World Wide Words -- 11 Jun 05
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jun 10 16:44:07 UTC 2005
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 444 Saturday 11 June 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. Weird Words: Bootless.
3. Recently noted.
4. BBC Wordhunt.
5. Q&A: Spelling bee.
A. E-mail contact addresses.
B. Subscription information.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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A.WORD.A.DAY ONLINE CHAT Wordsmith.org, in the person of Anu Garg,
has invited me to take part in an hour's online chat session next
Saturday, 18 June, on the subject of folk etymology. To join the
chat, go to http://wordsmith.org/chat/ at 16:00 UTC/GMT. This is
09:00 PDT / 12:00 EDT in the USA, 17:00 in the UK, 19:00 in
Jerusalem, and 06:00 Sunday in Sydney.
ERRORS There's a competition going on, I swear it. Every Saturday
morning, when I blearily download my overnight mail, several e-
mails jostle for my attention, listing the mistakes in the current
issue. Last week, writers had plenty of material to choose from. In
the review of the Oxford American Dictionary, it should have been
"agritainment", not "agitainment" (it's amazing what a difference
is made by leaving out one letter; agitainment would presumably be
agitation as entertainment - I've known student demonstrations like
that); another word should have been spelled as "diabulimia". The
first sentence in this section last time began "Many subscribers
suggestion a link ...", which Julane Marx noted but I omitted to
correct. And I spelled "nappachino" two ways in one paragraph, one
too many for comfort and neither of them optimal. Thanks to all
those who pointed out that a blend of "nappy" and "cappuccino"
ought to be "nappuccino", and that this form is by far the most
common one online (the reporter for the Guardian, where I saw the
word, presumably got it from someone who knew only the less common
spelling). More substantially, my complaint that no Mac version of
the Oxford American Dictionary existed was ill-informed: several
subscribers confirmed that it is available by default on the most
recent version of these computers.
MORE COMMENTS NEXT TIME This issue of the newsletter has got so
long, mainly because of the extended piece on "spelling bee", that
it seemed best to hold over several more comments arising from last
week's issue until the next issue.
2. Weird Words: Bootless
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Ineffectual; useless.
Around the time of the Norman Conquest a "boot", also often spelt
"bote", was something advantageous, profitable or good (through the
ancient Germanic languages, it's closely linked with "better" and
"best" as the comparative and superlative of "good").
We still have it in the fixed phrase "to boot", meaning something
extra or additional; back around the year 1000 the phrase meant "to
the good; to one's advantage" (see http://quinion.com?B19T for more
on this). There were lots of meanings associated with "boot": it
might mean a levy taken to repair a road or bridge; in the feudal
system it referred to the right of a tenant to take timber from his
lord's estate for fuel or repairs (a series of words existed for
various kinds, such as "firebote", "housebote", and "hedgebote").
It could also mean compensation for wrongdoing or injury. In this
sense, it often appeared in compounds such as "man-bote",
compensation by a person to somebody he had injured, or the later
"thief-bote", a bribe or reparations by a thief to avoid
prosecution.
If you were bootless, you were without help or remedy or couldn't
be compensated. The meaning evolved into the figurative sense of
something fruitless, unprofitable, or to no useful purpose. Charles
Dickens used it this way in A Tale of Two Cities: "'Well!' said
that good-natured emissary, after a full half-hour of bootless
attempts to bring him round to the question."
3. Recently noted
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CLONE TOWN This term was coined last summer by a left-wing think
tank, the New Economics Foundation (which calls itself, however, a
"think-and-do tank"), when it launched a survey to find the British
towns whose shopping centres have the most national chains and US
branded outlets such as Gap and Starbucks, to what it considered to
be the detriment of local diversity and independent retailers. This
week it reported on its findings and the term is back in the news.
The city of Exeter came bottom with almost all the locally operated
stores in its centre driven out by high rents and business rates;
at the top was Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire, with three national
retailers among its 50 shops. The report also coined "home town"
for places like Hebden Bridge, and "border town" for one in which
"colonisation by the clones" wasn't yet fully established. The
Foundation argues that planning law ought to be used to ensure that
developers guarantee affordable space for locally owned stores and
urges local communities to fight back against "bloated retail
behemoths" that dominate "identikit" clone-town high streets. See
http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/ .
4. BBC Wordhunt
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The BBC and the Oxford English Dictionary are asking members of the
public to join The Wordhunt Project and help update the Dictionary
with earlier evidence for some of the more mysterious terms in the
language. A television series on BBC2 next year will feature the
results. The OED is appealing for a focused effort on fifty words
and phrases, which you'll find listed on these sites:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/wordhunt/
http://www.oed.com/bbcwordhunt/
Most of the terms in the list are likely to be familiar to you only
if you're British. Do you perhaps know of a reference to a person
being called a minger rather than just ugly or unattractive before
1995? Did you describe the hairstyle as a mullet before the Beastie
Boys song Mullet Head in 1994? Do you know of examples of gone for
a Burton, codswallop, bog-standard, the full Monty, or chattering
classes before the first dates in the online list?
Interestingly, one phrase on that list, "back to square one", was
immediately backdated from 1960 to 1952 by Fred Shapiro, a lecturer
at Yale Law School, who found it in the Economic Journal: "The
writer ... has the problem of maintaining the interest of a reader
who is being always sent back to square one in a sort of
intellectual game of snakes and ladders." This makes clear where it
comes from (and incidentally, renders one of the articles in my
book Port Out, Starboard Home out of date).
To join the word hunt, you try to find an earlier appearance of one
of the listed words or phrases in a book or in a magazine, in a
film script, a fanzine, in unpublished papers or letters, or even a
post-marked postcard. It's vital its appearance can be dated and
that you can provide the evidence to the Wordhunt Project. Details
of how to do this are on the Web sites listed above.
5. Q&A
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Q. The American institution known as the "spelling bee" has been
getting a lot of attention recently - why is this competition named
after a stinging insect? Or is it? [Dan Flave-Novak]
A. It used to be assumed that a bee in this sense was indeed named
after the insect, an allusion to its social and industrious nature.
But these days the experts prefer to point instead to the English
dialect "been" or "bean". These were variations on "boon", once
widely used in the sense of "voluntary help, given to a farmer by
his neighbours, in time of harvest, haymaking, etc" (as the English
Dialect Dictionary put it a century ago). It's likely that the link
was reinforced by the similarity in names and by the allusion;
perhaps also because at one time "been" was the plural of "bee" in
some dialects (a relic of the old English plural that survives in
the standard language in a few words such as "oxen").
"Bee" in this sense appears in the eighteenth century. It's hard
today to realise how interdependent people were in earlier times,
not least on the North American frontier. Many annual tasks, such
as the harvest, needed neighbours to help each other to get the
crops in because no one farm had enough labour to do it alone;
clearing land and barn-raisings were major communal efforts;
families without the skills for some task could call on neighbours
through reciprocal arrangements. It was a complex system that was
more like a mutual labour exchange and insurance against individual
calamity than the selflessness that is sometimes evoked in romantic
images. Bees were also often social occasions, of course, with food
and entertainment provided to reward people for their help, and
sometimes also to an extent competitive to keep people working.
There were many sorts of bees during the year. Several acquired
their own fixed and standard names, such as "apple-bee" (picking
and storing apples), "paring-bee" (peeling apples), "husking-bee"
(husking ears of corn), "knitting bee", "quilting-bee", and
"raising-bee" (for barn raisings). These start to appear in print
from the 1820s and are common by the middle of the century. Others
handled sheep shearing, haymaking, threshing corn, and spinning
wool.
In the early 1870s, the idea of "bee" began to be extended to
situations that had some kind of communal basis, but weren't farm
work. Early examples were disquieting: "hanging bee" (1873) and
"lynching bee" (1879), with "whipping bee" arriving in the 1890s.
Informal spelling contests among neighbours or in schools had long
been held for recreation or instruction or as tests. They were
called "spelling matches", a name which appears in the USA in the
1840s. The term "spelling bee" wasn't applied to them at the time,
since "bee" was then firmly attached to the idea of communal manual
work (yet another, "spelldown", modelled on "hoe-down", only
arrived at the end of the century). The basis for most of these
competitions was the famous Blue-Back Speller of Noah Webster, The
Elementary Spelling Book, a work which sold more than 80 million
copies in the 100 years after its publication in 1783.
In 1874, US local newspapers start to report public "spelling
matches" or "spelling contests" with an admission fee and in which
contestants competed for prizes. Some were run as part of
vaudeville shows (one is advertised in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle on
5 April 1875). Early examples were mostly in the eastern USA
(Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania), but the idea soon spread
westwards. It became a craze, often referred to as "spelling
fever". In March 1875, a local paper in Ohio reported that "The
spelling fever is spreading rapidly". The Oakland Daily Evening
Tribune of California noted the following month that "The spelling
fever is playing bob with our pet phrases; 'too diaphanously
attenuated' is now the substitute for 'too thin.'"
It was in July 1874 that I've found the term "spelling bee"
appearing for the first time, in a report of a school event in
Brooklyn in which a pupil recites "The Spelling Bee" by Nellie
Watkins as an elocution exercise. (The term must obviously be older
than this, though nothing like pre-Revolution as H L Mencken
claimed in The American Language. It would be nice to learn more
about the work and Ms Watkins, but both have vanished into the
obscurity of history.) In March the next year the term is recorded
for one of these public contests and on 1 April 1875, the Bucks
County Gazette of Bristol, Pennsylvania enthused: "On Thursday
evening last, your correspondent attended the much talked of
'Spelling Bee' held in the Academy of Music, Philadelphia, and
enjoyed it exceedingly." The term spread quickly and widely - in
April that year the Oakland paper I've mentioned said of a
forthcoming entertainment that "The ladies will be behind the age
if they don't have a spelling bee."
Less than a month later the Staffordshire Sentinel, a newspaper in
Stoke-on-Trent, reported that "On Monday evening an entertainment
of novel, amusing, and instructive character, was given in the
Temperance Hall, Dresden - a spelling match, or what the Americans
call a spelling bee." The craze became general this side of the big
water for some while, at least according to Harper's New Monthly
Magazine of June 1876: "The spelling-bee mania has spread over all
England, and attacked London with especial virulence." But the
term, though recorded a few times, soon died out in the UK: The
Dictionary of Birmingham by Thomas Harman and Walter Showell of
1885 says that "The first 'Spelling Bee' held in Birmingham took
place January 17th, 1876. Like many other Yankee notions, it did
not thrive here."
The popularity of the spelling bee was so great that it redefined
"bee" for many Americans to mean a public contest of knowledge.
During the craze, other sorts were invented, including the
"historical bee" and the "geographical bee"; reformulated as
"history bee" and "geographic bee" these are still around, with
"math bee" being added in the 1950s.
The craze didn't last long: as early as May 1875 the Daily Gazette
And Bulletin of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, remarked that "The
spelling fever has almost entirely subsided, and the buzz of the
bee is scarcely heard any more." This was premature, at least for
other parts of the USA, but the evidence suggests it was not a
long-lived fashion; spelling bees went back to being popular in a
low-key way, as they had been before the craze erupted. The modern
national contest dates from 1925.
In 1878, Bret Harte wrote a comic poem about a spelling bee among
bored cowboys in a bar, news of this new pastime having reached
them from San Francisco. It went splendidly until "phthisis" and
"gneiss" turned up. It's hard to imagine what they would have made
of "appoggiatura", the winning word in this year's National Scripps
Spelling Bee.
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