World Wide Words -- 23 Apr 05
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Apr 22 17:41:31 UTC 2005
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 437 Saturday 23 April 2005
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Sent each Saturday to 23,000+ 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. Turns of Phrase: Man date.
3. Sic!
4. Weird Words: Coxcomb.
5. Recently noted.
6. Q&A: Pollyanna.
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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HOOPLEHEAD Following last week's Q&A piece on this term, a number
of subscribers more versed in American geography than I am tell me
that a town named Hoople exists in North Dakota. Might there be a
connection with the insulting slang term used in the television
series Deadwood? Well, it's a long way away and it's a tiny place
even today. If there is a linguistic connection, it's unknown to
etymological knowledge, which means it must also be unknown to the
writers of the series. Unless, as I said in last week's issue, they
have knowledge of which scholarship is ignorant. My enquiry to the
producer remaining unanswered, we can only surmise. If anybody has
a direct line to David Milch, do get him to contact me. Earnest
enquirers wish to know.
IN OTHER WORDS By an intriguing coincidence, William Safire also
featured Christopher Moore's book last weekend, in his On Language
column in the New York Times. In that article, Safire invented the
term "vocabugap" to describe "situations in our lives for which we
have no English word and have to turn to a foreign language for
lexical expansion".
BOWDLERISE James Barrett responded to last week's item on this
word by alerting me to the fact that the original inspiration and
much of the early work for Thomas Bowdler's Family Shakespeare
actually came from his sister Henrietta (also called Harriet), who
published expurgated versions of 20 of the plays anonymously in
1807 under the same title.
THE F-WORD You may like to be forewarned that next week's issue
contains a piece about the rudest word in the language. To try to
prevent mail systems worldwide bouncing that issue as obscene, the
word will not be printed in full, but if the newsletter doesn't
arrive, its implied presence may be the reason. If you don't get
it, you can read it online. Go to http://quinion.com?LIST (which is
an abbreviated link to the LISTSERV archives of this newsletter)
and click on the link for "April 2005, week 5". The RSS version of
the newsletter, of course, suffers from no such potential
censorship.
2. Turns of Phrase: Man date
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The New York Times seems to have started something with an article
by Jennifer Lee in its issue of 10 April under the headline "The
Man Date; What do you call two straight men having dinner?" The
article discussed the issue that two male friends enjoying certain
kinds of public activity together - going for a walk, visiting a
museum, or having a meal - are automatically assumed by onlookers
to be gay if there is no obvious business- or sports-related reason
for them to be together. The fear of being thought gay, the article
suggested, made it difficult for men to create the kind of one-on-
one close friendships that women take for granted. The story has
been picked up by papers worldwide as a peg for discussing these
issues and relating them to metrosexuality (changing male views on
fashion and grooming, see http://quinion.com?XA), social attitudes,
and other matters. Whether Ms Lee's invention of "man date" for a
non-sexual male assignation is going to become a permanent part of
the language is much too early to say. My back hairs say it isn't.
* From University Wire, 13 Apr. 2005: Like the now passé
"metrosexual," man date is sure to cause some consternation and
self-consciousness among males everywhere. Social behaviors once
considered mundane will be subjected to a man-date litmus test.
Watching a football game with another man will be kosher; watching
a foreign film will be a man date. Cooking outdoors on a grill will
be normal masculine socializing; cooking indoors on a range will be
a man date. Of course, Lee and The New York Times aren't trying to
promote homophobia by bringing "man date" into the national
vocabulary, but one can see little sociological use in the term
other than exacerbating homosexual panic.
* From the Observer, 17 Apr. 2005: Sideways, the recent highly
acclaimed film from Alexander Payne, is perhaps the best example of
the Man Date movie. Two buddies, Jack and Miles, hit the road for a
week of wine tasting and fine dining before Jack's wedding. These
are average guys, but are unabashed about sharing a good bottle of
wine over dinner and talking about their feelings.
3. Sic!
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Peter Noot found a headline in the Indianapolis Star on April 16:
"Part whale, part dolphin has a girl in captivity." He hopes that
the creature lets her go soon. Seriously, the animal concerned,
which has been dubbed a wholphin, a cross between a killer whale
and a bottlenose dolphin, gave birth to a female calf. Zoological
note: a killer whale (an orca) is actually a species of dolphin, so
the miscegenation is not as outlandish as it seems.
On opening the April issue of a British home-interest magazine,
Rooms Rooms Rooms, Annamaria Trusso found herself reading the
startling information that "Once a tired country house hotel, Lady
Henrietta Spencer-Churchill has designed a wonderful new wing." No
doubt furnished with a chair for a lady with Queen Anne legs.
Janet Brennan noted a photograph in the New Zealand Herald
yesterday, 22 April, which shows a sandwich board with "Bathroom &
Kitchen Factory Shop" on the top. Underneath, written in red ink on
a whiteboard, is the following: "CHINA TOILET SWEETS from $199.00.
BASIN AND PEDISTAL from $199. TAPWARE from $59." ("Tapware" is new
to me, but is a common collective term in the trade in Australia
and New Zealand, analogous to "sanitaryware" and "kitchenware".)
4. Weird Words: Coxcomb
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A vain and conceited man; a dandy.
Coxcomb was once spelled "cockscomb". The cock's comb in question
was the traditional jester's cap, which had a serrated red crest
rather like the one on a rooster. A "cockscomb" was therefore a
jester or fool, in the professional sense of that last word.
Around the middle of the sixteenth century, the word became a term
for the head. Charles Kingsley used it three centuries later in his
Westward Ho!, though it was by then essentially obsolete: "That
slate descended on the bald coxcomb of Sir Vindex Brimblecombe,
with so shrewd a blow that slate and pate cracked at the same
instant, and the poor pedagogue dropped to the floor, and lay for
dead."
At about the same period (the 1570s), it came to mean a simpleton
or fool, then a foolish, conceited, showy, vain person, "a fop; a
superficial pretender to knowledge or accomplishments", as Samuel
Johnson defined the type in his Dictionary. Through the following
two centuries it was a common term of disparagement for a man whose
exterior display of fashion disguised the superficiality within. It
was often qualified by adjectives such as "impertinent", "arrant",
and "egregious" (in the negative sense).
George Thompson of New York University found a description in the
Commercial Advertiser of June 1800 which suggested that the type
flourished in America as well in as Britain, though the style was
different: "Receipt to make a New-York COXCOMB. Take a creature of
any age, from 12 to 21, cut off its hair close to its head,
excepting a little bit resembling a small kitten's tail, dress it
in large white trowsers, and high top bootees and putting a lighted
segar [cigar] in its mouth, set it a-walking among the ladies at
Corres' gardens. The more smoke it puffs in the faces of the
company the better."
So what started out as a name for a professional comic turned into
one for a figure of fun.
5. Noted this week
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MURSE American and British newspapers have found some satirical
mileage in this word recently. It's a humorous portmanteau name
("male" + "purse") for a manbag, another name for it that has been
around for some years. Confusingly, "murse" has also been used
slangily for a male nurse. Try not to confuse the two. For the
cognoscente of male fashion, there are also the older "manties"
(male panties) as well as "moncho", which a writer in the Guardian
on 16 April described as the male equivalent of the poncho. Odd
that, considering that in South America the poncho can be male
attire anyway ...
THO FAN The computer game Jade Empire, out this week, features an
invented language by this name (said as /'T at Ufan/ or THOH-fan). It
was created by Wolf Wikeley, a graduate linguist at the University
of Alberta, to make a tongue that sounded authentically Asian but
didn't tie the game to a specific country or to historical events.
This has become a trend among creative endeavours: Sydney Pollack's
thriller The Interpreter, now on general release, includes a fake
African language called Ku. It brings to mind Klingon, created by
Mark Okrand for a Star Trek film in 1984 and which has since taken
on a continuing independent life. The granddaddy of such inventions
in fiction must surely be Tolkien's Elvish tongues.
6. Q&A:
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Q. I live near Philadelphia in Pennsylvania. We used "pollyanna"
for an exchange of gifts as if everyone knew it (I first heard the
term in the Girl Scouts as a young girl). I've not been able to
find out anything about it. Have you heard of this usage of
pollyanna? [Lori Manning-Bolis]
A. I haven't - it's not known in the UK. As you say, it's not in
most dictionaries. However, it is in the Dictionary of American
Regional English (DARE), which confirms that it is now mainly heard
in and around Pennsylvania and devotes almost a column to
quotations that explain how it's used.
It's a way to give gifts, as you say, to other members of a group,
such as fellow workers in an office, other members of a club, or
within a large family. The formal term at one time was "Pollyanna
gift exchange", which turns up a lot in newspapers from about 1947
on, but now seems to be virtually extinct. The idea is to limit
present giving by ensuring that each person gives one gift to one
other person in the group; often a ceiling is placed on the amount
that can be spent on each gift. In some cases, each person provides
a gift already wrapped so nobody knows what it is; the potential
recipients draw lots to decide who gets which gift. Or people draw
lots to determine who buys a gift for whom; sometimes recipients
are asked to guess who bought it for them. Both the giver and the
receiver may be called the pollyanna. Though the term isn't known
in Britain, the idea behind it is, as I assume it is elsewhere.
DARE has a first example from 1985, but with modern electronic data
files it's easy to take that back a long way. This, for example,
appeared in the Nebraska State Journal in July 1922: "A group of
Pollyannas met Friday morning from 10 to 1 o'clock at the home of
Ruth Barnard for a shower in honor of Miss Ola Kallenberger who is
soon to become the bride of Charles Spacht. Two hours were spent
pleasantly with games, during which Miss Kallenberger was showered
with a large assortment of towels, holders and recipes."
Further delving in old newspapers in various American states turns
up lots of references to Pollyanna clubs or societies from 1916
onwards, always associated with churches. Their function seems from
context to have been social and entertaining. A search on Google
shows that such clubs still exist in some places - perhaps some
current or recent member knows about their early history.
I can find nothing that says why they were called that, though the
lack of references before 1916 suggests they were named after the
Pollyanna stories of Eleanor Hodgman Porter - the first one, called
"Pollyanna", was published in 1913. Presumably the reference is to
the "glad game" that Pollyanna teaches her town, in which people
find cause for happiness in the most disastrous situations. The
servant Nancy explains it: "It's a game Miss Pollyanna's father
learned her ter play. She got a pair of crutches once in a
missionary barrel when she was wantin' a doll; an' she cried, of
course, like any child would. It seems 'twas then her father told
her that there wasn't ever anythin' but what there was somethin'
about it that you could be glad about; an' that she could be glad
about them crutches." The reason she should feel glad in this case,
her father tells her, is that she doesn't need them.
This gift-giving sense seems to be quite separate from the more
usual meaning of Pollyanna, also from the books: an excessively
cheerful or optimistic person, a term often used derisively for one
who achieves happiness through self-delusion.
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