World Wide Words -- 09 Sep 06
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Sep 8 18:02:53 UTC 2006
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 504 Saturday 9 September 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/gmft.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: XDR-TB.
3. Weird Words: Pulchritudinous.
4. My New Book.
5. Recently noted.
6. Q&A: Friend and pitcher.
7. Sic!
A. E-mail contact addresses.
B. Subscription information.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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CORRECTIONS Thanks to all the courteous writers who gently pointed
out that Chatham Dockyard was on the River Medway, not the Thames.
And those who noted that the Irish temperance campaigner was Father
Mathew, not Matthew. Because Greek mythology is pretty much Greek
to me, I did carefully check the story about Hecuba in a standard
reference, but then somehow muddled it badly in transferring it to
the newsletter (according to Euripides it was Polymester who killed
Hecuba's son and in revenge Hecuba and her serving women blinded
him, not killed him). My apologies for the errors.
2. Turns of Phrase: XDR-TB
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This abbreviation has been in use only since March, when it was
introduced into medical language by the US Centers for Disease
Control and the World Health Organization. It appeared again this
week as the result of what one newspaper called "an unprecedented
warning" by the WHO. XDR-TB expands to "extensively drug-resistant
tuberculosis" (though some reports have "extreme drug-resistant")
and refers to cases that are unresponsive to almost all the drugs
available to treat them. The International World AIDS Conference in
Toronto in August heard of a group of cases in rural KwaZulu-Natal
among patients also infected with HIV; a significant number of XDR-
TB cases have been reported worldwide, not associated with Aids.
It's a development of the situation that arose more than a decade
ago when MDR-TB ("multi-drug resistant tuberculosis") emerged, a
form resistant to the two first-line treatment drugs. Experts fear
that we may soon see an untreatable form of TB, a return to the
time before streptomycin was discovered in 1946.
* Daily Telegraph, 7 Sep. 2006: The combination of Aids and XDR-TB
found in a quarter of patients in Natal carries a mortality rate of
100 per cent.
* New York Times, 5 Sep 2006: Dr. Mario C. Raviglione, who directs
the World Health Organization's tuberculosis program, said in an
interview that "nobody at the moment can be considered an expert"
about the XDR-TB problem. But he said that the XDR-TB situation is
"extremely scary."
3. Weird Words: Pulchritudinous
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Beautiful.
The definition hardly begins to explain this word. These days it is
applied mainly to women, especially to film stars and models whose
curvaceous comeliness is a cynosure for onlookers. To be so called,
a woman has to be more than just a pretty face. But it has become a
tongue-in-cheek word difficult to use in a straightforward way and
which too often appears as an alliterative element in overwrought
prose, as in a newspaper article that described Eartha Kitt as a
septuagenarian sex kitten and pulchritudinous purrer (hang your
head in shame, Minneapolis Star Tribune).
The noun, "pulchritude", has been in the language since the early
fifteenth century. It derives from the Latin word "pulchritudo"
that comes from "pulcher", beautiful.
In its first few centuries, it could be applied equally to both
sexes. In January 1522, Cardinal Wolsey came to the royal court
with a papal legation and made a speech to Henry VIII in which he
described the king as "Your noble persone, so formed and figured in
shape and stature with force and pulchritude." (Henry was then 31.
Don't be confused by portraits of the obese middle-aged man: Henry
was handsome and athletic in his youth.) In 1919, an author named
Inez Haynes Irwin wrote about Californian men in The Native Son:
"That agglomeration of the Anglo-Saxon, the Celt and the Latin, has
endowed the Native Son with the pulchritude of all three races."
Though unusual now, it's still possible to use it for males, as a
(female) writer did in the Boston Herald in April 1998: "And then
there's Kevin Costner and Paul Newman, who, of course, fall under
the category of Super Hunks. So you can imagine our excitement when
we learned that, come spring, the pulchritudinous pair could be
coming to Massachusetts!"
One oddity about "pulchritude" is that it almost entirely vanished
from British English after the seventeenth century, but survived in
American English. Another is that "pulchritudinous" was created in
the US surprisingly recently: the first example I can find is from
1875, in a local Iowa paper, the Burlington Weekly Hawk Eye: "If we
were Mrs. Livermore, we should object to being called 'an amiable
and pulchritudinous lady.' It is the reckless use of syllables like
these which does more to encourage extravagance and debauch society
than all the fashion magazines."
4. My New Book
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Words vanish from our language for many reasons, not least that the
thing it describes has become obsolete. Would you wear a billycock
or gallygaskins, take rosolio as medicine, eat hasty pudding, dance
the caterbraul, play loggets, or send messages via a teleautograph?
Gallimaufry: A Hodgepodge of our Vanishing Vocabulary, describes
the origin and background of these and more than a thousand other
words. It will be published in the UK by Oxford University Press on
28 September and worldwide soon afterwards. More details here soon.
5. Recently noted
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HEATHROW INJECTION Nicholas Farhi tells me that he saw a note on
his Australian colleague's computer: "Biscuits [cookies] are the
Heathrow Injection". It turns out that this is a common term among
Australians and New Zealanders who come to Britain to work. The
stress of living in a strange country combined with limited funds
can cause them to eat too much fatty or carbohydrate-rich food; if
accompanied by a less active life it can cause a sudden increase in
weight. The Australian YHA's site explains, "Put simply, it is the
injection of fat on arrival at Heathrow airport; however, this fat
does not surface until anywhere from one week to one month after
arrival." The term may be becoming more widely known because it
features in a play, The Vegemite Tales, that's now running at a
West End theatre in London.
HANGER-ON A friend took a tour of the Tower of London this week,
guided by a member of the Yeomen of the Guard or Beefeaters. He was
told a gruesome story about ye olden days. The guide said that when
aristocrats were hanged on the infamous gibbet at Tyburn, friends
and relatives could pay a sum to the hangman to speed the condemned
man's death by hanging on his legs. These helpers became known as
"hangers-on". You will gather this is another example of tourist-
guide folk etymology. The term has a much more plausible origin in
a sixteenth-century sense of the verb "hang" that meant to attach
yourself to another as a dependent or parasite.
6. Q&A: Friend and pitcher
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Q. There's an old meaning of "pitcher" that seems neither to come
from baseball nor from a person who applies pitch, let alone from
the vessel. It appears in the form "friend and pitcher" in The
Poor Soldier, an opera by William Shield and John O'Keefe, dated
1785. Having a friend and pitcher is clearly a mighty nice thing,
but why? [John Townley]
A. A search through old books and newspapers has turned up more
than enough examples to show that "friend and pitcher" was quite
widely known and used from the late eighteenth century on and
even survived until the early twentieth century.
I've found it, for example, in Deacon Brodie, a play of 1884 by
William Henley and Robert Louis Stevenson: "[A]ll I hope is, that
our friend and pitcher, the Deakin, will make a better job of it
than he did last night". The Dubuque Daily Herald wrote about it in
January 1896: "The queer phrase 'My friend and pitcher' was still
sometimes heard in Maryland and Virginia - also, I am told, in
Pennsylvania, until within recent years, but would seem now to be
obsolete hereabouts. Is it still in use elsewhere? 'Pitcher' had
the meaning of chum, crony, or familiar acquaintance - preferably,
perhaps, said of, or to, one of the opposite sex."
The dating shows that the phrase was almost certainly taken from
the sentimental song in the opera, which had the title My Friend
and Pitcher and which was popular long after the opera had been
forgotten: "My friend so rare, my girl so fair! / With such, what
mortal can be richer? / Give me but these, a fig for care! / With
my sweet girl, my friend and pitcher."
Blessed if I know where it comes from, though. Dictionaries are
no help at all. None I've looked at contain any reference to a
phrase like "friend and pitcher". "Pitcher" here can't come from
the idea of it being somebody who "pitches in", who gives help in
need, because that's less old than the phrase. It seems unlikely
that it is from a member of a farm gang pitching hay on a cart,
or from a market pitch, or from any of those meanings you give in
your question. At the time of the opera, "pitcher" did have a low
slang meaning of vagina, but that could hardly be the sense meant
in the song, which wasn't in the least bawdy.
Either we have a meaning that has escaped all record, or John
O'Keefe intended some figurative sense that is now unknown.
7. Sic!
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Jesper Hultén e-mails from Sweden: "I think it's a good thing that
newspapers test consumer electronics. And it's commendable that
they try to eliminate any bias. But I think Sweden's number one
tabloid, Aftonbladet, takes it a little too far." He refers to a
headline in Swedish about a "blindfold test" - for televisions.
"My Mum," reports Léonie Watson, "recently encountered a series of
error-stricken signs. The courtesy car she was driving announced
'Curtsey car' on one door. A pub she went to the previous evening
had on the chalkboard menu 'Halibert' and 'Aspargus'. Later, she
passed a commercial van going the other way. She didn't catch the
name of the company, except for the words 'Bristol friuterers' on
the side."
>From the New York Times online edition this week, spotted by Linda
Lindenfelser: "Princess Kiko, wife of Prince Akishino, gave birth
to a boy by Caesarean section at a Tokyo hospital. The boy, who
will be named Tuesday, is Emperor Akihito's first grandson." A
distant cousin to Tuesday Weld?
A subscriber found a piece in the weekly newspaper for Savoy in
Illinois. It was reporting on the planned opening of Applebee's, a
chain restaurant. The manager, wanting to make the restaurant part
of the community, had been scouting for local memorabilia to hang
on the walls. She was quoted as saying, "When an Applebee's opens
in a community, the general managers get out and parooze. We like
to make sure that everything is accurate." Heaven knows what would
happen if it weren't.
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