World Wide Words -- 05 Mar 05
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Mar 4 17:48:55 UTC 2005
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 430 Saturday 5 March 2005
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Sent each Saturday to 22,000+ 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: Cockaigne.
3. Sic!
4. Q&A: Ton.
5. Noted this week.
6. Q&A: Brownie points.
7. Over To You ...
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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RADIO BROADCAST Recently I had the pleasure of talking to author
Martha Barnette at KPBS San Diego, California, for the programme,
"A Way With Words". This was ostensibly about my book Ballyhoo,
Buckaroo, and Spuds (the US edition of Port Out, Starboard Home),
but covered a lot of other ground as well. The programme goes out
today (Saturday 5 March) at 16:00 Pacific Time and is repeated
tomorrow at 10:00 PT. To listen live, visit http://www.kpbs.org/ .
You can also listen any time in the next seven days; to do that,
visit http://www.kpbs.org/Radio/DynPage.php?id=911 and click on the
link for "A Way With Words".
SCUTTLEBUTT Rob Weimer noted that "scuttlebutt" continues to be
used in the US Navy for a drinking fountain, which has the same
purpose as the original but a completely different physical form.
Many Australians pointed out that they have their own equivalent: a
"furphy", a rumour or false report. This derives from water carts
manufactured by J Furphy and Sons, used to provide drinking water
to Australian forces in World War I, especially in Gallipoli and
Egypt.
MOVING AGAIN We shall be moving the Web site to a new host in the
next few days. Traffic through the site has doubled in the past six
months and our current provider is unable to cope. There may be
some brief disruption to service.
2. Weird Words: Cockaigne
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An imaginary land of great luxury and ease.
Cockaigne was the Big Rock Candy Mountain of medieval Europe, where
the living was easy and the land flowed with milk and honey. This
mythical country had houses of barley sugar, roofs of cakes, rivers
of wine, and streets paved with pastry; buttered larks (a delicacy
of the period) fell instead of rain; roast geese passed slowly down
the streets, begging to be eaten; even better, shops provided goods
without asking for payment.
The name turns up first in a thirteenth-century French satirical
poem that refers to the "pais de cocaigne", literally "land of
plenty" (modern French spells it "pays de cocagne" with the same
meaning and also has "vie de cocagne" for a life of pleasure).
Where the word comes from has never been settled to the
satisfaction of scholars, but the many references to sweetmeats in
the poem support the view that the name originated in a Germanic
word for a cake, probably the ancestor of modern German "kuchen".
The idea of Cockaigne was popular in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, in writing and in illustration (Pieter Bruegel the Elder
painted "Schlaraffenland", the German name for the same place,
which was much later the subject of one of Grimm's fairy tales). An
English poem of about 1305 called "The Land of Cockaign" satirised
the life of monks in the same terms. Two centuries later,
"Lubberland" became popular in England as an alternative (a
"lubber" being a big, clumsy, stupid man who idles his life away,
whose name appears in the sailor's "landlubber" for a clumsy or
incompetent seaman).
To start with, Cockaigne wasn't linked to any place that actually
existed - it was all too obviously an exotic fantasy. However, in
the early years of the nineteenth century it began to be applied to
London, surprisingly so you might think for a noisy, smoky, dirty
city of vast inequalities that so obviously could not be the land
of legend. But it was a joke, of course: where else could Cockneys
live but in Cockaigne?
The names are similar enough that some writers have argued that the
origin of "Cockney" indeed lies in "Cockaigne" and that the link
isn't a joke at all. However, the dates don't fit. It's known that
"Cockney" is from a late Middle English term for a pampered child;
where that comes from is uncertain, but an earlier theory that it's
from "cokeney", a cock's egg, a disparaging name for a small
misshapen egg, isn't now believed either.
3. Sic!
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The following statement, Jonathan Corning notes, appeared in a Wall
Street Journal article by Jared Sandberg on 23 February about the
long journeys some people make to work: "Herb Seigler also misses
aspects of his 28-year commute in Los Angeles traffic." The traffic
in LA is really that bad?
Peter Harkins was reading job ads on a Web site and really felt for
any person who successfully applied for one at a technology company
in the Chicago area. That's because one line in their advertisement
read: "Compensation: commiserate with experience."
The online Latest News section of The Scotsman for Monday 28 Feb
had the heading "Top Policemen on Night Out Helped Attack Victim".
Shona Quinn was shocked, but then relieved when the reputation of
our men in blue was restored by the first sentence of the story:
"Three senior police officers enjoying a night out went to the aid
of a disabled man being attacked by three robbers, a court was told
today."
4. Q&A
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Q. My daughters and I frequently come across the word "ton" in
novels. It is used in Regency stories of the social whirl of
parties etc. of young ladies coming out. How did the word
originate? [Carolyn Jenkins]
A. That's an easy one. "Ton" in this sense - the fashionable style
- was imported from French in the middle of the eighteenth century
(so it predates the Regency period, though it was common then as
well). If we go further back, French got it from Latin "tonus". It
was our second stab at borrowing it from French, since we had
imported it four centuries earlier to make our word "tone".
In French "ton" meant, and means, one's manner in general, but in
English it referred to a person thoroughly in fashion, being - and
being seen to be - in the vogue. In this sense it's a shortening of
the French "bon ton", also borrowed into English society at about
the same time. Literally this was "good manner", though it meant
much more than that - good style, good breeding, and being at ease
in fashionable society.
The background to it was spelled out in a passage in one of Lord
Chesterfield's famous letters to his son, dated 30 April 1750:
Fashion is more tyrannical at Paris than in any other place
in the world; it governs even more absolutely than their king,
which is saying a great deal. The least revolt against it is
punished by proscription. You must observe, and conform to
all the 'minutiae' of it, if you will be in fashion there
yourself; and if you are not in fashion, you are nobody.
5. Noted this week
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CEDAR REVOLUTION This is the most recent example of a type of
labelling invention that is becoming common. The earliest of this
set was "velvet revolution", referring to a non-violent political
revolution, especially the events leading to the end of communist
rule in Czechoslovakia in 1989. We have recently had, among others,
the "rose revolution" in Georgia in 2003, the "orange revolution"
and "chestnut revolution", both in Ukraine in 2004, and, briefly,
the "purple revolution", which referred to Iraqis who raised their
purple-stained fingers to show that they had voted in their
country's recent election. "Cedar revolution" refers to opposition
to the Syrian presence in Lebanon; it appeared in the US State
Department's publication Country Reports on Human Rights Practices
for 2004, out this week, in reference to the famous Biblical cedars
of Lebanon. The trick is showing signs that it may achieve the
level of overuse and triviality of the infamous "-gate" suffix,
since recent examples have not referred to revolutions but to
political opposition or demonstrations of public opinion, albeit
ones with political consequences.
6. Q&A
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Q. It is quite common these days to hear of people gaining "Brownie
Points" as reward for some small favour or as a sign of
approbation. What is the origin of this phrase? [James Brunskill,
UK]
A. It's originally American. The Oxford English Dictionary notes
its first appearance in print in 1963, but it was definitely old
even then. A trawl through a database of US newspapers yields a lot
of examples from the 1950s, the earliest being two from 1954 that
describe it as school slang. (Being able to find these is not to
denigrate the skill of the OED editor who complied that entry two
decades ago, for whom such searchable electronic files would have
been a paradise beyond imagining.) One of these reports was in the
Daily News of Newport, Rhode Island, dated 15 April that year; I
reproduce it as a quick glance down nostalgia alley for all those
American high-school alumni who are even older than I am:
"We want more new lingo" writes a Missouri column fan who
wants to be the first to spring new vernacular on her group.
So here goes: Miami young people keep their teachers agog
with their lingo says Sanford Schnier, of the Miami Daily
News. He offers these "cool" expressions: "Flake out" - Too
much study is tiring. "Browse me on the scene" - Request
for information. "Pull a boo boo" - Make an error. "Racking
up the Brownie points" - Teacher's pet. "Toe Dancers" -
High school sissies. "Calories" - Plump girls. "Fluffs" -
Fat boys.
However, "flake out", in the sense of being exhausted, is actually
American services slang from early in World War Two. The Historical
Dictionary of American Slang argues that "Brownie points", too, was
US army slang from that period, a view backed up by indirect and
anecdotal evidence.
Several suggestions have been put forward for where it comes from.
We may rule out straightaway the idea that it is American railway
jargon, though around 1942 a Brownie was a demerit point, named
after its originator, a Mr Brown. Since this has the opposite sense
to our phrase, and was confined to the railways, it seems highly
unlikely to be its origin.
It seems that "Brownie points" derives from another sort of
brownie. Not the benevolent elves, nor those chocolate cake things,
but the junior branch of the Girl Scouts (the Girl Guides in other
countries), named for their brown uniforms. Linking it to their
merit badges, or their good deeds, is a neat idea, to such an
extent that even now the phrase almost always appears with an
initial capital letter.
The phrase seems to have been a sarcastic, backhanded compliment.
To earn credit by doing some little task to earn a badge or prize
is fine for Brownies but it's childish and a bit embarrassing if an
adult does it. The army's tendency to have soldiers do things that
seemed silly and child-like no doubt contributed to the popularity
of the phrase.
The experts are agreed that the sense was given greater strength
and impetus through scatological undertones, being intimately (and
I use that word advisedly) associated with the older term "brown-
nose", for a sycophant or toady, a person who curries favour to
such an extent that his nose seems to be up his superior's
backside. "Brownie" by itself is recorded as student slang from
1944 in this sense in the journal American Speech, which defined it
as "A person who is always asking and answering questions in class
to impress the instructor. Also a person who stays after class to
try to insinuate himself into the teacher's good graces". A
teacher's pet or apple polisher, in fact. An earlier issue of the
same journal suggested that "brown-nose" itself was pre-war student
slang that was carried into the American military by cadets.
7. Over To You
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A plea from William Wolf in Washington, DC: "Michael, it's time you
asked your adoring public to help me find the provenance of 'Don't
get up, Duchess, I've just come in to wash my hands'. Please." This
falls into the category of weird sayings like "I've had an elegant
sufficiency", or "Hang the expense; throw the cat another goldfish"
that often lurk in families for generations. Nigel Rees has traced
the origins of many of them, but most are opaque and baffling. Any
thoughts on the Duchess, anyone?
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