World Wide Words -- 19 Mar 05
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Mar 18 18:35:26 UTC 2005
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 432 Saturday 19 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: Blu-Ray.
3. Sic!
4. Weird Words: Maundy.
5. Over To You.
6. Q&A: Mare's nest.
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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GRANNY SMITH Last week I mentioned that "doing a Granny Smith" was
reported to be undertakers' slang for providing any spare cremation
ashes in place of the real ones. Andy Reid wonders if this might be
Cockney rhyming slang, in which the name of the famous Australian
apple variety (named after a real Granny named Smith) would be said
like "Granny Smiff", rhyming with "stiff" for corpse. It's more
probable, as Jim Yost suggested, that it's a semi-generic term for
an anonymous old lady.
BROWNIE POINTS Yet another possibility has come up for the origin
of the expression, from Bruce Shumway, Patrick Shannon, and Andy
Emerson. The last named e-mails as follows: "The term, at least in
my understanding, goes back to the 1930s. The Curtis Publishing
Company, publishers of the Saturday Evening Post, the Ladies Home
Journal, and the Country Gentleman, had an army of young boys who
delivered the magazines to homes on a subscription basis. The boys
received small commissions (the Saturday Evening Post sold for five
cents, the sales boy getting one of those cents) and also qualified
for premiums of green and brown vouchers (respectively known as
"greenies" and "brownies"). Five greenies equalled one brownie. The
Company published a catalog offering premiums for redemption of
brownies, such as model airplanes, chemistry sets, electric motors,
etc. I sold for Curtis for many years as a kid, but the ratio of
brownies awarded to magazines sold escapes my memory. But that, I
think, was an origin of 'brownie points'."
2. Turns of Phrase: Blu-Ray
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We've been seeing this term in the technical press since 2001, when
it was settled on as the name for a high-capacity optical storage
format. It was designed to supersede the DVD by providing the much
greater capacity needed to distribute films in high-definition
television (HDTV) format.
The term hasn't yet much impinged on daily life, as we have yet to
be able to buy a product using it, though that's expected to change
later this year. However, it was in the news last week because
Apple Computers announced that they were going to support it rather
than the rival contender, HD-DVD. For the past four years, the
prospect of a standards war has been looming, like the one that
bedevilled the take-up of VCRs back in the 1970s and 1980s when VHS
and Betamax were slugging it out for supremacy. Some pessimistic
analysts suggest that nobody much needs either and that it might be
a repeat of a more recent format war in which both Super Audio CD
and DVD-Audio lost out.
The name Blu-Ray was chosen because the system - like HD-DVD - uses
a short-wavelength blue laser that allows much larger quantities of
data to be stored on a disc than on a DVD.
* From the Detroit Free Press, 7 Mar. 2005: To pack more
complicated graphics, video and other content into each game,
Sony's PS3 will go beyond CDs and DVDs to a new disc standard
called Blu-Ray, which can hold up to seven times more data than
today's DVDs.
* From the Guardian, 20 Jan. 2005: HD-DVD and Blu-ray have a great
deal in common. They use a blue laser system, offer the huge amount
of storage required to house high definition video (at least 10GB),
boast interactive facilities and will also be used to store PC data
and games. Yet they are incompatible, and both are heading for US
stores this year and next.
3. Sic!
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"There is a sign at the Municipal Offices in Howick, a town in
KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa." Denis Brothers reports. "It reads,
'Trespassers will be prosecuted after 17.00 hrs'. I wonder what
they do with them before that time."
Daniel Austin e-mails: "I was perusing the eBay auction site this
week when I spotted an ad for a saw. The seller, presumably keen to
draw attention to its near-new condition, described it thus: MITRE
SAW: NOT MUCH USE. I think I'll steer clear of that one."
A headline in the Calgary Herald (Alberta, Canada) for Sunday, 13
March was spotted by Bob Lee: "Police Kill Man with Machete".
Actually, they shot him.
4. Weird Words: Maundy
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A public ceremony on the Thursday before Easter.
Next Thursday, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will distribute the
Royal Maundy as usual, this year in Wakefield Cathedral. Since she
is 79 this year, that many men and the same number of women will
each receive 79 pence in specially minted Maundy coins (in pennies,
twopences, threepences and fourpences), plus £5.50 in ordinary
money.
These days, the monarch no longer ceremonially washes the feet of
the poor - the last one to do so was James II - but this, and not
the giving of money to the poor, is the origin of the strange word
"Maundy", which never appears anywhere except in reference to the
Thursday before Easter. This day commemorates the Last Supper, in
which, after the ceremony of washing their feet, Jesus gave a new
commandment to his disciples that they should love one another.
In Latin "new commandment" is "mandatum novum" (the first word is
also the origin of "mandate"); in Roman Catholic churches the
anthem "Mandatum novum do vobis" ("a new commandment I give to
you", the start of verse 13:34 in St John's gospel) would be sung
on Maundy Thursday, in particular following the royal ceremony of
washing feet and giving alms. As a result, the ceremony became
known as "mandatum". The Old French version of that word is "mandé"
and over time it became corrupted into "maundy".
5. Over To You responses
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Molly Wolf asked, "Can anyone give me the origin of the line 'We
have no napkins, but a shaggy dog will pass among you'?" Several
subscribers attributed it to either Harpo or Groucho Marx (and it
certainly sounds like a Marxian line), while others argued it was
invented by Oscar Levant, the American jazz pianist, film composer
and actor, a noted wit ("There's a fine line between genius and
insanity. I have erased this line" is one of his). However, I've
since been able to find an example in a column in The Bee of
Danville, Virginia, for 17 August 1926 that repeats what is clearly
already a hoary old joke: "Ladies and gentlemen, on account of the
high cost of living, we shall have no napkins tonight, but now and
then a wooly dog will pass among you." Other early examples also
mention a woolly dog, so that we must assume that it changed to a
shaggy dog under the influence of the expression "shaggy dog
story". As the 1926 example predates the Marx Brothers films and is
a bit early for Levant (who was then only 19), we must look to an
earlier humorist for the origin, but who that might be remains a
mystery.
Talking of old jokes, John Benz Fentner suggests one as a solution
to Leslie Jessen's query about the curious phrase "No thank you, I
had a banana on the train." A woman travelling by train overhears a
passenger commenting that her baby is incredibly ugly. The woman is
deeply insulted and complains to the conductor, who listens with
sympathy and assists the lady back to her seat. He offers her a cup
of coffee and "a banana for her monkey". Mr Fentner comments "'I
had a banana on the train' means that I've already been treated as
badly as I can be today. Nothing else can faze me." Barton Bresnik
made a similar suggestion.
Doug Hagan and others thought it sounded like the surreal humour so
often part of the BBC radio Goon Show of the 1950s. The cast often
indulged in repartee such as "Have a photograph of Queen Victoria",
"No, thank you, I'm trying to give them up." It would be in the
spirit of the show that one exchange might have been "Come in. Sit
down. Have a gorilla", to which the answer might have been "No
thanks, I had a banana on the train." However, as a fan of the
Goons since youth who has listened to most of the surviving shows
in recent years, I can't recall an exchange anything like it.
Jim Hart takes a broader view of the whole phenomenon. "I suspect
that part of the value of this kind of remark lies in their non-
attribution: the listener is free to create any kind of background.
My own contribution is 'Mad, she's not; queer, I grant you. Many's
the time I've seen her naked before the piano.' In a similar vein
is the all-purpose weak double-entendre rejoinder, a common example
being 'As the bishop said to the actress' after a commonplace
remark such as 'Thank you, that was very kind of you.' Sometimes
this can be amusing, in the appropriate context and uttered perhaps
once a year, but if used about once every 10 minutes (as I have
heard it) ought to be grounds for justifiable homicide."
6. Q&A
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Q. I know that "Mare's nest" means something untidy, but what I'm
puzzled by is the idea that mares a) have nests and b) are untidy.
Neither seems to accord with reality, and I wonder how this phrase
came to be. [Helen Roberton]
A. Perhaps it's because I spend a lot of time nosing around in pre-
twentieth-century literature, but my first response to "mare's
nest" is that it means an illusory discovery. It took a moment to
recall that for most people today, when it turns up at all, it does
indeed refer to a muddle or a confused situation.
The idea behind the older sense of the phrase was clearly enough a
joke, since mares notoriously do not make nests, and so something
described as one cannot exist. The first form was "to find a mare's
nest", to imagine that one has found something wonderful that turns
out not to be real. It's first recorded in a play in 1576. A
typical usage is in Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands of
1903: "To accept the suggestion we must declare the whole quest a
mare's nest from beginning to end; the attempt on Davies a delusion
of his own fancy, the whole structure we had built on it,
baseless."
It's one variation on a set of phrases that were around centuries
ago. Another version was "horse's nest", which was at one time also
a dialect term for an idle tale or an oft-told story, one therefore
over-elaborated and unbelievable. Other variations that have been
recorded include "salmon's nest", and "skate's nest". For some
reason, "mare's nest" conquered the opposition and became standard.
There's a lovely elaboration of it in the 1811 edition of Captain
Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue: "He has found a mare's
nest, and is laughing at the eggs; said of one who laughs without
any apparent cause."
The modern sense wasn't recorded in the First Edition of the Oxford
English Dictionary, the entry for which was compiled in 1904,
suggesting that it was then uncommon. The updated online version
has examples dating from the 1830s, but the early ones have the
sense of "misconception" or "misunderstanding". My archive search
suggests that the untidiness sense began to appear in print only in
the 1930s but was common by the 1940s (the OED's first unambiguous
instance of this sense dates from 1948). In Agatha Christie's The
Mysterious Affair at Styles of 1920, the expression appears twice,
first in the old sense ("In my opinion the whole thing is a mare's
nest of Bauerstein's! ... Poisons are his hobby, so of course he
sees them everywhere."), then later in what looks very much like
the newer one of a muddle or confusion ("I'm much obliged to you. A
pretty mare's nest arresting him would have been.").
How the one sense changed into the other isn't altogether obvious.
A progression through illusion to misconception to confusion to
muddle to extreme untidiness seems to have occurred. But I have an
image in my mind of a drawing of a mare's nest I saw many years ago
(the mare had wings), constructed of a vast array of entangled
branches, as untidy as a stork's nest but seemingly even more so
because of its greater size. Is this part of the idea behind the
modern sense, I wonder?
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