World Wide Words -- 18 Oct 08
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Oct 17 16:38:17 UTC 2008
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 609 Saturday 18 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. Weird Words: Apricate.
3. Article: Red herring.
4. Q&A: Jackpot.
5. 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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JAY-WALKING I give in, under the onslaught of ornithologist ire.
Jays are not stupid. They are brilliantly intelligent members of
the crow family with a ratio of brain size to body weight not far
short of humans. "Blue jays are too smart to jaywalk," affirmed
Nancy Inganni from California.
My quotation from a Fort Wayne newspaper in 1913 about a jaywalker
being an "alleged human being" intrigued Andrew Stiller: "I had no
idea it was so old! I first encountered it in the late 1960s, when
it seemed an obvious play on the then-new journalistic custom of
referring to arrestees as 'alleged criminals' instead of just plain
criminals. Even in 1913, though, it is clearly mock-legalese. How
far back does 'alleged human being' go, and how did it originate?"
It does seem to have come about in the way Mr Stiller suggests. It
turns up a few times in newspapers before 1913, the earliest being
in the Inter Ocean of Illinois on 25 April 1877 (and in the Spirit
Lake Beacon of Iowa the following day - it was a syndicated piece
taken from Puck magazine): "The inside of an alleged human being is
a curious study, regarded as a receptacle for diversified food."
Many people queried a possible connection between "popinjay", a
dressy show-off, and "jay". It's an etymological misunderstanding,
since "popinjay" is from Old French "papingay", originally from an
Arabic word for a parrot. The alteration in the last syllable came
about because people thought that popinjays and jays had features
in common. For more, go via http://wwwords.org?PPJY to my Weird
Words piece about "popinjay".
2. Weird Words: Apricate /'aprIkeIt/
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To bask in the sun.
It is unlikely this word will be part of your everyday vocabulary,
or even recognised, as it is unknown outside books about defunct
words - I can find only a couple even of those that include it.
It derives from the Latin verb "apricorari", to bask in the sun or
to sun oneself, related to "apricus", a sunny place. If it brings
to mind that delicious distillation of raw sunlight, the apricot,
that's a false trail. However, it has been suggested that the name
of the fruit may have been partly influenced by "apricus" on its
journey from Latin "praecox", early-ripening, to Greek, Arabic and
Spanish and on to French and English.
"Apricate" first appeared in English around 1690 in an anecdote by
the British antiquarian John Aubrey about Sir John Danvers: "His
lordship was wont to recreate himself in this place, to apricate
and contemplate, with his little dog with him." Aubrey sent a copy
of the manuscript to his friend John Ray, who replied in September
1691 that he wasn't critic enough to censure another man's writings
but went on, "Some words I have noted, that do not sound well to my
ears," among which he included apricate as a new-coined word to be
avoided. Although Aubrey's text was published in 1697, the year of
his death, with "apricate" in it, most people have since taken that
advice. As long ago as 1847, James Halliwell-Phillipps included it
in his Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words.
One of the few to use it, in a figurative sense, was James Russell
Lowell, in a satirical piece that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly
in February 1863. It purported to be a letter from that fount of
Yankee pedantry, the Reverend Homer Wilbur, which was said to have
been found on his desk after his death (Mr Wilbur was ostensibly
the editor of The Biglow Papers, a humorous work by Lowell):
The infirm state of my bodily health would be a sufficient
apology for not taking up the pen at this time, wholesome
as I deem it for the mind to apricate in the shelter of
epistolary confidence, were it not that a considerable, I
might even say a large, number of individuals in this parish
expect from their pastor some publick expression of sentiment
at this crisis.
3. Article: Red herring
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About 12 years ago, in the early days of World Wide Words, I wrote
a puzzled piece about the origin of "red herring", something that
distracts attention from the real issues. A study of the entry in
the Oxford English Dictionary, coupled with a little knowledge of
fox hunting and some reading around the topic, made me wonder if
the usual story about its origin was correct.
All the dictionaries and reference books I consulted argued that
the metaphor grew up because a red herring was dragged along the
ground to confuse a scent. In the 1997 edition of the Facts on File
Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, Robert Hendrickson firmly
asserts that "Escaping criminals in the 17th century would drag
strong-smelling red herring across a trail to make pursuing blood-
hounds lose the scent". Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable,
and many dictionaries, say that red herrings were used to confuse
the hounds chasing a fox. What is left unsaid is any clue to who
was supposed to be laying this false trail, or why. Was an early
group of hunt saboteurs at work? In the half dozen books on aspects
of the history of fox hunting that I searched out, there was no
reference to the use of a red herring to lay a false scent.
At the time I had to leave the topic without providing any answer.
The matter is now cleared up as the result of a pair of articles in
the October 2008 edition of Comments on Etymology, edited by Prof
Gerald Cohen at the Missouri University of Science and Technology.
One article reprints notes Prof Cohen made on the term in the same
journal in 2000, the other is by Robert Scott Ross, who suggests a
plausible origin for the expression. Their findings are supported
by the Oxford English Dictionary's revised entry for "red herring",
which is to appear online shortly.
Let's take a step back first, as I had to in the original article,
to explain a literal red herring. Before modern refrigeration and
speedy transport, fish could not be got to customers more than a
few miles inland before it went bad. Various methods were invented
for preserving them, using salting, smoking or pickling. Kippers
are that have been split, salted, dried and smoked. Yarmouth
bloaters are made by a variation on kippering but are whole fish
and do not keep so well. Arbroath smokies are smoked haddock. Red
herrings are a type of kipper that have been much more heavily
smoked, for up to 10 days, until they have been part-cooked and
have gone a reddish-brown colour. They also have a strong smell.
They would keep for months (they were transported in barrels to
provide protein on long sea voyages) but in this state they were
inedible and had to be soaked to soften them and remove the salt
before they could be heated and served.
The first reference to them in English is from around 1420, though
the technique is older than that. Within a century, they had been
immortalised in the expression "neither fish, nor flesh, nor good
red herring" (later, "fowl" was added or replaced "flesh"), meaning
something that was nondescript or neither one thing nor another.
The original form of this now rather opaque saying was: "neither
fresh fish for the clergy, nor meat for the mass of people, nor red
herrings for the poor". Not only the poor: prosperous households at
times ate them on Fridays and other meatless days and during Lent.
The OED's current entry for "red herring" in the figurative sense
points to a reference in Nicholas Cox's The Gentleman's Recreation
around 1697 (Mr Ross says it was actually in a treatise by Gerland
Langbaine on horsemanship that was bound into the third edition of
this work without attribution) that seemed to suggest hounds were
trained to follow a scent by trailing a red herring on the ground.
This was a misunderstanding, as Langbaine included it in a section
on training horses so that they became accustomed to following the
hounds amid the noise and bustle of a fox hunt. He suggested a dead
cat or fox should be dragged as a training-scent for the hounds, so
that the horses could follow them. If you had no acceptably ripe
dead animals handy, he added, you could as a last resort use a red
herring. Neither the original misunderstanding of the text or the
correction suggests why red herrings might be thought of as laying
a false scent to draw hounds off a trail, quite the reverse.
Robert Scott Ross and the OED now trace the figurative sense to the
radical journalist William Cobbett, whose Weekly Political Register
thundered in the years 1803-35 against the English political system
he denigrated as the Old Corruption. He wrote a story, presumably
fictional, in the issue of 14 February 1807 about how as a boy he
had used a red herring as a decoy to deflect hounds chasing after a
hare. He used the story as a metaphor to decry the press, which had
allowed itself to be misled by false information about a supposed
defeat of Napoleon; this caused them to take their attention off
more important domestic matters: "It was a mere transitory effect
of the political red-herring; for, on the Saturday, the scent
became as cold as a stone."
This story, and his extended repetition of it in 1833, was enough
to get the figurative sense of "red herring" into the minds of his
readers, unfortunately also with the false idea that it came from
some real practice of huntsmen. This was reinforced by the belief
of Cobbett's son that the origin was correct; he included it in a
commentary on an edition of his father's Rural Rides in 1853.
This does nothing to alter the sense of "red herring", of course:
it's been for too long a fixed part of our vocabulary for it to
change. But at least we now know its origin. Another obscure
etymology has been nailed down.
4. Q&A: Jackpot
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Q. I was hoping you could illuminate me as to the origins of the
word "jackpot". [Ray Willis, Sydney, Australia]
A. The word has always had associations with gambling, at first not
the big lotteries of today with their rollover jackpots, but with
the game of poker.
In its early days in the US in the 1820s, poker was a gambling game
for four players using a deck of only 20 cards; its reputation was
commonly as a crooked game for cheats and hustlers. Its rules
evolved very quickly through the following decades. Players began
to use the full deck of 52 cards so more could take part in a game
and, around the 1860s, some bright spark had the idea of improving
the game by introducing a rule that nobody could open the betting
unless his hand contained two jacks or better. If, after the usual
rounds of dealing extra cards, nobody else had a hand good enough
to bid, the player with the good hand took the accumulated stakes,
which obviously enough became known as the "jack pot".
This version of the game took a while to catch on. Though the term
is first recorded in an issue of The National Police Gazette in
1865, it doesn't appear with any frequency until the middle 1870s.
A puzzled reference to it is in a story with the title The Young
Men at Narragansett Pier, which appeared in the Cincinnati Daily
Gazette of 21 August 1876:
One never sees these young men standing around bar-rooms
holding one end of a straw to their mouths and the other
to a julep. They are never seen playing billiards for wine
and cigars, or passing out of the game in a Jack pot when
they hold a bob-tailed flush. Indeed, like the reader and
myself, they do not know what a Jack pot is, unless it is
a pot to put jacks in, which is sometimes the case.
["bob-tailed flush": a useless one, missing one end of the
run of cards, like a chopped-off rabbit's tail.]
The term began to be applied to lotteries only around the start of
the twentieth century.
5. Sic!
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"It's all in the timing," noted John Neave after reading a headline
on the Web site of the New Zealand Herald last Sunday: "Police
conduct post-mortem after death".
Pat Abercrombie wrote: "My wife and I recently spent a few weeks in
Nairobi doing volunteer work. The rather ratty hotel we stayed in
presented their plastic room keys in a sheath containing the
following warning: 'Do not walk after dark except in your car.' It
rather limits the number of interesting destinations, doesn't it?"
Grif Fariello read a news item on the Web site of the San Francisco
Chronicle about an accident in Carlsbad in which a skateboarder
grabbed a tow from a truck: "The skateboard got stuck under a back
tire. [Sgt] Blackburn says the tire rolled over the skateboarder's
chin and chest but he only sustained moderate industries." In that
he's doing better than the banks at the moment.
Thanks to Eileen Gomme of Norfolk for sending in a report from the
Eastern Daily Press of Norwich on 11 October: "The Russian Leader
Vladimir Putin has been given a birthday present with bite, a rare
tiger cub. The cub, weighing about 20lb, was pictured with Mr Putin
curled up in a wicker basket with a tiger-print cushion."
"You'll have to take my word for this one," e-mailed Joan Butler on
Thursday, "as I've just heard it on the BBC TV News in a report on
Elderly Abuse: 'If you have an 80-year-old woman who's being ripped
off by her 20-year-old son ... ' I suppose that IVF is bound to
have some undesirable spin-offs."
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B. E-mail contact addresses
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