World Wide Words -- 13 Nov 04
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Nov 12 18:35:13 UTC 2004
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 418 Saturday 13 November 2004
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Sent each Saturday to 21,000+ subscribers in at least 120 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
http://www.worldwidewords.org US advisory editor: Julane Marx
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Macilent.
3. Q&A: Hoosier.
4. Sic!
5. Q&A: Done and done.
A. Subscription commands.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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LURGI My nostalgic stroll into memories of radio comedy last week
brought lots of appreciative e-mails from subscribers who remember
the Goon Show. Many suggested that this word might be an aphetic
form of "allergy"; it's an ingenious idea, though English doesn't
usually lose a stressed initial vowel. Also - and several messages
made me realise I should have noted this - the word is said with a
hard "g", to rhyme with "Fergie", so that the different value of
the "g" in "allergy" tells against it. Still with medical matters,
her doctor told Margaret Joachim that LURGI is a abbreviation for
Lower URino-Genital Infection, though, as she suggests, this was
almost certainly a later invention - it sounds like a typical bit
of medical black humour. Others told me of the Lurgi gasification
process, which was developed by the company of that name in Germany
in the 1930s to get gas from low-grade coal; one subscriber said
that Spike Milligan and his wartime pals knew this and that one of
his books makes the connection explicitly. I haven't yet been able
to check this. So many subscribers told me that I had misspelled
the name of one of the villains and that it should be Gryptype-
Thynne, that I went back to my sources to double-check, though I'd
done so while writing the piece because I wasn't sure myself: all
do give it as Grytpype-Thynne.
2. Weird Words: Macilent /'masIl at nt/
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Lean, shrivelled, or excessively thin.
This word was marked as rare in dictionaries a century ago and has
become even more so since, though it retains a niche in elevated or
pretentious prose. It's from Latin "macilentus", lean. In 1851 a
writer evoked with it a victim of tuberculosis: "of whom I could
recollect nothing but a macilent figure, stretched upon a sofa and
scarcely breathing". It can also have a figurative sense that
refers to poor-quality or inferior writing. A reviewer of Britney
Spears's album In the Zone in 2003 described it as "Britney's most
personal statement. Because it's as lost and macilent and alluring
and eager to please and disturbingly empty-eyed as she is."
3. Q&A
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Q. I am interested in finding out where the term "Hoosier" comes
from, as a term for people who come from or live in the state of
Indiana. [Jolene Gurrola]
A. I've been dodging this question for several years but it seems
inescapable. There are four good reasons why I've been reluctant to
get involved: a) it's an iconic American term that perhaps I ought
not to be meddling with from this side of the Atlantic; b) the
origin is uncertain; c) it generates more controversy than any
other American demographic term; and d) lots of vociferous people
in Indiana believe they know the answer and won't be afraid to tell
me so.
Facts first. This term for the inhabitants of Indiana is recorded
for the first time in a diary of 1826 and a work of 1831, neither
of which was published until much later. Its first public sighting
was in a poem called The Hoosier's Nest by John Finley that was
printed in the "Indianapolis Journal" on 1 January 1833. The
inhabitants of Indiana have been upset in the past to learn that
the word is also known in other states with the meaning (I quote
the Dictionary of American Regional English) "A hillbilly or
rustic; an unmannerly or objectionable person". The same work also
records it among black speakers as a "white person considered to be
objectionable, especially because of racial prejudice" and as a
term for someone inexperienced or incompetent. By a splendid
exhibition of inverted self-regard, the inhabitants of Indiana
proudly continue to use the name for themselves. The efforts of Dan
Quayle in 1987 to persuade the editors of Webster's Third New
International Dictionary to change the meaning to "someone who is
smart, resourceful, skilful, a winner, unique and brilliant" got a
polite but uncompromising refusal.
More people have had a go at finding its source than you can easily
count. It has variously been explained as "hoozer", a dialect word
from Cumberland that means something large or a dweller in the
hills; from a canal foreman named Samuel Hoosier who would only
hire men from Indiana; from the family name "Hooser"; from "Black
Harry" Hoosier, an African-American Methodist evangelist of the
early 19th century; from the exclamation "huzza!" after some
victory; from "Hussars", European cavalry; from "hoosa", an Indian
word for corn; from "hoose", a British term for a disease of
cattle; from "husher", a bullying vigilante, a roughneck river
bargeman, or anybody who could outfight his opponents (and so
"hush" them). Others argue that it derives from the days when ear-
biting was all the rage; when torn-off ears were found on a bar-
room floor after a brawl, people would ask "whose ears?". It's also
asserted that when a visitor knocked on a cabin door Indiana people
would say, "Who's there?" in a rustic accent that sounded like
"Hoosier". Or Indiana people would stand on the riverbank and shout
to people on boats, "Who is ya?"
There are excellent objections to all of these, which I will spare
you. I hate to end on a downbeat note, but the Oxford English
Dictionary's cautious "origin unknown" just about sums it up. Don't
write to me about it, please, unless you have copper-bottomed
evidence to back up your beliefs!
4. Sic!
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Mara Math found her calendar for the San Francisco group Save The
Bay advertised an unusual event for last weekend: "Canoe and Wine
Tasting." "Mmm," she wrote in appreciation, "Cedar, fiberglass and
a hint of mud, with an impudent brackish undernote." Prosaically,
it was a canoe trip that was promised.
A news item dated 5 November on the Web site of the Eastern Daily
Press startled Ken Blowers: "Norfolk's adopted warship will go out
in style this month by taking part in a series of events across the
county before she is decommissioned." "How are they going to do
that?" he asks. "Are they going to put the ship up on rollers and
push it?"
Michael Neustadt e-mails from Connecticut: "Just a few days after
the prescription medicine Vioxx was taken off the market, a local
TV station was carrying an ad for a law firm that was offering to
sue the manufacturer: 'Vioxx has been found to cause heart attack,
stroke, and even death. If you have suffered any of these symptoms,
call us at once at 1-800-...'"
The Police Beat section of the Montreal Gazette included this on 4
November: "An alarmed driver probably helped prevent an accident by
reporting a wreckless driver to police last Thursday at 3:15 p.m."
Owen Funnell comments : "The witness's intuition was right. Even
though the car was seen weaving in and out of traffic, it was soon
found intact in a parking lot with the driver asleep at the wheel!"
5. Q&A
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Q. I sometimes read or hear the phrase "done and done" used to seal
a business deal or bargain - usually in historical dramas. Is the
repetition there merely to emphasize that the deal has been
completed; or is it acknowledging that two halves of an unstated,
understood whole, such as payment and delivery, will be completed?
Or is this a modern affectation meant to imply Regency or Victorian
language? [David Means]
A. Let's take your last point first. It's certainly not a modern
invention, but a real expression of an earlier period that is now
defunct. Like you, I've come across it on occasion. However, the
Oxford English Dictionary - my usual source of information for such
phrases - fails on this occasion and I can't find another reference
work that gives any details.
Hunting around in my literature database, I've found a few examples
that suggest it might be an eighteenth-century Irish expression.
Its appearances all refer to wagers. The classic case, and the
earliest I've found, appears in Castle Rackrent by Maria Edgeworth,
published in 1800: "'Done,' says my master; 'I'll lay you a hundred
golden guineas to a tester you don't.' 'Done,' says the gauger; and
done and done's enough between two gentlemen." ["Tester": a slang
term for sixpence; "gauger": an exciseman's assistant who checked
the capacity of casks.] This book, hardly known nowadays, was an
early example of the historical novel, and was set in Ireland,
Maria Edgeworth's homeland.
>From these and other instances, it seems that the usual convention
was that a bet was agreed on the mere word of the two principals if
both said "done". They both being gentlemen, or assumed to be such,
their word was their bond and there was no question of going back
on the agreement once it had been made. Hence "done and done" meant
that a binding agreement had been mutually accepted. Another
example is in The Virginians by William Makepeace Thackeray, dated
1859: "I'll take your bet - there. And so Done and Done."
I haven't found a case in which the phrase was said in reference to
a business deal, but it's easy to see how the idea could have been
extended. Though most of my few examples are Irish or British, I
did find one that suggested it has also been known in the USA. It's
from The Crater, by James Fenimore Cooper, published in 1848: "Done
and done between gentlemen, is enough, sir."
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