World Wide Words -- 25 Apr 09
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Apr 24 16:35:38 UTC 2009
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 636 Saturday 25 April 2009
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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: Dumbbell.
3. Recently noted.
4. Q and A: Cuts no ice.
5. Book Review: Slang: The People's Poetry, by Michael Adams.
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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BUSY, BUSY, BUSY Last weekend, the Wall Street Journal published a
piece of mine (http://wwwords.org?FBBL) in their series Five Best
Books, in this case on language. And on Thursday I contributed an
article about first-contact linguistic problems in SF to the Oxford
University Press USA blog site (http://wwwords.org?OUPB).
2. Weird Words: Dumbbell /'dVmbEl/
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The shape of this item of exercise equipment is so familiar that it
has become a figurative term for anything of similar form. But it
looks nothing like a bell. And why is it dumb?
Early references hint at a much more substantial device:
I exercise myself an Hour every Morning upon a dumb Bell,
that is placed in a corner of my room, and pleases me the
more because it does everything I require of it in the
most profound Silence. My Landlady and her daughters are
so well acquainted with my hours of exercise that they
never come into my room to disturb me while I am ringing.
[Joseph Addison, writing in The Spectator, 1711.]
A play of 1727 likened a man to one who "pulls upon the string of a
dumb Bell", a sermon dated 1749 claimed that "a dumb Believer is
like a dumb Bell, all Lumber and no Melody". We must conclude that
the device was a substantial construction on which an exerciser
could imitate the action of a bell-ringer in a church belfry, but
lacking a bell, so that it was mercifully silent, or dumb.
This is confirmed by an illustration of a type of dumb bell in the
Gentleman's Magazine for September 1746 (reproduced in the online
version of this issue - see above), which shows a system of weights
in place of the bell. A note accompanying it says:
This contrivance, being framed together, and placed in a
garret, or upper room, affords the exercise called
RINGING, by means of a rope, which comes thro' the floor
or floors down to a study or chamber, and was practised
by an eminent physician who was very fat.
At some point, the name of this immobile device was transferred to
the device we have today, one that Joseph Addison also knew and
described in the same article in The Spectator, though he called it
by the classical Greek "skiamachia", shadow fighting or fighting
with oneself.
3. Recently noted
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SUBINFEUDATION This rather splendid legal term appeared in my
newspaper recently in a report of a court case. The defendant had
been accused of a scam in which he bought up defunct titles of the
lord of the manor, sub-divided them into districts and sold them.
He claimed that he was merely taking advantage of the ancient rule
of subinfeudation. This allowed the holder of a landed title to
grant part of his lands to others on the same terms as he held
them. The main purpose, after the Norman Conquest, was to pass on
part of the cost of supplying knights for military service. But,
unfortunately for the scammer, the practice was outlawed in England
in 1290 because the lords were passing on the obligations but not
the benefits. The word includes Latin "feudum", fee, from which
"feudal" also derives.
ENGLISH IS DIFFICULT Anne Umphrey e-mailed me a poem on problems
with plurals, which a friend sent her, but whose author she doesn't
know. The first four lines are:
We'll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes,
But the plural of ox becomes oxen, not oxes.
One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese,
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.
It's widely known today and appears in many English textbooks, but
is always marked as by Anonymous when any attribution is given. A
search found that its first appearance was in American newspapers
and magazines at the end of the nineteenth century (the earliest
I've found being in the Cedar Falls Gazette of Iowa in July 1896).
Early examples also give no author, but attribute it to a magazine
called The Commonwealth. It was widely reproduced in the following
years and has remained popular ever since, though somewhat altered.
Whoever created it has become one of the unknown immortals. The
original version is included in full in the online version of this
issue - follow the link at the top of this e-mail.
PLACENAMES CAN BE DIFFICULT Here in the UK, the longest name of
any place is the famous Welsh one, usually written as Lanfair PG:
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. There
are many longer, including one in New Zealand with 92 letters. This
week it was admitted officially that yet another long place name,
of a lake near Worcester, Massachusetts, has been spelled wrongly
on signs as Chargoggagoggmanchaoggagoggchaubunaguhgamaugg for some
years. It should be Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg.
The locals call it Lake Webster.
4. Q and A: Cuts no ice
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Q. I have heard the expression "cuts no ice" once or twice, but
never knew where it came from until just recently. I was reading
The Fortune of War by Patrick O'Brian, and found it was there
explained as being "a variant upon the Iroquois katno aiss' vizmi -
I am unmoved, unimpressed". I am not sure whether this is true, but
having read many of Patrick O'Brian's books and the historical
accuracy that he put in them, I think that this may well be the
correct derivation of this phrase. [Chris Coolbear]
A. Oh, very droll. You have fallen victim to Mr O'Brian's sense of
humour, as expressed through one of his characters. The supposed
Iroquois expression is, of course, just a respelled version of the
English (so the joke works better on paper than in speech). As the
idiom isn't known until late in the nineteenth century it could not
have been discussed by British sailors of the Napoleonic era in
which the book is set. Whether Mr O'Brian knew this can't now be
ascertained, though I've caught him out in one or two anachronisms
that show that his knowledge of etymology was less complete than
his skill in historical seamanship. But then, his novels weren't
intended as historical English dictionaries.
Having knocked this supposed origin out of court with a single blow
from a volume of the Oxford English Dictionary, I have to confess
to being at something of a loss how to proceed. The trouble with
idioms is that they're sleek and squirmy little beasts, hard to get
a firm grip on preparatory to dissecting them. "Cuts no ice", to
have no influence or effect, is a classic of its type.
The only solid information I have is that it's first recorded in
the US. The earliest example I've been able to track down is this:
If the village audience maintains a stony silence the
lecturer can cut no ice, but once the villager can be
drawn into an argument or made to laugh at himself the
battle is won.
[The Genesis and Ethics of Conjugal Love, by Andrew
Jackson Davis, 1874. Davis, known as the Poughkeepsie
Seer, was a spiritualist who dictated his works while in
a trance.]
A frequent explanation of "cuts no ice" holds that it has something
to do with real ice. This was before refrigeration, of course, when
blocks of ice were sold for cooling food and drinks. One suggestion
I've come across is that something that has no effect or makes no
impression is like a knife too blunt to shave ice off a block, or
that it refers to cutting blocks of ice from a pond or river, so
that something or somebody that cuts no ice is useless. Blunt ice
skates have also been put forward as the source of the expression.
These all seem unnecessarily complicated. There were other phrases
around at the time of its creation that refer to the qualities of
ice, such as putting something "on ice", keeping it in reserve
until needed. And we speak of "cutting the ice" or "breaking the
ice" at parties or other social events, meaning to break down
barriers of reserve and get people to enjoy themselves.
My feeling is that "cuts no ice" was a figurative expression right
from the start, based on the very common presence of ice in the
home and playing on its hardness and coldness as a metaphor for
unresponsiveness or lack of empathy.
5. Book Review: Slang: The People's Poetry, by Michael Adams
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Reviewed by Jonathon Green, editor of Chambers Slang Dictionary.
Next year will see Sarah Adams's translation of the French writer
Daniel Pennac's Chagrin d'Ecole, a book of musings on life first as
a dunce and, subsequently, a teacher of the intractably but not
irremediably stupid.
In it M Pennac is at pains to reassure his presumably cultured
readers that one aspect of such dunces' life, their use of slang,
is nothing to be worried about. Slang is ephemeral, it is
valueless, it is properly spurned by the orthodox lexicographer, it
is not, mesdames et messieurs, even a language system. It is but a
poor simulacrum of a secret code, created by those who have nothing
worth hiding. Were I, who would deny every one of those
suggestions, to offer M Pennac a book that at a stroke would
overturn such illusions, and convince him that he speaks, as the
French have it, through his cul, then it would be this one, by
another Adams, Michael Adams, professor of English language and
literature at Indiana University.
Adams has already made one foray into slang, a study of that
manifested in the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Slayer Slang,
OUP 2003). And although Buffy appears in these pages, this takes
his analyses to another and, I would suggest, a superior level.
The last attempt to offer an accessible analysis of slang came in
1933: Eric Partridge's Slang To-Day and Yesterday. And in it,
suggests Adams, Partridge got "nearly everything wrong", from his
suggested etymology onwards. But as he adds, it was a different
world, with different standards, and Partridge could only work with
what he had. And to give Partridge credit, his was the only such
study, outside the necessarily brief overviews offered in slang
dictionaries.
Michael Adams is a teacher, a lexicographer and a linguist and all
these inform his book. He looks successively at slang's essential
qualities, its social dynamics, its aesthetic dimensions and
finally, and for me most fascinatingly (although as a lexicographer
bereft of any linguistic skills, least penetrably) its cognitive
aspects.
The slang in question is primarily American and primarily modern
cum contemporary, although there are sidesteps into history, and
across the Atlantic (and indeed Pacific). The range of material is
impressive, and if the scholarship is worn lightly it is always
there. The aim is to deal with large topics and he does so with
élan.
The big picture, as ever, is open to minute dissection, and I would
suggest, knowing the nuts and bolts as I do, that he is perhaps too
trusting of slang dictionaries as the potential source of theory. I
would also argue against his prioritising of infixes to illustrate
slang's poetics and his respect for rhyming slang, and regret that
by concentrating on contemporary material, he has no time for what
to me has always been one of slang's fundamentals: the persistence,
if not of every word, then of its basic and recurring themes.
All this said, I have nothing but admiration for his efforts. This
is a study that should please anyone who professes an intelligent
interest in slang. It should perhaps be offered not merely to M
Pennac, but to anyone, including its own publishers, who seem to
believe that this complex and sophisticated area of our speech is
composed only of rhyming slang and dirty words and as such is
either risible or valueless.
[Michael Adams, Slang: The People's Poetry; published by Oxford
University Press USA on 1 Apr. 2009; hardback, 253pp. ISBN 978-
0195314632; list price US$23.95.]
AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
Amazon UK: GBP11.69 http://wwwords.org?DSEL4
Amazon US: US$16.29 http://wwwords.org?DSEL7
Amazon Canada: CDN$18.24 http://wwwords.org?DSEL2
Amazon Germany: EUR19,99 http://wwwords.org?DSEL9
[Please use these links to buy. They get World Wide Words a small
commission at no extra cost to you.]
6. Sic!
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Chris Church comments: "We know journalists need to get close to
the story but you have to pity the poor chap John Humphrys told us
about on the Today programme (BBC Radio 4) on Wednesday morning:
'We're getting reports that a train has been hijacked in India and
our correspondent Sanjoy Majumdar is on the line.'"
An organ recital program in Fullerton, California, suggested to
Keith Underwood that it might be the ultimate in encores: "Be sure
to check out the new George Wright CD that was recorded on this
organ ten years after he passed away."
We've heard of liquid gold, but never expected to have it sold that
way until Brian Hollingshead encountered this report in The World
Daily Markets Bulletin on Monday: "Gold futures are rising $7.90 to
$875.80 a barrel."
British MPs are going through a bad period, not least with all the
fuss over their expenses claims. Allan Price received a press
release from his local MP, Mark Pritchard, which suggests steps are
being taken to restore confidence: "The MP has already called upon
the National Audit Office 'to undertake a full investigation into
the government's financing of the Deference Training Review.'"
Mike Beiderbecke reports that they recently revamped his local
baseball stadium to provide a better baseball experience. It has
turned full service, as this sign indicates: "Patrons requiring
special assistance will be provided by the management." He's glad
that he doesn't have to bring his own.
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