World Wide Words -- 27 Dec 08
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Dec 26 14:06:20 UTC 2008
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 619 Saturday 27 December 2008
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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: Wait.
3. Elsewhere.
4. Q&A: Throw a tub to a whale.
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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MORE SPELLCHECKER STORIES Brian Barratt tells me that after he
bought a new car about 10 years ago, the Holden (General Motors)
company sent him an invitation to a talk in which someone would
"aquatint" him with the mechanical details of his car. He notes
"acquaint" has since replaced "aquatint" as the first suggestion
for "aquaint" in Microsoft Word. Richard Winter, in Toronto, says
that his spell check routinely converts "Obama" to "Osama", which
he suggests may be whimsical for a Canadian but less so for his
neighbours to the south.
BOLD AS BRASS Several readers mentioned, in connection with this
piece last week, that they had always assumed the phrase came from
"brass" or "top brass" in the sense of senior military officers.
This was originally an American term, a joke based on their gold
braid and other bright insignia, but it dates only from the end of
the nineteenth century, so over a century after "bold as brass"
came into the language. "Brass" for a prostitute (rhyming slang,
"brass nail" = "tail"), which was also suggested as a link, is from
the 1930s, though "tail" in various sexual senses dates from the
eighteenth century. Others pointed out that I'd omitted to mention
"brazen", the adjective for something brass. As a figurative term
referring to a shameless person, now its principal meaning, it's
sixteenth-century.
2. Weird Words: Wait
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A street singer of Christmas carols.
Once upon a time, a wait was a watchman, whose name derived from an
Old Northern French word, related to the modern German "wachen", to
wake. Early senses of the verb included lying in wait for an enemy,
observing carefully and being watchful. Watchmen in British towns
and cities in medieval times sounded the watch three or four times
a night on trumpets, hautboys or pipes as a way to show they were
alert and to deter thieves.
The term seems to have been transferred to musicians at the end of
the thirteenth century. The waits were a group of wind musicians
kept at public expense by a town or city. They played on ceremonial
or festive occasions and also paraded the streets to entertain the
public, sometimes at night or in the early morning as a continuing
association with watch calls. Waits were not just for Christmas at
this time.
Around the end of the eighteenth century, the practice of waits
being employed by a municipality seems to have died out (though an
official wait was still employed by the City of Westminster in the
1820s) and the name was transferred to self-appointed musicians and
singers who perambulated the streets playing and singing carols and
other appropriate music at Christmas in hope of reward. In many
places, especially rural areas, those who went by the name walked
house to house in daylight or evening, as carol singers do now, but
others maintained the old tradition of going their rounds at night.
Urban waits were considered an abominable nuisance by many, who
complained about their discordant nocturnal noise. Jerome K Jerome
wrote in The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow, "Christmas Waits
annoy me, and I yearn to throw open the window and fling coal at
them - as once from the window of a high flat in Chelsea I did." A
London footman named William Tayler wrote critically of waits in
his diary on 26 December 1837:
These are a set of men that goe about the streets playing
musick in the night after people are in bed and a sleepe.
Some people are very fond of hearing them, but for my own
part, I don't admire being aroused from a sound sleep by
a whole band of musick and perhaps not get to sleep again
for an houre or two.
James Greenwood commented in his In Strange Company in 1874 on the
oddity of the seasonal occupation of London waits:
Night after night, for ten or a dozen nights, they turn out
at an hour when even the public-houses are closed, and nobody
is abroad but penniless, homeless wanderers and the police;
and they play to houses wrapped in darkness, and to people
who, for all they can know to the contrary, are fast asleep,
and who, on that ground, may justly repudiate the debt
accumulating against them.
He noted that a peculiarity of the waits was that necessarily they
had to play and sing on credit (banging on doors in the middle of
the night to ask for money would have been unpopular) but that to
ask for contributions after the event must have been almost as
unrewarding.
3. Elsewhere
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BUZZWORDS OF THE YEAR The fifth annual collection of the buzzwords
of the year, collected by Grant Barratt, appeared in the New York
Times last weekend (http://wwwords.org?BZYR), illustrated by much
over-the-top typography. It includes some that have been discussed
here - "frugalista", "recessionista", "plutoid", "nuke the fridge",
"staycation" and "stag-deflation" - but also "Caribou Barbie", "Joe
the Plumber", "maverick" and "Obamanation" from the US presidential
election, plus others.
4. Q&A: Throw a tub to a whale
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Q. Could you enlighten me on a saying whose form I can't remember
exactly but which includes a reference to a tub and a whale? It
means to distract or confuse. It's common in American politics.
[Bart Brown]
A. That's almost certainly "throw a tub to a whale". I'm surprised
to hear that you believe it to be common - I'd not come across it
before you mentioned it and I can't find any modern examples. The
evidence suggests that it's long since defunct.
The standard story of its origin is recorded in William Pulleyn's
Etymological Companion of 1853:
The Greenland vessels, and indeed the South Sea vessels, are
sometimes (especially after stormy weather) so surrounded with
whales, that the situation of the crew becomes dangerous. When
this is the case, it is usual to throw out a tub in order to
divert their attention; when the marine monsters amuse
themselves in tossing this singular sort of a plaything into
the air, to and fro, as children do a shuttlecock. Their
attention being drawn, every sail is hoisted, and the vessel
pursues its course to its destination. Hence came the saying,
"Throwing a Tub to the Whale!"
The earliest known reference to this maritime technique is in the
introduction to Jonathon Swift's satire A Tale of A Tub of 1704.
His satire was a counterblast to Thomas Hobbes' treatise Leviathan
of 1651 and was intended to distract it "from tossing and sporting
with the Commonwealth". In the Bible, a leviathan - the word comes
from Hebrew - was an enormous aquatic beast, such as Jonah's whale.
However, Hobbes meant by it the organism of political society. As
another layer in Swift's satire, "tale of a tub" was also an idiom
at the time for what we would now call a cock-and-bull story.
Though the phrase "throw a tub to a whale" isn't recorded before
Swift, Sir James Macintosh reported in a book of 1846 that the idea
appears in an old translation of The Ship of Fools, a famous work
by the German writer Sebastian Brant of 1494, though I've not been
able to find it in the Barclay translation of 1504. Whatever its
origin, the expression "throw a tub to a whale" came to mean
creating a distraction.
A good example is in Frederick Marryat's A Diary in America, With
Remarks on its Institutions, of 1839, in which he complains about
the US attitude to Britain:
The great cause of this increase of hostility against us
is the democratical party having come into power, and who
consider it necessary to excite animosity against this
country. When ever it is requisite to throw a tub to the
whale, the press is immediately full of abuse; everything
is attributed to England, and the machinations of England;
she is, by their accounts, here, there, and everywhere,
plotting mischief and injury, from the Gulf of Florida to
the Rocky Mountains.
A. Subscription information
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