World Wide Words -- 09 Apr 05
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Apr 8 17:36:16 UTC 2005
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 435 Saturday 9 April 2005
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Sent each Saturday to 22,000+ 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: Vellicate.
3. Noted this week.
4. Q&A: Foot the bill.
5. Sic!
6. Q&A: Egregious.
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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GORP Last week's piece on the origin of this American term for a
high-energy snack carried by hikers produced many responses. Some
from Australia and New Zealand said they called it "scroggin", a
word that was created in New Zealand, probably among mountaineers
in South Island, but whose origin is even more mysterious than that
of "gorp", if that were possible. Amanda Cossham wrote that it is
said to be an acronym from Sultanas, Currants, Raisins, Orange
(peel), Ginger and Nuts - a neat parallel to the story about the
origin of "gorp" mentioned last week, but equally unlikely to be
true.
>From Australia, Geoff Moor sent a recipe for scroggin: "As a caver
(speleologist, spelunker or what have you), I used to prepare and
eat a mixture made up of dry oatmeal, cooking chocolate, nuts,
raisins and something called copha to hold it all together. This
mixture was heated in a saucepan to melt the chocolate and copha
and then poured into a tray and put in the fridge to set. It made a
great snack when underground, was easy to carry and tasted better
than proprietary brands of chocolate - particularly if you put a
dash of brandy in it before pouring into the tray!" [Copha, for
non-Australians, is solidified coconut oil - it's commonly used in
that country to make chocolate crackles.]
On the word "gorp", Steven Milne remembers another supposedly
acronymic origin from the 1960s: "From my earlier Boy Scout days
and canoe trips up the Gunflint trail on the Canadian border in
Minnesota, gorp was understood to stand for Granola, Oatmeal,
Raisins and Peanuts, and that's what we mixed up to eat. It wasn't
sold in any stores then."
The updated piece will soon be at http://quinion.com?GORP .
4. Weird Words: Vellicate
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To irritate.
Next Friday, 15 April, is the 250th anniversary of the publication
of Dr Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language. Scholars today
continue to regard it as a landmark in the study of the language,
an extraordinary achievement by one man. Well into the following
century, to speak of "the dictionary" was to refer to Johnson's
work. It was the first to systematically illustrate words through
citations; as the title page said, terms were "illustrated in their
different significations by examples from the best authors". But
modern critics will also point to its relatively small size, to an
idiosyncratic choice of headwords, and to definitions marred by
prejudice and caprice.
Among these are the famous examples quoted whenever the Good
Doctor's dictionary is mentioned: "EXCISE: a hateful tax levied
upon commodities", "DISTILLER: One who makes and sells pernicious
and inflammatory spirits" and "OATS: a grain which in England is
generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people".
And every modern successor can recite: "LEXICOGRAPHER: A maker of
dictionaries, a harmless drudge."
Some of his definitions must have taxed the vocabularies of even
the most literate of readers. "NETWORK: Any thing reticulated, or
decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the
intersections." To define a network as "reticulated" would cause
indrawn breath among modern lexicographers, since it meant
something "constructed or arranged like a net", so his definition
was circular; "decussate" meant to cross or intersect so as to form
an X shape; nowadays it's mainly a technical term in botany for
leaves arranged in pairs each at right angles to the next pair
above or below.
Another definition of like kind was "COUGH: A convulsion of the
lungs, vellicated by some sharp serosity." Few of us will know
"serosity", an old term for serum or the watery humours in the
body. Even fewer will know the verb "vellicate", though it was
employed in Dr Johnson's time as a medical term for some substance
or medicament that had a sharp or acrid effect, or anything that
nipped or pinched the body (its origin is the Latin "vellere", to
pull, pluck, or twitch). Edmund Burke used it a couple of years
after the publication of the dictionary in a work entitled A
Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime
and Beautiful: "There can be no doubt that bodies which are rough
and angular, rouse and vellicate the organs of feeling, causing a
sense of pain, which consists in the violent tension or contraction
of the muscular fibres."
3. Noted this week
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TUFTHUNTER It was surprising to read this word reportedly used by
the critic Robert Hughes this week, in a comment relating to Damien
Hirst's exhibition in New York. It means a toady or sycophant, and
I would have said it disappeared from the active language in about
1900. A tuft was at one time a slang term for a golden ornamental
tassel. It was worn on academic caps at the universities of Oxford
and Cambridge in place of the usual black one as a mark of status
by titled undergraduates, who were themselves called tufts. Wearing
the tuft went out of fashion in the 1870s.
DABBAWALLAH Among the 800 or so guests at the wedding reception of
Charles and Camilla this Saturday will be two dabbawallahs. These
men operate a sophisticated delivery system in Mumbai, in which
meals cooked at home during the morning are delivered to people's
workplaces in time for lunch. It seems Prince Charles was struck by
the efficiency of the operation during his tour of India in 2003.
The lunchboxes are named dabbas, and wallah (from a Hindi suffix "-
vala"), a doer, is common in India for a person engaged in some
occupation. The meal is often called tiffin, and dabbawallahs are
also known as tiffinwallahs. For more on the word tiffin, see
http://quinion.com?TIFF.
MACHOSEXUAL This should have been mentioned last week, as I found
it in the Observer for 27 March, but at the time the word hardly
seemed to have any currency. In the week since, this has changed
somewhat, with a number of Web sites picking up the term. As you
may have guessed, "machosexuals" are the opposite of metrosexuals
and are men who are "resistant to fashion and hearken to the call
of adventure with the same passion that metrosexuals adore grooming
products", as Robert Young Pelton put it in the original article.
4. Q&A
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Q. Where and when did the phrase "to foot the bill" originate?
[John Lanahan, Berlin]
A. It is an odd expression, isn't it? It's the kind of idiomatic
phrase that we may use regularly without any feeling that it's in
the least odd, until somebody such as yourself asks about it.
It comes from the mildly figurative sense of "foot" that refers to
the end or bottom of something, such as the foot of a ladder. In
this case, it is a verb that - for example - might once have meant
adding a postscript to the end of a letter. But our sense refers in
particular to the totting up of a column of figures, especially in
an account ledger, and adding the result to the bottom of the
column.
This was often used in the set phrase "foot up (to)", meaning to
count. The Times of 19 September 1867, for example, had this: "The
united debts of the colony foot up something like £50,000". And
this is from The Rover Boys on the Great Lakes, by Arthur M
Winfield, published in 1901: "The two counted the pile and found it
footed up to two hundred and forty dollars."
Our sense of settling one's account was acquired from the original
because adding up the items on an account was something that would
commonly be done at the point when one was paying one's bill. The
earliest example recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary dates
from 1819, in an American work with the title Evans's Pedestrious
Tour of Four Thousand Miles, which was republished in 1904 in a
book entitled Early Western Travels 1748-1846.
To start with, it was a decidedly colloquial usage, but as time
passed the associated senses fell out of use and "to foot the bill"
is now a fixed phrase, though still somewhat informal. It often now
has the implication of paying for something whose cost is
considered large or unreasonable.
5. Sic!
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A sign in a Hong Kong taxi, noticed by Martin Turner, suggests that
contortionists are common in that city: "A passenger should wear a
seat belt when occupying the front and rear seat."
The change of date for the wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla
Parker-Bowles because of the Pope's funeral caused last-minute
problems for the suppliers of souvenirs. Michael Grosvenor Myer
found a report in the Times on Tuesday that quoted a dealer on the
rush to buy such memorabilia with the old date: "In the last two-
and-a-half hours we've had about five hundred orders ... people
obviously want something unique."
Also postponed by one day because of the death of the Pope was the
long-expected announcement of the British general election, now to
be held on May 5 (or 05.05.05, a numerologically neat date). Tony
Blair made the obligatory visit to the Queen on Tuesday to formally
ask her to dissolve Parliament. Afterwards, outside Number 10, he
announced the election date to the waiting press and then said,
"From now until May 5, me and my colleagues will be out every day
in every part of Britain ...". In a perfect world, prime ministers
would have to pass a grammar test as well as an electoral one.
6. Q&A
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Q. Why is it that "egregious" means very foolish or blatant,
whereas the formal salutation "egregio" in Italian is clearly
intended as a compliment, as in 'Egregio Signore'? [William Wall]
A. It's the result of an odd shift of meaning in sixteenth-century
England. Originally, something or someone egregious was remarkable
in a good sense - distinguished, eminent or renowned - much as is
implied in the Italian form of address. Both languages have taken
it from Latin "egregius", which actually means "standing out from
the herd" ("greg" is an inflected form of "grex", a herd or flock).
But then - only 50 years after it first appeared in English - the
word started to be used jokingly in reference to somebody who stood
out from the crowd in a bad way, notoriously or outrageously. This
quickly became established and both senses ran in parallel for some
200 years (which must have been awkward for readers). Christopher
Marlowe employed it in the older sense in his Tamburlaine in 1590:
"Egregious viceroys of these eastern parts", while in 1611
Shakespeare has Posthumus describe himself in Cymbeline in the
newer condemnatory sense: "Egregious murderer".
By the nineteenth century our modern strongly negative meaning of
something outstandingly bad or shocking had triumphed.
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