World Wide Words -- 11 Sep 04

Fri Sep 10 18:38:12 UTC 2004

WORLD WIDE WORDS        ISSUE 409        Saturday 11 September 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: Ombre.
3. Sic!
4. Q&A: Break one's duck.
5. Noted this week.
A. Subscription commands.
B. E-mail contact addresses.

1. Feedback, notes and comments
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QUODLIBET  Thanks to Andrew Stiller for pointing me towards the New
Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, which has all the details
one could want of the way in which the word's meaning shifted from
serious philosophy to frivolous music. It did make that change in
Germany, as I thought, but the story is much more complicated than
I suggested. Not to take up space here, I've included the facts in
the version of the piece that should appear on the Web site later
today, at http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-quo1.htm .

2. Weird Words: Ombre  /'Qmb@(r)/ or /'QmbreI/
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A once-fashionable card game.

Every period has had its fashionable card games. From the middle of
the seventeenth century, everyone in English society wanted to play
"ombre". Its heyday began immediately after the restoration of the
monarchy in 1660, since Charles II and his courtiers brought it
back with them from France. However, ombre was originally Spanish,
and the name is a corruption of "hombre", man, because the person
leading the game was "the man" who had to be beaten. (The name was
usually pronounced like "omber", though some said it like "ombray"
to be nearer the original Spanish.) It was popular for generations
in Europe and is still played in some countries, so it has had many
other names as well. Ombre stayed in fashion into the eighteenth
century and was immortalised in Alexander Pope's poem The Rape of
the Lock of 1714, in which a game of ombre is described in detail.

It was a bidding game for three players using a standard pack of 52
cards but with the 8s, 9s, and 10s removed to simulate the 40-card
pack used in Spain. The rules were not too far from those of whist,
though more complicated and with some oddities (such as that all
the aces were trumps) and full of strange foreign terms: Codillio,
Repuesto, Voll, Gagno, Spadillio, Basto. The person who lost a hand
was said to be beasted and so an early English alternative name was
Beast.

One of its advantages was that it was a game that women could with
propriety play, though an anonymous letter writer to the Spectator
in August 1711, whom I assume to be male, said accusingly that it
often brought out the worst in them: "I have observed Ladies, who
in all other respects are Gentle, Good-humoured, and the very Pinks
of good Breeding; who as soon as the Ombre Table is called for, and
set down to their Business, are immediately Transmigrated into the
veriest Wasps in Nature." Or is this the plaint of a bad loser?

3. Sic!
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Terry Dowling comments: "When I was travelling around New Zealand
earlier this year, I ventured upon a camping goods store that
professes to be 'World famous in New Zealand'. That's good enough
for me. Also, a real estate agent in Gwelup (near Perth, Western
Australia) advertised a house as having 'floorless workmanship'. I
was just glad it wasn't a two-storey home. But if it were, I'm sure
there would be great views from upstares."

Ken Owens mentioned what may be a sign of the times: "In the open-
air main hall of the library on the campus of California State
University, Sacramento, there is posted the following sign, writ
large: ACCESIBLE ACCESS."

4. Q&A
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Q. In a report about Sheffield United football club appeared this:
'After seeing them break their duck, Warnock is confident that they
will emerge as genuine promotion contenders.' Where does "break
one's duck" come from and what does it mean? [Patrice Kyger]

A. It's not as cruel as it sounds. It's not the duck that's being
broken, but a duck's egg. These days the expression can be used in
almost any game that involves a score of some sort but originally -
back in Victorian times - it related solely to cricket. It seems to
have been English public-school slang of the 1850s to call a score
of nought against a player's name a "duck's egg" - presumably a
duck rather than a chicken because a duck's egg is bigger and more
prominent.

A player who had scored, who had moved off that accusing zero on
the scoreboard, was said to have "broken his duck's egg". It began
to appear in print in the early 1860s and soon people shortened it
just to "duck". The first known example of that form appeared in
the Daily News in August 1868: "You see ... that his fear of a
'duck' - as by a pardonable contraction from duck-egg a nought is
called in cricket-play - outweighs all other earthly
considerations." A batsman who was dismissed without scoring was
said to be "out for a duck".

It's only in comparatively recent times that the expression has
broadened to other games and to the performance of whole teams
rather than individual players. In the report you quote, it means
that the soccer team concerned has won a match, that their count of
wins has moved off zero, an extension that is so figurative as to
suggest it might be a misunderstanding of the original meaning.
Though the expression is known from all cricket-playing English-
speaking countries, it's only in British usage, I think, that you
can apply it generally to achieving some particular feat for the
first time.

Americans briefly knew of duck's eggs in the 1860s, but prefer now
to speak of "goose eggs" in much the same sense, a slang term that
is almost exactly contemporary with the cricket one. A related
expression also originally from cricket is "to lay an egg", so to
score a zero; that might be the source of the theatrical version
from the 1920s onwards that says an actor or a show is a failure or
a flop, but it might instead be from airman's slang of the First
World War, meaning to drop a bomb.

It's often said that the equivalent term "love" in tennis and some
other games for a zero score likewise derives from the shape of an
egg, in this case the French "l'oeuf". To forestall lots of e-
mails, I should say it's a folk etymology. There is no known such
link between the French word and the English one, and the term
"love" is recorded in English in 1742, in Hoyle's famous book on
the game of whist, a century before anybody used the egg analogy in
cricket, and longer still before lawn tennis was invented. It is
probable that "love" is from "playing for love", that is, for
pleasure, so that it doesn't matter if one hasn't (yet) scored.

5. Noted this week
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BRITALIAN  A blend of "British" and "Italian", this pops up from
time to time to describe in particular the reinterpretation of
classic Italian dishes like pizza and pasta for blander British
palates. This week it was the turn of Antonio Carluccio, who runs a
restaurant chain in London, to disparage supermarket offerings of
Italian foodstuffs as "a huge crime". His case was helped by a
quote in the Guardian from the executive chef of Sainsburys, who
said the firm tried to make their products "a bit authentic".

GLASS CLIFF  This expression was heard at the annual meeting of the
British Association for the Advancement of Science in Exeter this
week. It was coined by Dr Michelle Ryan and Professor Alex Haslam,
psychologists at Exeter University, in a study of the results of
promoting women to senior positions in business. Their conclusion
is that women who have broken through the traditional glass ceiling
often stand instead on the edge of a glass cliff, because female
executives are more likely than male counterparts to be promoted
into risky, difficult jobs where the chances of failure are high.
It's a strange metaphor, an unsatisfactory extension of the older
term that doesn't evoke any sensible image, and one which seems
unlikely to succeed.

IT'S RATHER LIKE SAYING TOILET  That comment was made on Wednesday
by the Tory MP Nicholas Soames to the Independent newspaper about a
hoax letter circulated in his name. It contained the sentence "The
gifts were most generous and I attach a letter of thanks." Soames
said: "There's the evidence it's a hoax. I've never in my life used
the word 'gift'. It's a 'present' and everyone associated with me
knows that." Words like "toilet" and "gift" are not used by upper-
class people like Nicholas Soames, for whom Nancy Mitford's class-
derived U and non-U language really exists, and who regard "gift"
in particular as an upstart Americanism. George Bernard Shaw wrote
in the introduction to Pygmalion in 1916 that it's impossible for
an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other
Englishman despise him. In some circles, it's still true.

PLASTIC SNOW  An article in the New Scientist this week about the
pollution caused by disposable plastic bags gave several names for
the visual pollution of bags that have been blown by the wind and
caught in trees. The Irish term for this white flapping plastic is
"witches' knickers", while in China it's "white pollution" and in
South Africa "the national flower". We don't seem to have a name
for it in the UK, though we do use the Irish one on occasion. What
names, if any, are common in other countries?

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