World Wide Words -- 26 Mar 05
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Mar 25 18:01:14 UTC 2005
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 433 Saturday 26 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: Hypnobioscope.
3. Noted this week.
4. Q&A: Sky-blue pink.
5. Sic!
6. Q&A: Scotch.
A. Ways to support World Wide Words.
B. Subscription information.
C. E-mail contact addresses.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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BROWNIE POINTS The possible origins of this expression have been
taken up on the American Dialect Society's mailing list, mainly as
a consequence of its featuring here.
Douglas Wilson suggests that its origin may lie in part in wartime
American food rationing, in which ration points in various colours
were required to make food purchases: red and brown ones for meats
and fats, for example. In particular, there are many references in
newspapers during 1943-44 to "brown points". He suggests that this
expression provides the link needed to create "Brownie points",
with allusion both to "brown-nose" and the Brownies.
Benjamin Zimmer provided an earlier example of the expression, from
the Los Angeles Times for March 1951, that's worth repeating: "You
don't know about brownie points? All my buddies keep score. In fact
every married male should know about 'em. It's a way of figuring
where you stand with the little woman - favor or disfavor. Started
way back in the days of the leprechauns, I suppose, long before
there were any doghouses."
I've updated my piece on the expression, yet again. You will find
the full story at http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-bro3.htm .
2. Weird Words: Hypnobioscope
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A fictional device for learning while asleep.
We have simultaneously to travel forward to the year 2660 and back
into the early history of science fiction to find this word. It was
invented by Hugo Gernsback, whom many regard - for better or worse
- as the founder of the modern genre. (He is commemorated in the
Hugo Awards, one of SF's annual prizes.)
In 1908, Gernsback started publishing his science-based stories in
his magazine Modern Electrics (for which he coined the term
"scientifiction" that has thankfully not survived). In 1911-12 he
wrote and published a serial with the snappy title Ralph 124C 41+,
set 750 years in the future. The personage of the title was "one of
the greatest living scientists and one of ten men on the whole
planet earth permitted to use the Plus sign after his name".
The writing was appalling and the plot mundane - Ralph falls in
love with a beautiful young woman and saves her from the clutches
of an evil fellow scientist - but as part of the story, Gernsback
has him invent a remarkable device: "It remained to Ralph, however,
to perfect the Hypnobioscope, which transmitted words direct to the
sleeping brain in such a manner that everything could be remembered
in detail the next morning. This was made possible by having the
impulses act directly and steadily on the brain. For thousands of
years humanity had wasted half of its life during sleep - the
negative life."
This was the first reference in print to the idea that several
decades later became known as sleep learning or hypnopaedia (Greek
"hupnos", sleep, plus "paideia", education; the term was first used
by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World in 1932). These have
necessarily been tried using the indirect method of playing
recordings to people while they were asleep, since even now we
don't know how to beam information directly into the brain, a
failure which has rendered hypnopaedia less than fully effective.
3. Noted this week
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COPACETIC In the current issue of Comments on Etymology, Professor
Gerald Cohen of the University of Missouri-Rolla has put forward a
plausible suggestion for the origin of this most puzzling American
term, first recorded in print from 1921, and which means "fine; all
right". He points to French "copain(s) c'est épatant!", "buddy(s),
that's great!". Many of the very early examples spell the word as
variations on "copasetee", which may well have been the earliest
pronunciation, the French phrase being abbreviated by losing all
except the first vowel of the last word. He argues that the phrase
may have been picked up by American soldiers in France during the
First World War. Other expressions were certainly created at that
time by mangling French terms, such as the British Tommy's "san
fairy ann", from "ça ne fait rien", and "napoo" from "il n'y en a
plus". The suggestion is seductive and intriguing, but in the
absence of firm evidence - which may now never be forthcoming - it
has to remain a hypothesis.
4. Q&A
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Q. I heard a phrase a few years back from a former colleague. She
was telling me about a poem she wrote that was about a "sky-blue
pink" dress; when I asked about this, she said it was a phrase for
a magical fantasy color that she had always known. Are you familiar
with it? [Ellen Smithee, California]
A. Yes, it was well known to my mother in London in the 1940s and
also to my wife's mother, another Londoner. This might suggest that
it's British, but it turns out to be American.
The earliest example I can find - which seems highly likely to be
the origin - is in a story by Howard R Garis. He was a famous, and
extraordinarily prolific, American children's writer of the first
half of the twentieth century. In 1910, he invented Uncle Wiggily,
the rheumatic elderly rabbit, while working for the Newark News,
and over four decades wrote one story a day for the paper. He also
authored more than 30 stories about the adventures of Tom Swift
under the pen name of Victor Appleton and lots more under other
names - such as Laura Lee Hope, Lester Chadwick, Roy Rockwood, and
Clarence Young - some 500 books in total.
The expression "sky-blue-pink" appears in the first collection of
Uncle Wiggily stories, Sammie and Susie Littletail, published in
1910, in which one young rabbit suffers a misfortune: "He splashed
around and scattered the skilligimink color all over the kitchen,
and when his mamma and Susie fished him out, if he wasn't dyed the
most beautiful sky-blue-pink you ever saw!" [Don't ask me about
"skilligimink": he seems to have been the only person ever to use
the word, and where it comes from is unknown.]
The term begins to appear in places other than his own writings in
the years that followed, always in children's stories. By the
1930s, it was widely known and had crossed the Atlantic to Britain.
Since millions of copies of the Uncle Wiggily stories have been
sold, and many of his books are still in print, the expression
continues to be introduced to new generations.
5. Sic!
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Mike Young saw two signs on the back of a British car last week and
sent me a photograph to prove it. One says KEEP YOUR DISTANCE, the
other SHARP BREAKING. (What, he wonders, would blunt breaking be
like?) Sadly, the signs were obviously professionally produced and
had presumably been bought from a shop.
"According to an advert now running on U.S. television," Ed Shaw
reports, "the new Craftmatic bed guarantees purchasers 'a lifetime
of temporary relief'. I guess we're guaranteed to suffer the rest
of the time."
A headline on the front page of Monday's Wall Street Journal read
"Rice arrives in China". Is that like carrying coals to Newcastle?
6. Q&A
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Q. Do you have any idea of the origin of the expression to "scotch"
something, meaning to toss, deep-six, 86, or reject some idea or
plan? [Wayne Simpson]
A. It's an elusive word. The one thing the experts are sure about
is that it has nothing to do with Scotch in the Scottish sense.
Dictionaries often amalgamate this word with "scotch" in the sense
of gashing, or cutting a mark or notch, but there seem to have been
two distinct terms involved. Your one comes from the old word
meaning to stop something from moving. You might, for example,
scotch a gate open with a stone, or scotch a ladder by putting
something at its foot to stop it slipping, or scotch a wheel with a
chock or stone to stop a cart or carriage from running away.
An example appears in The Parent's Assistant, by Maria Edgeworth,
dated 1853, in which children are being taught to beg from passing
traffic: "The next day, the little boy and girl went with their
grandmother, as they used to call her, up the steep hill; and she
showed the boy how to prevent the wheels from rolling back, by
putting stones behind them; and she said, 'This is called scotching
the wheels;' and she took off the boy's hat and gave it to the
little girl, to hold up to the carriage-windows, ready for the
halfpence."
An old form of the noun, for the block or stone you scotched with,
was "scatch". Taking it further back is hard, but it might be
connected to "scatch" in the sense of a stilt or pole, a word once
used in English dialect for pattens, shoes with raised soles to
lift your feet out of mud or slush. In turn this is linked to
"skate".
Whatever its origin, by the latter part of the nineteenth century
"scotch" was being used figuratively for frustrating some plan or
decisively putting an end to something - metaphorically putting a
stone under its wheels.
Confusingly, there has been yet another sense of "scotch" that
means to render something temporarily harmless. For example, Sabine
Baring-Gould wrote in The Deserts of Southern France in 1894: "From
the time of St. Louis, the feudal power in France was scotched,
though far from killed." This comes from a reading of a sentence in
Shakespeare's Macbeth: "We have scotch'd the snake, not kill'd it".
This is actually the cutting or gashing sense of "scotch", likewise
of obscure origin.
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