World Wide Words -- 08 Sep 07
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Sep 7 17:34:19 UTC 2007
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 552 Saturday 8 September 2007
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Sent each Saturday to at least 50,000 subscribers by e-mail and RSS
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
http://www.worldwidewords.org US advisory editor: Julane Marx
-------------------------------------------------------------------
A formatted version of this newsletter is available
online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/uwvn.htm
Contents
-------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Turgescent.
3. Recently noted.
4. Q&A: Like the clappers.
5. Book review: Foyle's Philavery.
6. Sic.
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
-------------------------------------------------------------------
HETEROGRAPHY Following the Weird Words item last week, Jim Muller
e-mailed from South Africa: "You may be familiar with this piece of
heterography I inherited from my father: 'Though the rough cough
and hiccough plough me through!' A slightly liberal interpretation
of the spelling of hiccup, perhaps, but it does make the point more
spectacularly." To follow up the point about spelling - "hiccough"
was standard in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and is
still often to be found in some regional varieties of English. J K
Rowling spells it like that, for example in Harry Potter and the
Order of the Phoenix: "At this, Professor Trelawney gave a wild
little laugh in which a hiccough was barely hidden." The word has
been spelled down the centuries in many ways: "hick-hop", "hicket",
"hickock", and "hickup". The spelling "hiccough", which assumed the
word was based on "cough", is well-meaning but wrong. It's actually
from the sound of the thing it described.
2. Weird Words: Turgescent
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Becoming or seeming swollen or distended.
On 1 July 2003, the British newspaper The Observer reported various
comments that had been made by visitors to its Web site: "Meanwhile
'stochata' suspects that George Orwell is 'the reason we have the
word "turgescent" in the English language.' No-one at The Observer
was aware that we did have the word 'turgescent' in the English
language, so we're grateful for that, at least."
You may share the Observer's misapprehension, though you can be
excused, as "turgescent" rarely appears except in technical fields
such as anatomy or botany. In these you may find usages such as
"the mucosal lining of the nasal septum is less turgescent than
that of the nasal conchae" or "the stigma often remains turgescent
and fresh for a period of 6 to 7 days". You can also occasionally
encounter it in the turgid prose of some fantasy writers. "To one
who dared peer within," wrote Clark Ashton Smith in his short story
Demon of the Flower, first published in 1933, "the cup was lined
with sepulchral violet, blackening toward the bottom, pitted with
myriad pores, and streaked with turgescent veins of sulphurous
green."
"Turgescent" is from Latin "turgescent", beginning to swell, from
"turgere", to swell. This last word is also the origin of "turgid",
swollen or distended, and of "turgor", the normal swollen condition
of cells or tissues. Another Latin verb meaning to swell, "tumere",
has bequeathed us "tumescent", with a similar meaning, though one
that often appears in sexual contexts.
3. Recently noted
-------------------------------------------------------------------
YO, WOMAN! For the first time in its 522 years, a woman began work
on Monday as a member of the Yeomen of the Guard who act as warders
at the Tower of London. Because one condition for joining the Guard
is a continuous period of 20 years in the armed forces, reaching at
least the rank of staff sergeant, it is only recently that women
have become eligible to join the warders' ranks. Most papers that
reported the event jokingly called the new member, Moira Cameron, a
yeowoman, no doubt believing they had invented it. But it turns out
to have a long history - the OED's first example is from 1852. It
became more widely known during the First World War when women
began to serve in the US Navy. They had the official rank of Yeoman
(F), "F" denoting female, as you would guess. An informal term was
"yeomanette", which the women hated; "yeowoman" was a common
alternative. The last member of the group, Charlotte Winters, died
only last March at the age of 109. Both "yeomanette" and "yeowoman"
vanished after the War except in reference to this period. Among
other meanings, yeoman was the name given to a superior servant in
a noble or royal household, one who often ate meat (in Old English,
humbler servants were called loaf-eaters, who mainly subsisted on
bread). Such well-fed menials were derisively named "beef-eaters"
and this is the source of the famous nickname of the members of the
Yeoman of the Guard, who acquired it in the seventeenth century.
These days they carry it with pride.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
KNOW SOMEBODY WHO WOULD LIKE THIS NEWSLETTER?
Feel free to forward it.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
4. Q&A: Like the clappers
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. On an Open Country program on Radio 4 I heard an interesting
explanation of the phrase "to go like the clappers", to move very
fast. "Clappers" in this context were stock rabbits, kept for
breeding and so likely to be exceptionally fast. It is, of course,
not my normal practice to doubt anything that I hear on the BBC,
but I had always assumed that the clappers in question were those
used to ring bells, so could you silence my unworthy suspicion by
confirming the rabbit etymology? [David Sutton]
A. I'd like to, but serried ranks of lexicographers behind me are
silently shaking their collective heads in dismissal of the idea.
Though rabbits can move really fast when they want to (hence the
North American expressions of the same idea, "quick like a bunny"
or "quick like a rabbit"), why rabbits kept for breeding should be
exceptionally fast is hard to understand. But a connection between
rabbits and "clapper" does exist, which may well have led to people
becoming confused. From the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries,
the word was used for a rabbit-burrow or a place where tame rabbits
were kept. It's from the same Old French source as modern French
"clapier", a rabbit hutch. An early example is in Randle Cotgrave's
A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues of 1611. He says of
"clapier" that it's French for a "clapper of conies" ("coney" being
the usual word at the time for an adult rabbit), "a heap of stones
&c., whereinto they retire themselves; or (as our clapper), a court
walled about, and full of nests or boards, or stones, for tame
conies."
A story often mentioned online refers to an ancient Shrove Tuesday
custom in parts of England and Wales. Mostly people repeat the tale
told in Old Stone Crosses of the Vale of Clwyd by Elias Owen, which
was published in 1886: "Most people turned out to beg, or Hel Ynyd,
on Shrove Tuesday. They received from the farmers fine flour, milk,
lard etc. Eggs were clapped for; boys went about with two stones as
clappers, and when opposite a farm house they clapped away with all
their might and received for their pains a gift of eggs."
The crucial thing that these explanations miss is the dating. It's
clear from the evidence that the expression is British military
slang of World War Two, or perhaps a year or two earlier. The first
example I can find is in an article in a Canadian newspaper, the
Lethbridge Herald, of September 1942, listing current RAF slang: "A
pilot chased by the enemy 'goes like the clappers' or full out."
The usual explanation in dictionaries is that the clapper is one of
the devices given that name, in particular the clapper of a bell. A
group of bellringers in a church tower ringing changes on the bells
do make the clappers collectively move fast, and would explain the
use of the plural in the expression. It might instead refer to the
clapper of a handbell, which moves faster than that of the clapper
of a church bell, especially if vigorously rung. However, the early
examples of the phrase come without any context to make it crystal
clear what kind of clappers are meant.
Though not by any means impossible, it seems unlikely that services
personnel would create a slang term from church bell ringing. Might
a different bell be meant, perhaps an electric one, whose clapper
goes a lot faster than one on a church bell or handbell? Were the
aircrew scrambled for action on hearing such bells, or did they
have another urgent meaning? Perhaps somebody who knows about the
period can tell us more.
There is a further possibility. Another form, recorded by Eric
Partridge, was "like the clappers of f**k" (*). This is intriguing,
as "clappers" as a slang term for the testicles was known in the
British military in the 1930s, so called because of their castanet
tendency if unrestrained. Might "going like the clappers" be a
crude reference to sexual activity? It's not mentioned in the
reference books, and the lack of evidence means that it is
impossible to say either way. But it's an intriguing alternative to
the usual stories.
---
* Please forgive my seeming prudishness; I have elided the word so
that this issue will not be troubled by the nannying censoriousness
of obscenity filters; it may be read in its full unexpurgated glory
at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/uwvn.htm .
5. Book review: Foyle's Philavery
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Do not look for this word in your favourite dictionary. The author,
Christoper Foyle, scion of the family that founded the bookshop of
that name in Charing Cross Road, London, says that "philavery" was
invented by his mother-in-law during a game of Scrabble. He says it
means "an idiosyncratic collection of uncommon and pleasing words",
a word loosely constructed from Greek "phileein", to love, and
Latin "verbum", a word.
This little book contains several hundred words that Mr Foyle has
collected down the years, each with a sentence attached explaining
its meaning and context. The same page that contains the word
"philavery", for example, also includes "perspicuous", clearly
expressed or easily understood speech or writing; "phallocrat", a
person who assumes or advocates the existence of a male-dominated
society; "phlogiston", a substance believed in earlier times to
exist in combustible matter; "phrenologist", someone who studies
the shape of a person's head to assess their character; "piblokto",
a condition affecting Inuit people and Arctic animals in winter,
when excitable, hysterical or irrational behaviour is followed by
depression or stupor; and "Pierian", relating to Pieria, or to the
Muses of ancient Greece (hence, of learning or poetry and, though
Mr Foyle doesn't mention it, the famous couplet by Alexander Pope:
"A little learning is a dangerous thing; / drink deep, or taste not
the Pierian spring").
I suspect everyone will find words here that strike them as neither
uncommon nor pleasing, but that's idiosyncratic for you. What you
will find is a browsable set of mostly interesting oddities, with
many accompanied by quirky comments. My favourite, which will be
understood by anybody who has attempted to navigate the eponymous
bookshop, is his note under "oubliette":
:
Derived from French oublier 'to forget', this misleadingly
pretty and inoffensive-sounding word reveals an unpleasant
concept, and the startling ideology behind its use. During
the recent major refurbishment of Foyles bookshop in Charing
Cross Road, one of the biggest bookshops in the country,
which has occupied the same building for nearly one hundred
years, we explored passages and rooms in the labyrinthine
interior which had lain unexplored for decades. Although we
did not find any 'oubliettes' containing the forgotten
remains of bygone book thieves, we did find a lift whose
existence was a complete revelation to every member of
staff.
[Christopher Foyle, Foyle's Philavery: A Treasury of Unusual Words;
hardback, pp233; Chambers, July 2007; ISBN-13: 9780550103291, ISBN-
10: 0550103295; publisher's price £9.99.]
AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
Amazon UK: GBP5.94 http://wwwords.org?FP34
Amazon USA: Not listed
Amazon Canada: CDN$20.99 http://wwwords.org?FP92
Amazon Germany: EUR16,95 http://wwwords.org?FP17
[Please use these links to buy. They get World Wide Words a small
commission at no extra cost to you.]
6. Sic!
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Last Saturday, the Guardian published a correction: "In The Looming
Food Crisis, G2, page 4, August 29, we wrote about a man who beat
bats to death with a dingy paddle; we meant dinghy paddle."
In the Free Times of Columbia, South Carolina, dated 25-31 July, an
advertisement for legal services for divorce seekers appeared that
said "Call TOLL FREE, to listen to a 24-hour recorded message."
Bruce Robb felt he really didn't have that kind of time available.
Rebecca Eschliman forwarded a news report from UPI dated 25 August:
"Yemen's severe weather conditions result in casualties every year,
despite forecasters' advice to avoid mountainous regions during the
rainy season. Fatalities and injuries caused by lightning strikes
are also common due to the state's typography." It's all those
damned exclamation marks that litter the landscape.
Subscription information
-------------------------------------------------------------------
To leave the list, change your subscription address or resubscribe,
please visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/index.htm .
You can also maintain your subscription by e-mail. For a list of
commands, send this message to listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org:
INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS
This newsletter is also available as an RSS feed. The address is
http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/newsletter.xml .
Back issues are at http://www.worldwidewords.org/backissues/ .
B. E-mail contact addresses
-------------------------------------------------------------------
* Comments on newsletter mailings are always welcome. They should
be sent to wordseditor at worldwidewords.org
* Items for "Sic!" should go to wordsclangers at worldwidewords.org
* Questions intended to be answered in the Q&A section should be
addressed to wordsquestions at worldwidewords.org (please don't
use this to respond to published answers to questions - e-mail
the comment address instead)
* Problems with subscriptions that cannot be handled by the list
server should be addressed to wordssubs at worldwidewords.org
C. Ways to support World Wide Words
-------------------------------------------------------------------
The World Wide Words newsletter and Web site are free, but if you
would like to help with their costs, there are several ways to do
so. Visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/support.htm for details.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2007. All rights
reserved. The Words Web site is at http://www.worldwidewords.org .
-------------------------------------------------------------------
You may reproduce this newsletter in whole or part in free online
newsletters, newsgroups or mailing lists provided that you include
the copyright notice above. Reproduction in printed publications or
on Web sites needs prior permission, for which you should contact
the editor at wordseditor at worldwidewords.org .
-------------------------------------------------------------------
More information about the WorldWideWords
mailing list