World Wide Words -- 31 Mar 07
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Mar 30 16:59:04 UTC 2007
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 533 Saturday 31 March 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
online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/nqkd.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Gowk.
3. Q&A: Holy cow!
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: Watch.
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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WIKI Several readers mentioned that they had read, or been told,
that the origin of this word lies not in the Hawaiian for "quick",
but as an acronym "What I Know Is". Alison Melville said, "Don't
tell me this is yet another of these fanciful false etymologies
that declares a perfectly good word is derived from an acronym!"
Sorry, Ms Melville, that's exactly what it is.
SICK ABED ON TWO CHAIRS This regional US expression, featured last
time, brought forth a number of interesting replies, among them
several indicating different ideas about what it means. "I have a
clear recollection," e-mailed Donald MacLellan, "of this phrase
being used by my mother and others in the early 1940s in Boston. We
always interpreted it to mean that the ill person, due to dire
social circumstances, lacked even a bed to sleep in. Instead, two
chairs were lined up and the person slept in that position."
Heather Masterton wrote about friends in northern Maine: "The
family (in the early 1930s) did actually make up a bed for a sick
child on top of the curving logs in the woodbox. That way, the
patient could keep warm next to the wood stove, and Mother could
keep an eye on them without running up the stairs (not a favorite
option with many children about). However, they always said someone
was 'sick in the woodbox', meaning they got to stay home and be a
bit pampered."
Others commented that they knew about the practice of using two
chairs, but not the expression. Terry Walsh recollected, "When I
was ill as a child, my mother did exactly this. I sat in one chair
with my feet on another, thus enjoying the social contact of the
living room, while still being waited on as an invalid. Obviously,
people in this happy state were not so ill that they could not, for
instance, talk; so the suspicion no doubt arose from time to time
that the person thus ensconced might not be so sick."
John Belshaw (born and raised in northwest England, but now living
in Australia) had a very different take on the sense: "The phrase
in question has meant to me over the years an expression of illness
something akin to 'one foot in the grave' - usually expressed in
manner frivolous but intending to impart the meaning that one, or
someone else, was not feeling at all well. The 'two chairs' I
understood to be the chairs laid at each end of a coffin in order
to support it (not an unusual situation) and the 'bed' of course
the coffin itself."
The last word must go to John Eliot Spofford: "Although not able to
fill in any blanks on this subject, I can tell you that when a
colleague of mine was feeling especially ill, he would report that
he was 'sick abed with two nurses'."
2. Weird Words: Gowk
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An awkward or foolish person; a cuckoo.
This is good Scots, not much known elsewhere. Its immediate sense
is that of the cuckoo, that wayward, opportunistic bird who avoids
the responsibilities of parenthood by laying its eggs in the nests
of other birds. The word goes back to an ancient Germanic one that
even then could mean a bastard, simpleton, or fool. (Though it's
closely similar in form to "gawk", to stare stupidly, and "gawky",
awkward and ungainly, these last two words are from quite different
sources.)
You may have come across "gowk" in a Robert Burns poem: "Conceited
gowk! Puff'd up wi' windy pride!" Someone who was sent on a gowk's
errand would suffer what those of us from other parts of the world
would call a fool's errand. But its best-known usage connects it
with this time of year. Others of us may unwittingly become April
Fools, but in Scotland you're an April gowk.
In particular, you might on that day be sent to hunt the gowk, a
specialised form of the gowk's errand. The technique was explained
by an author we know only by the initials MTW in a story called
April Fools and Other Fools, published in 1881 in a collection
entitled Connor Magan's Luck (well-read readers will spot that it's
an expanded version of a story that appeared in The Book of Days by
Robert Chambers, dated 1869):
Having found some unsuspecting person, the individual playing
the joke sends him away with a letter to some friend residing
two or three miles off, for the professed purpose of asking
for some useful information, or requesting a loan of some
article, while in reality the letter contains only the words:
"This is the first day of April, hunt the gowk another mile."
The person to whom the letter is sent at once catches the idea
of the person sending it, and informs the carrier with a very
grave face that he is unable to grant his friend the favor
asked, but if he will take a second note to Mr. So-and-so, he
will get what was wanted. The obliging, yet unsuspecting
carrier receives the note, and trudges off to the person
designated, only to be treated by him in the same manner; and
so he goes from one to another, until some one, taking pity
on him, gives him a gentle hint of the trick that has been
practiced upon him. A successful affair of this kind will
furnish great amusement to an entire neighborhood for a week
at a time, during which time the person who has been
victimized can hardly show his face.
3. Q&A: Holy cow!
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Q. I couldn't find "holy cow" on your Web site. What can you tell
me about this expression? [Srimanta Roy]
A. Contrary to popular belief, the site doesn't yet contain items
about every word and phrase in English. But we're working on it.
"Holy cow" is one of a variety of expressions starting with "holy",
of which others include "Holy Moses" and "holy smoke", both
indicating astonishment or consternation. A difficult person may be
a "holy terror" or a "holy horror"; a priest or chaplain may be
called a "holy Joe" and a hypocritically pious person a "holy
Willie".
"Holy cow" is definitely American, dating from the early years of
the twentieth century. Since there are also references at the time
to literal holy cows in India, we might assume that's the source,
jokingly taken over as an imprecation on the model of the others.
But examples are known of "cow!" on its own as an exclamation from
as far back as 1863, so "holy cow" might at least in part have been
an elaboration of that. (However, "having a cow", becoming unduly
upset, only dates from the 1960s.)
Some Americans may associate it with two baseball announcers, Harry
Caray and Phil Rizzuto. They popularised it but didn't invent it,
although early examples are tied to the game. The Lincoln Daily
News wrote in June 1914: "Denver fans have coined an imitation of
Charley Mullen's pet expression. Instead of 'holy cow,' the bugs in
the camp of the Bears yell 'sacred bessie'." The year before, a
report in the Oakland Tribune said, "Harry Wolverton assigned 'Holy
Cow' Peters to the job of umpiring one of the Regular-Yannigan
contests at Marysville last week and Peters is still alive." Both
these items suggest that the phrase was by then well known.
4. Recently noted
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A-LEVY-ATOR This term turned up while I was searching for early
examples of the mainly British expression "hole in the wall", a
colloquialism for what bankers prefer to call an automated teller
machine or ATM. What urged me to look into this was a report in the
Daily Mirror last Saturday, pointing out that the ATM in Britain is
40 years old this year. The first withdrawal was made by the actor
Reg Varney, whom some people may remember playing Stan Butler in
the ITV sitcom On the Buses. He took out the grand sum of £10 in
one-pound notes (a denomination that no longer exists) from a
machine at Barclay's Bank in Enfield on 27 June 1967. ATMs became
known to British users as holes in the wall rather later, borrowed
from the much older term for any small or obscure place, or a dingy
little business, or a place illegally selling alcohol (several
entirely legitimate pubs in the UK have inherited the name,
including one not far away from me in Bristol). However, the OED's
first example is from 1985. That's rather late, I thought, and went
searching. The earliest I've been able to find appeared in an
advertisement by the Bank of A Levy in the Valley News of Van Nuys,
California, in 1975. The machine was both called the "hole in the
wall" and also the A-Levy-Ator, in an excruciating reference to the
name of the bank, presumably because it relieved the suffering of
impecunious customers when its doors were closed. Advertisements a
year before also mention the device, but not the colloquial name.
So is "hole in the wall" actually from the US and not Britain, or
did Mr Levy borrow it? If you can supply me with an earlier example
of the expression in its sense of an ATM (from a printed source,
with the publication's name, date, page number and appropriate
text), I'd be interested to hear.
DIGILANTI This turned up online as a term for a group of people
who spend their time searching out and exposing online fraudsters,
or creating blacklists of rogue sites, or publicising details of
security vulnerabilities. The word is obviously enough built on the
existing "digirati", for those people having exceptional expertise
in information technology, combined with "vigilante". It would be
better were it "digilante" (plural "digilantes"), but presumably
the fashionable influence of "digirati", and other words of related
origin - such as "glitterati" and "culturati" - have modified the
ending. However, it doesn't fit the model of most such creations -
though its "-ti" ending makes it look a little like one of the set,
the others have "-(e)rati", from the ending of the Latin granddaddy
plural term "literati". A slightly more common term, for the
activity, is "digilantism".
GASTROCENTI While we're on strange foreign plurals, this one has
been turning up in the Independent in recent years, though it is
showing slight signs of spreading to other British newspapers (I
found it in the Guardian). It's based on "cognoscenti", of course,
Italian for "the people who know". In particular, the gastrocenti
know about food. Most people, less self-consciously erudite, would
call them foodies.
5. Q&A: Watch
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Q. I was thinking about my wristwatch the other evening and started
wondering why we call small timepieces watches. Is it because we
look at them to tell the time, or were they originally intended to
tell the watches of the night? I was tempted to give up on the
question by saying that we call them watches because "forks" was
already in use, but that lacked the intellectual satisfaction I
have come to enjoy from your columns. [Fred Roth]
A. The watches of the night is pretty much bang on as an answer.
A watch related to people before it became a mechanical device. The
job of the watch was - obviously enough - to watch, to stay alert
during the night hours to keep guard and maintain order. It turned
up especially in the phrase "watch and ward", as a legal term that
summarised the duties of the watchmen - to keep watch and ward off
trouble. Sailors' watches come from the same idea.
"Watch" started to be applied to clocks in the fifteenth century,
in the first instance to a form of mechanical alarm, presumably
either to wake the watchmen for their hours of duty, or to mark the
passage of the hours of a watch.
By the latter part of the following century it had become applied
to what we would now call a clock-face or dial (early mechanical
clocks often lacked both a dial and hands, the time being told by
bells, which explains the derivation of "clock" from the French
"cloche", a bell; the first clock with a minute hand is recorded as
late as 1475, which shows you how hard it was to make these early
clocks keep reasonable time).
The first time "watch" is applied to a complete timekeeper, not
just to an alarm bell, is in Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost of
1588. Watches steadily became smaller in size down the centuries
until they could be fitted into a pocket.
But it took until the end of the nineteenth century for them to be
made small enough that they could be worn on the wrist and for the
term "wrist watch" to be created as a term for them. At first they
were a purely female accessory. A report in a Rhode Island paper in
May 1888 remarked "I was not surprised to see that nearly all the
fair sex were wearing the wrist watches which are now so entirely
the fashion in London, but which I believe are very little worn as
yet in America." They also became known as wristlet watches from
about 1910. Men didn't regularly start to wear them until the
1920s, the associations of effeminacy only being dispelled as a
result of soldiers and airmen finding them convenient during the
First World War.
6. Sic!
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"Contamination of pet food here in the States," writes Dodi Schulz,
"killed several animals and made a number of cats and dogs quite
ill. A news release from the US Food and Drug Administration on 24
March says: 'Dogs or cats who have consumed the suspect feed and
show signs of kidney failure (such as loss of appetite, lethargy
and vomiting) should consult with their veterinarian.'"
In a story on 24 March, the Web site of WCAU-TV in Philadelphia
featured three students who stopped a school bus when the driver
passed out. "The brave trio steered the bus to a grinding halt in
front of Valentino's Deli. They said the bus just missed a power
pole with two other students on board, plus the driver who had
passed out." Thanks to Marie Drozdis for sending that in.
A large sign advertising a Brick Mattress Sale, seen on a highway
through Coquitlam, British Columbia, had Robin Denton wondering how
one would manage to get one into the house, let alone sleep on it.
However, it seems that the sign was put up by The Brick Warehouse,
a furniture dealer.
The New York Times of 26 March, John Scott tells us, reported on a
basketball game in which one of the nets became separated from the
rim. "As the ball passed through the net, it pulled some of the
string away from the rim...After everyone did double-takes, the
officials stopped the game for about 10 minutes and the net was
replaced by a man on a stepladder." Which presumably made it a
whole new ball game.
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