World Wide Words -- 02 Jul 05
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jul 1 18:05:24 UTC 2005
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 447 Saturday 2 July 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: Wikitorial.
3. Weird Words: Turducken.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: Over the moon.
6. 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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SIC! This section quietly disappeared from the newsletter at the
end of May because I felt it had become rather tired. Many requests
have come asking me to reinstate it, among them one from Morgiana
Halley: "I feel somewhat aggrieved that my weekly chuckle is denied
me and I am being forced to remain serious and scholarly." Heaven
forfend. So it returns this week. Your witty notings of weird ways
with language are as welcome as before, provided they are new and
you can give me full details of where they appeared.
SIMOLEON Many people suggested that the origin of the eighteenth-
century slang term "simon" for sixpence may have come from the old
term "simony" for the (by then) deeply deprecated practice of the
buying or selling of ecclesiastical privileges, for example pardons
or benefices. (The latter term comes from the New Testament story
of the sorcerer Simon Magus who tried to buy spiritual knowledge
from the apostles.) So far as I know there's no evidence, nor is
there likely to be with an old slang term, but it is plausible.
2. Turns of Phrase: Wikitorial
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This word hit public attention when the Los Angeles Times wrote on
13 June: "Watch next week for the introduction of 'wikitorials' -
an online feature that will empower you to rewrite Los Angeles
Times editorials." The experiment was based on the same software
that is behind the Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia created by its
readers in a process called open editing. At its best this produces
excellent results but all too often shows its contributors' biases
and limited knowledge. These and similar terms are based on the
Hawaiian word "wiki", meaning quick. The LA Times experiment -
based around an editorial about the Iraq war - proved disastrous.
Responses to it degenerated from sensible revisions into a sort of
electronic mob rampage containing pornography and racial abuse and
had to be pulled within 48 hours. Despite this, the paper plans to
try again, with better controls, and it is likely that the word has
a future.
* From AP Worldstream, 20 June 2005: The Wikitorial is one of
several changes to the paper's editorial page being made under the
leadership of Kinsley, the political commentator and columnist who
founded the online magazine Slate in 1996 and took over the Times'
opinion pages a year ago.
* From The Observer, 26 June 2005: The LA Times's approach to its
wikitorial was timid and patronising at the same time, and that was
the problem. The tiger will be stroked, but when it smells weakness
it bites.
3. Weird Words: Turducken
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A culinary construction.
Many of us have heard of this gastronomic excess, which in the USA
is associated with Thanksgiving and to a lesser extent with July 4.
A chicken is stuffed inside a duck inside a turkey - the inner two
deboned first and themselves stuffed with such delights as sausage,
cornbread, or oyster. A culinary chimera, it might be thought to
stand on the same level of gustatory invention as the Glaswegian
deep-fried Mars bar, though those who have tried it say it's quite
tasty. Some chefs draw away in horror from it, citing the excessive
amounts of skin and fat and the high risk of bacterial problems
because it is so hard to ensure that all three birds are properly
cooked through. If this creation were not enough, a news article
from 1997 said that a store in Louisiana was experimenting with a
"pigturducken", though nothing has been heard of it since. And a
rumour has reached me via the Internet that South Africans have
gone one better, producing an osturducken, in which the whole
concoction is stuffed inside an ostrich. However, this may possibly
be an urban legend, because the only reports come from somebody who
has heard of it from somebody else.
4. Recently noted
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COUCH POTATO Taking it at face value, you can't beat the recent
agitation by the British Potato Council as an example of the way
that people misunderstand the nature of language and the function
of dictionaries. On return from holiday I found that one story of
last week was the protest by potato farmers against the inclusion
of this term in the Oxford English Dictionary. They are reported as
having demonstrated both in Oxford and outside Parliament. "This
derogatory phrase misrepresents potatoes - an inherently healthy
food," one farmer is quoted as saying. If they were to demonstrate
anywhere, it ought to be outside the US Embassy, since the term is
an upstart Americanism, dating from 1979. John Simpson, the editor
in chief of the OED, commented: "When people blame words they are
actually blaming the society that uses them. I sympathise with
them. It's not much fun being called Simpson after the birth of
Bart and Homer." My suspicious mind says the supposed protest was
really a neat PR wheeze for promoting the humble spud. I await the
objections from brassica growers to "cauliflower ear".
WHOLE NINE YARDS Controversy has raged - to be strictly accurate,
smouldered a little in a few isolated locations - about the origin
of this American phrase meaning "everything", "the whole lot". The
stories are legion about its origin, the most popular pointing to
the length of ammunition belts in World War Two fighters. (Don't
send me any more supposed explanations; I have about thirty already
and don't need to add to their number. You will find others in my
piece about the expression at http://quinion.com?WNYS.) Now the
indefatigable New York researcher Barry Popik may have solved the
mystery. It has been known for some time that all the early written
instances, dating from the 1960s and early 1970s, pointed to an
origin among US pilots during the Vietnam War. Mr Popik has now
heard from an early user of the phrase, the US Navy pilot Captain
Richard Stratton, one of the best known prisoners of war in North
Vietnam. He has clear memories of having heard it at the Navy Air
Station in Pensacola, Florida, in July 1955, in reference to a
risqué story about the fictional Andrew MacTavish and his courtship
with Mary Margaret MacDuff (which you will find on Barry Popik's
site, linked through http://quinion.com?WNPK). We must be cautious,
since this is anecdotal evidence, and memory can be very fallible,
especially that far back. But, if true, the origin lies in a mildly
dirty joke, which I can't help finding incongruous in view of all
the earnest attempts that have been made at explaining it in such
terms as the length of an Indian sari or the capacity of a ready-
mixed cement truck.
FRICK AND FRACK A message arrived last week from Michael Mauch,
the son of Hans Mauch, Frack in the famous Swiss skating duo of
this name, which has become an American colloquial term for any
closely associated couple. He explained: "Frick took his name from
a small village in Switzerland; Frack is a Swiss-German word for a
frock coat, which my father used to wear in the early days of their
skating act. They put the words together as a typical Swiss joke."
[See http://quinion.com?FRCK for the full story.]
5. Q&A
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Q. Following up your item on "sky-blue pink" (the piece can be read
at http://quinion.com?SBPK), my grandmother used to use a phrase of
similar meaning, "sandy-grey russet". Ever heard of it? She was
born in 1891 in Sydney, Australia, but her parents were Cornish and
lived in New Zealand en route to Australia. Nancy Keesing, in Lily
on the Dustbin, a collection of Australian women's and family
slang, speaks of "dandy grey russet", "the colour of a field
mouse's tit". She attributes it to "a family of Cornish and
Scottish descent who came to Australia from New Zealand".
Coincidence? [Gary Whale, Australia]
A. Probably not. Your mother's version isn't recorded (though I've
found it online as the title of a song, also from Australia), so
it's most likely a mishearing of the other form you noted, "dandy
grey russet", an odd phrase but one with an interesting history.
It would have been known to settlers because it was recorded in
Britain before 1800. It's in Captain Francis Grose's Dictionary of
the Vulgar Tongue of 1811: "Dandy grey russet. A dirty brown. His
coat's dandy grey russet, the colour of the Devil's nutting bag."
It's also in a description written by the Reverend Jacob Bailey in
1799 of his escape in poverty to Halifax, Nova Scotia, during the
American Revolution in 1779.
The phrase was known in various English dialects during the 1800s,
though neither Cornwall nor Scotland are mentioned in the standard
reference books. It's listed in an East Anglian glossary in 1825
and, in the form "dandy-goo-russet", in Alfred Heneage Cocks'
Records of Buckinghamshire at the end of the century. He says it
meant "of nondescript colour, of no colour in particular". As
"dandy-go-russet", it's in the English Dialect Dictionary of the
same period, defined as "articles of clothing; old, worn-out,
faded, rusty-coloured".
A more recent appearance was in a recitation performed in the 1920s
by the surreal music-hall comedian Billy Bennett (he billed himself
as "almost a gentleman" and his stage costume included a large
moustache and down-at-heel tails):
I brought home a monkey from there for my girl
Of attraction she soon was the centre
For the monkey was dandy-grey-russet one end
And the other end ... pink and magenta.
We now think of "russet" as meaning a reddish-brown colour, but its
first sense was of a coarse homespun woollen material that peasants
and country people used for their clothing. This was often enough
brownish in hue that its name was borrowed for the colour in the
sixteenth century. However, the cloth was as often grey as brown
and "grey russet" referred to that specifically. The phrase is at
least as old as the poem Piers Plowman of 1377: "a goune of a graye
russet". Various books in the nineteenth century record the phrase.
George Northall's A Warwickshire Word-Book of 1896 says it was "a
coarse kind of grey, woollen cloth".
How "dandy" came to be attached to it isn't at all clear, since a
dandy wouldn't be seen dead in a homespun material. Perhaps it was
said to be so because it so obviously wasn't, especially when old
and faded, so it might have been a deliberate or ironic inversion.
The "dandy-go-russet" form may have come about because the original
expression had been misunderstood to mean clothes that had once
been dandy but had gone rusty with time and wear.
6. Sic!
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"P&O are running a big poster campaign in Underground stations in
London," e-mails John Saffer, noting that the advertisements are
indeed huge, "promoting the benefits of their cross-Channel ferry
service over the Channel Tunnel. While extolling the virtues of
their service and amenities on board, the poster says 'you can pour
over the menu in Langan's Brasserie'. Maybe they're expecting some
very rough seas on these crossings."
John Orford encountered a disquieting headline on Sportinglife.com:
REDKNAPP MAY TURN TO STONE. A Gorgonesque fate, it appeared, until
he found it was on a story about football: "Southampton boss Harry
Redknapp is interested in signing former Portsmouth midfielder
Steve Stone."
The motoring section of a local newspaper in Australia featured an
upgraded model of a car. A picture caption read: "The Peugeot 307
is now available with two diesel engines". "Presumably," comments
Leslie Harrison, who spotted it, "one at the front and one at the
back."
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