World Wide Words -- 29 May 04
Michael Quinion
TheEditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Sat May 29 08:03:20 UTC 2004
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 394 Saturday 29 May 2004
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Tetrapyloctomy.
3. Noted this week.
4. Q&A: Lead-pipe cinch.
5. Sic!
6. Q&A: Bonce; Pitch.
A. Subscription commands.
B. Useful URLs.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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PORT OUT, STARBOARD HOME Success beckons and the unfamiliarity of
the gesture leaves me bemused and uncertain. Penguin Books will be
publishing my book of this title on 1 July (you may be certain that
you run no risk of missing the event). It features and debunks the
stories that people invent about the history of words, for example
that "golf" stands for "gentlemen only, ladies forbidden", that a
"wake" was called that because the guests sat around to check that
the corpse didn't wake up, and that "posh" is an initialism for the
words "Port Out, Starboard Home" once printed on steamship tickets.
British subscribers who take the Daily Telegraph will find it is
serialising the book from today for the next 20 Saturdays. It has
also been chosen by several book clubs and the advance orders are
looking extraordinarily healthy. Might I have accidentally written
a best seller? Watch this space for more news in the weeks ahead.
US subscribers will have to wait until October this year, when the
Smithsonian Institution Press publishes the book under the title
Ballyhoo, Buckaroo, and Spuds (no, I didn't choose it, but these
are three of the words featured in the book). For more, see
http://www.worldwidewords.org/posh.htm .
NINETEEN TO THE DOZEN While we're on the topic of folk etymology,
which is the grammarians' term for the subject of my book, my piece
on this traditional English phrase produced many references to what
turns out to be a common story about its origin. Ray Heindl put it
like this: "Years ago I heard an explanation for the origin of this
phrase that involved the amount of water a steam engine could pump
out of a coal mine when burning a specific amount of coal (19,000
gallons and 12 bushels, respectively). Various web sites also cite
this origin. Is there any evidence that it's true? It seems a bit
suspect to me, as the amount of water that could be pumped would
depend on the depth of the mine, among other things. But at least
it could account for the specific number nineteen." I am sure in my
own mind that this is indeed a folk tale, as an origin so specific
and arcane would have been unlikely to generate a popular saying.
It's more likely that the figures were quoted in some treatise and
were then picked up as an explanation for the origin of the phrase.
But nobody can know for sure because its early history is obscure.
Ed Ver Hoef commented that a more familiar form to him was "ninety
to the dozen" and indeed there are examples to be found in various
places, dating back to the late 1940s. But it's uncommon and seems
to be a relatively modern variation on the older phrase. It may be
linked to a characteristically North American expression that other
subscribers told me about, "going ninety to nothing", which the
Dictionary of American Regional English records from 1950.
MISSING MAIL My ISP suffered two bad technical faults last weekend
that meant the World Wide Words site was unavailable for some hours
on both Saturday and Sunday and that some e-mail wasn't delivered.
Apologies from them and me. If you sent an e-mail that needed an
answer but didn't get one, please send it again.
2. Weird Words: Tetrapyloctomy
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The act of splitting a hair four ways.
Don't be a mere two-way hair-splitter; grasp your pedantry firmly
in both hands and split your hair crosswise into four. This word
has found a secure if niche existence in the lexicons of academics
with a sense of humour since it was invented by Umberto Eco in his
novel Foucault's Pendulum, published in English in 1989. In a
mocking attempt to reform higher education, one character proposes
a School of Comparative Irrelevance, whose aim would be to turn out
scholars capable of endlessly increasing the number of unnecessary
topics. In it would be a Department of Tetrapyloctomy, whose
function would be to inculcate a sense of irrelevance in its
students. Another department would study useless techniques, such
as Assyrio-Babylonian philately and Aztec Equitation. The word
combines "tetra", four, with "pilus", hair (as in "depilatory"),
and the ending "-(e)ctomy", a cutting. As the component parts come
respectively from Greek, Latin and Greek it's a miscegenated
linguistic sandwich that no self-respecting scholar would invent,
which is no doubt why Umberto Eco found it to be appropriate.
3. Noted this week
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CHUGGER In current British slang, a chugger is a person who stops
you on the street to persuade you to make a regular donation to a
charity by direct debit. This method is attractive because the law
currently only requires those collecting money in cash to seek a
licence. Their numbers have grown so high that the government has
announced this week that it is to regulate their activities in a
new charities law. The term is a blend of "charity" and "mugger";
it seems to have begun to appear in the press only about a year ago
but has now become common.
4. Q&A
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Q. What is the origin of "lead-pipe cinch", which, in American
slang, means a dead certainty? [Irving S Schloss]
A. Nobody seems quite sure. We've a lot of information about its
early days but it doesn't quite add up to a complete story. Facts
first, then the speculation.
The figurative sense of "cinch" is recorded from the 1880s on. This
came from the saddle-girth meaning of the word, which itself had
been borrowed from Spanish "cincha" in the 1860s. A saddle that had
been tightly cinched was secure, so something that was a cinch was
a safe or sure thing, an idea which developed into the slang sense
of something that was a certainty.
"Lead-pipe cinch" suddenly appears in the early 1890s, only a few
years after that sense of "cinch" had been created. The first
mention I can find is in a parody of Sandford Bennett's hymn In The
Sweet By and By that appeared in the Chicago Tribune late in 1891:
"Oh, the place will be delightful, and it's worth our while to try
/ To get a lead pipe cinch upon the sweet by and by."
It's obvious enough that a lead-pipe cinch is one up on the common
or garden variety of cinch, so that "lead-pipe" here is what
grammarians call an intensifier. But why should it be so? This is
where we part company with the facts and go drifting off on the
wayward currents of surmise and supposition. Robert Chapman's
Dictionary of American Slang suggested it is because a lead pipe is
easily bent, "in case one has bet on such a feat". Eric Partridge
thought it came about through the effectiveness of a length of lead
pipe as a weapon. Jonathon Green argues it is the solidity of the
lead pipe that is most important.
Unlike many modern urban folk, in the 1890s everyone who used the
phrase knew exactly what a cinch was in its literal sense. So
"lead-pipe cinch" had to resonate somehow with that. Jonathon
Lighter, in the Random House Historical Dictionary of American
Slang, points out that there was a brief flowering of another
sense, that of having an especially firm grip on something. The
idea was presumably that if a leather cinch was effective, one made
of lead would be even more so, or that one's grip on lead pipe
could be firmer than on a leather strap.
Either way, this is the nearest we can get to understanding the
thought processes of 1890s Americans.
5. Sic!
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Tesco's own-brand thick bleach announces proudly on the label that
it "Kills bacteria as well as the leading brand". That's one way of
handling the competition, argues Timothy Wiliams, who spotted it.
>From the Department of Improbable Images, noted on the CNN Web site
by Brian Obroin: "Both men - even then sliding down the thin edge
of the bubble - have since been discredited."
6. Q&A
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Q. I grew up with the word "bonce" meaning head. As far as I
recall, it was common to my friends as well as my family, and yet I
can now find no trace of it. Any idea if it is a word and if so,
what are its origins? [Martin Nickolls]
A. I'm guessing you were brought up in the UK, because "bonce" as
a slang term for the head is hardly known elsewhere. It was
certainly common in my youth, about half a century ago, though it
sounds rather old-fashioned these days. If you know the songs of
Flanders and Swann, you will recall the one about the Rhinoceros:
Oh the bodger on the bonce!
The bodger on the bonce!
Pity the poor old Rhino with
The bodger on the bonce!
where the bodger is his horn (see http://quinion.com?A73J for more
on this interesting term.)
The original "bonce" was a large marble that featured in several
children's games of the nineteenth century. The English Dialect
Dictionary suggests it's a version of "bounce", since such a marble
was also called a "bouncer" and was "the large earthenware marble
used for bouncing or playing with checks or cubes" (but don't ask
me what these games were, as I've been unable to find out). But to
judge from a comment in Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London
Poor of 1851, such marbles were also made of other materials: "We
did as we liked with mother, she was so precious easy, and I never
learned anything but playing buttons and making leaden 'bonces,'
that's all."
The shift to a slang term for the head seems to have happened
around the 1880s.
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Q. Some of us in the US who have been exposed to the Harry Potter
phenomenon wonder why a playing field is called a "pitch" in
England, as in "Quidditch pitch"? Was it once made of pitch, or is
it generally pitched at an angle, or what? I wouldn't think of
slope as a desirable feature in a playing field, but I guess it
depends on what you're playing. [Julane Marx, California]
A. Sloping pitches are a traditional joke in the amateur football
game, and even sometimes in the professional one, which is one
reason why high-powered executive types talk about the need for a
level playing field. But that's not why they're called pitches.
The oldest sense of "pitch" that's immediately relevant is that of
thrusting a stake or pole into the ground (as in pitching a tent).
The sense of a playing field comes via that, originally from
cricket. The act of setting up the playing area by knocking the two
sets of stumps into the ground at the ends of the wicket was called
"pitching the stumps" from the end of the seventeenth century on.
However, it wasn't until the 1870s that the term was turned into a
noun to describe the playing area and it was extended to football
only about 1900 - surprisingly late in both cases.
Incidentally, an associated idea is that of a place from which one
sells things, such as a site in a market or fairground in which a
trader sets up (or pitches) his tent or stall, and by extension any
spot on which an itinerant trader temporarily places himself. The
sense of a salesman's presentation, a sales pitch, derives from the
shouted cries of these traders from their pitches.
And, before anybody asks, all the other senses of the noun and verb
- apart from that for the black tarry stuff - seem to be connected,
but nobody is quite sure how.
A. Subscription commands
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