World Wide Words -- 12 Mar 05
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Mar 11 19:55:03 UTC 2005
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 431 Saturday 12 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. Turns of Phrase: Naked Street.
3. Sic!
4. Weird Words: Symploce.
5. Noted this week.
6. Q&A: Briar pipe.
7. Over To You responses.
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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WEB SITE MOVE This was completed in the middle of the week, after
the usual teething troubles of accommodating the quirks of a new
system. It's unlikely that any messages have been lost during the
move, but if you feel you should have received a reply to an e-mail
but haven't, please send it again.
BROWNIE POINTS This piece last week produced lots of comments. The
most frequent one was to suggest that the supposed link with the
junior branch of the Girl Scouts was a genteelism, a folk etymology
designed to disguise its origin in "brown-nose". In support of
this, several ex-members of the Brownies in the USA argued that the
phrase was never used in that organisation, though one who was a
member in the early 1940s says that it was. However, that doesn't
exclude a link, especially among World War Two male servicemen who
would have had only a vague idea what Brownies did. The early
evidence is sparse, but the expression seems to have arisen by
conflating the two ideas, the joke giving the expression its force.
The origin of the Brownies' name was queried, my suggestion that it
is from the colour of the uniforms being generally dismissed. I've
not been able to tie this down for sure, but it does look as though
the name preceded any uniform (the early packs, from 1916 onwards,
being unofficial), so the name must surely be a reference to those
helpful little elves.
Avrum Rosner queried what he felt was my over-hasty elimination of
the railway Brownie points from discussion: "The Brown system of
discipline on North American railways, which dates back to the turn
of the twentieth century, is still in use in Canada and provides
for both merit points and demerit points, albeit merit points are
no longer issued as frequently as they once were. The demerits are
known as 'brownies' or 'brownie points' (as my own 31 years of
service on Canadian Pacific Railway confirms), but so too were the
merits in previous times." I've since found references to the
system from the 1890s, when it was being widely introduced to US
and Canadian railways; it was invented by Superintendent George B
Brown of the Fall Brook Railway Company.
It may well be that "brownie" for one of these merits or demerits
(first recorded in 1942 but probably older) may have contributed to
the creation of "Brownie points" in our sense. There's no reason
why a slang term should have just one origin, and in fact the more
antecedents and associations one has, the more likely it is to
become popular.
2. Turns of Phrase: Naked Street
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A PR person's dream, this term is bound to make anybody sit up and
take notice. Rest your beating pulse, this is all about the unsexy
subject of traffic management. To disrobe a street, you remove all
the conventional methods of controlling vehicles and keeping them
separate from pedestrians. Traffic lights, barriers, signs, curbs,
and pedestrian crossings are all taken out. The idea behind it is
to make the road space less predictable. Instead of drivers being
able to rely on road markings and charge along on the assumption
that pedestrians are all corralled safely out of the way, they will
have to continually interact with people, make decisions about how
fast to drive and generally take more responsibility for their
actions. London is trying the idea in Exhibition Road, Kensington,
in which some of the capital's biggest museums are sited. The idea
sounds extraordinary, so much so that the British tabloid newspaper
the Sun wrote in an editorial: "Have you ever, in your whole life,
heard of anything more stupid? Apparently the idea was conceived in
Holland, where everyone is on drugs and drives slowly anyway." It
was indeed pioneered in the Netherlands, but by the soberest of
traffic planners, who claim success in significantly reducing
accidents.
* From the Denver Post, 14 Feb. 2005: The concept of the naked
street was spearheaded by the Netherlands, where traffic lights and
markings have been stripped from several junctions in recent years.
* From the Australian, 10 Feb. 2005: In the Danish city of
Christiansfeld, a busy intersection known for traffic jams and
accidents was given the naked street treatment four years ago.
Since then, there have been no fatal accidents.
3. Sic!
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Seen by Patricia Mackay on a market stall in Fremantle, Australia:
"Cor Jets". Americans know the vegetables better as zucchini, but
Australians (and Brits) prefer to call them courgettes ...
BusinessDay, in Johannesburg, South Africa, offered this in its
Home Front supplement on 25 February (thanks to Douglas Irvine for
spotting it): "When building or renovating, home owners should
always focus on windows and doors, as they are the foundation of a
beautiful home."
4. Weird Words: Symploce /'sImpl at si:/
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A repetitive rhetorical device.
You get three unusual words in one this week, because symploce is a
combination of anaphora and epistrophe. The first of these has more
than one sense; in this case it refers to an oratorical device by
which the first words of a section of prose are repeated. Hillary
Clinton's speech to the 1996 Democratic National Convention is a
good example: "To raise a happy, healthy, and hopeful child, it
takes a family; it takes teachers; it takes clergy; it takes
business people; it takes community leaders; it takes those who
protect our health and safety. It takes all of us."
In epistrophe the repetition occurs at the end of phrases. One of
the best-known examples is in Abraham Lincoln's famous Gettysburg
Address in which he speaks of government "of the people, by the
people, for the people." Another appears in Paul's first letter to
the Corinthians in the King James's Bible: "When I was a child, I
spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a
child."
With symploce, the repetition occurs at both the beginnings and the
ends of lines. A much-quoted example is in Anne Morrow Lindbergh's
book of 1955, Gift from the Sea: "Perhaps this is the most
important thing for me to take back from beach-living: simply the
memory that each cycle of the tide is valid, each cycle of the wave
is valid, each cycle of a relationship is valid."
All three words derive from Greek, though not altogether obviously.
"Anaphora" combines "ana-", back, with "pherein", to bear (in other
words, to repeat); "epistrophe" is from "epistrephein", to turn
around; "symploce" derives from "symplekein", to weave together.
5. Noted this week.
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DOING A GRANNY SMITH This expression appeared in an article in the
Guardian last Saturday: "When funeral director Roger Barker missed
his appointment at a crematorium to collect a client's remains, he
dipped into an urn of 'spare ashes' kept in the funeral parlour for
just such emergencies. But the practice - known in the trade as
doing a Granny Smith - did not go undetected, Oxford crown court
heard yesterday." Origin unknown, unless a British undertaker is a
member of the list and can elucidate?
6. Q&A
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Q. Why do we call it a briar pipe when it has nothing to do with
briars? [Hans]
A. This is a classic case of folk etymology, in which English
people have heard an unfamiliar word from another language, in this
case French, and turned it into one that sounded more sensible to
their ears.
The wood from which briar (or brier) pipes are made is actually a
type of heather, the white heath, which grows in the south of
France as well as in other parts of the Mediterranean coast. The
pipes are carved from the root. In French, this plant is called
"bruyer", which is from "bruyère", heath.
When the wood was introduced into Britain in the 1860s, its French
name was quickly changed because people confused it with the native
word that referred either to the bramble or the wild rose.
7. Over To You responses
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Last week, I forwarded a plea from William Wolf to help him find
the origin of the expression "Don't get up, Duchess, I've just come
in to wash my hands". It is so hard to pin down such sayings that
you will not be surprised that few suggestions came in, though
several commented that it sounded like a line from a film, perhaps
one spoken by Cary Grant.
Guillaume Cingal was reminded of a real historical incident, a
little-known episode in the life of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles
V. He was in Paris in 1540 on his way to subdue some rebels and
needed to buy the political support of the Duchess of Etampes. To
do so on the quiet without offending his royal host, he let a
valuable ring fall from his finger while he was washing his hands
before a meal. The Duchess hastened to pick it up and return it.
The Emperor told her to keep it. "It is now in hands too beautiful
for me to take it again; please keep it for the love of me." There
is a nineteenth-century painting of the incident by Pierre-Henri
Révoil. This incident is so ancient, poorly known and so loosely
related to the expression that it's unlikely to be its source. But
it's a nice story.
What did come in were further requests for enlightenment concerning
similarly obscure sayings. Peter Weinrich, for example: "Another of
those sayings from my youth was 'My name is Alberto Ascari and I
have come to clean my teeth'. Ascari was a racing-car driver of the
1950s, which dates it to a certain extent; it was used to announce
one's own presence ... but why? Opaque and baffling indeed." Molly
Wolf asked, "Can anyone give me the origin of the line 'We have no
napkins, but a shaggy dog will pass among you'?" And Leslie Jessen
remembered that "In the 1970s, while I was in college, a very funny
friend of mine was known to cryptically utter now and again, 'No
thank you, I had a banana on the train.' The phrase had an origin,
but she couldn't remember where she'd heard it. Do you think you
might know?"
Over to you ...
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