World Wide Words - 10 Jan 09
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Sat Jan 10 04:57:52 UTC 2009
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 621 Saturday 10 January 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. Vote, vote, vote ...
3. Weird Words: Prick-me-dainty.
4. Recently noted.
5. Elsewhere.
6. Q&A: Part brass rags.
7. 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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THE GREAT CHRISTMAS CAROL MYSTERY Many of you inventively sought
solutions to the line "May I press your cudiles?" mentioned last
time as a curiosity in the 1999 TV film of A Christmas Carol. The
speaker of the line, Edward Petherbridge, tells me that any baroque
explanation that involves a fluff is way out of line: he did say
the line correctly according to the script. The word was included
at the insistence of the scriptwriter, Peter Barnes: "He was born
in Bow so was a true Cockney. He was fond of obscure words but I
think I was assured the word meant 'mitts', fingers, digits or just
hands. I didn't feel it worth the candle to argue about this
annoying obscurity." Patrick Stewart (who played Scrooge) mentioned
the word to Mr Petherbridge when they met on New Year's Eve and
subsequently e-mailed me to say that he thought it might be London
East End slang or Yiddish. Mr Petherbridge hasn't kept the script,
but he believes that the word was spelled "cudulles" and recalls
saying it as /kVd'ju:lz/ (roughly "cud-yules").
So, the problem is half solved. It wasn't an error but supposedly a
real word, perhaps slang. However, the doyen of British compilers
of slang dictionaries, Jonathon Green, tells me, "I've checked my
own database in which there are several hundred words defined as
'hand(s)' but there's nothing relevant." He speculates that Barnes
(now unconsultable through reason of death) may have misremembered
"daddle", which was a popular mid-nineteenth century term for a
hand. I can take this no further myself because I'm way outside my
comfort zone when it comes to obscure slang.
Notwithstanding the inconclusive outcome, it seemed worth putting
the whole story online as a Q&A piece (http://wwwords.org?CHCA),
which includes an audio snapshot of the line containing the word.
2. Vote, vote, vote ...
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World Wide Words has comfortably maintained an absolute majority of
the votes in the LISTSERV Choice Awards 2009 contest since it was
nominated. This week, however, our vote suddenly slumped to a mere
33% at one point. This puzzled and dismayed many subscribers (and
me) but isn't the result of underhand goings-on, as some readers
have darkly hinted.
Susan Brown Faghani at L-Soft tells me it was because the counters
on the site were reset on 1 January. She explained something that I
hadn't previously been aware of: "The voting is a series of monthly
contests, with our intention being to clear the slate by resetting
the counter each month rather than using aggregated vote counts."
She went on to say, "All votes a list receives will count towards
the tabulation of the overall top three nominated lists from which
the winner will be selected by L-Soft founder and CEO Eric Thomas
and the awards program jury. WORLDWIDEWORDS has won the voting for
October, November and December 2008, and all of the votes received
have been tabulated and recorded."
May I urge you to continue your support of World Wide Words, so we
will top the poll this month as well as previous ones? Place your
vote via my short-form link http://wwwords.org?LCAS. You can vote
once a day, so "vote early, vote often", as the saying goes.
3. Weird Words: Prick-me-dainty /,prIkmI'deInti/
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Excessively finicky in dress, language and behaviour.
The original prick-me-dainties were sixteenth century dandies.
The first part is from an ancient sense of the verb that meant to
dress, specifically to dress in clothes that were fastened by pins
or bodkins. Since these were not everyday wear, it came to mean
dressing up, donning one's finery. When Richard Brathwait wrote in
Barnabees Journal in 1638 of a woman, "On Earth she only wished /
To be painted, pricked, kissed", you should not therefore infer a
modern meaning.
As time went on, the connection with clothes became less prominent.
Instead, a person so described was fastidious or over-particular in
many aspects of life. (When the word first emerged, "dainty" could
mean handsome, fine, or delightful, though it also already had the
newer idea about it of fastidiousness or delicate taste. It would
seem the term punned on these two meanings.) John Jameson wrote in
his Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language of 1818, that
a "prickmedainty" was "One who is finical in dress or carriage"
["Finical" is another word for "finicky"]. In 1822, the Scottish
writer John Galt described one Bailie Pirlet in The Provost as
"naturally a gabby prick-me-dainty body", or in standard English a
talkative and pedantic man. It has also been used to mean an
affected, self-conscious, over-refined or mincing person.
The English Dialect Dictionary recorded the term at the end of the
nineteenth century under a variety of spellings and noted that it
was then limited to Cumberland and Scotland. Its last holdout was
the Moray area of Scotland, where The Scottish National Dictionary
recorded it in 1966.
4. Recently noted
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RUMBLEDETHUMPS This isn't a digestive ailment but a food. Gordon
Brown, the British prime minister, contributed a recipe for it to a
fundraising book in aid of Donaldson's, a school for the deaf near
Edinburgh. Mr Brown stated that it's his favourite food, a claim
that has been widely derided as recession chic. Rumbledethumps has
been described as Scottish bubble and squeak: a traditional dish
whose key ingredients are potato and cabbage. Gordon Brown says it
can be made more interesting by topping it with melted cheese or a
slice of crispy bacon. I've not been able to discover the source of
the name rumbledethumps - the OED doesn't include it, though I've
found a reference in Blackwood's Magazine from 1825.
ADS WORDS OF THE YEAR The American Dialect Society has chosen
"bailout" as its word of the year for 2008. Voting took place at
the Society's meeting in San Francisco on the evening of 9 January.
In the specific sense used most frequently in 2008, bailout refers
to rescue by the government of companies on the brink of failure,
including large players in the banking industry.
Voting was as usual conducted in a spirit of fun - the Society
doesn't aim to give new words an official stamp of approval but
rather show that language change is normal, entertaining, and
always with us. Nominations came from members of the Society who
specialise in following language trends and also from the general
public. Unsurprisingly, they reflected the two major events that
preoccupied North America in the past year.
An impressive 51% of them were connected with the US presidential
election, including plays on the names of Barack Obama, Joe (as in
Joe the Plumber), and Sarah Palin ("Palinesque" was defined by the
ADS as "pertaining to a person who has extended themselves beyond
their expertise, thereby bringing ridicule upon a serious matter").
The financial crisis came in a distant second with a mere 19% of
the nominations. Top of the nomination list from the public was
"change", with "bailout" and "maverick" following well behind.
Grant Barrett, chair of the New Words Committee of the Society,
commented on the winner, "When you vote for 'bailout', I guess
you´re really voting for 'change', too, though you´d think a room
full of pointy-headed intellectuals could come up with something
more exciting."
Winners in sub-categories were more entertaining. The Word Least
Likely to Succeed was "PUMA" (Party Unity My Ass, used by Democrats
disaffected after Hillary Clinton failed to secure a sufficient
number of delegates); the Word Most Likely to Succeed was "shovel-
ready" (infrastructure projects that can be started quickly when
funds become available); voted Most Creative was "recombobulation
area" (an area at Mitchell International Airport in Milwaukee in
which passengers who have just passed through security screening
can get their clothes and belongings back into order); top of the
Most Useful category was the pair "Barack Obama", variously used as
combining forms; Most Outrageous by a large margin was "terrorist
fist jab" (a derogatory term coined by Fox News for a knuckle-to-
knuckle fist bump, or "dap", performed between two black people as
a sign of friendship, celebration or agreement).
5. Elsewhere
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MORE WOTY If you are not yet jaded with words of the year, you may
be interested in the Macquarie Dictionary's contest. It has listed
five words in each of 17 categories that have reached Australian
usage in the past year. Visitors may vote for the most valuable
contribution to the English language in each category. Short link:
http://wwwords.org?MCQU. For a couple of news reports with varying
slants on the choices, see http://wwwords.org?MCAB (ABC News) and
http://wwwords.org?MCGO (Government News).
6. Q&A: Part brass rags
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Q. Your piece about "bold as brass" caused me to wonder about an
expression I find in P G Wodehouse stories: to "part brass rags",
to have a falling-out. I can't for the life of me figure out where
it might come from. [Richard Francis]
A. The usual story bothers me, as it causes my folk-etymological
antennae to quiver a little. But there is supporting evidence for
it and I am persuaded to take it at face value.
Let us assume you are a rating (a non-commissioned sailor) on a
vessel of Her Majesty's Navy, not the Royal Navy of our current
monarch, however, but that of Queen Victoria. Say around 1890.
Naval officers were as obsessed then as they are now with keeping
everything clean and polished, particularly the brasswork. To aid
you in your eternal polishing and repolishing, you would have a bag
that contained cleaning rags, emery paper, and probably a bit of
scouring brick.
You would also have a partner, a chum with whom you shared your
cleaning and other duties and with whom you could pass the time of
day in conversation. A mark of friendship on board ship was that
friends shared their worldly goods, even establishing a shared bag
of cleaning materials. This friend, sharer of your brass cleaning
rags, was known as your "raggie".
If the two of you quarrelled, you divvied up the contents of your
shared bag and found somebody else with whom to share them, along
with your duties and your stories. In the slang of the time, you
parted brass rags with your former partner. (When you did so, you
also lost your raggie, but this isn't the origin of "to lose one's
rag", which is from Yorkshire dialect of an earlier period.)
Two contributors to Notes and Queries in April 1916 gave this as
the origin; to judge from their replies, both were navy men, one of
them signing himself as a former chaplain to the Royal Navy. We may
be reluctant to gainsay a man in holy orders who knew the phrase
first-hand, though it's possible that he was a saintly but gullible
clergyman who had been taken in by the well-spun yarn of a lower-
deck man.
The other Notes and Queries response in similar terms makes this
unlikely, as does a slightly earlier version of the tale, which is
also the earliest recorded example of the term we know about. It's
in a book of 1898, The Tadpole of an Archangel and Other Naval
Stories, by W P Drury:
When "Pincher" Martin, Ordinary, and "Nobby" Clarke, A.B.,
desire to prove the brotherly love with which each inspires
the other, it is their custom to keep their brasswork
cleaning rags in a joint ragbag. But, should relations
become strained between them, the bag owner casts forth
upon the deck his sometime brother's rags; and with the
parting of the brassrags hostilities begin.
P G Wodehouse used it a lot - it appears in at least five of his
early works that I know of, in the decade from 1906 onwards - and
my guess is that he did a lot to popularise this odd bit of lower-
deck slang.
7. Sic!
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Following last week's mention here of "vegetarian fed hens", Paul
Russell e-mailed about a packet of Malaysian-made instant soup he
bought recently: "It's not the usual cream of chicken, mushroom or
tomato, but 'Cream of Vegetarian'. It tasted fine, but I couldn't
help wondering if they'd washed him before they creamed him. The
packet shows a halal sticker, so at least we can be sure he was
slaughtered in the approved fashion."
Australian real-estate sellers seem disputatious. Alan Craig saw a
sale sign on a house in New South Wales: "Argumentatively the best
river view in Wooli, $850,000."
Remaining in Australia for the moment, Lynnie Worth was browsing
the Web pages of The Courier-Mail of Brisbane when she found this
caption to a photograph of creepy-crawlies that had been taken in
the USA: "Just a few of the 100 black widow spiders that ingested a
swimming pool in Madison, Alabama." Hungry little blighters!
A mangled sentence in a report in the Daily Mail on Tuesday about a
case for wrongful dismissal was submitted by Niall Quiggin and
Chris Little because of the intriguing image it conjures up: "He
told the tribunal how the Formula 1 supremo's Challenger 604 jet
had a white silk carpet that meant passengers had to remove their
shoes and polished silver leaf work surfaces."
Alan Siegal headed his message "Just a little proofreading needed,
nothing major". He had spotted a headline on the front page of the
New York Times on Tuesday: "An Atlanta man who lives in a scalded
down version of the presidential mansion is looking for a buyer."
Might he be in financial hot water?
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