; he states firmly that no rule exists
that says they can't be split, but that the decision to do so or
not depends on the need for clarity, which has to be coupled with a
keen ear to avoid clumsy phrasing. He dismisses the canard that you
must not start a sentence with a conjunction (which is a good thing
for me, since I do it often). He describes the rule that a sentence
may not end with a preposition as "spurious". He is in favour of
the serial (or Oxford, or Harvard) comma as an aid to clarity.
Where he considers a usage to be wrong, he says so. On that curious
word "irregardless" compare Burchfield's: "It has been used for
most of the 20C, chiefly in N. America, in non-standard or humorous
contexts, to mean 'regardless'", with Garner's direct and
uncompromising: "Should have been stamped out long ago ... careful
users of language must continually swat it when they encounter it".
Though he accepts that the battle over "hopefully" as a sentence
adverb is now ended, Garner clearly regrets its current broad
acceptance, and notes a residual antagonism that causes him to
recommend: "Avoid it in all senses if you're concerned with your
credibility: if you use it in the traditional way, many readers
will think it odd; if you use it in the newish way, a few readers
will tacitly tut-tut you." Burchfield, by comparison, gives a good
summary of the controversy but fails to give clear advice, though
in a more oblique way he makes the same point: "Conservative
speakers, taken unawares by the sudden expansion of an unrecognized
type of construction, have exploded with resentment that is
unlikely to fade away before at least the end of the 20C."
Despite its title, I would recommend it to anyone in any country
who is interested in improving the quality of their English. The
differences between standard American English and the standard
forms of other national varieties are comparatively slight so far
as grammar is concerned, most variations being in vocabulary and
pronunciation. And Bryan Garner is careful to indicate where such
differences exist, at least between American and British English.
[Bryan A Garner, Garner's Modern American Usage, Second Edition,
Oxford University Press New York, October 2003; hardcover; pp 928;
ISBN 0-19-516191-2; publishers' price US$39.95.]
AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
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5. Sic!
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Paul Hamilton found a news item on nynewsday.com under the headline
"Cab Kills Lottery Ticket Buyer", about a man named Ralph Onorato
who died in an accident at a Manhattan corner newsstand: "Reached
by phone, a Westbury woman who identified herself as Onorato's
granddaughter said he was a retired businessman. He lived alone and
never married or had children, she said".
A message to the alt.callahans group on 22 December, seen by Scott
Crom: "My wife had her gall bladder removed a few weeks after our
son was born via laparoscope".
Mark A Mandel was given a Micro Innovations 4-in-1 Stylus Pen for
Christmas. The instructions read in part: "In order to properly
select the function of this pen, you must hold the pen horizontally
flat (perpendicular to the ground). Note: This pen uses gravity to
determine its function."
6. Q&A
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Q. Do you know the correct use of the term "West Brit" used in
Ireland? [Simon Barron]
A. It's a term that's so deeply entrenched in the centuries of
Irish attitudes to Britain that it almost requires a book to sort
out its subtleties for somebody who doesn't know the historical
background.
In the Republic of Ireland today, it's definitely derogatory. In
its least insulting sense it refers to an Irish person who has
sympathies for the UK or who takes his cultural and social cues
from Britain. If you were being polite, you might instead call such
a person an Anglophile. The term is applied in particular to
Protestant Dubliners who have liberal attitudes to moral issues.
It's an abbreviation of "West Briton". In that spelling, it has
been around since the early nineteenth century. To start with, it
was borrowed from the equivalent term applied by the English to a
Scot, a "North Briton" (the country being "North Britain"), terms
that are thankfully obsolete, since Scots so often heard a
patronising tone in them. (At one time, "West Briton" could also be
used for a Welsh person, though this is long since defunct.)
The term "West Briton" evolved in meaning in the period of the
partition struggles of the early twentieth century that led to the
creation of the Irish Republic. A West Briton then was a person who
favoured the retention of a close association with Great Britain
and was against the establishment of the Republic. You can get a
flavour from James Joyce's Dubliners, published in 1914: "Perhaps
he ought not to have answered her like that. But she had no right
to call him a West Briton before people, even in joke". "West
Briton" remains a favourite insult of members of the Republican
movement, who sometimes use it for somebody who is seen as
retaining a subservient attitude to the UK.
A. FAQ of the week
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