World Wide Words -- 04 Feb 06
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Feb 3 13:53:59 UTC 2006
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 479 Saturday 4 February 2006
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Sent each Saturday to at least 32,000 subscribers by e-mail and RSS
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: Circumbendibus.
3. Noted this week.
4. Q&A: Big Apple.
5. Q&A: Old chestnut.
6. Sic!
A. E-mail contact addresses.
B. Subscription information.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
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A formatted version of this newsletter is available
online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/nura.htm
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1. Feedback, notes and comments
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PAUSE IN PUBLICATION As foretold last week, this is the last issue
of World Wide Words for six weeks, because my wife and I are taking
a much-needed holiday. The next issue is scheduled for Saturday 25
March. You're welcome, as always, to send comments and corrections
concerning this issue, but you'll have to wait a bit for a reply!
TATTOO Following the piece last week, many subscribers e-mailed to
tell me of an explanation for the body decoration sense that seeks
to link it to the older military signal meaning. For example, Jock
McGinty sent this from New Guinea: "My understanding of the origin
is the tapping noise made by the instruments used to mark the skin.
A wooden 'needle' dipped in pigment was held against the skin and a
device like a small hammer was tapped against it to break the skin
and inlay the pigment. This noise was described as 'tattow'." That
is an extremely interesting folk etymology - one that is widespread
to judge from the number of people who wrote - which tries to link
the senses on the assumption that they must have a common source,
though as it turns out they don't.
2. Weird Words: Circumbendibus
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A roundabout process or method; a twist, turn; circumlocution.
We have bendy buses in some of our major cities these days, double-
length monsters with a flexible connection in the middle. But it
was a taxi that last led me on a circumbendibus, an expensive one.
The word was created in the late seventeenth century as humorous
fake Latin from "circum-", around, plus English "bend", plus the
Latin ending "-ibus" (which, neatly bringing us all full circle, is
also the ending of "omnibus" and so is the source of "bus").
An example from the eighteenth century is in Oliver Goldsmith's
play She Stoops to Conquer: "I first took them down Feather-bed
Lane, where we stuck fast in the mud. I then rattled them crack
over the stones of Up-and-down Hill. I then introduced them to the
gibbet on Heavy-tree Heath; and from that, with a circumbendibus, I
fairly lodged them in the horse-pond at the bottom of the garden."
Sir Walter Scott had fun with it in his novel Waverley of 1814,
putting these words into the mouth of one of his characters:
But without further tyranny over my readers, or display of
the extent of my own reading, I shall content myself with
borrowing a single incident from the memorable hunting at
Lude, commemorated in the ingenious Mr. Gunn's essay on the
Caledonian Harp, and so proceed in my story with all the
brevity that my natural style of composition, partaking of
what scholars call the periphrastic and ambagitory, and the
vulgar the circumbendibus, will permit me.
(He seems to have invented that word "ambagitory", with the same
meaning, and used it in another of his novels, Woodstock.)
"Circumbendibus" has never quite vanished, a few modern authors
loving the sound of it enough to risk perplexing their readers.
3. Noted this week
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CHAMELEONITIS This word - not one destined to endure, I strongly
suspect - came out of a book entitled Why Work Is Weird, by Jerry
Connor and Lee Sears. They used it (indeed may have coined it) to
refer to the extreme changes in personality that happen to some
driven people when they move from home to work and back. Adapting
one's behaviour and attitudes to fit in with the environment of
one's workplace is natural to some extent, part of our instinctive
social awareness, but they argue that carried to excess it becomes
damaging to the individual.
BROKEBACK The success of the film Brokeback Mountain, about the
love story of two ranch hands, has caused "brokeback" to begin to
appear in everyday conversation as a near-synonym for "gay". Jesse
Sheidlower, boss of the OED's US operations, reported this week he
heard a man say "He got a Hummer? That's so brokeback!" Naturally,
he queried the usage: "The speaker said it was used in reference to
things that are so exaggeratedly masculine as to call into question
the sexuality of the man involved. Thus a man driving a minivan
wouldn't be brokeback, but a man driving a Hummer would be. The
speaker was a New York-raised late-30s heterosexual man, who hadn't
seen the film."
PAREIDOLIA This is my personal word of the week, largely because
it's one I'd not come across before finding it in New Scientist.
It's not in my standard dictionaries, though there are plenty of
examples in specialist books and Web sites. It's a psychological
condition in which the brain falsely creates meaningful patterns,
usually pictures of the human face, out of random patterns. This
ability lies behind many supposedly miraculous appearances, such as
that notorious face on Mars, the image of Jesus Christ on the wall
of a church in Ghana last year, or even the Man in the Moon. It can
be auditory instead, which has led to the paranormal episodes known
as electronic voice phenomena (EVP), in which people claim to hear
messages in the random noise of audio recordings. The word is from
Greek "para-", almost, plus "eidolon", the diminutive of "eidos",
appearance or form.
4. Q&A: Big Apple
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Q. Please tell me why New York City is called the Big Apple. [Mary-
Lou Kansakar]
A. This nickname became widely known after 1971, when in a bit of
spirited boosterism that became the envy of other cities, the New
York Convention and Visitors Bureau began to encourage tourism by
using it. The campaign succeeded beyond the promoters' hopes and is
now widely known, even beyond the shores of the US. As a result, a
perennial question to word sleuths asks where the name comes from.
Was it perhaps invented by the Bureau?
No, they didn't invent it. But where it actually came from has been
the subject of much argument and misinformation, leading at times
to bad-tempered exchanges between individuals claiming to be
experts. One hoaxer online has claimed the origin as far back as
the early 1800s and a French lady known as Eve; she was said to
have established a brothel in the city, whose clients became known
as Eve's Apples, leading to "apple" gaining an unsavoury sexual
connotation. Some say instead that the nickname appeared during the
years after the Wall Street Crash of 1929, when out-of-work
financiers sold apples on the city's streets. Others link it to a
dance of the late 1930s with that name, popular in New York.
However, none of these fit the known dates. As we shall see, "Big
Apple" has been recorded since 1921.
The real story is now known, as the result of a decade-long
detective hunt through old newspapers by American researchers Barry
Popik and Gerald Cohen. They found that the first printed evidence
comes from a racing writer named John J Fitz Gerald, who wrote a
regular column in the old New York Morning Telegraph that he
latterly renamed Around the Big Apple. He first used it in 1921 to
refer to the racetracks of New York: "The L T Bauer string is
scheduled to start for 'the big apple' tomorrow". He broadened the
term to refer to the whole of New York in February 1924: "The Big
Apple, the dream of every lad that ever threw a leg over a
thoroughbred and the goal of all horsemen. There's only one Big
Apple. That's New York".
After a lot of work, the researchers found that Fitz Gerald had
written in 1924 that he had first heard the term from a couple of
black stable hands in New Orleans in 1920, for whom the Big Apple
was the New York racetracks that represented the big time, the goal
of every aspiring jockey and trainer.
Fitz Gerald popularised the name to the extent that it was picked
up by others. Walter Winchell used it for the entertainment
district of New York in 1927: "To the lonely and aspiring hoofer,
the fannie-falling comedian, Broadway is the Big Apple, the Main
Stem, the goal of all ambition." Jazz musicians also used it the
same way, which led to the late 1930s dance name, possibly through
a New York club also called the Big Apple. The expansion of the
term to the whole of New York seems to have become common around
the 1940s.
This solves the immediate problem, but - as so often in etymology -
merely takes it back one step. Where did those New Orleans stable
hands get the phrase from, since it seemed to be well-known? Some
writers point to the Spanish phrase "manzana principal", main
apple, for a city centre or the main downtown area. That's from an
idiomatic usage of "manzana" for a city block, probably from
"manzanar", an apple orchard, hence a plot of land. It is suggested
that it was being used by the New Orleans men Fitz Gerald talked to
in the more general sense of the place to be, the place where the
main action is.
The problem with this story is that Spanish wasn't a common
language among black stablehands in New Orleans in 1920, though
they might have picked it up from racetracks in Spanish-speaking
areas. However, Barry Popik has found that "manzana principal"
isn't recorded until later; in fact it's a loan translation from
"big apple" into Spanish rather than the other way around. Scotch
yet another folk etymology, albeit a more learned one than most.
It seems from an early example of the phrase that people were
thinking of an apple as a treat, and that for those New Orleans
stable hands the New York racing scene was a supreme opportunity,
like an attractive big red apple.
[This is a modified version of a piece which first appeared in my
book Port Out, Starboard Home. Penguin published it in paperback
last Autumn outside the USA; it will appear in paperback in the USA
on 14 March under the imprint of the Smithsonian Institution under
the title Ballyhoo, Buckaroo, and Spuds. For more about the book,
see http://www.worldwidewords.org/posh.htm .]
5. Q&A: Old chestnut
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Q. Any idea where the phrase "old chestnut" comes from? It's the
subject of an office debate. [Gabbi Cahane, London]
A. I can tentatively give you an answer, one that is described by
the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary as "plausible", which
seems to be about as good as we're ever going to get.
It is said to go back to an exchange between the characters in a
play by William Dimond, first performed at the Royal Covent Garden
Theatre, London, on 7 October 1816. It had the title of The Broken
Sword; or, The Torrent of the Valley, and was further described as
"A Melo-Drama in 2 Acts, adapted from the French" and also "a grand
melo-drama: interspersed with songs, choruses, &c". The show became
popular, to judge from contemporary reports, and was toured and
revived in the following decades.
Let a writer for the Daily Herald in Delphos, Ohio, take up the
story, in a piece in the issue dated 23 April 1896, which said the
play was "long forgotten":
There were two characters in it - one a Captain Zavier and the
other the comedy part of Pablo. The captain is a sort of Baron
Munchausen, and in telling of his exploits says, "I entered the
woods of Colloway, when suddenly from the thick boughs of a
cork tree" - Pablo interrupts him with the words, "A chestnut,
captain; a chestnut." "Bah!" replies the captain. "Booby. I say
a cork tree." "A chestnut," reiterates Pablo. "I should know as
well as you, having heard you tell the tale 27 times."
This sounds reasonable enough as the source, but there are some
loose ends. This sense of "chestnut", for a joke or story that has
become stale and wearisome through constant repetition, isn't
recorded until 1880. Where had it been all that time, if the source
was the play? The word in this sense was claimed by British writers
in the 1880s to have originally been American, though it became
well known in Britain and according to the OED many stories about
its supposed origin circulated in 1886-7. But the play was
certainly originally British (Dimond was born in Bath and at the
time was managing theatres in Bath and Bristol).
The latter point is easily cleared up, because the play became as
popular in the USA for a while as it had been in Britain. The same
newspaper report claims that the intermediary was a Boston comedian
named William Warren, who had often played the part of Pablo:
He was at a 'stag' dinner when one of the gentlemen present
told a story of doubtful age and originality. 'A chestnut,'
murmured Mr. Warren, quoting from the play. 'I have heard
you tell the tale these 27 times.' The application of the
line pleased the rest of the table, and when the party broke
up each helped to spread the story and Mr. Warren's
commentary."
You may take this with as large a pinch of salt as you wish, though
a similar story, attributing it to the same person, is given in the
current edition of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Even if
it wasn't William Warren, it's not hard to see how somebody else
familiar with the play could have made the same quip.
As the joke could have been made at any time the play was still
known, and as it probably circulated orally for a long time before
it was first written down, the long gap between the play's first
performance and its first recorded use isn't surprising.
The "old" in "old chestnut" is merely an elaboration for emphasis -
another form is "hoary old chestnut" - both of which seem to have
come along a good deal later.
6. Sic!
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"I was amused," writes Jeremy Evans, "to find Lot 382 in an on-line
auction catalogue described as 'DWARF CENSORS, a pair, 19th century
Continental patinated metal, on circular bases.' I suppose they can
sneak into naughty Continental night clubs and sinful cinemas with
no risk of being seen. And being made from metal they can survive
being ejected from the premises. It would be much less fun if the
auctioneers meant censers."
"Finally, proof of reincarnation," David Moody comments. He found
it in a piece on the Web site of the Los Angeles Times about an
exhibit at the J Paul Getty Museum: "The villa is displaying the
mummy of a young man who died about AD 150 for the first time."
An Associated Press piece on 14 January was about a Massachusetts
cheese maker. Ray Stewart was concerned about cramped conditions
for the animals mentioned. "Inside, a cylindrical silver tank is
being filled with the milk of 15 Jersey cows standing on the other
side of the small room."
A caption to a picture showing two poodles in the San Jose Mercury
News for 26 January says: "Ming, left, and Ling have also been
trained to detect lung and breast cancer in breath samples from
people collected in tubes." Spotted by Roy Hayter.
The accidental conflation of the last sentence of a news report
with a journalist's byline in an article in the Toronto Globe and
Mail on 27 January startled Morgiana Halley: "Constable Guay has
been suspended without pay. If found guilty, he will be fired. With
a report from Ingrid Peritz in Montreal."
Cathy Varney was reading an online course in teaching English as a
Second Language* when she found this bit of advice: "Hand out the
dictation sheet. Tell the students that you are going to play (or
read) a passage and that you want them to listen, read along on
their sheets, and writhe in the missing words." It's always sound
policy to make your students writhe a little. The Mock Turtle in
Alice in Wonderland, you may recall, learned reeling as well as
writhing, not to mention drawling, stretching, and fainting in
coils.
[* http://humanities.byu.edu/elc/Teacher/sectiontwo/Les1Mod3.html]
Jerry Ochs e-mailed from Japan to mention a Bangkok Post editorial
on 25 January about the business interests of the prime minister,
Thaksin Shinawatra, which mentioned "one long-standing thorn in his
armour". Or perhaps instead a chink in his flesh?
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