World Wide Words -- 21 Jul 07
Michael Quinion
michael.quinion at GMAIL.COM
Fri Jul 20 17:43:47 UTC 2007
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 545 Saturday 21 July 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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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Balductum.
3. Q&A: Restive versus restless.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: Toast.
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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THE WANDERER RETURNS Thank you all for your patience during the
recent suspension of publication while my wife and I were dragged
half asleep and gently complaining from one Canadian high spot to
another. We vowed eventually never again to go on any holiday that
required us to get up at 6am to be driven many miles to a place of
interest, no matter how enticing. But - thank you for asking - we
enjoyed the trip enormously. Normal service, however you define
that, is now restored. But I'm still way behind in reading my e-
mail!
2. Weird Words: Balductum
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A farrago(*) of words; trash, balderdash(*).
The link in meaning and form between "balderdash" and "balductum"
is close enough that some writers have tentatively suggested that
the former derives from or was influenced in its creation by the
latter.
Both started life having food implications, with "balderdash" being
a jumbled mixture of liquids, such as milk and beer. "Balductum"
was a type of posset(*), hot milk curdled with ale or wine. But
while we have no clear idea where "balderdash" comes from (the
supposed link between the two words not being supported by the
experts these days), we do know that "balductum" is from Latin
"balducta", the curds of milk.
"Balductum" took on its derived and derogatory sense of worthless
speech around the time of Shakespeare, the better part of a century
before "balderdash" acquired the same overtones. But "balductum"
never gained the popularity of "balderdash" and seems to have gone
out of use in the seventeenth century.
* You may also like to read:
Balderdash: http://wwwords.org?BALD
Farrago: http://wwwords.org?FARR
Posset: http://wwwords.org?POSS
3. Q&A: Restive versus restless
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Q. I said to my wife this morning: "I had a restive night". We went
on to talk about the difference between restive and restless, until
I finally looked both words up in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary. I
was surprised and faintly appalled to find that I had apparently
been using the word quite wrongly all my life. It makes much more
sense for the word to mean "unwilling to move". Is it only me who
uses the word in the sense of restless, or has this quite incorrect
meaning usurped the original one? [Will Mason, Austria]
A. "Restive" is one of those interesting words that has completely
reversed its sense during its history in English. These days, we
use it in the way you automatically did, for being unable to stay
still. But for several centuries, it meant the opposite: inactive
or inert, more resting than restless.
The politician Sir Edwin Sandys wrote in 1599 about the "perpetual
quiet" of "heavy and restive bodies"; 100 years later, the surgeon
and buccaneer Lionel Wafer recorded in A New Voyage and Description
of the Isthmus of America a note about some natives of the area:
"Notwithstanding their being thus sluggish, and dull, and restive
in the day-time, yet when moon-shiny nights come, they are all life
and activity". This meaning is obsolete, marked in the Shorter
Oxford with the date range "L16-M19", meaning that it was in use
from the late sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries.
"Restive" arrived in the fifteenth century from the French word now
spelled "rétif", ultimately from Latin "restare", to rest. In its
first incarnation it was spelled "restiff" and meant a horse that
resisted control and in particular refused to move forwards when
commanded. "Restiff" remained in the language until the nineteenth
century. At the very end of the sixteenth century a variant form
evolved from it in the modern spelling of "restive", with a sense
of being still or sluggish. This spelling and sense likewise stayed
in the language into the nineteenth century. To confuse matters, by
the middle of the seventeenth century, "restive" had borrowed the
main sense of "restiff", a stubborn refusal of a horse to do what
it was told.
During the latter part of the nineteenth century, the skittishness
and wild movements that often resulted from the refusal of a horse
to obey caused "restive" to acquire the new meaning "fidgety" or
"impatient". This has become our dominant one today.
"Restive" has muscled in on the territory of "restless", both of
them suggesting a physical manifestation of internal unease, but
for different reasons. Behind "restive" lie impatience, irritation,
dissatisfaction, or boredom (J B Priestley wrote in 1929 in The
Good Companions: "The audience was growing restive; there was some
stamping of feet at the back"). A thesaurus will put "restive" with
"insubordinate", "recalcitrant" and "unmanageable" (reflecting the
older sense of an uncooperative horse) as well as "fidgety" and
"impatient". "Restless", on the other hand, usually implies anxiety
and you can often replace it by "edgy", "nervous", "agitated" or
"tense". To have a restless night implies that you can't sleep
because you are turning over some problem in your mind or or are
suffering some physical discomfort.
American writers started to complain about the new "impatient" and
"fidgety" senses of "restive" around 1870 ("restive" had appeared
in Webster's Dictionary in 1864 with the definition "impatient;
uneasy"). However, the first edition of the OED, whose entry was
written about 1908, doesn't include this sense, so it looks as
though our modern meaning is American in origin and only slowly
became known in other countries. Many writers have tried to defend
the older sense of "restive" against the newer one and to try to
maintain a distinction between it and "restless". Sir Earnest
Gowers wrote in the 1965 edition of Fowler's Modern English Usage:
"A horse may be restless when loose in a field, but can only be
restive if it is resisting control. A child can be restless from
boredom, but can only be restive if someone is trying to make him
do what he does not want."
This distinction remains, though it is being eroded by users who
consider "restive" and "restless" to be exact synonyms.
3. Recently noted
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GORDON BENNETT This British term of astonishment has long been a
puzzle to word historians. It's generally accepted that it is from
the name of James Gordon Bennett, a US newspaper proprietor (see
http://wwwords.org?GORD). But his heyday was the late nineteenth
century (he died in 1918), so why was it that until recently the
expression was known in print only from the 1980s onwards? That
yawning gap in recording has been reduced thanks to the recent BBC
television series Balderdash & Piffle. A viewer found it in a 1937
novel, You're in the Racket, Too. This was written by a little-
known London-based writer, James Curtis: "Gordon Bennett. He wasn't
half tired." But why it should be a British expression, when
Bennett was American, is still unclear.
Rather more significantly, Balderdash & Piffle antedated "spiv", a
somewhat outmoded British slang term for a flashily dressed man who
lives by his wits and who supports himself by petty black-market
dealings (see my piece at http://wwwords.org?SPIV for the details).
Its first appearance in print is now known to be in 1929. It's also
now known that the term appeared as the nickname of Henry "Spiv"
Bagster, a London newspaper seller and petty criminal of the early
years of the early twentieth century, though nobody knows how he
acquired it. Spiv Bagster's court appearances for theft, selling
counterfeit goods, assault, and loitering with intent to commit a
felony were reported in the British national press between 1903 and
1906. The nickname is recorded from 1904.
OBSCENITY ALERT One of our Canadian hotels, in Jasper, had fitted
all the computers in its business section with an obscenity filter
of an especially nannying type. When I viewed the World Wide Words
home page, the list of recent pieces included one on "Caught -ed".
Curious. On reading the item concerned, every example of the term
was converted into that spurious suffix. The word that so offended
the filter? "Redhand". Have I missed some startling slang sense of
this term that renders it unfit for sensitive eyes? If so, this
puzzled editor would like to be told!
LOST IN TRANSLATION? Penguin, who in 2004 published my book on
folk etymology - Port Out, Starboard Home - tell me that they have
sold the translation rights to a Finnish publisher. The news, while
naturally welcome, leaves me wondering how many Finns will find a
book on English-language folk etymologies interesting.
4. Q&A: Toast
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Q. I've been told that the verb "to toast", meaning to propose the
health of a person, comes from an old winemaking technique in which
sediment was removed from the wine in the neck of the bottle below
the cork by soaking it in a piece of toast. Can this possibly be
so? [Alan Smith]
A. I scratch my head in puzzlement. There are several stories that
attempt to explain how the word for browned bread led to a vinous
wish for somebody's good health, but yours takes the biscuit, or
even the toast. How you get from a piece of toast in the neck of a
bottle to a public gesture of approbation?
Though people have been drinking each others' healths with wine
since ancient times, "toast" turns up in this sense for the first
time around 1700. To begin with, it was used in the specific sense
of asking the company to praise the qualities of a lady who was the
belle of the society season, this lady being called the toast. The
usage puzzled the intellectuals of the day, who couldn't work out
where it came from (so we shouldn't be too surprised that people
are still having trouble with it).
In 1708 Joseph Addison speculated on the matter in The Tatler. He
connected the idea with an incident in the spa town of Bath in the
time of Charles II:
It happened that, on a public day, a celebrated beauty of
those times was in the Cross Bath, and one of the crowd of
her admirers took a glass of the water in which the fair
one stood, and drank her health to the company. There was
in the place a gay fellow, half fuddled, who offered to jump
in, and swore, though he liked not the liquor, he would have
the toast. He was opposed in his resolution; yet this whim
gave foundation to the present honour which is done to the
lady we mention in our liquor, who has ever since been called
a toast.
It would seem that the half-fuddled gay fellow ("gay", of course,
in the old sense of being merry) was thinking of the then common
practice of floating a piece of toast steeped in spices in a glass
of wine to give it a special piquancy. (Nutmeg and sugar were the
usual flavourings.) To his thinking, the lady in the bath was like
the spicy piece of toast in the wine.
Nobody today believes the story of the gallant and the lady in the
bath, which is even more exotic than the one about the wine lees,
and which might have been invented by Addison with tongue in cheek.
But this evolution of ideas is almost certain to be the origin of
the noun and verb in the congratulatory sense.
Incidentally, the tale you recount may be a muddled conflation of
the true origin with some knowledge of the traditional method of
making champagne, in which fermentation continued in the bottle to
provide the sparkle. To remove the dead yeast after bottle
fermentation was complete, the bottle was inverted so that the lees
accumulated in the neck, the neck was frozen and the bottle turned
right way up again and uncorked. The pressure of the gas above the
wine in the bottle blew out the ice plug together with the trapped
lees. The bottle was then quickly recorked before any fizz was
lost.
6. Sic!
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The Queen's birthday honours were announced just before we went on
holiday, but I missed a titbit. Robert Bendesky spotted it on the
Web site of The News: "Peter Sallis, the voice of Wallace, the
Palestine man in the Wallace and Gromit films, has been appointed
an OBE for services to drama." Well, I'll go to the foot of our
stairs! There was me thinking Wallace is from Wigan. (I suspect The
News may have meant Plasticine.)
The New York Times of July 6 included an article on hospital noise:
"Hospital hallways are often the source of a cacophony of seemingly
unavoidable noises: beeping monitors, squeaky medication and meal
carts, blaring intercoms, late-night conversations between nurses
and patients." Bob Taxin comments, "The squeaky medication is the
one which always drives me nuts!"
On 12 July the Washington Post reported on Iraq. The story ended
thus, "In her testimony Nov. 13, [Condoleezza] Rice recounted her
discussions with [Iraqi prime minister] Maliki in which she bluntly
told him the importance of making progress on national unity and
reconciliation. Rice said she had told the prime minister, 'Pretty
soon, you'll all be swinging from lampposts if you don't hang
together.'" The ultimate Hobson's choice, suggests Marc Picard. Or
perhaps an unconscious reference to a famous quotation that's often
attributed to Benjamin Franklin? ("We must all hang together, or
most assuredly we shall all hang separately.")
Julane Marx was amused, as a film buff living in Los Angeles, to
read in the Los Angeles Times on June 14: "Though we had concerns,
particularly about the layout [of the new Landmark Theatres complex
in West LA], it looked promising and we took a couple of good-
natured swipes at its chief rival for discriminating movie butts,
the ArcLight." It's still online in that spelling; don't nobody
tell 'em.
This sentence appeared in ScrippsNews on 19 June, noted and sent in
by Don Edwards: "Specially trained bloodhounds cornered the bear
Monday near Mount Timpanogos and shot it to death." Now, that's
what I call training ...
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