World Wide Words -- 17 May 08
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri May 16 11:03:34 UTC 2008
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 588 Saturday 17 May 2008
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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
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Abigail.
3. Recently noted.
4. Q&A: Acid test.
5. Review: An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology.
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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BREAK IN PUBLICATION An early warning: my wife and I are away at
the end of May, drifting down the (hopefully) blue Danube, so the
World Wide Words newsletter will not be published on Saturday 31
May. Normal service should be restored the following week, 7 June.
STRUTH! Roger Cooper pointed out that I'd missed an etymological
trick in the piece about "struthonian" last week. As he noted, the
word "ostrich" has the same source, since it derives from the low
Latin "avis struthio", in which the "v" was said as a vowel, and
was further mangled in its passage through Old French (the same
thing happened with French "oiseau", bird, also from "avis" via the
late Latin "aucellus"). The German word for ostrich, "Strauß", is
from the Greek ancestor of all these words, "strouthos", sparrow or
other small bird.
Andrew Dostine tells me that the ancient Greeks may have been a bit
shaky on their nature notes, but they weren't stupid. "The first
record of the ancient Greeks encountering ostriches may have been
the one in Xenophon's Anabasis, describing the Greek expedition to
seize the Persian throne for the pretender Cyrus, written around
380BC. When they first saw an ostrich they referred to it as 'ho
megas strouthos' - the great sparrow. Without a word to describe it
they did the best with the words they had."
COCK AND BULL STORY Many readers asked if the shift from "coq-à-
l'âne" into Scots as "cockalane" might also have been responsible
for "cockamamie", something ridiculous, incredible or implausible.
It wasn't - see http://wwwords.org?CKMM for my piece on the word.
Others queried if there's a connection with "cockaigne", the land
of great luxury and ease. That's also from French, but there's no
other link - see http://wwwords.org?CKGN for my piece.
2. Weird Words: Abigail /'abIgeIl/
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A lady's maid.
By 1771, when Tobias Smollett wrote in The Expedition of Humphry
Clinker about "An antiquated Abigail, dressed in her lady's cast
clothes", the term had been around for about a century.
It had been borrowed from a character in a play by Francis Beaumont
and John Fletcher, The Scornful Lady, of 1616. This had been first
performed by the Children of the Queen's Revels, a troupe of child
actors, a theatrical convention popular at the time. The play was a
comedy of high life and fantastic love in London that became a big
favourite of audiences in following decades, especially after the
Restoration in 1660 Samuel Pepys recorded in his Diary that he saw
it no less than five times between 1660 and 1668. In the entry for
27 December 1666 he noted, "By coach to the King's playhouse, and
there saw 'The Scornfull Lady' well acted; Doll Common doing
Abigail most excellently, and Knipp the widow very well."
In the play, "Abigail" was an alternative name of the maidservant,
described as "a waiting gentlewoman" whose real name was Younglove.
This implies that the word was even then a generic term applied to
a maid. The suggestion is that it was a Biblical allusion, to the
first book of Samuel, "And when Abigail saw David, she fell at his
feet, and said 'hear the words of thine handmaid'." On the other
hand, Biblical names were common at the time and it may just have
been plucked out of the air.
The rather rare male equivalent was "Andrew". In 1698, Congreve
refers in his play The Way of the World to "Abigails and Andrews",
a collective term for servants. This mustn't be confused with
"merry-andrew", slang for a clown or a mountebank's assistant at a
fair, which also comes from the male forename, though nobody quite
knows why. The same name has also been applied to the Royal Navy, a
nineteenth-century term that seems to be a shortened form of Andrew
Millar, whoever he was.
3. Recently noted
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SPELLING REFORM Generations of experts have put forward ways in
which the notoriously chaotic and inconsistent spelling of English
could be improved. This is not the place to rehash the arguments on
both sides but to note that the Spelling Society - founded as the
Simplified Spelling Society in 1908, the British sister society of
a US organisation funded by Andrew Carnegie - is celebrating its
centenary in June by hosting a conference at Coventry University
called The Cost of English Spelling. A first-year student there has
worked out that some £18m a year is wasted teaching traditional
spelling; the Society's secretary, John Gledhill, says that this is
compounded by what he calls the "psychological pain" caused to poor
spellers. The Society is not the force it once was, with membership
having fallen from a high of 35,000 in the early days to 500 now,
because the subject does not attract the interest it once did. The
Society no longer advocates a specific system of spelling, though
members frequently use simplifications such as Cut Spelling, which
removes redundant letters from words and makes other substitutions
to improve correspondence with the spoken word, leading to forms
like "frend", "alfabet" and "scool". This leads to sentences such
as "Th perenial complaint of oldr jenrations that ther desendnts
fal short of ther eldrs has ofn been aplyd to languaj, and, within
languaj, to yung peples spelng in particulr."
TITILLATION It feels as though almost every reader told me about a
headline on the science and technology page of the BBC Web site on
8 May: "Great tits cope well with warming". Settle down everyone,
the great tit is a British songbird, a relative of the American
chickadees or titmice, which the story explains is coping well with
climate change. "Tit" here means "small"; it's a Scandinavian word
related to Icelandic "titlingur", sparrow. That "tit" could once
mean a girl is just an accidental association; in the sense you're
all thinking of it's an unrelated recent creation from "teat".
4. Q&A: Acid test
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Q. Where did the expression "acid test" come from? In the back of
my mind - way back - it originally had something to do with testing
diamonds to see if they were real. It's an expression I don't often
hear anymore. Clearly it means the definitive test. [Will Thomas]
A. That's right. As you may guess, the phrase started its life in
science but was popularised. Chemists have been making acid tests
for centuries. The newspapers and books of the later part of the
nineteenth century are full of references, mainly in connection
with tests to identify suspected adulteration of foods such as
bread, butter or milk or to prove to customers that they are pure.
One American advertiser around 1900 made great play of the acid
tests that had supposedly been done on his woollen goods to prove
that they didn't contain any cotton or other inferior materials.
So far as I know, nobody tests diamonds with acid. The most famous
acid test - and almost certainly the oldest - is the one for gold.
This relies on the fact that gold is insoluble in virtually every
acid (except the famous aqua regia) and it takes only a moment to
check a sample with a strong acid to learn if it's genuine. As an
example, The Merchants' Magazine of New York commented in 1849 on
items made from a new alloy resembling gold, "It would be difficult
for the most practised eye to discover they were not gold, without
having recourse to the acid test."
The first recorded examples of the figurative expression come from
the US in the middle of the nineteenth century, though it's more
than likely substantially older. The earliest I've found is in an
advertising supplement in the issue of the Columbia Reporter of
Wisconsin for 18 November 1845: "Twenty-four years of service
demonstrates his ability to stand the acid test, as Gibson's Soap
Polish has done for over thirty years."
5. Review: An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology
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The academic-sounding title of this work is a fair warning of its
contents. If terms like cognate, secondary ablaut, Neogrammarian
linguistics or phonosemantics cause you to blench, or if you're
unfamiliar with the fundamentals of etymology and the history of
English and related European languages, you should give it a miss.
Also, it isn't a full dictionary but a sampler of things to come.
Professor Anatoly Liberman has been working on his dictionary of
etymology since 1988. A vast bibliography has been assembled from
the linguistics literature and each entry is the result of detailed
analysis. He wrote a general introduction to the subject in 2005,
Word Origins and How We Know Them (see http://wwwords.org?LIBE for
my review). This volume is a showcase sample of fifty-five entries
that will form part of the final work, to test his chosen approach
and to get feedback.
The entries are all words that are found intractable by current
dictionaries. These aren't obscure or rare but among the most basic
words in the language, including boy (and girl), bird, Cockney,
dwarf, fiddle, ivy, kick, lad (and lass), man, rabbit, understand,
witch and yet. Do not expect firm conclusions in every instance:
these words are poorly understood for good reasons.
Professor Liberman believes that readers seriously interested in
the history of words are ill-served by the current dictionaries of
etymology. Etymologies are too brief, he feels, over-condensed to
the point of being misleading, often over-technical, fail to get
across the wealth of research and disputation that surrounds many
words or the sources of their information, and as a result appear
to be shallow, obscure, dogmatic or unhelpful. He is particularly
critical of comments such as "unknown origin", arguing that what's
often really meant is that there's disagreement about origins, not
ignorance, an interesting philosophical distinction. He feels that
discussion should be the prime goal of an etymological dictionary.
Many of his discussions here are extremely detailed. Take "Cockney"
as an example, best known as the name of a Londoner traditionally
born within the sound of Bow Bells. Where it comes from has long
been disputed. Professor Liberman writes more than six pages on it,
about 5000 words, detailing the evidence and the various theories
that have been put forward (that's far from the longest entry: the
one on "dwarf" is more than 16 pages). Many dictionaries argue that
it comes from the old expression "cock's egg", for a misshapen or
small egg, and that this was later applied to an urban dweller. He
concludes this is incorrect and that in Middle English there were
two words spelled "cokeney", one meaning a cock's egg, the other a
pet child, simpleton, later a pampered, effeminate, or squeamish
person, hence the inhabitant of a town. This is now accepted as
correct in some recent dictionaries, such as the single-volume
Oxford Dictionary of English.
A second example is the entry on "girl", long a puzzle, not least
because it could at first refer to a child of either sex (in some
English dialects the reverse is true, with "child" meaning a girl).
One view is that "girl" derives from Old English "gyrela", garment,
with the sense then shifting from "clothes" to "wearer of clothes"
(the modern slang "skirt" for a woman is a parallel case). Others
argue for a link with Low German "Gör(e)", a small child, though
problems exist with dating ("girl" is recorded first by a couple of
centuries) and how the vowel sound could shift. Professor Liberman
notes instead the sound correspondences in a loosely related group
of continental Germanic languages - starting with "g" or "k" and
ending in "r(l)" (the "l" being a diminutive form) - that relate to
children, young animals and creatures considered to be immature,
worthless or past their prime (such as "kerl", an Old Irish term
for an old woman and "gorre", Norwegian dialect for a little boy or
lazy person, as well as "Gör(e)"). He argues that an unrecorded
word from this group was borrowed into Middle English. Some experts
regard sound analogies as inadequate evidence, in part because of
the difficulty of being sure that the symbolic meanings ascribed to
them actually existed in the various languages of the period.
Professor Liberman's main aim is to make the literature on English
etymology available and to sweep away the anonymity that surrounds
the conclusions presented in etymological works. In this he is not
alone; for example, the recently revised entry for "girl" in the
online Oxford English Dictionary gives a good account of the main
competing theories and provides detailed references for further
research, including links to his own work.
It may transpire that the greatest service he has provided to the
history of English language is the extensive, indeed unparalleled,
bibliography he has brought together.
[Anatoly Liberman, An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An
Introduction; University of Minnesota Press, March 2008; hardback,
pp359; ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-5272-3, ISBN-10: 0-8166-5272-4; list
price US$50.00.]
AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
Amazon UK: GBP32.99 http://wwwords.org?ANA9
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[Please use these links to buy. They get World Wide Words a small
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6. Sic!
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The old ones are the best, number 645564. Chips MacKinolty reports
that an editorial in Darwin, Australia's Northern Territory News on
8 May was discussing the need for cuts to staffing in the public
service. It was headed, "Pubic sector needs surgery". Or should it
have been "Disgruntled subeditor strikes again"?
In a transcript on the ABC Web site of an audio background briefing
of 27 April about allergies, Fiona Pitt discovered this comment: "I
think the tide is turning, and it may not be quite ready to bury
the corpse that food avoidance is wrong, but it might be ready to
start tilling the earth just in case we need the hole." To call it
a mangled metaphor doesn't quite do it justice.
"One of the best headlines I saw recently," says John Day, "was in
the Adelaide Independent in South Australia dated 8 May." The story
concerned a thief stealing underpants from clothes lines. It read
"Knicker nicker nicked". By one of those coincidences that make you
wonder whether journalists everywhere are linked by telepathy (or
trained in the same school), an identical headline appeared in the
Sunderland Echo two days later. It also featured on 14 March 2007
in the London free paper Metro. And a month earlier in The Spoof
(note the title): "Nick Nicholas, known as the 'nighttime knicker
nicker', has been 'nicked' near his home in north Nantwich." That
ought to have done for the alliterative headline, but no such luck.
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