World Wide Words -- 16 Sep 06
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Sep 15 16:24:19 UTC 2006
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 505 Saturday 16 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/ldun.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Gormagon.
3. Recently noted.
4. Q&A: Barbarian.
5. My New Book.
6. Q&A: Different to.
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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MY FRIEND AND PITCHER Many helpful comments came in following my
puzzled piece about the origin of this expression. Based on the
stanza of the song that I quoted, many ingeniously suggested that
the line "With my sweet girl, my friend and pitcher" didn't consist
of two phrases in apposition (with "friend and pitcher" referring
to "my sweet girl") but a serial list of three items. This would
make it a close parallel to Edward Fitzgerald's translation of a
line in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: "a jug of wine, a loaf of
bread - and thou", with "pitcher" standing in for "jug". However,
the complete lyric shows it's directed solely at the singer's one
true love.
Another intriguing suggestion was that it might be linked with the
expression "to pitch woo", meaning to court, pay one's addresses
to, or utter affectionate pleasantries to, a member of the opposite
sex. This was new to me and sounded possible, but fell foul of the
evidence, since it only appeared in the 1930s - in the USA and
Australia - about 150 years too late to have been an influence.
2. Weird Words: Gormagon
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A mythical beast.
This monster is known to have been described in print just twice,
in each case in an improper riddle. Its sole appearance in this
spelling is in the 1785 first edition of Captain Francis Grose's
Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue: "A monster with six eyes, three
mouths, four arms, eight legs, five on one side and three on the
other, three arses, two tarses, and a *** upon its back".
"Tarse" is worthy of attention in its own right, since it is an old
Germanic term for the penis. You will not be surprised therefore to
learn that the "***" should be expanded to the c-word and that the
monster is a distant cousin of the beast with two backs.
A sighting in North America twenty years earlier suggests the fame
of the riddle and this beast in the oral tongue was both widespread
and ancient. A notice in the New York Mercury of 16 February 1761
announced that an example had been caught in Canada and had been
brought to James Elliot's tavern at Corlear's Hook, where "it will
be exhibited at said House till the Curious are satisfied":
This MONSTER is larger than an Elephant, of a very uncommon
shape, having three Heads, eight Legs, three Fundaments, two
Male Members, and one Female Pudendum on the Rump. It is of
various Colours, very beautiful, and makes a Noise like the
conjunction of two or three Voices. It is held unlawful to
kill it, and is said to live to a great Age. The Canadians
could not give it a Name, 'till a very old Indian Sachem
said, He remembered to have seen one when he was a boy, and
his Father called it a GORMAGUNT."
Captain Grose gave the game away in his entry by explaining that it
was "a man on horseback, with a woman behind him." (His "five legs
on one side" description is easily explained - the woman was riding
side-saddle.) Jonathon Green suggests in Cassell's Dictionary of
Slang that, in the form "gormagon", the word is a blend of "gorgon"
and "dragon".
In the interests of completeness, it should be noted that a word of
the same spelling was applied to a member of a society imitating
the Freemasons that had been founded in London in the eighteenth
century. There is no suggestion that the two senses are linked. The
Oxford English Dictionary proposes that in this sense "gormagon" is
meaningless and probably pseudo-Chinese, since the first reference
to it says "The Venerable Order of Gormogons" had been brought into
England by a Mandarin.
3. Recently noted
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M-TICKET This has recently joined a small group of words beginning
in "m-" (for "mobile", as in mobile phone), including "m-commerce",
"m-payment" and "m-voting". M-tickets, say to a pop concert or for
a bus journey, are bought by mobile phone with the purchaser later
identified either by a confirmation number or by a text message on
his phone which he can show the checker. Since Americans generally
call the devices cellphones, the term seems likely not to catch on
in the USA.
4. Q&A: Barbarian
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Q. Could you investigate the origins of "barbarian," please? I've
been informed that the Greek "bar-bar" chestnut is a folk etymology
and that the true lineage of the word goes back to a historical
group of people. I was taken to task for repeating this "bar-bar"
trivia by a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, who was
in full battle armour at the time. [Jared Martin]
A. I can understand your not wanting to argue the point under these
circumstances. However, unless your informant possesses a working
time machine and is able to do some original research denied to the
rest of us, he's wrong. But I think it may be possible to work out
where he got this idea. At least he didn't produce the hoary old
story that foreigners were called barbarians because they were
forced to wear beards, having no barbers ...
It's generally accepted that the original Greek "bárbaros" for a
foreigner came from an earlier sense of the word that meant someone
who stammered. That's thought to be older than the Greek language,
since Sanskrit has the root "barbara-s" that also means stammering;
it was probably in the Proto-Indo-European language predating both.
With the repeated "bar-bar", it is probably imitative. The Greeks
presumably thought that foreigners talked as though they were
stammering.
The word was taken from Greek into Latin "barbaria", a foreigner,
and from there into English in the fourteenth century. Its first
sense was also that of a foreigner, particularly someone who was
neither Greek nor Roman nor a Christian. It was only a little later
that the idea of an uncouth or uncivilised person came to the fore
in English, though that derogatory sense had been present in both
Latin and Greek. However, neither the Greeks nor the Romans seem to
have used the word to mean savagely cruel or inhuman people.
The Barbary Coast, the old name for the countries of North Africa,
comes from the same source, as does its close relative "Berber" for
the native peoples of North Africa and their language. Both terms
come immediately from the Arabic "barbar", but that has been shown
to derive from the Greek word. I suspect your informant knew about
the link between "barbarian" and "Berber" but not the background.
5. My New Book
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Words vanish from our language for many reasons, not least that the
thing it describes has gone out of daily use. Would anybody today
wear fustian or a crestinette, allow a dog-leach to treat illness,
eat bukkenade, drink Peter-see-me by the nipperkin, play barley
break, or watch an engastromyth? Gallimaufry: A Hodgepodge of our
Vanishing Vocabulary, describes the origin of and background to all
these and more than a thousand others. It will be published in the
UK by Oxford University Press on 28 September and worldwide soon
after.
For full details see http://www.worldwidewords.org/gallimaufry.htm
For advance orders via Amazon, follow these links:
Amazon UK: GBP7.79 http://quinion.com?G84Y
Amazon USA: US$16.50 http://quinion.com?G34Y
Amazon Canada: CDN$19.77 http://quinion.com?G91Y
Amazon Germany: EUR21,90 http://quinion.com?G27Y
6. Q&A: Different to
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Q. In issue 501 of World Wide Words, you say "[t]he Sun was very
different to the others...". In the United States, "different"
usually takes "from", not "to". Is there a difference in usage
between the US and the UK? Would you please give me guidelines how
to select the appropriate preposition after "different"? [Allan
Paris; similar questions came from Martin Murray and David L Smith]
A. Yes, the UK is often different to the USA in this respect. That
is the quick answer, but a rather longer one is needed to cover the
topic in anything like completeness.
An astonishing amount of print has been devoted to these forms in
various style guides and grammars in the past three centuries, with
much argument devoted to supporting the "from" form through logical
parallels with other formations. Some writers have argued that as
"differ" must be followed by "from", so should "different"; others
have held that as both words begin with the Latin prefix "dis-",
meaning apart, and "apart" requires "from", "different" must have
it too. Attitudes have softened in the past century; authorities
now agree that "to" and even the maligned "than" have their place.
The problem for conservative arbiters is that all three forms have
been used for hundreds of years. Shakespeare is the first writer
known to have used "different from" - before his time "unto" and
"to" were the usual accompaniments.
Considering how much it has been denigrated, the "than" form has
also been surprisingly common: the first edition of the Oxford
English Dictionary more than a century ago gave a long list of good
writers who have used it, including Addison, Steele, Richardson,
Defoe, Fanny Burney, Coleridge, Southey, De Quincey, Goldsmith,
Carlyle, and Thackeray. Eighteenth-century grammarians held that
"than" was a conjunction and so could not be used as a preposition
in a similar way to "from" and "to"; that view prevailed, though
the opposing opinion was argued forcefully even at the time and is
now accepted by all grammarians. "Than" is still deprecated by many
stylists; However, its use with "different" has long been common in
the USA, though almost unknown in the UK. It can be the only good
choice when "different" is followed by a clause ("She had one day
hoped for a different lot than to be wedded to a little gentleman
who rapped his teeth" - Thackeray, 1848).
The usual advice these days is that "from" is irreproachable. "To"
is unobjectionable in British English but may need thought if it is
to appear in the US. "Than" is colloquially acceptable - in the USA
only - but can be used in more formal prose anywhere if a difficult
paraphrase would otherwise result.
7. Sic!
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The rather splendid word "implacabliopope" turned up in a column in
the Observer on 3 September. I might have noted it as an invented
term for an obdurate head of the Catholic Church, if it had not
been amended to "implacable" in the online version of the article.
How the one could have been turned into the other is still a
puzzle.
John Craggs found this note about the author O Henry in a current
newsletter from ArcaMax publishing: "William Sydney Porter was born
in North Carolina, and began a long series of different jobs late
in his youth. Shortly after his wife died, he was found guilty of
embarrassment and sent to prison in 1898". John Craggs trusts that
the person who wrote that will be suitably embezzled.
Continuing the theme of incongruous word substitutions, Don Wilkes
and Peter Weinrich both noted one in their local paper, The Saanich
News, for 13 September 2006. It turned up in a piece about melting
permafrost leaking methane: "It means that if the permafrost front
continues to recede, the amount of greenhouse gas pumped into the
atmosphere will be greatly exasperated."
Sometimes homonymic errors lead to incongruous images. Susan Klee
found one in a letter to the Wall Street Journal of 8 September,
concerning historical dust-ups at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire:
"Once, rowdy students discharged the college canon into the walls
of Dartmouth Hall."
A letter in this week's New Scientist shows what can happen when an
association of ideas bubbles on to the page from the unconscious
mind. The writer says about the controlled use of drugs in sport,
"It is naive to suppose that athletes will be content with a level
playing field."
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