World Wide Words -- 02 Jun 07

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS            ISSUE 543          Saturday 2 June 2007
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Attercop.
3. Recently noted.
4. Q&A: Caught red-handed.
5. Q&A: Clean one's clock.
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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ISOGRAMS  David Crystal's challenge to find a place name in Canada 
or Australia of more than 14 letters in which no letter appears 
more than once had no takers. Professor Max Coltheart pointed out 
that "Australia is exactly the wrong country in which to look for 
isogrammatic places. On the contrary, it has, for example, a 10-
letter place name composed of just three letters (Wagga Wagga), a 
13-letter one of just four (Woolloomooloo), and a 20-letter one 
with just seven (Caddabarrawirracanna)."

CORRECTION  Apologies to Anthony Massey, whose first name became 
Andrew in this section last week.


2. Weird Words: Attercop
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A spider.

Many of us came across this word for the first and only time in the 
works of J R R Tolkien, and even perhaps suspected he had invented 
it. But his unfamiliar words were usually from ancient sources and 
"attercop" is a good example. Bilbo sang this in an episode in The 
Hobbit when he was distracting the spiders:

  Old fat spider spinning in a tree!
  Old fat spider can't see me!
  Attercop! Attercop!
  Won't you stop,
  Stop your spinning and look for me!

It's still known - it appeared in the Yorkshire Post on 24 May in 
an article about Ian McMillan's work to create a modern dictionary 
of Yorkshire dialect. He described it as an old-fashioned word that 
was still spoken in North Yorkshire that could also mean a peevish 
person or a moaner. Mr McMillan provided an illustrative sentence: 
"Tha' won't go in cos' of an attercop? Tha's an attercop thissen!". 
["tha": you; "thissen": yourself.]

The word is Old English, from "attor", poison + "cop", the head. 
("Cop", or "coppa", was also used by itself to mean a spider, so 
"cobweb" ought really to be spelled "copweb".) The name was given 
to spiders in the mistaken belief that they were all venomous. It 
was applied to a cross-grained, ill-natured, figuratively venomous 
person no later than the sixteenth century.


3. Recently noted
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PHILFING  This would be put into the substantial file, were I to be 
keeping one, of "unnecessary words invented for public-relations 
purposes which are never going to be used in the real world". (It 
has to be a substantial file to get the title on.) Back in April, I 
wrote about "wilfing", aimless and time-consuming online browsing, 
a word derived from an acronym that expands to "What was I Looking 
For?" At the end of May "philfing" appeared, derived from this by 
some marketing genius to stand for "purposely hiding what I'm 
looking for" (so it really ought to be "phwilfing" but that would 
have spoiled the headline "Hidden charges are a philfy practice"). 
A survey by a British firm that shall remain nameless to avoid 
giving it more free publicity claims to show that 93% of online 
shoppers have been annoyed by hidden charges that appear only at 
checkout - such as VAT or sales tax, or delivery - or a variety of 
underhand practices such as claiming delivery is free and then 
charging for packaging and handling. As that term "hidden charges" 
is about a century old, and understood by anybody who has ever had 
their car serviced at a back-street garage, "ph(w)ilfing" has 
little chance of survival.

TWO LANGUAGES  Forget the old saw about America and Britain being 
separated by a common language, Tesco supermarkets feel the true 
language divide in the UK is between the old and the young. They've 
just produced - accompanied by a grand flourish of PR trumpets - a 
youth slang guide for staff, which they're targeting at stores with 
more than the usual number above retirement age. Sadly, it consists 
only of a single-page sheet containing 32 entries. Among them are 
"buggin'", to act crazy or strange (I'd say "crazily or strangely" 
myself, but who needs adverbs these days?); "cane", to do a thing 
to excess; "laters", cheerio, goodbye; and "slammin'", pleasing to 
the eye. There's also "bad", which is glossed as "Good. NB: this 
can also mean bad; when in doubt just nod".

CLOSE, BUT NO CIGAR  A newspaper article in Atlantic City at the 
end of May reported on redevelopment plans for the historic Bader 
Field, which the paper points out, quite correctly, is recorded in 
the Oxford English Dictionary from 1919 as being the first facility 
to which the word "airport" was attached. That seems a reasonable 
date, as air travel was in its infancy and there could hardly have 
been much need for the term before then (although passengers were 
flying from Bader Field as early as 1911). But, like "television", 
which appeared in the language two decades before a working device 
was demonstrated, "airport" is recorded earlier in the vocabulary 
of blue-sky visionaries. In 1902 the Fort Wayne Evening Sentinel of 
Indiana reported in some puzzlement that "M. Santos-Dumont, the 
young Brazilian aeronaut and inventor, has arrived in this country, 
bringing with him a part of an airship and a stock of bewildering 
ideas about aerial navigation and a fleet of commercial air ships 
to ride the currents of the nether blue between New York and Paris, 
or any other airport." Sorry about that, Atlantic City.

TAKING THE HEAT  The rapidly rising prison population in the UK has 
led to overcrowding and no spare cells. Some prisoners are having 
to be held in court cells instead. The usual purpose of these cells 
is to hold remand prisoners during trials, so the only way to keep 
the system working is for a convicted criminal being accommodated 
in a court to swap cells with a prisoner going to court. This has 
led to the new term "hot celling", based on the term "hot desking" 
for the system by which office workers have no set desk of their 
own but take any one that's available. 


4. Q&A: Caught red-handed
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Q. Do you know the origin of the phrase "caught red-handed"? [David 
Perry, South Africa]

A. We must thank (or conceivably blame) the famous Scottish writer 
Sir Walter Scott for having popularised this term, which was until 
his time purely a Scots expression. He used it first in his novel 
Ivanhoe of 1819: "I did but tie one fellow, who was taken redhanded 
and in the fact, to the horns of a wild stag". Before then it was 
usually written as "red-hand" or "redhand" as in "if he be taken 
redhand". It dates back to the fifteenth century.

The meaning was then the same as now. Somebody taken redhand was 
either in the act of committing a crime or with clear evidence of 
it about him. The original reference was to literal red hands, 
those of a murderer stained with the blood of his victim. But it 
soon became broadened to refer figuratively to other crimes, for 
example to a thief being caught carrying stolen items.

The term has no connection with a red hand in heraldry, such as the 
famous Red Hand of Ulster, which derives from the ancient device of 
the O'Neills, once high kings of Ireland.


5. Q&A: Clean one's clock
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Q. What are the origins of the phrase "Clean their clock"? It 
produces a lot of hits on Google, and sportswriters are fond of it, 
but I don't see anything about its pedigree. [Jim Marchant, 
California]

A. In American English, "To clean someone's clock" means to trounce 
one's opponents in a game ("We'll clean the Dodgers' clocks today") 
or more generally to inflict some severe reverse ("Republicans got 
their clocks cleaned in November's elections").

It became particularly popular from the 1990s on, but it's possible 
to trace it back a surprisingly long way. The first example that 
I've come across is a baseball report in the Trenton Evening Times 
in July 1908: "It took the Thistles just one inning to clean the 
clocks of the Times boys." The stronger sense is to give somebody a 
thrashing, as in Stephen King's story The Ten O'Clock People: "If I 
blew some [smoke] in his face, I bet he'd come over the top and 
clean my clock for me." It's not obvious from the written history 
of the expression that this is the original meaning, though it's 
more than likely.

"To clean" goes back a lot further. Jonathon Lighter's Historical 
Dictionary of American Slang lists it from 1819 in the sense of 
vanquishing or drubbing. All the early examples are either "clean 
out" or "clean off" but by Mark Twain's time it had reduced to just 
"clean" ("He went for 'em! And he cleaned 'em, too!" appeared in 
Roughing It in 1871). The slang use of "clock" to mean "face" may 
also be from the nineteenth century, though the first examples are 
contemporary with the 1908 Trenton report. (We British had "dial" 
with the same meaning from a century earlier.) Around that time "to 
fix someone's clock" in North America also meant to defeat somebody 
but in a more thorough way. However, to "clock" a man, meaning to 
hit him in the face, is recorded only from the 1930s.

As an intriguing aside, US railway slang used "clean the clock" 
(and also "wipe the gauge") to mean that a driver brought his train 
to a sudden halt by applying the air brakes. The allusion is to the 
gauge that shows the air pressure. A sudden use of the brakes will 
cause the needle to swing right over, so figuratively cleaning the 
glass of the gauge. This is recorded only from the late 1920s, so 
quite how it fits into the history of the expression isn't clear.


6. Sic!
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You can't fault the meaning and it's perfectly grammatical, but at 
Watchet harbour in North Somerset (where, as a literary aside, the 
poet Coleridge got his idea for the Rime of the Ancient Mariner), 
an intriguing sign announces that the "Slipway may be slippery".

"This past weekend," notes Michael Shannon, "I participated in a 
course for the use and care of chainsaws. Now, chainsaws are often 
accused of making awful noises, so I found it highly amusing that 
the printed material we were given constantly referred to pulling 
on 'the starter chord'. Unfortunately, we weren't told what key it 
was in."

On 26 May, a supplement to the Boston Globe contained a sentence 
that caused John Emery and Frederick Hinchliffe to open their eyes 
wide in astonishment. It was announcing events at the famous open-
air museum in Massachusetts, Old Sturbridge Village, and said "If 
you ask kids where their cotton shirts come from, they might say 
the Gap. If you asked 19th-century kids they might say 'from the 
sheep'". That was why cotton picking was such hard work: the damn 
sheep just wouldn't stay still.

Alice Bannan noted that an article in The Age of Melbourne on 29 
May about the wild weather then being experienced included this 
interesting visual image: "Mr Briggs warned motorists to take 
caution on the roads and secure any outdoor furniture."

"A report in the Gloucester Citizen," writes John Gray, "about a 
traffic accident said that 'Mr Brown died of multiple and fatal 
injuries.' I suppose you can die of non-fatal injuries?"

Many people, including Tim Riley, reported their shock and horror 
at seeing the bills on news-stands all across London advertising 
Thursday's issue of the Evening Standard: "TORIES' GRAMMER SCHOOL 
RETREAT". That would neatly make the Tories' case for retaining 
such schools, one might think, if it were not for that accurately 
placed apostrophe.


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