World Wide Words -- 20 Oct 07

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 558         Saturday 20 October 2007
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Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK      ISSN 1470-1448
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Pelf.
3. Topical Words: Spanish practices.
4. Q&A: Brass tacks.
5. Feedback: Geis and geas.
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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GEIS AND GARNISH  Enough needs to be said following the piece last 
week on "geis" that I've put feedback on it in a separate item. A 
Sic! item mentioning "garnish" provoked a big correspondence, but 
this issue is so full that I've held comment over until next week.

SPURTLE  David Carr e-mailed from Canada following the item on the 
Golden Spurtle last week: "Quite amazing, Mr Quinion, that you have 
never heard of spurtles." Alison Melville in Port of Spain feels 
the same: "I am a state of mild shock as a result of learning that 
'spurtle' was a word hitherto unknown to you." CKE, Ms Melville and 
Mr Carr - Can't Know Everything. Nicola Young noted: "Spurtles are 
well known in New Zealand, probably due to the large number of 
Scots who settled here in the late nineteenth century and since. I 
thought that everyone made porridge with one!" Lesley Shaw issued 
an invitation: "If you ever come to Queensland I'll take you to a 
Saturday morning market and buy you a spurtle. They're big in the 
homecrafts woodturning industry and are really handy - great for 
grandchildren to bang on saucepan lids, suitable for threatening 
visitors who pinch tasty bits out of cooking pots - and are quite 
attractive when nicely turned with a slightly bulbous working end 
and a shaped handle part." Jeff Lewis told me about a variation: 
"In Devon, a wooden stirring stick, sometimes with a flattened 
spatula-like end, is called a spuddle. Several pubs hang one in 
'spuddlers corner', where gossips and 'stirrers' congregate."

BOTTLE  Several readers commented that they had heard "bottle" came 
from rhyming slang "bottle of beer" = fear. This may have been a 
contributing factor but I've no evidence either way. Robin Fosdal 
suggested that "bottle", courage, came from an ability to control 
one's bottle (arse) in the face of bowel-melting threats. That is 
plausible, too.

MISTAKE OF THE WEEK  The US writer on slang mentioned in the piece 
about Old Leather Arse is Tom Dalzell, not Tam Dalyell. The latter 
is a well-known Scots politician. Apologies to both.


2. Weird Words: Pelf
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Money, especially when gained dishonestly or dishonourably.

The only place you're likely to find this word used at all often is 
in the Indian subcontinent, where it still forms part of the active 
English vocabulary. It's now rare elsewhere except in historical 
contexts or among writers who like to demonstrate the breadth of 
their vocabularies. Those who know the words of The Red Flag will 
recall one verse:

  It suits today the weak and base,
  Whose minds are fixed on pelf and place
  To cringe before the rich man's frown,
  And haul the sacred emblem down.

You might replace "pelf" by "ill-gotten gains" or "filthy lucre" or 
other expressions that disparage the senseless acquisition of mere 
wealth or which express the Christian view that the love of money 
is the root of all evil. Its own root is the Old French "pelfre", 
booty or spoils. A relative has bequeathed us "pilfer", to steal 
things of little value. The first sense of "pelf" in English was of 
objects of value that had been stolen or taken as the spoils of 
war. By the fifteenth century it had taken on the idea of money or 
riches, but particularly seen as a corrupting influence. Abraham 
Lincoln had this sense in mind when he wrote in 1864: "Murders for 
old grudges, and murders for pelf, proceed under any cloak that 
will best cover for the occasion."

When the Reverend Henry Todd produced a new edition of Samuel 
Johnson's famous Dictionary in 1818, he added "paltry stuff" to Dr 
Johnson's definition of "money, riches". That wasn't a pejorative 
editorial comment but a note of a usage that Johnson had left out 
because it was already defunct in the London speech of his time, 
though it clings on to this day in some British dialects. It had 
been around since about 1550, meaning broadly trash or rubbish. In 
1595 Stephen Gosson wrote in Pleasant Quips For Upstart Newfangled 
Gentlewomen, "All this new pelf, now sold in shops, in value true, 
not worth a louse." It could also mean detritus or waste: in 1589 
George Puttenham said in The Arte of English Poesie that "Pelf is 
properly the scraps or shreds of tailors and of skinners". Dialect 
senses have included grass, roots, weeds and other waste material 
raked off the land.

All in all, not a word you will want to make friends with.


3. Topical Words: Spanish practices
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A long-running dispute between the Communication Workers' Union and 
the Post Office in the UK, which culminated recently in a series of 
strikes, has brought once again to public attention two terms that 
had to some extent fallen fallow following a period of comparative 
industrial quietude. One is "wildcat strike". The other is "Spanish 
practices", which the Post Office management says are rife within 
the business.

This is less exotic than it sounds. It's a well-understood term in 
British labour relations for long-standing workplace restrictive 
practices, something unauthorised or irregular but to which a blind 
eye is turned by management in order to preserve harmony within the 
workforce. The term became infamous in the 1980s as a result of 
battles between the print unions and management in the newspaper 
industry in Fleet Street. Newspapers had been losing money heavily 
for years but feared to confront the complex interplay of unions 
involved in the hot-metal production process - in the 1970s, for 
example, the Times had 47 chapels (branches) of eight unions. The 
Spanish practices included deliberate overmanning; union control 
over who was hired; demands for cash payments to remake a page as 
deadlines approached; machine-room employees who claimed wages for 
workers who didn't exist; and men who might be absent for whole 
days while moonlighting at other jobs but who would be covered by 
unspoken agreements not to notice. These were swept away by new 
technology and confrontations with a rougher breed of proprietor, 
such as Eddie Shah, Robert Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch.

Understandably, many people have complained about the term, both 
then and now, on the grounds that it unnecessarily denigrates the 
Spanish. Commentators in the newspaper business at the time say it 
was Robert Maxwell who first applied the term "Spanish practices" 
to the print workers. The original - known from the 1930s - was 
"old Spanish customs", a humorous, nod-and-wink reference to what 
was politely referred to as "custom and practice".

The British have in the past had a difficult relationship with the 
Spanish (as they have had with the Dutch), which arose from the 
commercial and military rivalry between the two seafaring powers 
that can be traced back beyond the Armada of 1588. In the Cassell 
Dictionary of Slang, Jonathon Green begins a list of the resulting 
derogatory terms by saying that "Spanish" was "used in combinations 
to denote arrogance, duplicity, treachery, sexual corruption, etc." 
The Spanish gout was syphilis; Spanish money was empty compliments 
and meaningless courtesies; a Spanish padlock was a chastity belt; 
and a Spanish trumpeter was a donkey braying. Some have argued, 
without substantiation, that the term Spanish practices refers to 
the Inquisition; in his 1996 book, I Couldn't Paint Golden Angels, 
Albert Meltzer asserted that "old Spanish customs" was American 
slang brought over to the UK through a hit song of the 1930s, but 
I've not been able to trace either slang term or lyric.

Now that the postal workers' dispute has been settled - although 
unofficial strikes continue in some places - perhaps the term will 
vanish from our newspapers again. The most enduring effect of the 
strike is likely to be that even fewer people than before will be 
writing personal letters.


4. Q&A: Brass tacks
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Q. One of the guys in my office sat down at his desk and commented, 
"Time to get down to brass tacks this morning, boys." Of course, I 
immediately rushed to your site to look it up and since it wasn't 
there, I'm askin'. [Dean O'Kelley; related messages have come from 
Karen Indermuehle, Linda Lindenfelser, Nicholas Brandes and Dave 
Cotton]

A. I'm answerin', I'm answerin' ...

The meaning of "to get down to brass tacks" is clear enough: to 
concern oneself with the key issues of some matter or to focus on 
the immediate business at hand. You sometimes see this online as 
"brass tax", an error that may have come about because there's no 
very obvious image on which to hang the expression.

Its origin is not altogether certain, though we do know that it's 
American. The first examples appear in newspapers in the 1860s and 
early 1870s. The first I know of is dated 1863, from The Tri-Weekly 
Telegraph of Houston, Texas: "When you come down to 'brass tacks' - 
if we may be allowed the expression - everybody is governed by 
selfishness." That was unearthed by Fred Shapiro of the American 
Dialect Society. Barry Popik, of the same society, found another 
instance, of January 1867, in the Daily Whig & Courier of Bangor, 
Maine: "The Galveston Bulletin says that Texas must 'come down to 
brass tacks' and accept the constitutional amendment, unless the 
people wish Congress to proceed with reconstruction." I've since 
found further examples from the early 1870s, all of them from the 
Galveston Daily News of Texas. Might "brass tacks" be a Texanism? 
It seems likely.

Until recently, the lack of early evidence - all the examples above 
have been found in the past year or so - didn't make it clear what 
country it came from or anything about it. This has led to a set of 
more or less fanciful stories. It has been said that it refers to 
cleaning the hull of a wooden ship, scraping off weed and barnacles 
until the bolts that held its hull together (the "brass tacks" of 
the expression) were exposed. Others point to the brass tacks often 
used in upholstery because they won't rust and stain the fabric; to 
reupholster a chair would require the craftsman to get down to the 
brass tacks. The schoolboy prank of putting tacks on chair seats to 
puncture the pride of the unwary has been suggested as its genesis. 
However, much the most common story - the one most widely believed 
- says that it's Cockney rhyming slang meaning facts ("tacks" and 
"facts" rhyme in Cockney speech).

We can dismiss most of these for good reasons. The expression has 
no known connection with the sea and hull fastenings were always of 
copper, not brass. Though brass tacks were used in furnishings, the 
association with the phrase seems more than a little stretched. The 
suggestion of a Cockney origin was put forward by Eric Partridge 
and supported by Jonathon Green, but as the idiom is certainly 
American in origin, it seems unlikely.

The chair-seat practical joke origin has something going for it, in 
that it's directly relevant to the "get down to" part of the saying 
and might refer to the painful duty of facing facts and getting on 
with the job. But there's no contemporary evidence and somehow I 
can't see a childish practical joke leading to a colloquial term 
used by adults.

Yet another idea is that it refers to the brass nails or tacks set 
into the counter of a hardware store or draper's shop a yard apart 
to measure lengths of material. The idea here is that measurements 
were often casually made by the almost immemorial method of using 
the distance between the nose and the tip of the outstretched hand 
as a yard. As this was imprecise, to request an exact measurement 
using the brass tacks on the counter would be to focus on the true 
facts of the matter. We can't be sure about this, but the homely 
analogy is seductive. The use of brass markers in this way long 
predates the earliest appearance of the idiom, though it was more 
common in the earlier nineteenth century to describe them as brass 
nails rather than brass tacks, the latter term only becoming common 
later in the century. But "brass tacks" was certainly used in this 
sense. For example, this appeared in Scribners Monthly in August 
1880: "I hurried over to Seabright's. There was a little square 
counter, heaped with calicoes and other gear, except a small space 
clear for measuring, with the yards tacked off with brass tacks."

As you will gather, I prefer this explanation.


5. Feedback: Geis and geas
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Unfortunately, Irish is all Greek to me. After last week's Weird 
Words item, several people pointed out that the modern Irish plural 
of "geis" is "geasa". The one I gave, "geisa", incorrectly mixed up 
a historical form with the modern one, though it's given as an 
alternative in the new edition of the Shorter Oxford English 
Dictionary. 

I was confused about its pronunciation, too, so I consulted experts 
on the Irish language: Greg Toner, Professor of Irish Language and 
Literature at the University of Ulster; Professor Dónall O'Baoill, 
Head of the School of Languages at Queen's University, Belfast; and 
Jeffrey Huntsman, who taught Old Irish for 40 years and e-mailed 
from Indiana to put his experience at my disposal.

One trouble foreigners have with Irish is that its spelling system 
is idiosyncratic (though internally consistent) and makes it hard 
to work out how to pronounce words. As one example, "gh" is silent 
away from the beginnings of words, which is in part why the port of 
Dún Laoghaire near Dublin is said as "dunleary". Irish also has a 
lot of what linguists call palatal consonants, said with the tongue 
touching the roof of the mouth back from the teeth ridge, which are 
often marked by the presence of vowels that aren't themselves said. 
This affects the pronunciation of the "g" and "s" in "geis", "geas" 
and "geasa" in a way that isn't always easy for English speakers to 
catch, leading to various mishearings.

The experts agree that "geis" is correctly said as "gesh" in Irish. 
The "s" becomes palatal "sh" through the influence of the preceding 
"i", which is there to indicate that but isn't itself sounded. The 
other spelling, "geas", is known in modern Irish as well as Scots 
Gaelic and may be a back formation from the plural. It's said in a 
slightly different way, but non-native speakers might find it hard 
to spot how; the few English dictionaries that include it use the 
same pronunciation for both it and "geis". The plural, "geasa", is 
said roughly like "geis", but with an unvoiced final "uh" sound, as 
"gesha". 

I hope all is now clear!


6. Sic!
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Peter Weinrich e-mailed about a review in The Toronto Globe and 
Mail on Saturday 13 October of a book of short stories by William 
Trevor. The reviewer said: 'Trevor's contribution to literature is 
already an agreed three-dimensional crevice that the dithering of 
this or any reviewer will not budge.' Mr Weinrich was puzzled to 
know how Trevor's contribution could be a crevice or how a crevice 
would be anything but three-dimensional. How to budge one defied 
his comprehension. He noted, "The New Yorker used to run column 
fillers titled 'Hold that Metaphor'; perhaps World Wide Words might 
take it up!"

Last Saturday Philip Platts heard someone on the Today programme on 
BBC Radio 4 say about the England cricket team: "As long as we keep 
our feet on the ground and go in the right direction we can go 
anywhere". Truer words were never spoken.

"Walking through a mall in Ottawa recently," reports Chris Parsley, 
"I noticed an advertisement in a bookstore for a well-known series 
of books that proclaimed in big bold writing '30% Off For Dummies'. 
I always knew that there was a price to pay for being smart."

The fine weather tempted my wife and me to Westonbirt Arboretum, 
renowned for its autumn tints. There we saw a classic example of a 
greengrocer's apostrophe, though as it was on a van selling a hot 
Cornish delicacy, it should be a pasty-maker's apostrophe. The van 
had at least three examples of "pasty's" when "pasties" would have 
been correct. A photo is in the online version of this newsletter.


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