WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 384 Saturday 20 March 2004
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Sent each Saturday to 19,000+ subscribers in at least 120 countries
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: Alcolock.
3. Sic!
4. Weird Words: Mortsafe.
5. Noted this week.
6. Q&A: Shindig.
A. FAQ of the week.
B. Subscription commands.
C. Useful URLs.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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SITE FAILURE Apologies to anybody who had difficulty last Sunday
with the short-form Web addresses listed in last week's newsletter
(like http://quinion.com?QA). A fault on the Web site resulted in
a failure of the scripting functions for some hours.
2. Turns of Phrase: Alcolock
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An alcolock, or more formally in Euro-bureaucrat-speak a "breath
alcohol ignition interlock device" (BAIID), is fitted to a car's
ignition to stop a driver from starting it if he's over the drink-
driving limit. The device is seen as a way to stop people who have
been convicted of driving under the influence from offending again;
supporters of the scheme argue that it does help to prevent repeat
offences. Trials have been taking place in recent years in the US,
Australia, Canada, and Sweden, though not always under this name.
The European Union has been conducting studies to see if it ought
to be adopted throughout the EU and as a follow-up a trial is to
take place in two areas of the UK shortly.
>>> From The Times, 4 May 2003: In Sweden 1,500 Volvo trucks have
been fitted with the Alcolock.
>>> From The Observer, 29 Feb. 2004: The "alcolock" requires the
driver to take a breath-test before the ignition can be turned on
and activates a lock if the result is above a certain level.
3. Sic!
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In the Economist issue of 6 March, seen by Timothy Williams: "Some
body parts had been sold to private laboratories for profit. The
head of the university's donor programme was arrested." They let
the rest of him go free.
David Guest, based in the UK, reports that "If you go into a branch
of Office World (or into the Derby one, at least) you will find
them selling a 'Leather Faced Executive's Chair'." That would fit a
few managers I've known.
Nora Miller was struck by an offer on an American classified ads
website: "Free Shower Insert and Wayne's Coating". It sounds like a
proprietary paint until you say it aloud.
Department of anxious architecture: "The woman chattered away in a
slightly nervous manor ..." Department of intermittent agriculture:
"Though the soil was reasonable, the Ulon wasn't really suitable
for serial crops". (Both from Pandora's Star by Peter F Hamilton,
2004, whose 882 pages were tough on its copy editor.)
4. Weird Words: Mortsafe
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An iron frame put over a coffin to prevent the body being stolen.
Medical schools in the eighteenth century, and increasingly so in
the early nineteenth century, found it difficult to teach anatomy
because the supply of bodies for dissection was limited (legally,
only the corpses of convicted murderers might be used, and even
those were often hard to obtain because of public revulsion against
the practice). So a clandestine trade grew up of grave-robbing: the
anatomists paid "resurrectionists" to go out at night, especially
in winter when the cold would slow putrefaction, to dig up freshly
interred bodies and convey them to the schools. At the time, a dead
body was not legally regarded as property, so body snatchers could
not be convicted of theft. When this supply proved inadequate, some
gangs - such as that of the infamous Burke and Hare - turned to
murder to meet demand, leading to the verb "to burke" and to
"burkism" as a name for the practice.
Various methods were tried to thwart the resurrectionists, such as
setting guards or traps over the grave. Another was to employ metal
coffins, such as the patent coffin invented by Edward Bridgman in
1781. In Scotland the most common method in the eighteenth century
- for those who could afford it - was the "watch box" or "mortsafe"
(from French "mort", death). This was an iron grid or cage either
placed over the coffin or set in mortar above ground to cover the
whole area of the grave (see http://quinion.com?Z01A for a picture
of an example). Some of the latter type can still be seen in
churchyards. Poor people sometimes erected communal mortsafes or
placed huge coffin-shaped pieces of stone or metal on new graves
(they were called "jankers"; the source of this word is unknown,
but may derive from the name of the device employed to move the
weights; it's probably not connected with the twentieth-century
sense of a military punishment, whose origin is also unknown).
5. Noted this week
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DOGGING This slang term for sex with strangers in public places
such as country parks, beauty spots and picnic areas as a form of
exhibitionism has been seen a lot in British newspapers recently,
because the practice seems to have become more common in the past
few years. The term dates back to the late nineteenth century sense
of pursuing a person with sexual intent, from the broader meaning
of the verb "to dog", meaning to follow a person closely and
persistently, as in "to dog one's footsteps". To conflate this
section with "Sic!", Giles Watson found that an online British news
site (see http://quinion.com?X69X ) had turned the practice into a
solitary vice when reporting on the troubles of a footballer: "The
star admitted yesterday that he regularly had sex with people he
had never met, in an underground practice known as dogging."
SEDNA Claims in newspapers that a group at Caltech have found the
mysterious and long-sought tenth planet are probably wide of the
mark, since the object is almost certain to be classed instead as a
planetesimal, of which there are many out there in the Kuiper Belt
beyond Neptune. (Some astronomers now think that the ninth planet,
Pluto, should also be included in this group.) But it's the name
provisionally given to this new object, Sedna, that's interesting.
Both in astronomy and science fiction, the traditional name for the
tenth planet has been Persephone, based on the presumption that we
would continue to name planets after classical mythological figures
(though the names of the planets are all from Roman deities, such
as Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, while Persephone is Greek). Instead,
the Caltech group have borrowed the name of an Inuit goddess of the
ocean. Other objects of similar size in the Belt have also been
named from other spiritual traditions, such as Quaoar, named after
a creation deity of the Californian Tongva people, and Varuna, from
the Hindu deity who keeps the sun moving.
6. Q&A
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Q. I don't know if I have the correct spelling, but do you know the
origin of the term "shin-dig," which I have always heard used to
refer to a party or event? [Tara Goddard]
A. This is going to be one of those answers with more conjecture in
it than readers would like. Many researchers have theories about
the origin of this interesting little word, but few can supply firm
facts. With a bit of guesswork, though, we can get somewhere near
the source.
The usual spelling today is without the hyphen, "shindig", and
means a noisy or merry dance or party, often one that is
celebrating something (to define it, the OED uses the informal
British English phrase "knees-up" for a similar sort of party,
taken from the music-hall song Knees Up, Mother Brown). "Shindig"
appears for the first time in American writing of the 1870s and the
oldest example I can lay my mouse on is in the Idaho Statesman of
30 October 1871.
"Shindig" is a modification of the older "shindy", which could
equally be a noisy party or gathering, but in its first examples
instead referred to a commotion, ruckus or brawl, as in "to kick up
a shindy". In that form it dates from the 1820s; an example from
later in the century is in Jerome K Jerome's Idle Thoughts of an
Idle Fellow, published in 1886: "I always do sit with my hands in
my pockets except when I am in the company of my sisters, my
cousins, or my aunts; and they kick up such a shindy - I should say
expostulate so eloquently upon the subject - that I have to give in
and take them out - my hands I mean." This idea was often taken
over into "shindig", as you can tell from Stephen Crane's Active
Service of 1899: "You have noted that there are signs of a few
bruises and scratches? ... Well, they are from the fight. It seems
the people took us for Germans, and there was an awful palaver,
which ended in a proper and handsome shindig."
You can see how the idea of a ruckus could have become modified
into that of a noisy party. It's less obvious how "shindy" turned
into "shindig". An entry in Bartlett's Dictionary of Americanisms
gives the clue, because it says that "shin-dig" was used literally
in the Southern states to mean a kick to the shins. You can see how
popular etymology could have added that to the sense of a brawl and
created "shindig" from "shindy".
That leaves us only to explain the origin of "shindy". Here we get
on to shaky ground. It is possible that it's from the Scots game of
"shinty" or "shinney", a bit like hockey and likewise played with a
bent stick, a cousin of Irish hurling that some say is also the
origin of ice hockey. If that's so, "shindy" may be from the Gaelic
"sinteag", a bound or leap, or possibly from one of the rude cries
uttered in the game, such as "shin ye", "shin you", "shin t'ye". By
all accounts it was a rough game, often with 100 or more men on
each side and no holds barred in the quest for supremacy. The Penny
Magazine of 31 January 1835 described it with muted horror: "Large
parties assemble during Christmas holidays, one parish sometimes
making a match against another. In the struggles between the
contending players many hard blows are given, and more frequently a
shin is broken, or by rarer chance some more serious accident may
occur."
It's not hard to imagine the name being borrowed in North America
for a commotion.
A. FAQ of the week
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Michael Quinion
Editor, World Wide Words
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Web: <http://www.worldwidewords.org/>