World Wide Words -- 07 Apr 07
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Apr 6 17:35:33 UTC 2007
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 534 Saturday 7 April 2007
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Sent each Saturday to at least 48,000 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
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Rambunctious.
3. Q&A: Sharpshooter.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: Balls-up.
6. 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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GOWK Chris Pringle comments on last week's Weird Word that "gowk"
is also Geordie (the English dialect spoken around Newcastle-upon-
Tyne) for apple-core. "It's a word I learned from my late father,
along with 'spelk' (splinter) and 'spuggy' (sparrow), and a lot
more that I've forgotten. I never used these outside the house, as
we lived in the middle of commuter Surrey, where there wasn't much
call for Geordie expressions in the 50s and 60s!" Ron Canter tells
us "'Give us yer gowk' (especially prevalent during WW2 when fruit
was short) means 'Please may I have your apple core when you've
finished with it?'" Sheila Maslen recalls that her father "used to
tell the story of two boys, one eating an apple. His friend asks
'give us your gowk', to which the first one replies 'there'll be no
gowk when I've finished!'" Eric Thompson corrects my linguistic
geography: "I was surprised to see 'gowk' described as 'good Scots,
not much known elsewhere', as it was a word commonly used when I
was a child in the East Riding of Yorkshire in the 1930s and
1940s."
HOLE IN THE WALL Following last week's quick note about this very
British term for an ATM, I've found time to look into the history
more deeply and have put the results online as an update. The URL
is http://quinion.com?HITW .
2. Weird Words: Rambunctious
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Uncontrollably exuberant or boisterous.
This is another of those irrepressibly energetic words that came
out of the US in the first half of the nineteenth century. It's
first recorded in Boston in 1830: "If they are 'rumbunctious' at
the prospect, they will be 'riprorious' when they get a taste."
("Riproarious" was another bright-eyed and bushy-tailed coinage
also first recorded that year, with roughly the same meaning.)
Cautious dictionaries say "of unknown origin", an open invitation
to strange and inventive suggestions. One such holds that it is a
compound of "ram" (to butt or strike) with "bust" (to thrash or
beat). So rambunctious individuals went around ramming and busting
people. Please don't pass this on.
A little burrowing in the Oxford English Dictionary suggests that
it has been borrowed from one or other of two earlier words. One is
"rumbustious", recorded from 1778. The other is "robustious", an
ancient adjective meaning both "robust" and "boisterous", of which
the OED entry, published in 1909, comments that it was "In common
use during the 17th century. In the 18th it becomes rare, and is
described by Johnson (1755) as 'now only used in low language, and
in a sense of contempt'. During the 19th it has been considerably
revived, especially by archaizing writers." At the time, the OED's
editors thought that both words came from "robust".
3. Q&A: Sharpshooter
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Q. I once read that the origin of the word "sharpshooter" harks
back to the days of the buffalo hunters in the American west. They
used the old Sharps rifle and hence became known as Sharps'
shooters. Do you know if there is any truth in this? [David
Jaundrell, Cheshire]
A. It's a story that's sometimes told and you can understand why,
as a connection between "sharp" and "Sharps" seems obvious. It has
also been said that the term was popularised during the American
Civil War of the 1860s. Wrong war, wrong country, wrong rifle. The
stimulus was the Napoleonic Wars and the term is British. So the
short and sharp answer is, no, there's no truth in it.
Doubters may like the facts. The Sharps rifle was designed by
Christian Sharps in the late 1840s and made from 1850 onwards by
his firm, the Sharps Rifle Manufacturing Company. But the term
"sharp shooter" had been in use in Britain since no later than
1801, based on "sharp" in the senses of accurate, intelligent,
acute, or precise. The Experimental Group of Riflemen had been set
up in the British army in 1800; this led to the creation of the
95th (Rifle) Regiment in 1802 as a specialist sharpshooting force
using the Baker rifle.
I found the term in the Edinburgh Advertiser for 23 June 1801, in
an item on the North British Militia: "This Regiment has several
Field Pieces, and two companies of Sharp Shooters, which are very
necessary in the modern Stile of War." It quickly became common,
appearing in the Times more than 20 times in the next three years.
In 1805, a report could say baldly in the expectation of being
immediately understood that "Lord Nelson was wounded by a French
Sharpshooter."
4. Recently noted
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BRITISH DIALECTS A most interesting site has been assembled by the
British Library as a learning resource from speech recordings that
date from the 1950s to the late 1990s. The site features 72 items,
showing the way that speech varies regionally and how dialects and
word use have changed in the past half century. Notes accompanying
the recordings provide pointers on changing usage for students. A
section with the title Your Voices encourages students and schools
to record voices of local people to add to the recorded archive. An
interesting example of aspects of British language change given in
the site is this: "we couldn't listen to the latest tunes because
we hadn't a wireless". "Tune" has changed its pronunciation among
younger people from "tyune" to "choon"; "hadn't" is a form that
younger people would find odd, as it has been replaced by "didn't
have" and "hadn't got"; "wireless" is only heard from the very old,
"radio" having almost entirely taken over. Follow
http://quinion.com?BLSF to visit the site.
COOPERING When this turned up in the Guardian on Tuesday, in an
item about the conviction of a man involved in cocaine smuggling, I
was surprised to learn it had nothing to do with the old craft of
making wooden casks. The report said that it referred to an ancient
smugglers' trick in which a deep-sea craft would approach a British
port, attracting the keen attention of customs officers. Before it
docked, however, it would rendezvous with a local boat apparently
on a legitimate errand and transfer its smuggled cargo. The Oxford
English Dictionary doesn't know about the term in this sense, but
the one it does record also refers to small boats going out to sea
to meet others for questionable purposes. "Coopering" began to be
used in print around 1880 for the practice of sending vessels to
sell spirits to fishermen at sea. These ships were called copers,
from a Dutch or Flemish word meaning to buy or trade that's allied
to the old British verb "cheap", to buy or sell, which survives in
the London street name Cheapside. It was pronounced "coper", but it
usually appeared in British newspaper reports as "cooper", perhaps
through confusion with the craft term. The OED has an illuminating
note: "The practice began in a comparatively innocent barter trade
carried on by Dutch boats visiting the fishing fleets, when the
latter fished in close to the land, off Camperdown and the Texel;
but it led to the fitting out of 'floating grog-shops' to attend
each fleet. Public attention was called to the demoralizing nature
of the traffic in 1881, and it formed the subject of a convention
between the British, German and Dutch governments in 1882, for the
carrying out of which an Act of Parliament was passed in 1888."
5. Q&A: Balls-up
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Q. I've been wondering where the expression "balls-up" comes from.
[Graham C Reed, South Africa]
A. Though now widely known in the English-speaking world, this is
in origin British coarse slang for a bungled or badly carried out
task or action, a messed-up or confused situation, or a complete
foul-up. The earliest example I've found is from Frederic Manning's
book about the First World War, The Middle Parts of Fortune, which
was published in 1929; a Tommy on the Somme in 1916 is quoted as
saying: "I suppose we'll come through all right; we've done it
before, so we can do it again. Anyway, it can't be more of a bloody
balls-up than some o' the other shows 'ave been." ["Show" here is a
slang term for a military engagement, battle or raid.]
The obvious implication is that there is a testicular association,
which is why it is regarded as coarse or low slang, though quite
how it might have come about is unclear. Once one begins to look
into matters more deeply, that origin becomes more unlikely still.
My first clue was this in the Lincoln Daily News of Nebraska dated
October 1902: "He balls up the English language and his verses are
without rhythm or sense."
This verbal construction, "to ball up" - in much the same sense as
in the British slang term, though not regarded as coarse - turns
out to have a long history in the US. Jonathan Lighter has recorded
examples in the Historical Dictionary of American Slang from the
middle of the nineteenth century. A book about college slang dated
1865 records that "to ball up" meant to fail a recitation or
examination. From no later than the 1880s it meant becoming mixed
up or confused or entangled in some way. There's a reference to the
noun "ball-up" in the US publication Dialect Notes in 1900, meaning
a confused or muddled situation. It looks highly plausible that
"balls-up", although a British expression, derives from this older
American one.
Having said all that, there's no obvious clue from the examples
where it might come from. Indeed Professor Lighter remarks at the
beginning of the entry that the term's "semantic development is
obscure", which is academic-speak for "I haven't a clue, either".
Entanglement might suggest the ball is of string or yarn that has
become snarled up, or perhaps it refers to crumpling a piece of
paper into a ball, or conceivably it comes from college sports.
6. Sic!
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Department of mystifying units: on Tuesday the BBC Web site ended a
story about troubles with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN with
the explanatory comment, "These experiments, each about the size of
a mansion, will capture and measure new particles produced in the
beam collisions." Colin Burt wonders how big, exactly, a mansion is.
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