World Wide Words -- 18 Nov 06
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Nov 17 17:57:12 UTC 2006
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 514 Saturday 18 November 2006
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Sent each Saturday to at least 45,000 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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A formatted version of this newsletter is available
online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/skfe.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Hokey-pokey.
3. Recently noted.
4. Q&A: Bulldozer.
5. Sic!
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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CONTRIBUTIONS DRIVE Your response has been even more generous than
I could have imagined. World Wide Words is now financially secure
for the foreseeable future, with a surplus put away to protect it
against anything that isn't. My most heartfelt thanks to you all.
THERE ARE MORE THINGS IN HEAVEN AND EARTH ... Following last week's
stroll through the culinary and linguistic legacy of the hamburger,
subscribers told me about other varieties. John Craggs wrote "Just
for the sake of completion - and repletion, according to those who
tried them - a stall was selling buffaloburgers at this year's
Summer Solstice gathering at Stonehenge." Jane Greenwood once ate a
chicken excaliburger at a pub in Tintagel in Devon ("it wasn't half
bad, washed down with a pint of cider"). Just to show there are few
meats that haven't at some point graced the inside of a bun, others
noted ostrichburgers, rabbitburgers, gooseburgers, duckburgers and
octoburgers (from octopus). Readers of a sensitive disposition may
wish not to dwell on the implications of the term Bambiburger that
was mentioned by Ken Hughes. A reader who refers to himself only as
Curmudgeon commented, "Your article reminds me of a cartoon I saw
in a magazine back in the 1950s, which featured a burger stand with
a menu listing a couple dozen varieties. The proprietor was telling
a customer: 'We have one made with ham, too. But we don't know what
to call it!'"
BELLWETHER While we're retailing jokes (my mildly frivolous issue
last week clearly brought out the humour in you), Patricia Norton
wrote from New Zealand following last week's piece that featured
the word "wether" for a castrated ram: "There's an old story about
the farmer who took his new prize ram off to the A&P (Agricultural
and Pastoral) show and was displeased when it failed to win even a
highly commended, let alone the first prize that he'd been looking
forward to. On his way out of the grounds, tugging the sorry beast
behind him, he encountered a neighbour. 'Nice weather,' chirped the
neighbour. 'Soon will be,' growled the disgruntled cocky."
Which gives me the opportunity to drop back into didactic mode in
order to explain that "cocky" is a term used in both Australia and
New Zealand for a farmer. It's an abbreviation of "cockatoo", from
Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour, which was formerly a prison for
intractable convicts. "Cockatoo farmers" was a name given to tenant
farmers from the prison who were settled around Port Fairy on the
Victoria coast of Australia in the 1840s. The abbreviated form came
along later in the century.
MUNGO Emery Fletcher rose to an aside in the piece that mentioned
this word: "Your comment on the OED's definition of 'mung' sounded
so like a line from one of the patter songs of Gilbert and Sullivan
that it inspired me to compose the following doggerel:
When a social invitation doesn't specify the dress
And your only formal trousers need a cleaning and a press
The state of your appearance isn't really hard to guess:
A mingling, a mixture, a confusion, or a mess."
2. Weird Words: Hokey-pokey
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An inferior type of ice cream.
Its origin is open to dispute, though we do know that the term was
first applied to ice cream in Britain. Its sellers from handcarts,
the hokey-pokey men, were invariably Italians who had fled poverty
in their own country. The term's history matches their emigration -
it was recorded in the UK in 1884 and in the eastern US in 1886.
A report appeared in The Daily News of Frederick, Maryland, in July
1887:
The custom of eating ice-cream in England is so popular that
even the dirty arabs of the street are bound to have their
'penny wipe,' as they call it, which consists of a dab of the
refreshing delicacy on a piece of questionably clean paper.
This mode of retailing ices has crept into New York and
Chicago, and is possibly an humble offshoot of the Anglomania
now so prevalent throughout the United States. Somewhat similar
to this method of selling ices on the street is the custom now
in vogue in the cities, and used to be in Frederick, of
retailing the 'poor relation' of ice cream known as Hokey
Pokey, by the boys with hand carts.
It's commonly said that the name of the comestible comes from the
cry of the sellers, either "Gelati, ecco un poco!" ("ice cream,
here's a little!") or "O che poco!" ("O how little!", meaning it
was cheap rather than insufficient in quantity - its price was a
penny, both in Britain and the US, and led to the cry "Hokey-pokey,
penny a lump!"). We can't be sure this is where the name came from,
but the sudden appearance of the same term within such a narrow
space of time 3000 miles apart might suggest that it was brought by
the Italians themselves.
But there's another school of thought (there so often is, you may
have noticed). "Hokey-pokey" already had another meaning, that of
deception, cheating or underhand activity, first noted in the UK by
James Halliwell-Phillipps in 1847. It might have been given to the
inferior cornstarch-and-milk product of some of the less reputable
early street sellers in Britain and followed them across the ocean,
though the term in the deceit sense was already known in the US.
We are fairly sure that the deception sense comes from the older
"hocus-pocus" as the name for a conjuror or juggler, perhaps the
one that Thomas Ady described in A Candle in the Dark in 1656 who
used the incantation "Hocus pocus, tontus talontus, vade celeriter
jubeo" (though often said, there's no good evidence that "hocus-
pocus" is a parody of the Latin phrase "hoc est enim corpus meum"
from the Catholic Eucharist). In the next century, "hocus-pocus"
became a common term for conjuring, jugglery or sleight of hand,
and so developed the idea of trickery or deception.
Incidentally, the name of the song-cum-dance usually known in the
US as the hokey-pokey ("You put your right foot in, you put your
right foot out") and elsewhere as the hokey-cokey, has no obvious
direct link with any of these senses. Its history is bedevilled by
accusations of plagiarism, but the original seems to have been that
composed by Jimmy Kennedy in the UK in 1942, which was referred to
during the War years variously as the cokey-cokey, the okey-cokey
and the hokey-cokey. The US version under the name hokey-pokey is
usually attributed to Larry LaPrise in 1949.
3. Recently noted
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WORDS OF THE YEAR Already? It's only November, after all. But the
big dictionary publishers are already cranking up the PR gramophone
to announce their suggestions for the most significant words of
2006. This week the Oxford American Dictionary picked out "carbon
neutral" as its choice, which relates to the process of maintaining
a balance between producing and absorbing our emissions of carbon
dioxide as a way of helping to counteract global warming. The
editors of Webster's New World Dictionary selected "crackberry", a
sarcastic term for users of the BlackBerry mobile device who are
supposedly addicted to it. Since the term has been recorded since
2001, it's an odd choice for 2006. In the UK, Susie Dent's annual
compendium for Oxford University Press, The Language Report, chose
"bovvered", from the catchphrase "am I bovvered?", used by a bored
and mouthy teenager in the British TV comedy Little Britain. It's
"bothered" respelled, that's all. Of all the words in all the media
in all the English-speaking world, she had to choose this one? Do I
detect a sad case of dumbing-down?
SMISHING Continuing attempts by technological bad-hats to separate
us from our money has led to this most recent creation. It's formed
from "SMS" (Short Messaging Service, the system that lets mobile
phone users send and receive text messages), plus "phishing", for
sending trick e-mails that lure unsuspecting people to fake bank
Web sites to get the passwords of their accounts. So smishing is
phishing by mobile phone text message. It's new enough that it's
still sometimes written as SMiShing to make its provenance clearer.
GATEGATE It was inevitable that this apotheosis of the strangest
suffix in the language, "-gate" (which continues to appear in nouns
referring to real or alleged scandals, especially involving cover-
ups, though it should have been put out to grass years ago), should
be gleefully coined by the wordsmiths of the Fourth Estate when an
opportunity presents itself. It has been used in Britain recently
to refer to a planning dispute concerning some substantial barriers
to admission put up by the Welsh singer Charlotte Church outside
her home in Cardiff to protect her from unwanted visits by fans.
Journalistic invention running on tramlines as it does, you won't
be surprised to hear that earlier appearances are recorded.
HARRUMPH The inhabitants of Pahrump, Nevada, may be upset if I say
that the town's name is inherently humorous. Having had a moment of
fame as the focus of the last two episodes of the American TV show
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, it has gained linguistic notoriety
for voting this week to make English its official language. As only
a very small percentage of the population isn't already fluent in
English, the action seems unlikely to lead to any practical result.
The town´s name comes from the language of the Southern Paiute, so
it might be a good idea for them to rename it quickly to something
English before residents are accused of speaking a foreign tongue
every time they mention where they live.
CREDO Ian Mayes, the Readers' Editor of the Guardian, wrote his
regular column this week about some of the grammatical errors that
readers find in the newspaper: "What we are involved in here is the
war on error and, following Mr Bush's example, we shall seek out
errorists and bring them to justice."
4. Q&A: Bulldozer
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Q. Watching earth-moving near my home the other day, I wondered
why the machine doing the job was called a "bulldozer". I can see
how it might be like a bull butting, but is that really where it
comes from? [Jim Whittaker]
A. Sort of. But the story's surprisingly complicated.
The word is definitely American. The earliest sense had nothing
to do with machinery, but referred to punishment, in particular a
severe whipping applied with a bullwhip. Detailed explanations
appear in several US newspapers in the latter months of 1876. All
say that it came into being as a result of a determined attempt
by Republicans in the Southern states, particularly Louisiana, to
stop blacks from joining the Democrats by "persuading" them to
take the oath of the brethren of the Union Rights Stop. This is
the way it was explained in the Gettysburg Compiler of 11 January
1877:
In very obstinate cases the brethren were in the habit of
administering a "bull's dose" of several hundred lashes on
the bare back. When dealing with those who were hard to
convert, active members would call out "give me the whip
and let me give him a bull-dose." From this it became easy
to say "that fellow ought to be bull-dosed, or bull-dozed,"
and soon bull-doze, bull-dozing and bull-dozers came to be
slang words.
By the early 1880s, to "bulldoze" was to intimidate or coerce by
violence, specifically the threat of a flogging. A "bulldozer"
could be a bully, an intimidator, or a member of a vigilante mob.
It could also refer to a type of gun, presumably seen as a
usefully intimidating device.
The next step occurs around the end of the century. We start to
get references to "bulldozer" being the name for various items of
equipment. The earliest is for a machine in a blacksmith's shop
for bending big pieces of metal. There's no way to tell whether
this sense appeared independently or had been borrowed from the
earlier ones, but the ideas are sufficiently similar to presume a
link of some sort.
In 1910, a Pennsylvania news report said a boat had been bought
to scrape out and clean the channels of a canal. This came with a
bulldozer - from the description a device for mounting on the
bows of the boat - to break up heavy ice in winter. Crude early
mule-powered earth-movers were also said to be fitted with such a
bulldozer (the problem, it was said, was getting the mules to go
backwards ready for the next stroke).
As you can imagine, in time "bulldozer" for the pusher device at
the front of a machine became confused with that of the machine
that did the pushing. But the first cases of "bulldozer" for a
tractor fitted with one appear only at the end of the 1920s and
are usually linked with the then new Caterpillar tractors. After
that, of course, a retronym had to be invented to describe the
item once called by that name, and "bulldozer blade" came into
existence.
5. Sic!
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>From a Chicago Tribune item of 9 November, sent in by Al Yellon, on
a local suburb's proposed ban on driving while using a hand-held
phone: "Resident Mark Hecht spoke in favor of the ban, saying he
was almost run down by a driver using a cell phone Sunday while
raking leaves." That's some serious multitasking!
"Last week," Brian Ashurst e-mailed, "I received a message from one
of my customers apologising for a printing problem in the latest
batch of cheques it sent out. 'We hope it will not cause you any
incontinence,' the message ended. I assured them that it had not,
and would not." On the other hand, an OB/GYN in California, Ellen
Smithee reports, "advertises some sophisticated surgical services,
one of which is called urogynecology. This term is defined in his
advertisements as 'treatment of urinary inconvenience'." Somebody
should organise a noun swap.
Roger DeBeers noted a sign posted in the window of a restaurant in
Fairfield, California: "REAR PARKING IN THE REAR PARKING LOT". He
wonders how many rears are parked back there.
The AMC Movie Watcher Newsletter dated 8 November contains a short
item about the actor Will Ferrell: "In July 2006, Ferrell announced
they were expecting their second child on the Tonight Show with Jay
Leno." Kris Raiman hopes this doesn't start a trend of celebrity
births on late night TV.
John Neave reports from New Zealand that he heard on the television
news last weekend that "A helicopter pilot is in hospital awaiting
an operation after a collision between Greymouth and Westport." He
is glad that only these two small towns were involved - if it had
been Wellington and Auckland, for instance, it would have made a
dreadful mess.
>From the newsletter of Spalding Baptist Church in Lincolnshire,
sent in by Diana Platts: "The Boys' Brigade will be holding their
Christmas Coffee Morning on Saturday 25th Nov. 10am-12 noon. Mince
pies, stolen, etc.". [If readers are not familiar with the German
delicacy called stollen, they're missing a treat.]
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