World Wide Words -- 04 Oct 08
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Oct 3 08:57:43 UTC 2008
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 607 Saturday 4 October 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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For a key to phonetic symbols, see http://wwwords.org?PRON
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Haute barnyard.
3. Weird Words: Hwyl.
4. Recently noted.
5. Q&A: Kippers and curtains.
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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SATISFACTORY Several non-Brits queried the name of Ofsted in this
piece (the one appearance of "Ofstead" was of course a typo), which
I should have explained. It stands for the "Office for Standards in
Education", and follows the naming model for the British sectoral
regulatory bodies, all of which have begun in "Of-" or "Off-" for
"office" (Ofgas, Oftel, Ofcom, Ofwat, Offrail). There's even Ofreg,
though this doesn't regulate the other Offs, but is the Office for
the Regulation of Electricity and Gas. Ofsted is a little different
in that it borrows from the first two letters of each of the key
words in its full title. I don't know a name for this formulation:
strictly speaking it's neither an acronym nor an abbreviation.
ENCHIRIDION As a (relatively) modern example of the word, Peter
Weinrich noted that he had a copy of Alexander Ireland's work The
Book-lover's Enchiridion. This appeared first in 1869 and went into
several editions. Its full title gives a taste of the contents: The
Book-Lover's Enchiridion; a Treasury of Thoughts on the Solace and
Companionship of Books, Gathered From the Writings of the Greatest
Thinkers. Should you want to read it, a free copy is downloadable
from the Internet Archive, via http://wwwords.org?ENCH. And Paul
Mclachlan points out that "the official collection of prayers that
attract indulgences published by the Vatican is still published as
the Enchiridion of Indulgences."
TAKE THE BISCUIT Ruth Marie Newton mentioned another version of
this expression: "Here in Canada, we use 'had the biscuit' to
indicate something worn out or tired or of no further use, as in 'I
can't go on; I've had the biscuit'." Anton Nemeth commented he had
heard the expression in Ontario and among Canadians in California:
"I couldn't get it out of my mind while reading that passage that
we use 'had the biscuit' in the Roman Catholic sense of Extreme
Unction. That would be the Last Rites, part of which is Holy
Communion, or the taking of the communion wafer. In this sense 'had
the biscuit' carries the sense of 'the end' or 'dead'." Doug Lennox
asserted in his Now You Know (2003) that it arose as a contemptuous
Protestant reference to the host and Christopher Davies says that
it's specifically Canadian in Divided by a Common Language (2007).
2. Turns of Phrase: Haute barnyard
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Foodies in New York were the first to encounter this term, through
the writings of restaurant critic Adam Platt in New York magazine.
A play on "haute cuisine", the traditional high cookery of France,
it describes a restaurant whose house style emphasises the quality
of the ingredients and where they come from rather to a greater
extent than their preparation. Fresh, good-quality ingredients,
often organic and sourced locally according to season, are cooked
well and served simply. The idea behind it is farm cooking at its
best, hence "barnyard". But it's often at a premium price at the
New York eateries first identified with the tag and which have
since been described as "pretentiously unpretentious". "Haute
barnyard" has spread beyond New York, with sightings from both
Australia and the UK; in the latter country it has been taken up by
the restaurant critic Jay Rayner in particular.
* The Village Voice, 30 July 2008: The ongoing hunger for American
countrified cuisine made with greenmarket ingredients and spun
upscale (coined "haute barnyard" by New York magazine's Adam Platt)
shows no signs of flagging. Get all the farmhouse chic you can
swallow at Forge and Hundred Acres, twin additions to the genre.
* The Observer, 21 Sept. 2008: Market is the sort of place any of
us would like to be able to call our local: a small, simple
restaurant serving food with its own solid but definable character
- that great term "haute barnyard" comes to mind once more - at a
reasonable price.
2. Weird Words: Hwyl /'hu:il/
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A stirring feeling of emotional fervour and energy.
Welsh speakers may like to be reassured that "hwyl" is included
here because of its un-English look, not because it's thought to be
intrinsically odd. It is, of course, a Welsh word, but one that has
become widely enough known in British English to be included in
most dictionaries, though users often mispronounce it.
This is how it was described in Garthowen, by Allen Raine (1900):
Will was certainly an eloquent preacher, if not a born
orator, and possessed that peculiar gift known in Wales
as "hwyl" - a sudden ecstatic inspiration, which carries
the speaker away on its wings, supplying him with burning
words of eloquence, which in his calmer and normal state
he could never have chosen for himself.
That's pretty much how it is understood in English. But in Welsh
the word more often refers to a complex and intangible quality of
passion and sense of belonging that isn't easy to translate but
which has been said to sum up Welshness in a word. The Geiriadur
Prifysgol Cymru (the big dictionary of Welsh recently published by
the University of Wales) lays out its ramifications like this:
A healthy physical or mental condition, good form, one's
right senses, wits; tune (of a musical instrument); temper,
mood, frame of mind; nature, disposition; degree of success
achieved in the execution of a particular task &c; fervour
(esp religious), ecstasy, unction, gusto, zest; characteristic
musical intonation or sing-song cadence formerly much in vogue
in the perorations of the Welsh pulpit.
Its origins lie in a much older sense of the sail of a ship and
hence elliptically one's course - in life rather than on the sea.
Most broadly, in Welsh "hwyl" refers to a person's mood. By itself
it can also mean "goodbye" as a common short form of "hwyl fawr",
roughly "all the best", as can "pob hwyl".
4. Recently noted
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'TIS THE SEASON We've not yet had the pleasure of the Lord Mayor's
Show but I've already had my first meal of sprats(*) and the first
Word of the Year has been sighted. It is from the Oxford University
Press, whose annual publication on words in the news by Susie Dent
came out on Thursday. You will have no difficulty guessing the area
of life from which this year's word has been drawn: the current
financial crisis. Ms Dent has gone for the obvious, out of a dozen
or more terms that have become all too familiar to us in recent
months - she's chosen "credit crunch". As she points out, it isn't
even a recent invention, since it was first used in the 1960s.
[* A sprat is a tasty small fish, the young of species such as the
pilchard and herring, that's fried and eaten whole with a dash of
lemon juice. Traditionally sprats didn't become available until 9
November, just after the procession and banquet to inaugurate the
new Lord Mayor of London. An old tale has it they're not legal to
eat until the Lord Mayor has tasted them first. The British idiom,
"a sprat to catch a mackerel", a small expenditure made, or a small
risk taken, in the hope of a large or significant gain, dates from
the nineteenth century.]
ROOM FOR MANOEUVRE The supermarket checkout sign "Ten items or
less" is regularly castigated for its bad grammar, though some
language experts argue that the traditional distinction between
"less" and "fewer", that the former refers only to quantity while
the latter refers only to number, is vanishing so rapidly that any
attempt to stem it is doomed. Campaigners succeeded many years ago
in getting some Marks and Spencer stores to change signs to read
"six items or fewer". Now the British supermarket Tesco is in the
news for making its own change, to "up to ten items". This was
reported in the Daily Telegraph and other papers recently, though
one of the new-style signs was spotted by Neil Roland of the South
Manchester Reporter way back in January. But Tesco's well-meaning
attempt to assuage criticism, based on a suggestion from the Plain
English Campaign, has resulted in those of logical mind querying
whether this means a basket can contain a maximum of nine items or
ten. Instead, how about "limit 10 items"? Then the pedants can get
on with something really important, like crushing those of us who
split infinitives.
5. Q&A: Kippers and curtains
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Q. In a letter to the editor of the New York Times on 29 September
2008, Lindsay Gray commented: 'In Britain, we have an expression,
"kippers and curtains," for status-seekers who would bankrupt, even
starve themselves, in order to project an image of affluence.' Can
you explain what, if anything, kippers have to do with curtains -
and how these are related to status-seeking? [Ben Ostrowsky]
A. Thank you, and by extension Lindsay Gray, for reminding me of
this British working-class expression.
Alex Hannaford remembered it in an article about her London East
End childhood that appeared in the Evening Standard in September
2003: "There used to be a saying 'all kippers and curtains', which
meant you bought flashy curtains to keep up with the Joneses, but
then you could only afford to eat kippers. Appearances were
everything."
Oddly, the term turns up in books about nursing care for the old.
It appears in Rosalie Hudson's book of 2003, Dementia Nursing: A
Guide to Practice, in which she recasts Alex Hannaford's depiction
in more formal terms: "Unfortunately, a significant number of aged-
care facilities still fit Brooker's description of a 'kippers and
curtains culture'. Such a culture exists when people pretend to be
well-to-do by having expensive curtains on the windows, but exist
on a diet of inexpensive fish - that is, the outward appearance is
not matched by the internal reality."
Apart from these, the expression is not that well recorded, though
it was used as the title of a Wednesday Play on BBC Television in
1967 and turned up in June 2008 in an episode of the BBC comedy cop
series New Tricks, about a group of ageing ex-policemen in a unit
that investigates cold cases. One character explained why he hated
trendy Notting Hill: "It's all kippers and curtains, fur coats and
no knickers." ("Fur coat and no knickers", in which "knickers" is a
British term for female underpants, refers to a fashionably dressed
woman whose clothes disguise vulgarity or superficiality, with a
hint that "she's no better than she ought to be", that she's
promiscuous, a bit of a tart.)
"Kippers and curtains" is one of a set of pithy expressions that
refer to genteel poverty or a desire to keep up appearances at all
costs. Others now not used are "empty bellies and brass doorknobs"
and "plus-fours and no breakfast". The latter made an appearance in
The Age in Melbourne in July 2006: "Recently, Dee, a friend who
grew up in Yorkshire, recounted in her still wonderfully British
accent, how her mother used to say 'the people of the south are all
plus-fours and no breakfast'. Meaning they were all style and no
substance."
6. Sic!
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"This," wrote Max Everett, "is from a BBC article about Yves Rossy,
the first man to fly solo across the English Channel using a single
jet-propelled wing. He was quoted as saying, 'I only have one word,
thank you, to all the people who did it with me.' And to Mr Rossy I
only have three words, 'That's really very funny.' Disclaimer -
perhaps he was speaking in French, which would mean he probably
said 'merci'."
Joe Jordan reports that on 25 September the Sydney Morning Herald
wrote about the New South Wales state premier who resigned earlier
in the month: "Morris Iemma wants perks similar to those of his
predecessor Bob Carr - including a driver, office and assistant
worth up to $500,000 a year." Almost worth his weight in gold.
Still in Australia, Robert Young found this sentence in the issue
of the Geelong Advertiser for 24 September: "Sgt Allen said that
during a search of Baggott's car, police found a sawn-off shotgun
on the back seat with a sock over the barrel. Closer inspection
revealed the gun was loaded with a cartridge of packed glass,
$3909.90 cash, a set of scales, two mobile phones and various drug
paraphernalia." What was it, a blunderbuss?
It's always good to have a sideline. Maurice Fox spotted a sign
outside a New Orleans beauty salon: "Haircuts, styling, manicures
and pedigrees". Though, come to think about it, a pedigree helps
with good grooming.
William Newman communicated from Japan: "I found this biographical
note about Andrew Malcolm on a Los Angeles Times Web page: 'A
veteran foreign and national correspondent, Malcolm served on the
Times Editorial Board and was a Pulitzer finalist in 2004. He is
the author of 10 nonfiction books and father of four.' I am left
wondering which is the easier way to get a book out."
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