World Wide Words -- 27 Oct 07
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Oct 26 16:08:44 UTC 2007
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 559 Saturday 27 October 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: Foofaraw.
3. Recently noted.
4. Feedback: Garnish versus garnishee.
5. Q&A: Chew the fat.
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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GARNISH See below for comments and feedback on this word, which
appeared in a Sic! item two weeks ago, but which I held over from
last week's issue because of pressure of space.
SPURTLE Following recent raised eyebrows about my ignorance of
this term, Peter White wrote from Glasgow, "It's interesting when
others don't know words in local daily use. Another is 'tacket',
which none of the contestants on My Word including Frank Muir knew,
years ago. Tackets were the metal studs in a working man's boots
and daily in Glasgow the last thing a man would do as he left for
work was to put on his tackety boots."
SIC! The column fillers in the New Yorker that were mentioned in a
item in last week's Sic! column were actually titled "Block that
metaphor." Thanks to everybody who wrote in about that.
PELF Following last week's piece, lots of people remembered "pelf"
as a word they'd come across at school when learning bits of verse.
Interestingly, most of the historical examples I found were also in
verse; it does seem to have become a literary word at one point. A
particular memory was of part of one stanza of Sir Walter Scott's
Lay of the Last Minstrel:
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonour'd, and unsung.
[Don't e-mail me to say that "from whence" is ungrammatical; look
at this page first: http://wwwords.org?FRWH.]
SPANISH PRACTICES In the piece last time on this expression, I
mentioned a reference to a US popular song of the 1930s that one
writer, Albert Meltzer, claimed had been the genesis of the phrase
"old Spanish customs", but that I'd been unable to find a source.
Subscribers sprang into action. Chris Green found a song with the
title It's An Old Spanish Custom in an unsuccessful 1953 Broadway
musical, Carnival In Flanders, as well as earlier examples; these
included the 1934 film, We're Not Dressing, loosely based on The
Admirable Crichton, in which Ethel Merman sings It's Just a New
Spanish Custom, suggesting that the "old" version of the phrase was
already widely known. Doug McKinnon indeed found several songs of
roughly that title and added, "I would probably attribute it to his
having seen a Roy Rogers film that included 'It's An Old Spanish
Custom' by the Sons of the Pioneers."
2. Weird Words: Foofaraw /'fu:f at rO:/ *
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Frills and flashy finery; a fuss about nothing.
"Foofaraw" is fairly common in North America, though it has never
become widely known elsewhere. The earliest senses were of a thing
that was vain, fussy, tawdry or gaudy - baubles, bangles or beads.
In time, this shifted to mean frivolous accoutrements or trappings,
then became a dismissive adjective with the sense of being vain or
stuck-up and later took on the idea of ostentation. The most common
sense nowadays, a brouhaha or fuss, especially a storm in a teacup,
came last of all.
What qualifies it for inclusion in this section is partly its odd
look and partly its curious origin. Dictionaries mostly play safe
and say "origin unknown" while noting that it began to be used in
the 1930s. The Oxford English Dictionary has recently compiled an
entry, based in part on the one in the Dictionary of American
Regional English, that takes the origin back nearly a century.
There are a lot of examples from the late 1840s onwards, variously
spelled "fofarraw", "fofarrow", "frufraw", "foofooraw" and in other
ways. It isn't well recorded in its early days and there are big
gaps in its history, but etymologists are sure that it's the same
word. The earliest example, in Blackwood's Magazine for June 1848,
is in an article written by an adventurous Englishman named George
Frederick Augustus Ruxton, who travelled in the Rocky Mountains and
who wrote a book, Life in the Far West, that was published in 1849.
The word was used by traders, trappers and explorers in the area.
The experts point to Spanish "fanfarón", a braggart or blusterer,
and the related French "fanfaron". These terms were picked up by
English speakers from French and Spanish frontiersmen. As is so
often the case with foreign words, hearers misheard and mangled
them. Later development was probably influenced by the French word
"frou-frou", frills or ornamentation, which began as an imitation
of the rustling noise made by a woman walking in a dress.
A delightful example that evokes pioneer times is in John Varley's
SF novel Steel Beach: "All in all, it was the goldarndest, Barnum-
and-Baileyest, rib-stickinest, rough-and-tumblest infernal foofaraw
of a media circus anybody had seen since grandpaw chased the possum
down the road and lost his store teeth, and I was heartily sorry to
have been a part of it."
* See http://wwwords.org?PRON for a guide to pronunciation.
3. Recently noted
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HABBY DAYS "Hab", from "rehab" (short for "rehabilitation"), is
showing signs of taking on a life of its own as a suffix. There is
"prehab", for example, exercises undertaken by athletes in order to
prevent more serious injuries. What prompted the thought were news
reports about the American actress and singer Lindsay Lohan that
described her stay at a clinic in Utah as "threehab". This turns
out to mean no booze, no narcotics and no tobacco.
THE JOY OF TEXT It seems that a survey and a neologism go together
like a horse and carriage. The British breakfast TV programme GMTV
reported last week that "A new poll of 2,000 adults reveals that
235 million flirtatious text messages are sent every month, at a
cost of £231 million. In other words, we are spending nearly £3
billion a year 'flexting'."
AROUND AND ABOUT Much has been written in British newspapers this
past week about the comic genius of Alan Coren, who has just died.
Among his many cherished dislikes was the word "suburban", about
which he wrote in his last published piece in The Spectator, a year
ago. "Suburban is ... a perfectly rotten word, it degrades the
environs I cherish into something woefully less than urban; it is a
sneer, a snub, a smirk behind the metropolitan hand." He claimed to
have coined an alternative 20 years ago, "peripolitan". Its lexical
beginning is Greek "peri", around, which appears in "pericardium",
"peristyle", "perihelion", and "perilune". Its middle is "polis", a
city. So "peripolitan" means "around the city". With his tongue in
his cheek, he bitterly complained about those "snooty philological
time-servers" at the Oxford English Dictionary who refused to put
it in on his say-so. John Simpson, the Chief Editor of the OED (who
is certainly philological but not in the least snooty), tells me
there are just two examples in their files, not enough to justify
including it. He went on, "Despite his failure with 'peripolitan',
he is nevertheless cited seven times in the dictionary, notably at
'something for the weekend' - an early quotation for the term which
his daughter Victoria brought to our attention as presenter of
BBC2's word-hunt programme Balderdash & Piffle." In one paragraph
we've moved from English comic writer to French letters. How very
Alan Coren.
TROUBLED WATERS The British prime minister, Gordon Brown, was on
his feet in the House of Commons this week to speak about the new
European Union treaty agreed last week. He commented in passing
that Margaret Thatcher negotiated certain passerelles with the EU.
This glorious item of Euro-jargon sent journalists scurrying to
their EU glossaries. I found this on a Web site: "A word meaning
footbridge, referring to the possibility of either moving a policy
area from the intergovernmental third pillar to the supra-national
first pillar, or changing the voting rules in the council or the
extension of the article's scope of application." I then looked up
"pillar", but the explanation depressed me too much to want to
write about it.
4. Feedback: Garnish versus garnishee
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An item in the Sic! section two weeks ago puzzled many readers from
North America, since they know - and some regularly use - the legal
verb "garnish" in the sense of seizing money, especially a part of
a person's salary, to settle a debt or claim. Jacklin Vanmechelen
said "garnishing wages is often done in the USA - it's removing
some of the green stuff, not adding it." However, I knew it only as
"garnishee", a common UK form, which is why I included the item, in
the belief that "garnish" was an error. I have since learned that
"garnish" appears without comment in many US dictionaries. However,
the other form also appears in them and it is easy to find hundreds
of examples in recent newspapers (Chicago Sun-Times, 24 September:
"He was wary of taking a job outside of his field because he feared
his wages would be garnisheed.")
Opinions on it in resulting correspondence have been extreme. Jean
Rossner said: "Alas, this seems to be standard US usage these days.
In my days as proofreader and editor, I stopped counting the number
of times that I corrected it to 'garnisheed' and the editor changed
it back again, or the printer just ignored me." On the other hand,
Koven Vance said, "I hope that your correspondent wasn't thinking
that the correct form of the word was the grotesque and debased
'garnisheed.'"
"Garnish" is in fact the older form, with the meaning "to serve
notice on a person, for the purpose of attaching money belonging to
a debtor". (The word is Middle English, in the sense of equipping
or arming, from Old French "garnir", probably of Germanic origin
and related to "warn"; the sense of decorating or embellishing came
along in the late seventeenth century.) "Garnishee" appeared in the
early seventeenth century, reasonably enough as the term for a
person whose money has been so attached. The OED's entry implies
that "garnishee" came to be used semi-adjectivally ("garnishee
order", "garnishee summons", "garnishee proceedings") so often that
around the end of the nineteenth century it turned into the verb
and partially replaced "garnish".
5. Q&A: Chew the fat
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Q. So why do we chew the fat while we're talking? The idea I've
heard that you might hack off a piece of your bacon for guests as
it was curing in the hearth seems preposterous to me. Surely
there's a better explanation? [Steve Haywood]
A. These days we mean by it that people are chatting or gossiping
to pass the time to no very deep purpose. When it first appeared,
though, it meant to grumble or complain.
Some wonderfully literal-minded stories have been invented with
which to explain its origin, especially in North America, where it
has been linked to native peoples, American Indians or Inuit, who
would chew hides to soften them, an activity carried out in their
spare time. The tale you mention first appeared around 1999 in a
widely circulated humorous message with the title Life in 1500 that
purports to give the origins of several puzzling expressions. It
still annoyingly pops up from time to time and has unfortunately
been widely taken to be accurate:
Sometimes people could obtain pork and would feel really
special when that happened. When company came over, they
would bring out some bacon and hang it to show it off. It
was a sign of wealth and that a man "could really bring
home the bacon." They would cut off a little to share with
guests and would all sit around and "chew the fat."
Like the other stories in the message, it's rubbish, of course. For
a start, the expression is about four centuries less old than the
tale suggests.
Our first reference to it in the Oxford English Dictionary is in a
book by J Brunlees Patterson published in 1885, Life in the Ranks
of the British Army in India. He suggested it was a term for the
kind of generalised grumbling, the bending of the ears of junior
officers as a way of staving off boredom, that's a perennial and
immemorial part of army life. It also appears in the 1891 British
compilation Slang and Its Analogues by John Farmer and William
Henley; it is likewise said to be of military origin and to refer
to grumbling. The next examples we have are from the US, dating
from the early part of the twentieth century. It became more common
over the next decade on both sides of the Atlantic and weakened
until it just meant idle chat.
Mr Patterson also records the phrase "chew the rag", which at one
point he uses in the same sentence as "chew the fat" and which he
obviously considered to be synonymous. This is a little older - an
example is recorded in the Random House Historical Dictionary of
American Slang from about 1875: "Gents, I could chew the rag hours
on end, just spilling out the words and never know no more than a
billy-goat what I'd been saying". The OED has an example of 1891
taken from James Dixon's Dictionary of Idiomatic English Phrases,
which was published in Shanghai; the author glosses it as "to be
sullen and abusive. A phrase common in the army". "Chew the rag" is
much more widely recorded from the US from about 1895 onwards than
is "chew the fat" and becomes commonly known both there and in the
UK in the decades that followed.
The 1875 US example sounds like the modern meaning but the slightly
later British ones are in the military slang sense of grumbling.
This may indicate independent creation. The dating and geographical
distribution of citations leave us with some unanswered questions,
too. However, it looks from the evidence as though "chew the fat"
is a modification of "chew the rag". If it is, then the origin is
probably in the US.
But we don't need to invoke any literal interpretations, either of
chewing rags or fat. It's enough to compare the steady chomping of
the jaws in chewing with the mouth movements of conversation to see
where the figurative sense came from. The image of a person biting
down on something so uncongenial and unrewarding as a rag, like an
angry dog worrying a bit of cloth, is enough to evoke the original
sense of grumbling and discontent.
6. Sic!
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"I was reading some sentencing decisions of the Supreme Court of
Tasmania recently (thrilling stuff)," e-mailed Margaret Chandler
from Hobart, "when I came across the following comments about a
defendant: 'He has been in regular employment since leaving school,
save for a period when he was pursuing a career as a professional
football.' Ouch."
The CBC news site had this concluding sentence in an item dated 17
October about various countries' seabed land grabs: "A quarter of
the world's undiscovered oil and gas reserves can be found in the
Arctic, according to the U.S. Geological Survey." Reg Brehaut could
only marvel at the ability of the Survey to know the unknowable.
On Thursday of last week, Peter Lynch tells me, Channel 4 announced
the death of Deborah Kerr, "An English Rose - born in Scotland".
The Daily Mail, reporting on free health care for immigrants to the
UK, noted that "GPs ... report confusion over who is illegible for
Health Service care". Mary Grylls wonders if this is the biter bit,
a case of doctors not being able to read patients' handwriting.
Searching for information on the California fires from Switzerland,
Pat Mackay stumbled upon this, on www.cbs8.com: "Please note: The
following homes have been confirmed destroyed by News 8 reporters
on the ground." She has always felt the media had a lot to answer
for, but that was a bit much.
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