World Wide Words -- 01 Mar 08
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Feb 29 17:17:32 UTC 2008
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 577 Saturday 1 March 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. Topical Words: Co-respondent.
3. Weird Words: Fidimplicitary.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: Rum do.
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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YAOI It was remarked by Bue on the Underbelly blog, in a comment
on this piece in the last issue, that the term was not only similar
to "slash fiction", which I mentioned, but also to "PWP", short for
"Plot, What Plot?". This refers to the tendency of erotic fiction
to concentrate on the steamy action without bothering much with any
boring storyline. The full expression was used in 2004 as the title
for a book of lesbian erotica by Mavis Applewater.
Numerous readers were perplexed by my mentioning manga and anime
but not explaining them. A second blog commented that, "Quinion's a
generous guy: he assumes you already know that manga and anime are
avatars of Japanese comic art." The Oxford English Dictionary
online defines manga as a "Japanese genre of cartoons and comic
books, drawn in a meticulously detailed style, usually featuring
characters with distinctive large, staring eyes, and typically
having a science-fiction or fantasy theme, sometimes including
violent or sexually explicit material." It's from "man-", rambling,
involuntary, + "-ga", picture. Anime is essentially the animated
film or television equivalent of manga. "Anime" was borrowed into
Japanese from French in the 1930s (from "animé", as in "dessin
animé", animation or cartoon).
2. Topical Words: Co-respondent /k at UrI'spQnd at nt/
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The British government has for some years been trying to make the
language of the civil law more easily comprehensible to the layman
(see http://wwwords.org?CLCW). The last attempt was only partially
successful, the force of tradition being too strong for words like
"writ" or "plaintiff" easily to vanish in favour of "claim form"
and "claimant" outside formal proceedings. Last week the government
proposed changing terms in the family courts, which years ago were
called divorce courts. The intermediate judgement, the degree nisi
(from the Latin meaning "unless") is to be called a conditional
order and the final decree absolute will become the divorce order.
The person called the co-respondent becomes the second respondent.
This last change hardly seems an improvement, though I guess the
aim is to remove some of the historical stigma attached to the
role. "Co-respondent" came into the language following the 1857
Matrimonial Causes Act to describe the person who has sex with an
adulterous spouse. Divorce was then difficult to obtain and often
resulted in a public dirty-laundry-washing spectacle as matrimonial
matters were thrashed out in open court, providing juicy reading
for readers of the gutter press. Jerome K Jerome bitterly noted in
1899 in Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow: "Now we are passionate
lovers, well losing a world for love - a very different thing to
being a laughter-provoking co-respondent in a sordid divorce case."
Marcel Berlins commented in the Guardian on 25 February: "Legally,
the word covers both men and women, but the public image of a co-
respondent was usually that of a somewhat spivvy, silver-tongued
individual with a questionable past, charming his way into the bed
of an innocent young wife. In fact, before the days of 'no-fault'
divorce, you risked not only social death but financial ruin if you
were a co-respondent: you could be sued by the angry cuckold and
have to pay large sums in damages." This view that co-respondents
were male is made explicit in the definition of "co-respondent" in
the Oxford English Dictionary, unchanged from its first drafting
around 1893: "In a divorce suit, a man charged with the adultery
and proceeded against together with the respondent or wife."
Even if government proposals stamp out "co-respondent" from the
legal system, it will be retained in "co-respondent shoes", those
two-tone horrors that for most men went out with the lounge lizards
of the 1930s (they're also called spectator shoes). A G MacDonell
wrote in How Like an Angel in 1934 about "Those singularly
repulsive shoes of black and white which are called co-respondents
(quite wrongly called, incidentally, for co-respondents at least
get or give some fun and these shoes do neither)." In view of the
male bias of the term, it is notable that one of the most famous
wearers of the shoes was the divorced Wallis Simpson, whose love
affair with Edward VIII caused his abdication in 1936.
The shoes are said to have got that name because they were often
left outside hotel rooms, ostensibly to be cleaned, as an easily
identifiable signal that hanky-panky should be assumed to be taking
place within. This was because the only permitted cause for divorce
at the time was adultery by one partner. For a couple to arrange a
divorce in an amicable way, one member - it was commonly the man -
had to be caught in flagrante with another woman. A minor industry
grew up in which housemaids in hotels augmented their meagre wages
by giving evidence of having found the supposedly adulterous couple
in bed together. This origin for the shoes' name could just be a
tale, of course. The true source may be just that in the 1930s they
were the fashionable wear of a spivvy male type, which the Belfast
Telegraph described in a piece of April 2007 about the cad: "Once
you could tell him from 20 yards away by his Tattersall check
waistcoat. Or the co-respondent shoes. Or his driving gloves. No
gentleman would be seen dead wearing any of them, and the thing
about the cad is that he lacks the instincts of a gentleman."
Though fundamental changes in divorce law has long since abolished
this mucky and degrading business, the term has survived. Indeed, I
am told that co-respondent shoes are making a comeback. Their name
will provide a continuing link to a part of British social history
thankfully now over.
3. Weird Words: Fidimplicitary /,fIdim'plIcit at ri/
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Putting one's faith in someone else's views.
It rather looks like the sort of word somebody has forged in a fit
of misplaced inventiveness. It was created by Sir Thomas Urquhart
in 1652 in a book with a Greek title I won't try to reproduce but
which has the subtitle The Discovery of a Most Exquisite Jewel. He
took it from the church Latin phrase "fides implicita", implicit
faith.
He used it as a scathing epithet for academic types, "gown-men",
who were happy to believe the assertions of their predecessors and
were prepared to take all things literally without examination. So
far as anybody knows, he was the only person who ever used it. It
did appear in an issue of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in 1817,
but that was in an article that caricatured Sir Thomas by having
him refer to "those shallow and fidimplicitary coxcombs, who fill
our too credulous ears with their quisquiliary deblaterations".
Those are a nice pair of knock-down words, as Humpty Dumpty might
have said to Alice. "Quisquiliary" is merely Urquhart's variation
on "quisquilian", meaning worthless or trivial; "deblateration"
comes from the Latin "deblaterare", to prate or blab out.
These old-timers certainly knew how to insult people. We've largely
lost the art of elaborate epithetical impugnment, relying more on
crude invective. Polysyllabic scurrility should be our watchword!
4. Recently noted
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QUICK! It's long been assumed that the shortest known period of
time is a New York second, the immeasurably tiny moment between the
lights changing and the car behind you tooting impatiently. There's
also these days the Internet minute, which is how long it takes for
some scurrilous item of news to appear online. William Safire wrote
in the New York Times last weekend about another time term, used by
Hillary Clinton a few weeks ago: "If I am president, if I discover
there is such an agreement, it'll be gone in a bird-dog minute." He
pointed out that she used it back in 1992, implying then that it's
an Arkansas expression. It may well be, but neither Mr Safire, nor
the Dictionary of American Regional English, nor a search in the
electronic databases, can find an example that predates her usage.
ANOTHER SPORTY NEOLOGISM Following on last week's mention of a new
extreme sport, a less energetic active pursuit was described in the
Observer last Sunday: "sightjogging". You don't walk from one city
place of interest to the next - you jog instead. It's said to be a
convenient way for time-pressed or health-conscious people to enjoy
new places. If you agree with Mark Twain that golf is a good walk
spoiled, what does that make sightjogging?
WEIRDEST FIND OF THE WEEK This appeared in the same issue of the
same paper, in a review by Peter Preston of Jacob Weisberg's book
The Bush Tragedy: The Unmaking of a President. Peter Preston wrote,
"Books about George W have moved over the years from hagiography to
mere slaghimoffgraphy, chronicling the supposed transition from
titan to figure of fun."
5. Q&A: Rum do
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Q. Can you please help with the origins of the phrase "a rum do",
which I take to mean an unacceptable occurrence? [Alastair Chapman,
Suffolk]
A. The books say that "rum do" is an old-fashioned bit of British
slang. I would agree with that, except that nobody seems to have
told the British journalist, who keeps using it. This, for example,
appeared earlier in the month in which I'm writing, in the Times
for 6 February 2008: "It seems a rum do, however, that women must
wait for a cavalry of progressive male CEOs to ride to the rescue."
It would be possible to quote many others. However, it is now used
mostly as a deliberately old-fashioned or humorous term.
The second half is easy enough to explain. It refers to an event or
happening, especially an organised one such as an entertainment or
a party (as in Madeline Kerr's People of Ship Street of 1958 about
life in a Liverpool slum, "Her family has a 'do' every year on the
anniversary of the day her mother's father died.") It turns up in
sentences like "We're having a do next week for Mark's eighteenth
birthday. I do hope you can come" or "Joe's changing jobs and we're
organising a leaving do for him". It can also mean a commotion or
fuss, as in "a bit of a do". Terry Pratchett used it that way in
Soul Music, "Ha! That was a bit of a do. That's when poor old Vince
got stabbed." In this sense "do" dates from the early nineteenth
century.
The first half has nothing at all to do with the drink, whose name
appeared about a century later than our word. It began as what the
Oxford English Dictionary described as a canting term, that is, one
of the criminal underworld. To start with it was positive, meaning
variously good, fine, excellent or great. So "rum booze" was fine
or excellent drink, a "rum duke" was a handsome man and a "rum dab"
was a dextrous thief ("dabs" are fingers).
Around 1800 the word did a complete flip in sense from positive to
negative and started to mean something that was odd, strange or
peculiar. A rum book was a curious or strange one, a rum customer
was a peculiar man or one risky to offend, a rum phiz was an odd
face and so on. The OED guesses (I think that's fair to say) that
it came about through one of these slang expressions, perhaps "rum
cove", originally an excellent or first-class rogue, in which "rum"
was mistakenly taken to be derogatory by those unversed in criminal
slang. Other terms also shifted their senses over time: at the end
of the nineteenth century the English Dialect Dictionary noted "rum
duke" meant "a strange, unaccountable person", a substantial shift
in sense from the original. There were once dozens of slang terms
that included "rum" in one sense or the other, all now obsolete.
There's also "rummy", from the same source and with much the same
meaning of something strange or peculiar.
Where it comes from is disputed. Some suggest it might have been
borrowed from Rome, the city of glory and grandeur, as a term of
great approval (there is some slight evidence for this in that the
word could in its early days be spelled "rome"); others point to
the Romany "rom", a man. A third group, of which the OED and I are
members, confess we have absolutely no idea.
6. Sic!
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As part of a radio campaign in California to reduce drunk driving,
an advert - Chris Wilcox heard it on 106.9 KFRC recently - included
the line, "Following every long weekend celebration, someone drives
home while intoxicated, causing hundreds of accidents." Mr Wilcox
argues that the police should concentrate their efforts on finding
that driver.
Department of stylish working apparel. In a story on Tuesday about
the clothes worn at the Academy Awards ceremony last Sunday, the
Guardian noted, "Diablo Cody picked up her Oscar for writing the
Juno screenplay in diaphanous leopard-print Dior."
John Blois was reading job adverts on the same newspaper's Web site
and discovered that Manchester City Council wanted someone to fill
a post it described as a Teenage Pregnancy Implementation Manager.
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