World Wide Words -- 16 Oct 04
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Oct 15 18:08:57 UTC 2004
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 414 Saturday 16 October 2004
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Sent each Saturday to 20,000+ subscribers in at least 120 countries
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
http://www.worldwidewords.org wordseditor at worldwidewords.org
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Termagant.
3. Q&A: On one's tod.
4. Sic!
5. Book reviews: Recent dictionaries.
A. Subscription commands.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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SKIVVIES Following my piece last week, many subscribers mentioned
another sense of "skivvy", the British one of a lowly, overworked
and ill-paid female servant - an old-fashioned term that pretty
much went out of use when the job vanished, though the verb has
lingered on. The experts have no clear idea where that comes from
either, but the evidence suggests that it has a different origin,
possibly an English dialect word. Many Australians pointed out that
in that country "skivvy" has another sense still, that of a long-
sleeved roll-neck lightweight T-shirt worn by both men and women. I
can't find an origin for this, but it's comparatively recent and so
the implication is that it derives from the American "skivvy" for
an undershirt.
SPANISH WOOD My comment last week about my family's memories of
this sweetmeat brought many responses. Though few subscribers can
recall raw liquorice root by that name, many remember the processed
product in its various forms being called "Spanish". Reports have
come in from Lancashire, Pembrokeshire, Kent and other places. But
the most frequent comment was on my spelling, since it is usually
written as "licorice" in the USA. The word has had many spellings
down the centuries, including "lickerish", which is the way it's
often said. It's from Greek "glukurrhiza", meaning "sweet root".
The "liquorice" spelling was probably influenced by the process of
getting it out of the root, the first stage of which produces a
liquor that is then evaporated.
2. Weird Words: Termagant /'t@:m at g(@)nt/
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A harsh-tempered or overbearing woman.
It's a long way from the Crusades to the modern sense of the word,
but that's the path we must follow to explain where we got it from.
In the Middle Ages, Crusaders knew almost nothing about Islam and
lumped everyone non-Christian together as Saracens or pagans; they
thought that Mahmound (or Mahound) and Termagant were among Islam's
gods. The word appears about 1100 as "tervagaunt" in French, in the
Chanson de Roland. The Italian equivalent was "Trivagante", which
may in turn have come from Latin words for a threefold wanderer;
this referred to the moon, which was considered to travel between
heaven, earth, and hell under the three names Selene, Artemis, and
Persephone.
The word was borrowed into English and became the usual name in the
medieval morality plays for an overbearing, violent and turbulent
character, the supposed god of the Saracens, who was always dressed
in Eastern robes. He was borrowed by Shakespeare and put into the
mouth of that early theatre critic, Hamlet: "I could have such a
Fellow whipt for o'erdoing Termagant: it out-Herods Herod." The
name had by then been generalised to mean a quarrelsome person or
bully.
Around the middle of the seventeenth century, the word changed sex
to become our modern term for a quarrelsome woman. It's likely that
people were confused by the Saracen's robes in the morality plays
and assumed that the supposed god Termagant was really female.
[Visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/pronguide.htm for a guide to
the pronunciation symbols used in these newsletters.]
3. Q&A
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Q. I used the phrase, "on one's tod", which means to be on one's
own, or is used to describe an object in isolation, and then
realised I didn't know its derivation. Might it be rhyming slang?
[Ed Matthews, UK]
A. One of the more delightful parts of writing these weekly
missives is the odd byways that questions take me down. With this
one, I ended up with horse racing and British royalty as well as
the rhyming slang you mention.
The "tod" here is an American. He was born in 1874; his real name
was James Forman Sloan, but later let it be known that his middle
name was Todhunter and so is remembered as Tod Sloan. He was an
inventive and highly successful jockey who pioneered what was
called the "monkey ride" or "perching on the animal's ears": riding
with short stirrups, lying low with his head almost on the horse's
neck. He was a colourful and difficult man, who made and squandered
vast sums of money. In 1896 he crossed the Atlantic to Britain to
become a rider for the then Prince of Wales, later Edward VII.
He fell disastrously from fame in 1901 when the Jockey Club, which
controls British racing, denied him a licence because of some
unspecified "conduct prejudicial to the best interests of the
sport" (a newspaper report in 1903 said it was because its upper-
class members found his arrogance and impertinence too offensive to
put up with) and he then lost his American and French licences.
A writer in the Washington Post in 1903 described his state: "All
of the flashy togs of his marvelous days as a race rider are gone.
He doesn't wear any jewelry any more. I can remember when he had
almost a whole floor of one of the finest hotels in New York. Not
now. He hasn't got any 'man' any more to lay his clothes out,
because he is minus the clothes. ... His Panhard and Mercedes
touring autos are all gone - everything of Tod's is gone."
He died alone in poverty in Los Angeles of cirrhosis of the liver
in 1933 - though he was well enough remembered for his death to be
widely reported - and it was about this time that the rhyming slang
"to be on your Tod Sloan" first appeared. Like many such phrases it
became shortened and so, though the short form "on your tod" is
still common British English, hardly anybody remembers the American
jockey who inspired it.
4. Sic!
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Aharon Eviatar writes from Israel: "On the phone information card
in a hotel in Netanya, written in four languages (Hebrew, English,
French, and Russian), the English section tells us to 'dial *21 to
hear the vice mail'. Typos will always be with us."
"Here in Swing State Ohio," e-mails Sally Miller, "We are receiving
daily political admonitions by sign, telephone, and e-mail. My
favorite is a sign that urges me to 'Support Mental Retardation'."
A small ad was spotted by Anne Judson in The Daily News, the local
paper in Nanaimo, British Columbia. "Lost: Small yellow parrot with
a red beak. This bird is a little larger than a cocktail."
5. Book reviews: Recent dictionaries
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Today is National Dictionary Day in the USA. It commemorates the
birthday of Noah Webster, whose American Dictionary of the English
Language, published in 1828, was hugely influential in that
country. To mark the day, I've brought together some notices of
recent dictionaries. Though all are British in origin, all are
available in the USA and most also worldwide.
BLOOMSBURY ENGLISH DICTIONARY This is a new edition of what was
first published in 1999 as the Encarta Dictionary in both paper and
CD-ROM forms, the latter for Microsoft. It's a large-format single-
volume work, comparable in size and word coverage with the Collins
English Dictionary or the Oxford Dictionary of English, though with
much information on people and places and many illustrations,
making it a closer relative to the American Heritage Dictionary
than any comparable British one. Another similarity with a US
dictionary is that its pronunciations are in a home-brewed phonetic
system, not the usual International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) of
British works. This second edition claims to contain some 12,000
additional entries, including - as the chief editor, Kathy Rooney
points out - a large group of new military and war-related terms
that reflect the times we live in, such as "embed", "warblog" and
"IED" ("Improvised Explosive Device"). It also includes cross-
reference entries for more than 900 common misspellings, such as
"seperate" and "definately". The over-emphatic flagging of obscene
terms remains from the first edition.
[Bloomsbury English Dictionary, Bloomsbury; Hardback, pp2166; ISBN
0747562431; published 11 October 2004; publisher's UK price
GBP30.00. There is a separate US edition under the title Encarta
Webster's Dictionary of the English Language; ISBN 1582345104;
US$50.00. In Australia, it is to be published on 1 November by Pan
Macmillan as the Macquarie International English Dictionary; ISBN
1405036346; A$79.95.]
CONCISE OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY This is the eleventh edition of
this venerable work, first edited by the Fowler brothers and
published in 1911. Some 2,000 new words have been added, including
"sky marshal", "designer baby", "m-commerce", "health tourism",
"middle youth", "weekend warrior", "flash mob", "bookcrossing" and
"pharma". The number of usage notes has risen to help users with
common confusions between pairs of words that sound alike (such as
"diffuse" versus "defuse", "pour" versus "pore", and "tow the line"
versus "toe the line"). A new feature is a series of etymological
notes that expand on the brief origins given for each word and show
relationships between words of common origin. Pronunciations are
given only for difficult words and are in IPA. The accompanying CD-
ROM comes separately, and is strangely (and surely uncommercially)
priced at more than the printed version, which compares badly with
the new Collins dictionary, noted below.
[Concise Oxford English Dictionary, OUP; hardback, pp1708; ISBN
0198608640; publisher's UK price GBP20.00. The CD-ROM costs
GBP25.00; MS Windows only; ISBN 0198610025.]
COLLINS DESKTOP ENGLISH DICTIONARY This is a new dictionary from
Collins, derived from their larger Collins English Dictionary,
which has long been in the first rank of British works. This one is
similar in size to the Concise Oxford but with rather more pages.
It has been set in a new font that is claimed to be very legible in
small sizes. It scores over the Concise Oxford in that it includes
a greater range of geographical and personal names: for example,
under the letter "I" it has (to pick four at random) "Ionesco" and
"Iona", "Inverness" and "Isherwood", as well as a table of Internet
country domains. Pronunciations are given for most words, again in
IPA. Unlike the Concise Oxford, it comes with a CD-ROM included;
however, it was a pain to install, since the setup program asked
for a serial number, which turned out to be on the disc I'd just
put in the drive; the number was printed in small print in an odd
font that forced me to ask for help in deciphering it. Both printed
book and CD-ROM have Web links associated with a small proportion
of entries - a somewhat arbitrary and eclectic selection.
[Collins English Dictionary, first edition; hardback, pp1911 plus
47 pages of appendices; ISBN 0007163347; publisher's UK price
GBP20.00.]
A DICTIONARY OF MEDIEVAL TERMS AND PHRASES One of the difficulties
with reading about medieval history is that a lot of the words then
in common use have either vanished from the language or changed
their meanings. Examples of the latter featured in the book include
"havoc", which was originally the cry at the end of a battle that
permitted an army to break order and plunder the defeated, and
"franchise", originally a legal immunity from prosecution, one that
was enjoyed especially by a feudal lord against acts of the king.
If you come across "dwale", you can discover here that it was a
potion used to render a patient insensible; "exennia" was the name
given to customary gifts of produce from a monastery's estates to
the archbishop at Christmas and Easter; "Nicolaitism" was the
practice of priests of being married or having a mistress; "socage"
was a type of land tenure. Many Latin terms are included from the
language of the church, law and government.
[Corèdon, Christopher and Williams, Ann, A Dictionary of Medieval
Terms and Phrases; D S Brewer, Cambridge; hardback, pp308; ISBN
1843840235; publisher's UK price GBP25.00.]
OXFORD RHYMING DICTIONARY Nobody has a problem rhyming "moon" with
"spoon" and "June", but what if your poetic inspiration has led you
to some word with less obvious partners? Clive Upton has produced a
brave and almost monumental attempt at helping you out, which is
based on phonetic pronunciations. First look in the index to find
if your word is among the 85,000 there. Then follow the numeric
links to see a list of rhymes. Now you can with confidence rhyme
"sybil" with "habile" or "brachiator" with "defoliator". Even those
notoriously hard words to rhyme "orange", "purple", "silver",
"bulb" and "aardvark" are here, though what are listed are near or
half rhymes in which the stressed vowel sounds don't match (among
his suggestions are respectively "scavenge", "Serpell", "revolver",
and "stilb"; "aardvark" defeats him). The pronunciations are those
of southern standard British English, so if your accent is very
different you might find that some pairings clang discordantly on
your inner ear.
[Upton, Clive, Oxford Rhyming Dictionary; OUP; hardback, pp659;
ISBN 0192801155; publisher's UK price GBP19.99.]
[To order any of these books online from Amazon or Barnes & Noble,
please visit http://quinion.com?DICT (a private online version of
this set of reviews) and follow the link you want. Buying in this
way gets World Wide Words a small commission at no extra cost to
you. See also Section C below.]
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