World Wide Words -- 13 Jan 07
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jan 12 19:07:49 UTC 2007
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 522 Saturday 13 January 2007
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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/aqth.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Jocund.
3. Q&A: Stick one's oar in.
4. Recently noted.
5. Article: Fudge.
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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MANGEL-WURZEL It has been a decade or several since I last looked
into the Worzel Gummidge books and assumed his name implied that he
was in part made from a mangel-wurzel. John Neave has had cause to
read them much more recently and pointed out this description in
the first chapter of the first book in the series: "Susan saw that
he [Worzel Gummidge] had a most friendly and pleasant face. It was
cut out of a turnip". So the author, Barbara Euphan Todd, might
have been as confused as anybody else about the exact nature of the
vegetable, though "turnip" is sometimes used as a generic term for
several of these root vegetables. Several Scottish readers pointed
out that it is incorrect to imply that "swede" is the name for the
vegetable in the whole of the UK. Scots call them turnips or neeps,
bashed neeps (mashed swede) being a traditional accompaniment to
the famous haggis. At one time, generations ago, Scottish turnips
or neeps were indeed turnips; the Scots changed at some point to
eating swedes instead, but kept the old name. Confusion abounds.
2. Weird Words: Jocund
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Cheerful and light-hearted.
This could hardly be more positive. Its definition in the Oxford
English Dictionary brims with agreeableness: "Feeling, expressing,
or communicating mirth or cheerfulness; mirthful, merry, cheerful,
blithe, sprightly, light-hearted; pleasant, cheering, delightful".
That definition also included the word that dare not speak its name
these days in such company, "gay". "Jocund" comes to us via Old
French from Latin "jucundus", meaning pleasant or agreeable, from
the verb "juvare", to delight.
Dictionaries describe it as rather formal and it feels a little
old-fashioned, to the extent that it sometimes appears these days
as a mildly humorous term for being agreeable. That wasn't so for
Wordsworth, wandering lonely as a cloud while intent on watching
his daffodils: "The waves beside them danced; but they / Out-did
the sparkling waves in glee: / A poet could not but be gay, / In
such a jocund company". Or indeed Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet:
"Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day / stands tiptoe on
the misty mountain tops".
3. Q&A: Stick one's oar in
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Q. Having moved from the UK to the US, I'm often entertained by the
different use of words. I've used a term here in the US that gets
blank looks - to stick one's oar in. Could you expose its history?
[Andrew Martin]
A. No problem. The idiom "to stick one's oar in" means to interfere
or meddle in some matter that doesn't concern one. It's a close
relative of "sticking one's nose" into something.
It's now less common in Britain than it once was, though it does
turn up from time to time, as here in the Daily Mail in August
2005: "He feels he must be [there] today. Not to stick his oar in,
you understand, but to offer moral support." A rare instance of an
American author using it turned up as a neat reference back to its
original context in Ursula K Le Guin's The Dispossessed: "An old
adviser, Ferdaz ... liked to stick his oar in even when it steered
the boat off the course he wanted."
The expression dates back to the sixteenth century and has turned
up in all sorts of different formulations down the centuries. The
original was "to have an oar in every man's boat", meaning to be
involved in every man's business or affairs. Variations include
"He'll have an oar in everything", "He will put in his oar", and
"Don't you put your oar in".
By the time that the Londoner W W Jacobs was writing, around the
start of the twentieth century, it had become quite divorced from
any physical image. This is from his short story The Substitute:
"'You mind your bisness,' he ses, shouting. 'And not so much about
my missis! D'ye hear? Wot's it got to do with you? Who asked you to
shove your oar in?'"
4. Recently noted
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YET MORE WORDS OF THE YEAR In early January each year, members of
the American Dialect Society vote at their Annual Meeting for their
words of the year in various categories. The winners this time
were: Most Useful: "climate canary", an organism or species whose
poor health or declining numbers hint at a larger environmental
catastrophe to come; Most Creative: "lactard", someone who is
lactose-intolerant; Most Unnecessary: "SuriKat", the supposed
nickname of the baby girl of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes; Most
Outrageous: "Cambodian accessory", Angelina Jolie's adopted child
(who is Cambodian); Most Euphemistic: "waterboarding", the US
interrogation technique in which the subject is immobilised and
doused with water to simulate drowning; Most Likely to Succeed:
"YouTube", as a verb, to use the YouTube Web site or to have a
video of oneself posted on the site; Least Likely to Succeed:
"grup", a Generation-Xer who doesn't act his age (the word is said
to derive from an ancient episode of Star Trek in which it was a
mangled form of "grown-up"). The overall winner of the Word of the
Year was: "to pluto" or "to be plutoed": to demote or devalue
someone or something (you may recall this happened to the former
planet Pluto when the International Astronomical Union decided
Pluto no longer met its definition of a planet).
ARE THESE WORDS? Last Sunday's Dilbert cartoon mocked the tufty-
haired manager's use of "words that aren't words", as his secretary
described them: "incentiment", "flexitate", "leadershipping", and
"robustify". We can go along with the first two - the only examples
I can find for "incentiment" are misprints for "incitement" and the
second isn't used at all so far as I can tell. But for the third
Scott Adams surely knows the management aphorism "leadership is a
verb, not a noun" - ie, what matters is what leaders do, not the
position they hold. The verb has a history: it appears in Morton
Freeman's A Treasury for Word Lovers of 1983 ("It is possible to
take courses in leadershipping"), and even earlier in a novel by
Mason Smith, Everybody Knows and Nobody Cares, dated 1971. The last
example, "robustify", obviously enough means to make some device or
situation more robust. It's fairly common online and turns up in
reference to computer programs in particular. Both "leadershipping"
and "robustify" are jargon and neither has yet graced the pages of
a dictionary, but they're real words that a few people use in all
seriousness.
5. Article: Fudge
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I happen to have been hunting down the early history of the name
for this sweet recently for a different purpose and was intrigued
to find that it's a relatively modern confection, at least under
that name. The Oxford English Dictionary has its first example from
as late as 1896, in which the writer describes fudge as "a kind of
chocolate bonbons".
These days, with electronic archives that allow one to solve in
moments a problem that a researcher of a previous generation might
have taken weeks over, it took me about half of no time at all to
find an earlier example, from the Davenport Daily Tribune of Iowa
for 22 February 1895:
"Nearly every night at college," said the Vassar girl,
"some girl may be found somewhere who is making 'fudges'
or giving a fudge party." Fudges are Vassar chocolates,
and they are simply the most delicious edibles ever
manufactured by a set of sweetmeat-loving girls. Their
origin is wrapped in mystery. We only know that their
receipt is handed down from year to year by old students
to new, and that they belong peculiarly to Vassar.
This was an interesting find, my exhilaration at having unearthed
the Vassar connection being only slightly dampened when I found
that many had made the same discovery previously. Chief among them
was the US researcher Barry Popik, who five years ago went to this
famous - originally women-only - college at Poughkeepsie, New York,
to read through the Vassar yearbooks of the period. These contain
many mentions of fudge, including this ditty from 1893:
What is it that we love the best,
Of all the candies east or west,
Although to make them is a pest?
Fudges.
What perches us upon a chair
To stir a sauce-pan held in air,
Which, tipping, pours upon our hair--
Fudges.
What needs more stirring than oat-mush,
And more still when we're in a rush,
But what's e'en sweeter than a "crush"?
Fudges.
What subtle odor doth recall,
To artless minds that "long-owed call,"
On the "sweet" maiden up the hall?
Fudges.
The puzzling reference in the second verse is explained in the
newspaper article: "It never tastes so delicious, however, as
when made at college, over a spluttering gas lamp, in the
seclusion of your own apartments." The thought of long-skirted
maidens balancing on chairs to heat pans over a gas mantle above
their heads would make a modern safety-conscious teacher blench.
The newspaper article and the poem presumably pluralise "fudge"
from its being cut into pieces for serving. When the word gets out
into the wider world in this new sense, at around the turn of the
century, "fudge" becomes a collective noun. Despite the use of the
word chocolate in the newspaper article and the modern implication
in the US that fudge is normally chocolate flavoured, the recipe
accompanying the article lists only sugar, butter and milk, the
"traditional" fudge known in Britain. The making of fudge to much
the same recipe was a craze around this time at several US women's
colleges, including Wellesley College and Smith College.
The poem is the earliest dated reference to the word we have in
this sense. However, there is also a letter in the Vassar archives
from a former student, Emelyn Hartridge, to her professor, Lucy
Salmon, telling how she introduced fudge to the college. According
to Lee Edwards Benning in Oh Fudge!: A Celebration of America's
Favorite Candy (1994) this was written long after the event, on 11
December 1921:
Fudge, as I first knew it, was first made in Baltimore by
a cousin of a school mate of mine. It was sold in 1886 in
a grocery store for 40 cents a pound and my brother Julian
bought me my first box. ... I secured the recipe and in my
first year at Vassar I made it there - and in 1888 I made
30 pounds for the Senior Auction, its real introduction to
the college, I think.
Tantalisingly, she doesn't mention when it became known as fudge -
might its first maker or the owner of that grocery store in
Baltimore have given it its name? If either did, a record of the
verbal ingenuity of this mute inglorious Milton has not survived.
How it came by the name is still a mystery. "Fudge" first came into
the language in the late seventeenth century as a verb meaning "to
fit together in a clumsy or underhand manner". This could refer to
putting facts or figures together in a superficially convincing way
or to patching something up to disguise its faults. This led to the
cry of "fudge!", meaning nonsense, and to senses of the verb such
as to talk rubbish or to cheat in exams. Our modern usages, such as
"an unsatisfactory or makeshift solution", "to avoid commitment",
"to dodge the issue", or "to deal with something in a vague or
inadequate way", come from this.
None of this is any sort of guide to how it became a name for a
sugary confection. Some Oxford Dictionaries suggest that an early
usage of "fudge" was in the sense "to turn out as expected" or "to
merge together", which may have led to the confectionery sense. But
I can't find any supporting evidence for the word having being used
in this way, nor how it might have survived into the 1880s. A story
repeated in several places online says it came from the bungled or
"fudged" making of a batch of caramels on 14 February 1886, which
is a suspiciously precise date, more so because it was Valentine's
Day - it feels like a folk etymology invented long after the event.
6. Sic!
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Andy Philip was intrigued by a sentence in a news report on the
Church Web site Ekklesia last Saturday: "Concern for the damaging
impact of divisions within Anglicanism are also reported to have
been expressed by the recently deceased US President Gerald Ford,
an Episcopalian, at the memorial service held for him at Washington
National Cathedral."
One for the department of bizarre images, via Greg Connell from a
rugby report in the Woking Review for 6 January: "At the final
whistle, the gloom was lifted by some seasonal port and later,
solid and liquid nourishment in the new Kingston RFC bar. Vousden
commented: 'The highlight of the afternoon was the fine vintage
port we coiffed at the final whistle.'"
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