World Wide Words -- 22 Dec 07
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Dec 21 17:00:02 UTC 2007
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 567 Saturday 22 December 2007
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Sent each Saturday to at least 50,000 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: Hodening.
3. Recently noted.
4. Q&A: Once upon a time.
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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CUT AND DRIED Subscribers who know about timber seasoning disputed
my view, expressed last week, that the term couldn't be from that
source. Colin Hartwright was just one reader who pointed out that
"Timber yards are (and were) full of cut timber laid out in the
original tree shape separated by battens for drying. Whatever the
preliminary stages they were certainly 'cut and dried' after this
treatment." I stand corrected. But my other argument still holds,
that the historical evidence doesn't point to timber yards as the
origin.
Others mentioned "cut and try", a similar-looking expression that
refers to a process marked by trial and error. This is more recent,
according to Merriam-Webster, which dates it from 1903. I've been
able to improve on that - it appeared in The Cultivator, published
by the New York State Agricultural Society, in July 1850: "If the
earth is hard, and the stick rather long, it must be cut shorter,
on the old principle of 'cut and try'." Though there is evidence
that "cut and try" is muscling in on the territory of the other
expression through an obvious-enough mistake, the two must surely
have different origins, with "cut and try" most probably deriving
from woodworking.
UNFORTUNATE BOOK TITLES Henry Willis contributed a recollection:
"Thirty years ago, when I was a desk clerk at the library of the US
Department of the Interior in Washington DC, I was given the job of
organising all the check-out slips for the previous three years in
Dewey decimal order. (This was punishment, by the way, for being
caught reading the books that were being returned; I was told that
doing so was 'inappropriate' for someone in my job.) One of the
slips was for 'How To Hold Up A Bank'. That intrigued me enough to
get me to descend a few floors into the stacks on my lunch break to
find it. Unfortunately the book wasn't there, but I was able to get
an idea what it was about from the other books on that shelf, all
of which concerned soil engineering."
2. Weird Words: Hodening
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A mumming or masquerade on Christmas Eve in Kent.
This ancient custom died out around 1910 but has been revived, with
several groups now performing in East Kent towns. Originally, the
hodening or hoodening was performed by agricultural workers, who
went from house to house to beg money. These days, groups tour pubs
and parties, performing a short play and collecting for charity.
Central to the traditional performance is a wooden horse's head -
the Hoden or Hooden Horse - with moveable jaws that were fitted
with hobnails for teeth. This description appeared in The Mirror of
Literature, Amusement, and Instruction on 22 December 1832:
A string is attached to the lower jaw, a horse-cloth is
tied round the extreme part of the head, beneath which
one of the party is concealed, who, by repeated pulling
and loosening the string, causes the jaw to rise and fall,
and thus produces, by bringing the teeth in contact, a
snapping noise, as he moves along; the rest of the party
following in procession, grotesquely habited, and ringing
hand-bells! In this order they proceed from house to house,
singing carols and ringing their bells, and are generally
remunerated for the amusement they occasion by a largess
of money, or beer and cake.
However, an article in the Church Times in January 1891 suggests
that the tradition was by then in terminal decline:
Nothing was done or sung by the small crowd around; and
the clapping caused by the opening and shutting of the
mouth continued, till the creature having been satisfied
with money was driven away.
Nobody knows for sure where "hodening" comes from, though it's
known in print from the beginning of the nineteenth century. The
Oxford English Dictionary speculates with others that it might be
from a dialect confusion with "wooden", referring to the head. It
is also guessed that it might have come about because the horse
forms a hood over the operator or because of some fanciful
association with Robin Hood. Because a horse sacrifice was said at
one time to take place at the winter solstice among peoples of
Scandinavian origin, it has also been suggested that the word is a
corruption of the name of the Norse god Odin (or Woden or Wotan).
[See the online version for a photo of 1909 showing a hodening.]
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3. Recently noted
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BRAINWORM Oliver Sacks recently published Musicophilia: Tales of
Music and the Brain, which mentions neurological faults that can
lead to people getting uncontrolled music running through their
minds, perhaps being tormented by a single phrase for days on end
or even being driven mad by hallucinating incessant loud music in
their heads all the time. Sachs refers to advertising jingles and
the like that are designed to get inside your head in this way as
"brainworms", presumably as a variation on "earworm". Perhaps he
didn't know that "brainworm" is used in the US for a parasite of
animals such as elk, caribou, moose and deer; it infects their
brains and can cause a fatal neurological disease.
WHAT'S ANOTHER WORD FOR THESAURUS? Malcolm Hensher, an English
teacher from Oxfordshire, e-mailed to recount an episode during a
recent lesson. "The class was to make extensive use of the dished-
out thesauruses (thesauri if you prefer) to assist them in their
creative writing. One young man, clearly unenthusiastic about the
task, was trying to describe a safari adventure. After rummaging
around in his grubby tome he whined to me, 'Sir, this fesaurus is
rubbish.' I asked which word he was looking up. 'Zebra.'"
4. Q&A: Once upon a time
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Q. I am interested in the origins of the phrase "Once upon a time",
which begins fairy tales and folk tales. "Upon a time"? What does
that really mean? Is it a translation from German or other European
story tellers? Any history would be of interest. [Lynn Peterson]
A. The expression has for a very long time indeed been an idiom,
one that most of us take in at a gulp without much bothering about
the meaning of the individual words. We've learned, as you say,
that it usually begins a mythical or fabulous story set in some
unspecified moment in the past. "Once upon a time," Charles Dickens
wrote in A Christmas Carol, "old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-
house." People often use it in a hand-wavingly imprecise way to
indicate a moment in the past or to imply a fairy tale: "Once upon
a time we all believed in the magic of the Fed", the Independent
headlined a story on 1 December 2007.
It's definitely English in origin, though it's hard to say how old
it is. The Oxford English Dictionary has examples going as far back
as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in 1385, but it had probably achieved
the status of a conventional phrase even then.
What's bothering you, you imply, is this word "upon" in the phrase.
We still use it in connection with time, although it often sounds
formal ("we plan to meet upon another occasion"). It was once the
done thing to attach it to any time-related term where we would now
use "on" or "at". Lord Dunsany wrote in Time and the Gods in 1905,
"Upon an evening of the forgotten years the gods were seated on the
hills."
Another phrase with similar meaning to "once upon a time" was "upon
a day", as in Westward Ho! by Charles Kingsley: "And it befell upon
a day, that we came into a great wood of ferns." Another was "upon
a time" - an example is in Miles Coverdale's translation of the Old
Testament book of Job, dated 1535 (I've modernised the spelling):
"Now upon a time ... the servants of God came and stood before the
Lord."
"Once upon a time" combines this last form with "once", implying
that what was to follow was a unique happening, or at least a very
special one.
5. Sic!
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The recent ice storm in the USA was reported in an Associated Press
piece that was copied verbatim in many press and television news
reports on 16 December, including those in USA Today, Yahoo! News,
the Washington Post and the Arizona Star. Al Schneider, Jonathan
Kern, Dodi Schultz, Barton Bresnik and Dorothy Zemach sent me its
first sentence: "Motorists slid off roads Sunday across the Great
Lakes states and into New England." That's one heck of a skid.
On the same theme and on the same day, the BBC News site featured a
number of photographs of the ice storm contributed by its visitors.
Carol Weston, Tim Mathews and Susanne Barton all spotted a picture
of three birds in the snow, with this caption: "Susanne and Roland
Schnippering from New Hampshire found these bluebirds pausing for a
moment on a Japanese maple tree while they celebrated their 20th
wedding anniversary." Let's hear it for long-lived celebratory
avian threesomes.
An Irish bull is an expression containing a contradiction in terms
or implying a ludicrous inconsistency, which is known from the
eighteenth century but of unknown origin. The OED remarks that
"bull" had been long in use, originally to mean a ludicrous joke,
before it came to be associated with Irishmen. Eoin C Bairéad e-
mailed from Dublin with the tale of an Irish bull that's actually
from Ireland. He reported, "We have here a system of penalty points
for motoring offences such that those reaching 12 points may no
longer drive. A proposal that the police be given the authority to
confiscate the licences of such drivers was rejected on 12
December. Instead, according to our national radio, quoting the
Department of Justice, 'drivers are obliged to voluntarily hand
over their licences'."
A neighbour of mine mentioned last week that her husband organised
an organ recital last September at Holy Trinity Church in Wickwar,
Gloucestershire, to raise funds for the restoration of the church
fabric. The details were phoned in to the local newspaper. It duly
published them, with a note that the recital was to be in aid of
the curtains.
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