World Wide Words -- 28 Feb 09

Fri Feb 27 16:36:33 UTC 2009

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 628        Saturday 28 February 2009
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Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK      ISSN 1470-1448
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Skew-whiff.
3. Q&A: Meld.
4. Q&A: Screw your courage to a sticking-place.
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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GLEBE  Many messages arrived in response to this Weird Words item 
last week. Most told me about place names in North America and 
Australia that include it. Alan Taylor was one of many Australians 
who noted that the name survived there: "Glebe is a major, rather 
trendy, inner suburb of Sydney. Its history dates to a government 
grant to the Anglican church at the start of white settlement in 
Australia." In North America many mentioned Glebe Road, Arlington, 
Virginia, which got its name, Priscilla Jensen says, because in the 
eighteenth century it connected the glebes at Falls Church and 
Christ Church, Alexandria. Others mentioned "glebe" is also in 
place names in Maryland, New Hampshire and Vermont. The Reverend 
Richard R Losch pointed out that The Glebe House in Woodbury, 
Connecticut (now a museum) is generally accepted as the birthplace 
of the Episcopal Church. A neighbourhood in Ottawa is called The 
Glebe because it is built on the former glebe of St Andrew's 
Presbyterian Church.

Three readers drew their breath in sharply and dashed off messages 
to tell me that my etymology was way off mark. I wrote, from memory 
and without checking my facts, that "tithe" derives from the Latin 
word for a tenth. No, it doesn't. It's from Old English "teotha", 
also meaning a tenth. Apologies.

CARROT AND STICK  Following my note last time on the existence of 
this idiom in Italian, Barbara Gadomska e-mailed from Poland: "It 
also exists in Polish ('kij i marchewka'), although, as in Italian, 
in reverse order: the stick comes first. Don't you think this order 
of suggested incentives may be revealing?" Frank Barbato tells me 
that Spanish is the same: "el palo y la zanahoria". French has the 
same order as English, Jean-Pierre Aoustin explained: "de la 
carotte et du bâton". In German, by the way, the idiom is "mit 
Zuckerbrot und Peitsche", "with sweet bread and whip", although 
"Zuckerbrot" isn't used in modern German except in this idiom (it's 
also a family name as it was once an occupational term for a baker 
of fancy cakes).

NIGHTHAWKING  Following my note about this term last time, Michael 
Lean points out that it appears in some of Jonathan Gash's books 
about the antique dealer Lovejoy, published in the early 80s. I was 
puzzled how it might have got from US to British English. Richard 
Hallas told me, "People in the UK are very familiar with the word 
'nighthawk' thanks to the long-running and Resistance sitcom, 'Allo 
'Allo, as it was the codename café owner Rene Artois used when 
radioing London. Quite why that bird was chosen as a codename by 
the writers of the sitcom is another question." 

ALTERMODERNISM  Monica Sandor e-mailed from Belgium to point out 
that this new art term almost certainly echoes another French term, 
"altermondialisme", meaning an alternative form of globalisation 
that isn't driven by big business at the expense of the poor and 
disenfranchised (a term without a good English equivalent, since 
"antiglobalisation" lacks the nuances of the French word). She 
notes, "Since the definitions of 'altermodernism' you cite refer to 
the global, rootless nature of this art, I am sure the allusion to 
altermondialisme is deliberate, but probably lost on an English 
audience."

ONLINE UPDATES  I've updated these pieces with fresh information:

    * "jay walking" (http://wwwords.org?JYWK)
    * "petrichor" (http://wwwords.org?PTCR) and 
    * "wigs on the Green" (http://wwwords.org?WGGR).

2. Weird Words: Skew-whiff  /skju:'wIf/
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Crooked, not straight, askew.

This colloquial expression dates from eighteenth-century Scots and 
is now mainly to be found in Britain and the Commonwealth.

    You'll think you've tumbled into a Vermeer with your 
    first glimpse of a skinny townhouse so skew-whiff that 
    it's probably only standing by dint of being supported on 
    either side by equally historic homes.
    The Scotsman, 20 December 2008.

The off-centredness is often figurative. One writer described a pop 
song as having "skew-whiff charms"; others variously criticised a 
skew-whiff shortlist, referred to a poem's skew-whiff irony, and 
shuddered at fashion's "skew-whiff combos like puce and purple".

The first part of the word will cause no difficulties, since it is 
almost certainly from "askew". The second element, I am assured by 
those who know (though most dictionaries dodge the issue), is the 
same word as that meaning a light puff of air, suggesting that the 
thing in question has been blown off course.

North Americans may know the closely related "skewgee". Here, the 
second part is from the Scots "agee" (or "ajee"), created from a 
call to a horse to move to one side.

3. Q&A: Meld
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Q. I note with a bit of dismay that "meld", which had always meant 
to show or display, and entered the common vocabulary when the game 
of canasta became popular (when one laid down a set of cards, one 
was said to meld), is now assumed by most users to mean mix or 
merge. Would you care to comment in your column? [Bob Lee]

A. The situation's a bit more complicated than that. There are 
actually two different verbs here.

I well remember the post-war fashion for canasta, which my older 
brothers played with great enthusiasm, if inexpertly. This brought 
the verb "meld" into much wider circulation than it had ever had 
before, though it had been recorded from the 1880s in connection 
with other card games, such as pinochle and rummy. This sense, of 
laying down or declaring a combination of cards, is from German 
"melden", to announce. As it appeared first in the US, one may 
guess that it derives from German immigrant usage.

Oddly, the verb had made an earlier appearance in the language, in 
medieval times, when it meant much the same as the modern German 
verb - to announce or make known, later also to inform against a 
man or accuse him. It was an Old English term that derived from 
Germanic sources. It vanished from the language in the fifteenth 
century, only to be reintroduced from the modern German language in 
a different sense.

The other verb, meaning to merge or combine, is by comparison an 
upstart - it's recorded only from the middle 1930s. In grammar as 
well as meaning it's a blend, since it was almost certainly created 
by combining "melt" and "weld". Early examples suggest it arose in 
cookery, meaning the blending of flavours. It has become a standard 
part of the language, more in the US than the UK; "meld" as a noun 
meaning a blend or combination dates from the 1970s.

4. Q&A: Screw your courage to a sticking-place
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Q. The phrase "screw your courage to a sticking-place", is said to 
be by Shakespeare, but would you know or can you describe what or 
where a "sticking-place" might be? Without knowing why, I just love 
this phrase, but cannot find any mention of sticking places in my 
searches online. [Christy Wopperer]

A. The phrase in that form and sense does appear first in Macbeth, 
spoken to the thane of Glamis by his wife when encouraging him to 
murder Duncan. Macbeth is having a bad case of cold feet and is 
thinking of all the things that can go wrong. The RSC Shakespeare 
gives Lady Macbeth's line in the slightly modernised form, "But 
screw your courage to the sticking-place / And we'll not fail". 
Today we're much more likely to talk simply about screwing up our 
courage, another form of the same expression.

The idea behind it is of a place where something stops and holds 
fast. If Macbeth does this, he will not change his mind but stay 
with his previous decision to act against King Duncan. However, 
nobody is quite certain what the sticking-place is - as so often, 
Shakespeare omitted to tell us what he meant and "sticking-place" 
appears in English only in reference to this line.

The Clarendon Shakespeare, published in Oxford in 1869, suggested 
it refers to "some engine or mechanical contrivance". In a note in 
another Shakespeare play in the same series, Troilus and Cressida, 
the editors argue that it had something to do with "screwing up the 
chords of string instruments to their proper degree of tension". 
The Oxford English Dictionary's entry, published in 1911, accepts 
this as the correct answer.

A writer in Notes and Queries in December 1869 instead suggested 
the image of a contemporary soldier, "with his crossbow planted at 
an angle against the ground, screwing its cord by means of a kind 
of windlass to 'the sticking-place,' or catch, by which it will be 
held at furthest stretch." This has also been put forward by other 
writers and it's accepted by most modern editors of the play. It's 
supported by a line later on in the scene: "I am settled, and bend 
up / Each corporeal agent to this terrible feat", where by "bend 
up" it is accepted that Macbeth is referring to the stringing of a 
longbow. A martial image would make sense when discussing a murder.

As things stand, however, we've no way of deciding for certain 
which allusion, if either, is what Shakespeare had in mind.

5. Sic!
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Anne O'Brien Lloyd says that a women's clothing shop in Saskatoon 
regularly displays an inducement to buy at bargain prices: "All 
pants half off". It might be a cunning advertising ploy, of course. 
Or possibly not.

The Guardian suffered a classic error on 21 February, Lorena Verdes 
spotted: "Vere 'Papa' Bird had steered the island to independence 
from Britain in 1981 and was at that time revered on the island for 
having shaken off the imperial yolk." Also with egg on its face, 
Don Herring reports, was the Associated Press. In a story dated 15 
February on the crash near Buffalo, it wrote that the aircraft was 
"equipped with a 'stick shaker' mechanism that rattles the yolk to 
warn the pilot if the plane is about to lose aerodynamic lift." You 
may not be surprised to learn that at least a dozen US newspapers 
reprinted the story complete with mistake.

While we're on unfortunate errors not caught by spelling checkers, 
the Wall Street Journal suffered one in an article on 19 February, 
in which it wrote about GE "raising $15 billion in a public sock 
offering". John Shore feels this must be a world record.

Dennis Ginley found another such error in the corrections column of 
the Oregonian, Portland, on 24 February: "The Oregonian strives to 
be accurate, fair and complete in it's coverage, and corrects 
significant errors of fact." But not so much concerned with errors 
of punctuation.

Ian Wilson sent me a photo of a sign he came across at the National 
Trust shop at Chirk Castle, Wrexham, on the border between England 
and Wales. It was on a box of ceramic toadstools (a snip at £7 for 
the small ones and £10 for the big ones) and offered two for the 
price of three. [The photo is in the online version of this issue.]

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