World Wide Words -- 24 Jan 04
Michael Quinion
DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jan 23 18:47:55 UTC 2004
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 377 Saturday 24 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: Skedaddle.
3. Sic!
4. Q&A: Short shrift.
5. Q&A: Indefinite pronouns.
A. FAQ of the week.
B. Subscription commands.
C. Useful URLs.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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HOLIDAY BREAK No issue of World Wide Words will appear next week,
31 January, as my wife and I are taking a short break. Normal
service will be resumed on 7 February.
2. Weird Words: Skedaddle
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Run away; scram; leave in a hurry; escape.
This archetypal American expression has led etymologists a pretty
dance in trying to work out where it comes from.
What we do know for certain is that it suddenly appears at the
beginning of the Civil War. Out of the blue, it became fashionable
in 1862, with lots of examples appearing in American newspapers and
books. The focus of all the early examples is the War; without
doubt it started out as military slang with the meaning of fleeing
the battlefield or retreating hurriedly. Its first appearance in
print, in the New York Tribune of 10 August 1861, made this clear:
"No sooner did the traitors discover their approach than they
'skiddaddled', (a phrase the Union boys up here apply to the good
use the seceshers make of their legs in time of danger)." However,
it quickly moved into civilian circles with the broader sense of
leaving in a hurry. It crossed the Atlantic astonishingly quickly,
being recorded in the Illustrated London News in 1862 and then
being put in the mouth of a young lady character by Anthony
Trollope in his novel The Last Chronicle of Barset in 1867:
"'Mamma, Major Grantly has - skedaddled.' 'Oh, Lily, what a word!'"
So far so good. Where it comes from is almost totally obscure. Was
it Greek, as John Hotten argued in his Dictionary of Modern Slang
in 1874, derived from "skedannumi", to "retire tumultuously",
perhaps "set afloat by some Harvard professor"? It sounds
plausible, but probably not. The English Dialect Dictionary,
compiled at the end of the nineteenth century, argues that it's
from a Scottish or Northern English dialect word meaning to spill
or scatter, in particular to spill milk. This may be from Scots
"skiddle", meaning to splash water about or spill. Jonathon Green,
in the Cassell Dictionary of Slang, suggests this transferred to
the US through "the image of blood and corpses being thus 'spilled
and scattered' on the battlefield before the flight of a
demoralised army".
3. Sic!
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A O'Sullivan found this unfortunate error in the brochure of the
Australian honey producers Warren's Country Produce: "Narrowleaf
Peppermint - A popular dark viscose honey produced in the mountain
ranges of North Eastern Victoria." Viscose: a thick golden-brown
solution made by treating cellulose with caustic alkali.
Alastair Scott wrote: "I note that Brixton underground station,
currently being rebuilt, will have a 'mobility impaired passenger
lift', according to a London Underground poster at the top of the
escalators." Careful how you parse the notice ...
4. Q&A
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Q. I am wondering about where the term "short shrift" came from?
[Anne in Seattle]
A. Do you know the scene in Shakespeare's Richard III of 1594 in
which Lord Hastings is condemned by Richard to be taken out at once
and beheaded? Richard Ratcliffe says to Hastings, "Make a short
shrift; he longs to see your head." That's the first known use of
the phrase in English.
What's odd about it is that it then doesn't appear again until Sir
Walter Scott's poetic romance, The Lord of the Isles in 1815:
"Short were his shrift in that debate". After that, it quickly
becomes a standard idiom in the language with the sense first of a
brief respite, then of giving a matter brief and unsympathetic
attention, especially in the phrase "to give short shrift" to
somebody or something. Scott likely extracted the phrase from
Shakespeare's play - he loved using archaisms. He was so
influential in the early nineteenth century that he was probably
single-handedly responsible for making it popular.
Shakespeare's meaning for "shrift" would have been immediately
known to his audience. It's from the verb "shrive", the act of
confessing to a priest followed by penance and absolution. So, when
Ratcliffe was telling Hastings "to make a short shrift" he was
telling him to be quick about his confession because Richard wanted
him dead as soon as possible.
"Shrive" is itself a strange word, since its source is the Latin
"scriptum", letters or writing, from which we get words such as
"script". The modern German verb "schreiben", to write, comes from
the same source, as do similar terms in other European languages.
For some reason we don't understand, the verb "schrive" took on a
special sense in the Old English and Scandinavian languages of
imposing a penalty, perhaps from the idea of making a written
decree. This led to the specific religious meaning and eventually
to an idiom for brushing somebody's concerns aside unfeelingly.
Such are the oddities of language evolution.
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5. Q&A
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Q. I quote you in your piece on "freegan": "A person...who eats
only what they can get for nothing." Is your use of "they" simply
an agreement error or have you adopted it as a way to finesse the
he/she problem? [Norm Brust; related questions came from too many
people to list.]
A. So many subscribers have written (many of them denouncing me as
an enemy of literacy) that a note about the usage would seem timely
as an elaboration of a piece I wrote about gender-neutral pronouns
some years ago (see http://quinion.com?XD). To include an example
of the form in a review of Bryan Garner's Modern American Usage on
3 January ("I would recommend it to anyone in any country who is
interested in improving the quality of their English") may have
been unintentionally provocative.
However, I shall nail my colours to the mast and say that these and
similar usages are now so common as to be unremarkable, are now
considered standard by most usage guides, and pass unchallenged by
many copy editors. Objection to the form, however, is greater in
the United States than elsewhere - most of the criticism has come
from Americans.
Those who deprecate this form argue that a pronoun must agree in
number with the noun to which it refers. The rule has been drummed
into generations of schoolchildren by teachers who are quite sure
that it exists.
Unfortunately, it's not the way that reputable writers have used
"they", "their" and "them" down the centuries. It is possible to
find examples of such pronouns used with singular nouns at least as
far back as Chaucer. The problem is that English doesn't have a
gender-neutral pronoun to cope with those cases in which we know
little about the person being referred to. Many writers have
happily got around this by using "they" and their relatives as
indefinite pronouns, especially after words such as "anyone",
"everyone", "someone" and "no one".
Our modern confusion stems from eighteenth-century grammarians who
analysed English according to the structures of Latin and imposed
stringent and irrelevant rules (such as the one about not splitting
infinitives) that have bedevilled everybody since. In this case,
they proposed that "he" should instead be the standard in cases in
which the sex of the person referred to isn't known. It isn't only
writers of the past half century who have found that to be
invidiously sexist, though the trend towards gender equality has
made it increasingly indefensible.
Every reputable style guide I've consulted says that the supposed
rule doesn't conform to the way people actually use the language
and that "they" and relatives are becoming accepted even in the
most formal prose. Robert Burchfield, in the Third Edition of
Fowler's Modern English Usage, says, "It begins to look as if the
use of an indefinite third person singular is now passing unnoticed
by standard speakers (except those trained in traditional
grammar)." Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage remarks
that ""They", "their", "them" have been used continuously in
singular reference for about six centuries, and have been
disparaged in such use for about two centuries. Now the influence
of social forces is making their use even more attractive." Bryan
Garner is more equivocal: "Depending on how you look at it, this is
either one of the most frequent blunders in modern writing or a
godsend that allows us to avoid sexism."
As you will have gathered, I take the latter view.
A. FAQ of the week
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B. Subscription commands
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