World Wide Words -- 24 Dec 05
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Dec 23 15:45:31 UTC 2005
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 473 Saturday 24 December 2005
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Sent each Saturday to at least 32,000 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. Q&A: Walker!
3. Weird Words: Mesmerise.
4. Noted this week.
5. Q&A: Fossick.
6. Sic!
A. E-mail contact addresses.
B. Subscription information.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
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A prettily formatted version of this newsletter may be read
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1. Feedback, notes and comments
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SUBSCRIPTION NUMBERS Sharp-eyed scanners of this issue will have
noticed that the circulation numbers at the top have risen very
sharply. My estimate of those reading it via RSS turns out to have
been far too low, since one service alone, Bloglines, has more than
4,000 subscribers. Some more work established that a better figure
than my original crude guess of 1,000 would be 7,500!
CASH ON THE NAIL Following my piece last week many US subscribers
mentioned "cash on the barrelhead" or "cash on the barrel" as an
alternative. Unlike "cash on the nail", this may have had a literal
connection, either to the barrels used as informal counters in old-
time general stores or to merchants refusing to hand over a barrel
containing goods until it had been paid for. But it appears to be
surprisingly modern: the earliest example I can find is dated 1906.
Several writers made the point that the association of a nail with
perfection probably came about through the creation of a sculpture
or carving so perfect that running a fingernail over it couldn't
detect any unevenness.
SATURNALIA Several subscribers pointed out after last week's piece
on this word that the well-known ability of Australians to party
hard and long might be connected with "Australian" being an anagram
of "Saturnalia"!
MORE SHORING Following earlier items on "offshoring", "onshoring"
and similar words, Warren Blaisdell pointed out yet another one,
"farmshoring". This has been coined for the idea of outsourcing
computer programming work to small rural communities or smaller
cities in the US where the cost of living is low.
2. Q&A: Walker!
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Q. Near the end of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol Scrooge
tells a young boy to go and buy the prize turkey at a nearby
poulterers. The boy replies 'Walk-er!' What did he mean by that?
[Neil Makar]
A. He might instead have said something like, "Are you pulling my
leg, Guvner?" In standard English, he was incredulous, seriously in
doubt that Scrooge actually wanted him to go and buy that turkey.
That's why Scrooge had to reply, "No, no, I am in earnest."
The full expression was originally "Hookey Walker", which starts to
appear in the early nineteenth century (the OED records it from
1811). It was an exclamation of disbelief or of an opinion that
something was all humbug. In 1838, to take just one example, it is
in Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities, by Robert Smith Surtees:
"'Ladies and gentlemen - my walued friend, Mr Kitey Graves, has
announced that I will entertain the company with a song; though
nothing, I assure you - hem - could be farther from my idea - hem -
when my excellent friend asked me,' - 'Hookey Walker!' exclaimed
someone who had heard Jemmy declare the same thing half a dozen
times."
Charles MacKay wrote about "Hookey Walker" in his Memoirs of
Extraordinary Popular Delusions in 1841:
In the course of time the latter word alone became the
favourite, and was uttered with a peculiar drawl upon the
first syllable, and a sharp turn upon the last. If a lively
servant girl was importuned for a kiss by a fellow she did
not care about, she cocked her little nose, and cried
"Walker!" If a dustman asked his friend for the loan of a
shilling, and his friend was either unable or unwilling to
accommodate him, the probable answer he would receive was
"Walker!"
There are several stories about where it came from. MacKay says it
"derived from the chorus of a popular ballad". In the 1894 edition
of his Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, Dr E Cobham Brewer included
a note on it by John Bee, a pseudonym of John Badcock, who wrote
some dictionaries of sporting slang in the 1820s. Badcock said:
John Walker was an outdoor clerk at Longman, Clementi,
and Co.'s, Cheapside, and was noted for his eagle nose,
which gained him the nickname of Old Hookey. Walker's
office was to keep the workmen to their work, or report
them to the principals. Of course it was the interest
of the employés to throw discredit on Walker's reports,
and the poor old man was so badgered and ridiculed that
the firm found it politic to abolish the office, but
Hookey Walker still means a tale not to be trusted.
The Oxford English Dictionary is disparaging about these stories.
The second, despite its wealth of circumstantial detail, seems to
be a classic example of folk etymology. MacKay's view appears more
probable, except that - so far as I can discover - no such ballad
predating 1811 is known.
3. Weird Words: Mesmerise
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To capture someone's complete attention or transfix them.
This perpetuates the name of the eighteenth-century physician Franz
Mesmer of Vienna. He believed that a magnetic force flowed from the
stars to act on us all and that diseases were caused by blockages
stopping the magnetic fluid flowing through the body. He called the
force "animal magnetism", a term we still sometimes use for people
with strong personalities.
He tried acting on this force with magnets - he persuaded one of
his early patients, for example, to swallow iron filings and then
passed a magnet over her legs. Later - he'd moved to Paris by then
- he created his "baquet", a large tub filled with iron filings and
magnetised water that 20 people could sit round (we know that water
can't be magnetised, but he didn't). Projecting iron rods were
provided for the patients to grasp or touch to the affected spot.
In his salon, quiet music played and perfumes scented the air. Dr
Mesmer would enter, dressed in a long robe of lilac-coloured silk,
richly embroidered with gold flowers, holding a white magnetic rod
in his hand. He treated every patient at the baquet with gestures,
passes of his white rod, murmured words and searching looks.
Unfortunately, he became too popular, especially with the French
queen, Marie Antoinette. Two politically motivated enquiries in
1784, one headed by Dr Guillotin of head-chopping fame, the other
by Benjamin Franklin (the American ambassador to France at the
time), concluded it was all done by manipulating the imagination of
patients. In essence, Mesmer was, without realising it, putting his
patients into a trance and giving them post-hypnotic suggestions to
clear up psychosomatic ailments. All that stuff about iron bars and
animal magnetism was irrelevant.
Mesmer's reputation never recovered, but his name entered the
language and later became an alternative term for hypnotism.
4. Noted this week
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NON-CORESIDENTIAL Or, if you're sensitive about where you put your
hyphens, "non-co-residential". This turned up in a report this week
by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) in the UK. I'd not come
across it before but it turns out to be a well-known bit of jargon
in the demographics business. It refers to unmarried couples who
continue to live in separate residences even though they're in an
intimate relationship. A more colloquial equivalent is "living
apart together" or LAT. The most telling part of the ONS report is
that the number of LATs in Britain is now about the same as the
number of cohabiting couples.
WORD SIGNS OF THE TIMES If you send text messages on your mobile
phone, you probably use predictive texting; this calls up a list of
relevant words based on your initial keystrokes and so saves a lot
of typing. Phones with T9 predictive text from Tegic Communications
will soon get a dictionary upgrade. Tegic has announced a "top ten"
among the new words, including "lifehack" (a technique that makes
some aspect of one's life easier or more efficient); "mashup" (new
information created by combining data from two different sources);
"placeshift" (to redirect a TV signal so the viewer can watch a
show on a device other than his or her television); "playlistism"
(judging a person based on what songs are on the playlist of his or
her digital music player); and "sideload" (to transfer music or
other content to a cell phone using the cell phone provider's
network). Aren't these all indispensable?
[My thanks to Phil Glatz for this story.]
ORGANLEGGING The macabre and horrifying allegations this week that
the bones of the late Alistair Cooke were harvested by criminals
and sold for medical purposes reminds us that some people will do
anything for money and also supplies my personal word of the week.
There's nothing new in selling bodies - Burke and Hare were at it
two centuries ago, sometimes hastening a person's decease in the
process. And this new style body-snatching was foretold in SF by
Larry Niven in a series of short stories about a future time when
an acute shortage of spare parts for transplants led to a thriving
illegal trade in murder and organ harvesting. He coined the term
"organlegger" ("organ" + "bootlegger") for a person who did this,
which first appeared in his story Death By Ecstasy in 1969: "For
instant replacement of your ruined digestive system, for a young
healthy heart, for a whole liver when you'd ruined yours with
alcohol ... you had to go to an organlegger".
5. Q&A: Fossick.
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Q. The Antiques Roadshow recently came to Australia and one of the
appraisers asked a lady where she had found the particular item she
presented. She replied that she had found it while "fossicking
around in the attic". The word seemed to both amuse and astonish
the appraiser, who had clearly never heard it before. "Fossick"
does not appear in your Web site's lengthy compendium and I
wondered about its derivation. [Warren McLean, Australia]
A. "Fossick" is a characteristically Australian word (and, let us
not forget, of New Zealanders too). As you've discovered, it isn't
widely used in Britain, though there are so many Antipodean writers
working in the media over here that the word is by no means unknown
(my favourite paper, the Guardian, has included it several times
this year alone).
These days, it means to search about in an unsystematic way in the
hope of finding what you're looking for, or just searching in the
hope of turning up something interesting. My New Zealand dictionary
also says it can refer to pottering about more or less aimlessly (a
travel writer in the Guardian in October 2005 used it this way:
"And so back on board, for a last fossick through the Kattegat and
Skaggerak.") But the original sense, and one that's still used, is
to search gold-mine waste dumps or abandoned claims in the hope of
turning up a few overlooked nuggets. That dates from the late 1850s
in Australia and a few years later in New Zealand.
Its origin isn't altogether clear, but the experts point to Cornish
dialect. Cornishmen were well represented in early migrants to both
countries and were known everywhere for their expertise in hard-
rock mining. The English Dialect Dictionary a century ago included
the Cornish dialect "fossick" in the sense of "to obtain by asking;
to 'ferret out'", as well as "fursick" or "fossick", East Anglian
words for pottering over one's work, and "fussock about", a rather
more widely distributed dialect term for making a fuss or bustling
about in an irritating way.
The truth is lurking in there somewhere.
6. Sic!
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Jonathan McColl found a report in the Register of 14 December on an
anti-piracy swoop in the Netherlands; it said that "Eight people in
nine different locations were arrested on suspicion of committing
copyright infringement." Were they copying themselves, too?
An Australian subscriber, who wishes to remain anonymous because he
hopes to be accepted on the Australian version of Who Wants To Be A
Millionaire), was impressed by one of the programme's conditions:
"Contestants are provided with economy class travel to Melbourne,
along with any reasonably necessary ground transfers (if train or
flight), and accommodated overnight and provided with a continental
breakfast valued at up to $1,378 per person, depending on point of
departure."
The Essex Evening Gazette and Echo recently intrigued Eric Shackle,
far away in Australia, with this report of an unusual method of
delivery: "In the past year, Cleanaway, the company managing the
tip [dump], has built 1,000 wells and 65,000 metres of pipework
deep into the site. As many as 42,000 trees and shrubs have been
planted to create a nature-rich environment and 72,000 more are in
the pipeline."
Martin Turner sent an e-mail headed "blue on blue", whose meaning
became clear when he followed it up with a quote from an item in
the South China Morning Post on street violence relating to the WTO
conference: "About 100 police with riot shields quickly arrived and
forced the protesters to retreat before scuffling with officers in
another area."
Submitted by too many people to mention individually: "Medieval
alchemists identified Saturn with the element lead and astrologers
with slowness and gloom." Bob McGill was saddened to learn of "all
those morose astrologers fingered by alchemists". This came from
last week's issue of an obscure newsletter called World Wide Words.
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