World Wide Words -- 21 May 05
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri May 20 18:08:15 UTC 2005
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 441 Saturday 21 May 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. Q&A: Dekko.
3. Weird Words: Mithridate.
4. Sic!
5. Book review: Word Histories and Mysteries.
A. Ways to support World Wide Words.
B. Subscription information.
C. E-mail contact addresses.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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OF BATTERED SAVELOYS AND HELPFUL RUBBER WHALES Once one starts a
"Sic!" column, I have reluctantly concluded, one opens oneself to
the scrutiny of hyperattentive seekers after humorous incongruity.
Peter Weinrich e-mailed about a definition in last week's book
review: "I don't suppose I am the only one who is delighted with
your 'deep-fried battered saveloys'. Do you use a kitchen mallet or
a hammer? Some of those saveloys can be pretty tough." Don Cameron
noted my exegesis of a headline in the "Sic!" column. I wrote that
"a two-ton rubber whale is helping to train volunteers to rescue
stranded mammals". He responded, I hope with tongue in cheek (but I
have my suspicions): "I was unaware that a rubber whale was capable
of actually doing anything, other than perhaps just float there?
Surely it was being used to train volunteers rather than helping to
train?" Christopher Mitson thickened the mixture when he enquired,
apropos of another phrase of mine last week, "Am I almost unique in
wondering how you can 'rather disagree'?"
NIPPER Several subscribers gave another story about the origin of
this word, in the sense of a young person; this one is from sailing
ship days. Mike Daplyn tells me it appears in Dudley Pope's Life in
Nelson's Navy. When weighing anchor, the anchor cable was too thick
to go around the capstan directly and so was attached to an endless
messenger cable that did. The two cables were temporarily tied to
each other by short lengths of rope, called nippers because they
nipped the cables together. The two cables were temporarily tied to
each other by short lengths of rope called nippers, because they
nipped the cables together. Nippers had to be quickly taken off
when they arrived at the hatch down which the anchor cable dropped
to the cable tier and taken back to fix the messenger to the next
section of cable where it came inboard. This job was done by men,
aided by ship's boys. It's said that the name "nipper" was later
transferred to the latter. I'm unconvinced, because the Oxford
English Dictionary doesn't include a reference to "nipper" in this
sense, and indeed has one citation that refers to "nipper-men" who
carry out this job; that term is also given in William Falconer's
Dictionary of the Marine of 1780, though he says that boys assisted
the nipper-men. This sounds rather too much like a folk etymology
to be unreservedly accepted.
2. Q&A
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Q. I recently read your explanation of the word "shufti", meaning a
quick look (see http://quinion.com?SHUF). My father used to use
another word to mean the same thing: "dekko". I've always assumed
this was Hindi in origin - am I right? [Willy Wilson]
A. Yes, it is indeed from Hindi, from "dekho", "See!", which is the
imperative of "dekhna", to look. Like the Arabic word "shufti", it
was borrowed by British servicemen, but it's rather older; the
latter is recorded from the Second World War, whereas "dekko" is
known in print from the latter part of the nineteenth century,
having been brought into the language through the British Army in
India.
Many early examples are direct recordings of Hindi Speech. This one
appeared in the Lima Daily Democratic Times in 1888: "Our 'gharri'
(carriage) halted suddenly at the entrance of a long, straight
avenue flanked by two ranges of lofty trees, and our Bengal driver,
pointing to the far end of it with his lean, brown forefinger, said
impressively, 'Dekho, burrah gach wahan hai' (look, there is the
big tree)." By the time of the First World War, it had long been
established as services slang in the way that we spell it now, as
Frederic Manning makes clear in The Middle Parts of Fortune about
the battles of the Somme and Ancre in 1916: "'Let's 'ave a dekko,
sir,' said Sergeant Tozer, taking Mr Finch's arm. 'It's all right,'
said the young man, infuriated; but the sergeant got his arm out of
the sleeve, and bandaged a bullet wound near the shoulder."
My eldest brother, long dead alas, will always be remembered by me
through his catchphrase, "Let's have a perfunctory dekko", meaning
he wanted a quick look at something. But that was in the 1950s, and
the word has lost much of its circulation since.
3. Weird Words: Mithridate
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An antidote.
A recipe for a mithridate in Nicholas Culpeper's English Physician
Enlarged of 1653 begins: "Take of Myrrh, Saffron, Agarick, Ginger,
Cinnamon, Spikenard, Frankincense, Treacle, Mustard seeds, of each
ten drams". It goes on to specify schenanth, stoechas, galbanum,
costus, turpentine, pepper, castorium, cubebs, troch, cypheos,
bdelium, gum arabic, macedonian parsley seeds, opium, cardamoms,
fennel seed, gentian, dittany, annis seeds, asarabacca, orris
acorus, valerian, sagapen, and several other ingredients. It then
says they should all be compounded with wine and honey.
By this time preparation is completed, your patient has probably
expired, of old age if not of the poison or infectious disease that
was the original reason for creating this extraordinary mixture.
Many of Culpeper's herbs remain widely known, but some others are a
mystery (I can't identify schenanth or cypheos, for example) or
uncommon (such as cubebs, once a popular substitute for black
pepper).
Culpeper's comments on the efficacy of the remedy remind one of
snake-oil salesmen at their most exuberant: "It is good against
poison and such as have done themselves wrong by taking filthy
medicines, it provokes sweat, it helps continual waterings of the
stomach, ulcers in the body, consumptions, weakness of the limbs,
rids the body of cold humours, and diseases coming of cold, it
remedies cold infirmities of the brain, and stopping of the passage
of the senses, by cold, it expels wind, helps the colic, provokes
appetite to one's victuals, it helps ulcers in the bladder, as also
difficulty of urine, it casts out the dead child, and helps such
women as cannot conceive by reason of cold, it is an admirable
remedy for melancholy, and all diseases of the body coming through
cold, it would fill a whole sheet of paper to reckon them all up
particularly."
The antidote was named after Mithridates VI, the king of Pontus, a
small kingdom on the southern shore of the Black Sea. He fought
four wars with Rome, finally being defeated by Pompey in 65 BC.
Mithridates is said to have tried to protect himself against poison
by taking progressively larger amounts of the ones that he knew
about until he was able to tolerate lethal doses. As a result,
anything that was thought to provide a general antidote to poison
or disease became known as a mithridate.
4. Sic!
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I bought a bicycle last week. A little leaflet that came with the
guarantee called itself an instruction manual for the bell. I was
disappointed to find it didn't actually tell me how to ring it. It
did, however, include this warning: "The structure of this bell is
not able to dismantle. Improper use of disable the bell will cause
eternal damage." Ask not for whom the bell rings ...
>From an e-bulletin called HealthTalk dated May 13th, noticed by
Gila Blits in Israel: "Researchers at four university hospitals in
Italy looked at close to 3,000 post-menopausal women and found that
the earliest age of menopause was found in women born in March at
age 48." That's one for the Journal of Irreproducible Results.
This arrived from Michael Kelsay: "I am a college instructor, and
the other day I was grading papers when I came across this: 'In the
early 1960s, rock and roll was spreading like wildflowers.' I found
it oddly apt and a little poetic, if totally wrong." Wrong it may
be, but it's spreading like, er, rapidly - Google finds more than
300 examples, including the apposite "Aromatherapy is spreading
like wildflowers".
A Swansea Council spokesman was quoted in Computer Weekly this week
as saying that its revamped customer service system ("customer" is
jargon for local resident) would greatly improve communication with
local people and would mean that "Customers who report issues like
street lighting failures will no longer be left in the dark."
Instant enlightenment, in fact.
5. Book review: Word Histories and Mysteries
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Some 400 words have their origins investigated in an alphabetical
listing. The individual pieces are a paragraph or two, sometimes a
full page. They won't win any literary prizes - the writing is
rather flat - but there's a lot of interesting information here.
An attic, for example, is named after a classical architectural
style, behind which this topmost story was hidden; "caprice" in
origin refers to hedgehogs, not goats as it might seem and was
afterwards assumed; "dinner" derives from a French word meaning to
have breakfast; "fornication" refers to a vault, since prostitutes
in Rome plied their trade in arched cellars and similar places. A
"hearse" is, etymologically speaking, the same as the agricultural
implement called a harrow. The entry on "internecine" points out
that mistaken usage becomes conventional when everybody adopts it,
as has happened here, since the word had as its first English sense
"fought to the death"; however, Dr Johnson mistook its origins in
his dictionary and defined it as "endeavouring mutual destruction",
which led to its modern sense. "Menu" is another oddity, since the
Latin original could mean "involving minute knowledge", and was
applied in French in the sense of "detailed list". "Nausea", it
transpires, was originally and specifically seasickness, "pants"
for trousers derives indirectly from the name of a fourth-century
Roman Catholic saint in Venice, and a slogan is in origin a Scots
Gaelic war cry.
There is a fairly formal introduction that gives a potted history
of English and of the languages that have influenced it. The end
matter contains a glossary of grammatical terms and a complex chart
giving the genealogy of the Indo-European language family of which
English is a member.
[The Editors of the American Heritage Dictionaries, Word Histories
and Mysteries: From Abracadabra to Zeus, published by Houghton
Mifflin, Boston; paperback, pp352; ISBN 0618454500; publisher's
price US$12.95.]
ONLINE BOOKSTORE PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
Amazon USA: US$10.36 (http://quinion.com?A93Z)
Amazon Canada: CDN$14.36 (http://quinion.com?A45Z)
Amazon UK: GBP6.10 (http://quinion.com?A23Z)
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Barnes & Noble: US$10.48 (http://quinion.com?A83Z)
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