World Wide Words -- 02 Feb 08
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Feb 1 17:27:19 UTC 2008
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 573 Saturday 2 February 2008
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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: Stammel.
3. Recently noted.
4. Request for help.
5. Q&A: "Try and" versus "Try to".
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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MAN OF STRAW Following last week's piece, Bill Rouner e-mailed:
"When I worked in the aerospace industry during the 1970s, the term
"strawman" often referred to the initial draft of a proposal that
was sent around for review with the expectation it would receive
many arrows of criticism, as would happen with a straw-stuffed
archery target. Subsequent drafts would be called woodman (not
often used), ironman, and steelman, indicating the increasing
difficulty of finding a weakness. Although I no longer work in the
aerospace industry, I occasionally see this term, and it's still
being used in the sense of soliciting criticisms to better define
or refine a nebulous or incomplete concept or product idea."
Karl Brehmer e-mailed from Rostock in Germany to note that the
source of the English term may be the German "Strohmann", recorded
from the sixteenth century, which the Kluge Etymological Dictionary
says may be a loan translation from the French "homme de paille".
SLEDGING A comment from a reader in this section last week said
that Percy Sledge was a reggae singer. A chorus of fans responded
that he's actually a soul singer and that to use the past tense is
premature, since he's still alive and touring, aged 62.
DR MUDD Numerous readers felt I had understated Mudd's sufferings
following his supposed involvement in Lincoln's assassination. I
wrote that he was pardoned soon after, but in fact he was in prison
for three years and, though released, was never pardoned. His
descendants have been trying without success to get him one.
CAD A gently remonstrative message came from Prof E M Freeman, the
Emeritus Professor of Electromagnetics and Computer Aided Design at
Imperial College, London. "Dear Sir! May I protest at the bad press
we CADs are getting." Sorry about that. Perhaps I should have tried
writing about "bounder" instead, though I might now be getting some
stick from gymnasts. By the way, lots of people have asked me what
the difference is between a cad and a bounder. I'm working on the
definitive answer to that one. But don't hold your breath.
UPDATES Some recent etymological discoveries have provoked me into
revisiting existing pieces. Among the updates are a fuller account
of the story of "kangaroo court", some new information about "mad
as a hatter" and "face the music", a rewritten note on "mind your
Ps and Qs" that for the first time comes to a firm conclusion, an
update to "beyond the pale", and the news about "Big Apple" (see
below). To consult these, go to the World Wide Words homepage -
http://www.worldwidewords.org - from where they are linked.
2. Weird Words: Stammel
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A coarse woollen clothing fabric usually dyed red.
The origins of this word lie in the underclothes of self-flagellant
or ascetic monks of medieval times. It evolved from "stamin", for a
coarse cloth made of worsted, at first used to make undergarments
that seem to have been halfway to hair shirts in their purpose.
"Stamin" is the same word as "stamen", which immediately makes us
think of the male fertilising parts of flowers. In Latin a stamen
was a warp thread in a loom. It was also the name for the thread
that was spun by the three Fates Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos at a
person's birth, on whose length depended his vital strength and so
how long he would live (it is also the source of "stamina", which
is just the Latin plural of "stamen").
Later on, "stamin" became the usual name for a kind of woollen or
worsted cloth that was used for outer garments as well as curtains
and the like. It was particularly associated with Norfolk and the
word was modified to "tamin" or "tammy".
"Stammel" went its own way, though it remained a coarse woollen
cloth, a type of linsey-woolsey. Stammel was usually dyed red with
madder. For this reason, it was also used for the colour, which was
considered inferior to scarlet. Red was thought to be a healthful
colour, hence the belief almost down to the present day that to
wrap a weak chest in red flannel was an excellent preventative.
It was a lower-class cloth, a mark of poverty or inferior status.
Thomas Middleton's The World Tost At Tennis of 1620 has a character
disparagingly note, "Yonder's a knot of fine, sharp-needle-bearded
gallants, but that they wear stammel cloaks methinks, instead of
scarlet". The Little French Lawyer, a play by Francis Beaumont and
John Fletcher, published the year before, includes the lines, "I'll
not quarrel with the gentleman / For wearing stammel breeches."
The material was most often used for women's petticoats; the link
with low-class female attire was so strong by the late eighteenth
century that Francis Grose noted in his Dictionary of the Vulgar
Tongue in 1785 that it was slang for "A coarse brawny wench".
3. Recently noted
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LANGUAGE DEATH You may have seen the reports last week that yet
another language has become extinct. Marie Smith Jones, the last
native speaker of Eyak, has just died at the age of 89, at the end
of a linguistically lonely period of 15 years in which she was the
sole remaining fluent speaker. Eyak, a member of the Na-Dené group
of languages, was spoken on the Copper River in south Alaska, east
of Anchorage. Ms Jones cooperated in her last years with Michael
Krauss, a linguist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, to create
an Eyak dictionary and a guide to its grammar. As a result, we do
at least have a record, something not true of many other vanished
languages.
SHOCK, HORROR "Big Apple" has long been a nickname of New York,
one that was heavily publicised by the New York Convention and
Visitors Bureau back in the 1970s. Until recently, the consensus
was that the term came from horse racing and was popularised by the
New York racing writer John J Fitz Gerald in the New York Morning
Telegraph from 1921 on (see http://wwwords.org?BGAP for the full
story). But now Fred Shapiro and Ben Zimmer of the American Dialect
Society have reported independently discovering an earlier example,
which appeared in the Chicago Defender on 15 May 1920. "No, Ragtime
Billy Tucker hasn't dropped completely out of existence, but is
still in the 'Big Apple', Los Angeles." So the Big Apple was Los
Angeles before it became New York? What a turn-up for the books
that would be. However, etymologists are sceptical about this, not
least because one citation doesn't constitute proof. And in 1920,
Los Angeles was a small city, nothing like the sprawling metropolis
it has since become. But it does make one wonder anew where the
term came from. Somehow, I feel we haven't heard the last of this.
IT'S ALL IN THE PREFIX The promotional insistence by McDonald's on
its "Mc" prefix has down the years resulted in lots of denigratory
creations, of which the most famous is "McJob". When on Monday it
was announced by the British government that McDonald's, with other
firms in the UK, would be permitted to formalise employee training
by awarding skills qualifications equivalent to A-Levels (the pre-
university school-leaving qualification) or National Vocational
Qualifications (NVQs), I wondered how long it would take for the
word "McQualification" to appear. About 10 minutes, as it turned
out, with the word turning up as the headline on a Guardian blog.
By Tuesday morning, it was in the printed editions of the Times,
Telegraph, and Daily Post as well as the Guardian. The Financial
Times and the Belfast Telegraph went for "McA-level", while others
preferred McEducation. Education Guardian, as befits a specialist
supplement, chose "McNVQ" but then used the same joke as everybody
else: "That will be two McNVQs with fries, please." No doubt, where
they lead, others will follow. You can almost hear all the knees
jerking.
4. Julia Miller asks for your help in researching idioms
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Favourite stories from my English childhood revolved around idioms
and school jargon which entered my vocabulary to be recognised, if
not used. One of the commonest expressions was "up a gum tree". I
had assumed this idiom had an Australian origin, but having been in
Australia ten years I now know better. Many Australians have not
heard of it, and generally refer to being in a sticky situation as
being up various kinds of creeks, usually without a paddle.
I had also assumed that people of different generations within the
same country would use the same expressions, so that there would be
a difference between Australian and UK usage. I'm finding, however,
that the difference is more generational than geographical. Younger
people in the UK and Australia are more likely to use the same
expressions than, say, younger and older people within one country.
This apparent gap has prompted my PhD research in the area, and I
have devised a questionnaire to examine the differences between
Australian and UK idiom use. (Sorry, American readers, but I don't
have enough knowledge or time to include US expressions too, though
I'm guessing that many of the idioms used by younger people are
American in origin, due to the increasing influence of TV and the
Internet.)
The survey will be in an online format, though paper copies will
also be available. If you are interested, don't hide your light
under a bushel. Your participation would be bonzer, and I'll really
be up a gum tree without enough participants. Please contact me at
Julia.Miller at flinders.edu.au.
5. Q&A: "Try and" versus "Try to"
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Q. A recent newsletter included a quotation from Jerome K Jerome,
containing "to try and hide it from the world." Why, for crying out
loud, isn't it "try to hide"? The most erudite speakers and writers
seem to use "try and". I sense it is predominantly a British thing,
but by no means exclusively, though I have no scientific basis for
that conclusion. Is it simply so ingrained in the language that I
might as well just anaesthetise whatever part of me responds to it?
[Peter Norton, Alaska]
A. Peace, Mr Norton. You're going to have to learn to love it.
You're right to say that this has strong British connections. Bryan
Garner says in his Modern American Usage that it is regarded as a
colloquialism in the US but is a standard idiom in the UK. That's a
fair statement of the current position.
It hasn't stopped people arguing. Writers have criticised the
construction for ages - the first, according to the Merriam-Webster
Dictionary of American Usage, appeared in Routledge's Magazine in
1864. Critics argue that "try" must be followed by an infinitive,
that infinitives must be preceded by "to", and that the expression
must therefore be "try to", not "try and". Grammarians point out
that the idea that the infinitive must be preceded by "to" is a
mistaken belief based on a false analogy with Latin. It's also the
basis of all the erroneous and useless debate concerning the split
infinitive.
The problem for the critics is that "try and" is an ancient form,
recorded from the thirteenth century. The early evidence is sparse,
but there's even some suggestion that "try and" may be older than
"try to". This refutes all the commentators who believe that it has
only recently become widespread. The written evidence over the past
two centuries, however, does show that most earlier usage was in
informal situations such as speech or letters, not formal writing.
Since so much current writing is deliberately informal in style,
its usage appears to have widened.
Part of its continuing success may be the parallels that exist with
other verb constructions with "and" followed by an infinitive, such
as "come and see us", "go and thank him", "do stop and think", "be
sure and wear gloves". Again, most such forms are informal.
Some writers have tried to find a difference between the usage or
meaning of the two forms but none has been successful. There seems
no reason why one or the other is preferred. But Robert Burchfield
notes in the third edition of Fowler that it can only be used in
the present tense (so "he tried and hide" is impossible and you
have to say "he tried to hide"). The Merriam-Webster book adds that
you can't insert an adverb (as in "try hard and hide"; it has to be
"try hard to hide") or insert a negative after "try" (forms like
"try not and hide" don't work). Heaven help people trying to learn
English. Merriam-Webster cites a sentence written by Herbert Reed
in 1952: "To try and keep it alive by State patronage is like
trying to keep the dodo alive in a zoo." You will see Reed has had
to convert the second appearance of the expression to "to" because
he has inflected the verb.
Such inflexibility is a clear sign that "try and" is an idiom. So
to answer your question, Mr Norton, it is entirely legitimate, it
is ingrained in the language and you will just have to accept it.
6. Sic!
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In the New York Times of 26 January, John T Scott read about the
allegedly rogue trader at Société Générale: "Mr Kerviel's former
judo teacher, Philippe Orhant, said he taught him judo for more
than six years and that Mr Kerviel later taught marital arts to
children." Mr Scott suggests that in most countries those last five
words would describe illegal behaviour.
Bram Amsel was listening to the BBC from Antwerp. "An MP from an
area in South Wales that has suffered a group of recent suicides
said she and others were working on a solution to the problem. She
probably meant well when she said that 'Suicide is the last thing
you should do when you're feeling depressed.' But isn't that the
problem?"
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