World Wide Words -- 20 Aug 05
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Aug 19 17:35:03 UTC 2005
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 455 Saturday 20 August 2005
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Sent each Saturday to at least 25,000 subscribers by e-mail and RSS
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: Painient.
3. Over to you.
4. Weird Words: Ishkabibble.
5. Recently noted.
6. Q&A: Troubleshoot.
7. Sic!
A. E-mail contact addresses.
B. Subscription information.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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DUCT TAPE Following my piece last week, many subscribers mentioned
gaffer tape, which is a similar material used on television and
film sets. This gets its name from the chief electrician, the
gaffer, because one of its main uses is to hold cables in place,
though it has many others. In general, a gaffer is the boss of a
crew, a foreman or similar person, a name which derives from an
English term of respect for an old man that's most likely a
contraction of "godfather". "Gaffer tape" is of similar age to
"duct tape", being first recorded in the 1970s.
2. Turns of Phrase: Painient
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This and the related words painism and painience are creations of
Dr Richard Ryder, a British psychologist and ethicist, a retired
professor and former chairman of the RSPCA. He has a long-standing
concern for animal rights - he coined "speciesism" in the 1970s to
refer to what he called in 1975 "the widespread discrimination that
is practised by man against other species". He made "painient" and
"painience" from "pain" by analogy with "sentient" and "sentience",
so that "painient" means being able to feel pain, while "painience"
is the quality or state of being painient. "Painism" is his term
for the moral theory that requires us to reduce the pain of others
who suffer the most, especially that of individuals. All three
words have been known since the middle 1990s, though they remain
rare. "Painism" gained attention in 2001 through his book Painism:
A Modern Morality; in it he argues that anything that can feel pain
can suffer and so must have rights, specifically in the case of
animals to be protected from human use and abuse. He wrote recently
in a newspaper article: "Our concern for the pain and distress of
others should be extended to any 'painient' being regardless of his
or her sex, class, race, religion, nationality or species. Indeed,
if aliens from outer space turn out to be painient, or if we ever
manufacture machines who are painient, then we must widen the moral
circle to include them."
3. Over to you
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Last week, I forwarded a query from Rachel Becker about the meaning
and background of a chant she had learnt in New Zealand as a child:
"First the worst, second the best, third the golden eagle". Lots of
subscribers responded. Thank you all. It turns out that the chant
is known in many forms in most English-speaking countries.
There's a detailed article about specifically New Zealand versions
at http://www.vuw.ac.nz/lals/research/Playground/docs/lip21.pdf .
It is based on a survey of local schools, part of the New Zealand
Playground Language Project run by Laurie and Winifred Bauer at
Wellington university. The article shows that the first two lines
were the same almost everywhere: "First the worst, second the
best". The next line was more variable, but "third the golden
eagle" was the most common.
Almost no clues to the reason for the golden eagle surfaced, though
Paul Wiggins commented that "In my New Zealand childhood we chanted
'An eagle, an eagle, a golden, golden eagle' purely for the joy of
the scan. The phrase itself was meaningless." Might this have been
from a once-popular song?
Several British subscribers also recalled this version from their
youth. Carmel Swann passed on a report from her daughter that it's
still current in Sussex among young children. But the more common
variety in Britain seems to be "First the worst, second the best,
third the one with the hairy chest". Two Australians recalled
"First the worst, second the best, third the golden princess" and
other third lines remembered by subscribers include "third the
dirty donkey", "third the silver egg cup", "third the dirty rascal"
and "third the lucky last". Some versions go on at greater length:
six is not uncommon and a few are even longer.
Douglas Wilson found the form "First the worst, second the same,
last the best in all the game" in an online newspaper archive in
the US dated 1903 and a partial version on a US literature database
from 1896. Candi Thomas recalled a similar one from Pennsylvania in
the late 1980s: "First the worst, second the best, third the best
of all the rest." A variety of Rachel Becker's form has certainly
also been known in the US: from his childhood in Michigan, Greg
Fleming reports: "First the worst, second the best, third the royal
princess, then the king, then the queen, then the rotten jelly
bean."
The reasoning behind the chant is clearly enough to take the glory
away from the winner, to bring down someone who was successful and
give solace to the losers. But where it comes from is a mystery and
comments from subscribers raise more questions than they answer -
not an unusual event. Since many subscribers in Britain know of it,
it's surprising that Iona and Peter Opie don't mention it in their
book, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren of 1959. Might the
chant be more recent?
It looks as though all the chants have a common origin, with local
variations that have presumably grown up over time. But their wide
geographical spread suggests the origin is either something fairly
recent known in every country, such as a television series, or is
old enough to have spread from one place via emigration.
As so often, we are now much better informed, but no wiser.
4. Weird Words: Ishkabibble
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A dismissive statement.
This slang expression came into existence in the USA quite suddenly
around 1913 with the ostensible meaning "I should worry!", which
means, of course, "Don't worry!" or "Who cares?". It had quite a
vogue for a decade or two and was the name of a character played by
Merwyn Bogue on a 1930s radio show called Kay Kyser's Kollege of
Musical Knowledge (they don't make titles like that any more).
Those of us who sift the detritus of language for fun and profit
are intrigued by it. It looks and sounds Yiddish and the phrases
"nish gefidlt", "nicht gefiedelt", and "ich gebliebte" have all
been suggested as sources. The idea of a Jewish connection was
reinforced in 1914 when Harry Hershfield began his cartoon strip
Abie the Agent in Hearst newspapers, which featured the salesman
Abraham ("Abie") Kabibble.
Many people at the time certainly thought it was Yiddish, and it's
notable that some Anglicised it to "I should bibble" or "we should
bibble". But it was equally firmly said by contemporaries that no
Yiddish connection existed at all. And the slang term "bibble" is
recorded a few years earlier, albeit with the meaning of nonsense
talk. It's a shortened form of "bibble-babble", a reduplication of
"babble", which goes right back to the sixteenth century and turns
up in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night: "Endeavour thy selfe to sleepe,
and leave thy vain bibble babble."
Might "ish-ge-bibble" - as it was often written in the early days -
have been a fake Yiddishism? It could have been based on German
"ich" for "I" (often said by natives as "ish"), the "ge" prefix for
the past participles of German verbs, and "bibble". In the Word
Detective, Ewan Morris says a popular song in 1913 by Sam Lewis was
called "Isch Gabibble" and that this might have been the immediate
source for the sudden popularity of the term. Did Sam Lewis invent
it in this way? It would be nice to know.
5. Recently noted
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METROTHERAPY Think "metro" in the sense of a commuter rail line. A
man running a stress management clinic in London has just published
a CD with this title to help people meditate on the way to work and
so reduce the anxiety associated with travelling on crowded trains
and the stress of the workplace once you arrive.
SHIASTAN Stresses between the religious and ethnic communities in
Iraq over the proposed constitution have led commentators to invent
this word for the Shia-dominated south of the country, as well as
Sunnistan for the Sunni areas of the country's centre, in addition
to the existing Kurdistan for the Kurdish areas of the north. All
include the ending "-stan" that means place or home in Persian and
other languages.
6. Q&A
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Q. Could you please, please, please, sir, shed some light on a
question that plagues my colleagues and me in the information
technology world? What in the world is the correct past tense of
"to troubleshoot"? Just how did this vexing and vaguely silly verb
"troubleshoot" come about, anyway, and get slapped all over my
noble profession and others? Did someone once go around shooting
everyone who caused them trouble, inspiring others to at least
verbally follow their example? [Nicholas Taylor, Raleigh, North
Carolina]
A. To judge from Google, "troubleshot" is by a factor of about 3:1
more common than the alternative of "troubleshooted". That's very
reasonable; the usual rule is that in a compound the past tense
follows that of the base verb, here "shoot". The "troubleshooted"
version arises from people taking the verb as being a new regular
weak verb.
("Weak" here is just grammarians' jargon for a verb that forms its
past tense by adding "-ed" or "-t" to the stem, as opposed to a
strong verb, which changes the vowel inside the stem, as "drive"
changes to "drove" or "break" to "broke". Strong verbs, of which
there are only about 70 in the language today, are leftovers from
massive changes in structure in the Middle English period. They
survived because they are common. New verbs are always weak.)
The oldest form in the records is "trouble-shooter" from the start
of the twentieth century (my earliest example, from a newspaper in
Iowa, is from August 1904: "A. L. Pels, 'trouble shooter' for the
Bell Telephone Co., visited at Geo. Dewell's the past week.") It
seems to have been jargon of the early telephone business.
It's based on a rather older American slang sense of "shoot", to
discard or get rid of. An example from 1884 in the Oxford English
Dictionary is: "If I had all the cash he takes in to-night, I'd buy
an island and shoot the machine business." It often turned up as
"shoot that", a mild imprecation, especially as "shoot that hat!"
(It might be from sending rubbish down a chute or shoot or putting
something out of its misery with a well-aimed gunshot. But if you
think it might instead be from a euphemistic alternative to "shit",
as "shoot" is still used today, you may well be on the right track,
though there's no evidence to prove it.)
The next step might have been to form the verb "to shoot trouble"
in the sense of disposing of, dealing with or generally getting rid
of trouble. Oddly, the records don't show this form turning up
until recently as a humorous reversal of "troubleshoot". The first
recorded form after "trouble-shooter" is "trouble-shooting" for the
process. The verb "to troubleshoot" doesn't appear until the late
1930s, which means it may have been a back-formation from "trouble-
shooter", the "-er" ending suggesting to people that there ought to
be a verb to go along with it.
7. Sic!
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A page on the MIT site about the Institute's 16th president opens
"Susan Hockfield's daughter, Elizabeth, was 6 when she was dean of
the graduate school at Yale." This case of extreme precocity was
noted by Paul Hoffman.
A headline in the New York Times' online edition dated 13 August:
"GI's Deployed in Iraq Desert With Lots of American Stuff." Gabriel
Lanyi thinks they ought to be made to give it back.
A fascinating feature of the Net is that mangled expressions often
find their way into print. Michael McKernan found many Google hits
for this splendid example: "lack toast and tolerant". As in "My
sister can't eat cheese or ice cream because she's lack toast and
tolerant."
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