World Wide Words -- 17 Jan 09
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jan 16 11:31:29 UTC 2009
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 622 Saturday 17 January 2009
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Sent each Saturday to at least 50,000 subscribers by e-mail and RSS
Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
http://www.worldwidewords.org US advisory editor: Julane Marx
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Don't forget to vote! http://wwwords.org?LCAS
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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: Poodle-faker.
3. Recently noted.
4. Q&A: Round the bend.
5. Q&A: Thwart.
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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RUMBLEDETHUMPS John Douglas suggested that the term featured here
last time as the Prime Minister's favourite dish might not be so
unknown to people in southern England as I had implied. He pointed
out that the big supermarket chain Sainsbury's sells it as a ready
meal in some of their bigger stores. Their Web site calls it "a
delicious combination of potato, swede [rutabaga] and savoy cabbage
topped with mature cheddar cheese." According to recipes I've seen,
the addition of swede makes the dish into the one called clapshot,
not rumbledethumps. The blurb includes a note new to me, that the
latter word means "mixed and bashed together". I must be losing my
touch, if I have to get etymological information from a grocer!
J Holan pointed out that rumbledethumps resembles not only bubble
and squeak, as I said, but also the Irish colcannon, potatoes and
cabbage pounded together in a mortar and then stewed with butter.
Its name derives from "cole", cabbage; the remainder of the word is
of uncertain origin, although the Oxford English Dictionary notes,
"it is said that vegetables such as spinach were formerly pounded
with a cannon-ball". An 1825 description of making it suggests
rumbledethumps was prepared in a similar way.
The word now has its own entry in the Weird Words section, which
includes a lot more detail. Go via http://wwwords.org?RBDT.
VOTE EARLY, VOTE OFTEN Several readers enquired about the origin
of this expression, which I used last time, some mentioning that it
was made famous, or infamous, by Mayor Richard J Daly of Chicago.
On this side of the Atlantic, it's often assumed to be an Irishism,
as a nod towards one-time election shenanigans in that country. But
the evidence shows that it's not only much older, but also that
it's an Americanism. I found an expanded form in an advertisement
in the Racine Daily Journal of 6 November 1860: "Vote early in the
day; and see that the Democrats don't vote too often." In the Yale
Book of Quotations, Fred Shapiro cites a speech by William Porcher
Miles in the House of Representatives on 31 March 1858: "'Vote
early and vote often,' the advice openly displayed on the election
banners in one of our northern cities." Which northern city, he
doesn't say. Might it have been Chicago?
Competition is heating up in the L-Soft contest with the arrival of
further entrants. From now on it's going to be hard work keeping
ahead. So please don't forget to vote: http://wwwords.org?LCAS.
2. Weird Words: Poodle-faker
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A man who habitually chooses to socialise with women.
It's long-outmoded British army slang. A poodle-faker was a young
officer who was disparagingly considered by fellow officers to be
pretending to the role of a lapdog through being over-attentive to
women. To suggest that he was a gigolo, as some have done, would be
to go too far, though a ladies' man he certainly was.
Somehow, perhaps because I've come across it several times in books
about the British Raj in India, I associate "poodle-faker" and its
relatives with hanky-panky in the hill stations to which British
officers and their wives retired in summer to escape the heat of
the plains. In several supposed memoirs, George Macdonald Fraser
put it into the mouth of that erstwhile bully of Rugby, Harry
Flashman, here in its verb form in Flashman in the Great Game:
However withered an old trot she might be, she'd be an odd
female if she was altogether impervious to Flashy's manly
bearing and cavalry whiskers. ... Still, as I turned in that
night I wasn't absolutely looking forward to poodle-faking
her in two days' time.
However, the word is recorded only from the start of the twentieth
century. One of the better-known examples is in George Orwell's
Burmese Days (1935): "As for social duties of all descriptions, he
called them poodle-faking and ignored them. Women he abhorred. In
his view they were a kind of siren whose one aim was to lure men
away from polo and enmesh them in tea-fights and tennis-parties."
Despite the assertion in dictionaries that it's a dated Britishism,
it continues to appear in books and newspapers. Boris Johnson, at
the time a British MP and newspaper columnist but these days Mayor
of London, wrote in the Daily Telegraph in October 2003 about Tony
Blair: "How dare this mincing poodle-faker stand up and start
confiding to the nation about his emotional journey of the past six
years." It has a salaciously nudge-nudge, wink-wink penumbra that
usefully implies more than it delivers.
"Poodle", of course, has been used opprobriously for a lickspittle
or lackey, an obsequious follower, a term that also dates from the
beginning of the twentieth century. The poor old poodle has had a
bad press because of its role as a cosseted appurtenance in ladies'
boudoirs, though when allowed to be itself in high-stepping and
unclipped confidence the standard poodle is an intelligent and
companionable animal.
3. Recently noted
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NEOLOGISMS ALERT Dalton Conley is head of the sociology faculty at
New York University. His book for our times, Elsewhere USA, which
was published on 13 January, includes several invented terms, among
them "weisure" ("work" + "leisure"), shorthand for an increasing
tendency to work during leisure, because of advances in portable
personal technology. Others are "intravidualism" (he says that it's
"an ethic of managing the myriad data streams, impulses, and even
consciousnesses we experience in our heads as we navigate multiple
worlds" - there can be no doubt he's a sociologist); "Elsewhere
Society" (which he explains as "the inter-penetration of spheres of
life that were once bounded from each other"); and "economic red
shift" (the anxiety caused by rising inequality at the top, in
which, no matter how rich you are, people at the wealth level just
above you seem to be pulling away, like receding galaxies). Expect
to read some or all of these buzzwords in a newspaper near you
soon. Or perhaps not.
CARTOCACOETHES Grant Barrett's Double-Tongued Dictionary (go via
http://wwwords.org?DTWW) brought this nonce or neologistic word to
wider notice this week. It was coined by John Krygier on his Making
Maps blog last October. It's an uncontrollable urge, compulsion or
itch to see maps everywhere, a specific example of what has been
called apophenia, our very human tendency to see patterns in random
or meaningless data. "Cartocacoethes" is formed from "cartography"
(French "carte", a card or chart), the drawing or study of maps,
plus "cacoethes", an urge or incurable passion to do something,
often inadvisable (from a classical Greek word that means a bad
habit). What provoked the word was a report that a supposed map of
Çatalhöyük of 6200 BC probably wasn't a map at all.
AH! MEMORIES! A BBC television programme, Victorian Farm, last
week featured a panking pole, something I remember well from my
time running a museum of cidermaking. It's a long pole with a hook
on the end used to shake apples and pears from high branches during
harvesting. The OED suggests the southern English dialect verb to
pank meant only to pant or breathe hard, though the sense better
fits the definition in the English Dialect Dictionary of a century
ago, which says it meant to beat. There may be a link between hard
breathing and beating via the OED's comment that "pank" could also
refer to a pounding heart. A picture of one in action is in the
online version of this newsletter, taken from my little book on
cidermaking, which has just been reissued in an updated version
(see http://wwwords.org?CDMK).
4. Q&A: Round the bend
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Q. You wrote in the 3 January issue of the newsletter that "round
the twist" is a variation of "round the bend". What's the origin of
the latter expression? [Paul Hobson; Michael Grounds]
A. A fascinating set of stories exists to explain this expression,
meaning eccentric, crazy or insane.
Two were quoted by my questioners. Michael Grounds mentioned one,
that the one-time Hudson River State Hospital near Poughkeepsie in
New York State was sited round a bend in the river, so that inmates
arriving there literally went round the bend. Paul Hobson gave a
closely similar story that referred to the old Yarra Bend Lunatic
Asylum in Melbourne, which closed in 1925. As it happens, the river
Hudson is straight near the Hudson River State Hospital and is some
way away, as was the Yarra Bend Asylum from the Yarra. In neither
case can one imagine new arrivals being brought by boat.
Several writers to mailing lists online had a different story about
its origin, suggesting that mental institutions had long tree-lined
driveways that curved at the end so that no one could actually see
the buildings. "If you were sent to the loony bin," one wrote, "you
went around the bend in the driveway to get there."
To counter these tales, all we have is just one entry in the Oxford
English Dictionary, from Frank Bowen's, Sea slang: a Dictionary of
the Old-Timers' Expressions and Epithets, dated 1929. He said that
the phrase was "an old naval term for anybody who is mad." This
presumably puts paid to any suggestion of a land-based origin.
The image, prosaically, must be of a person who is "bent", but in a
figuratively particular way.
5. Q&A: Thwart
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Q. I've just looked up "thwart" in Collins Dictionary and wasn't
surprised to find an Old English origin. Or that it has various
splinter meanings, such as a seat in a boat. But I'd guess that
there is a tale to tell in its history over these many years. Is it
one of these words whose meaning has completely changed? Care to
take it on? [Martin Turner]
A. "Splinter meaning" applied to a boat seat sounds painful.
"Thwart" is actually Middle English, thirteenth century, not Old
English, which would put its arrival before the Norman Conquest.
But what's three centuries between friends? It's from an ancient
Indo-European root shared by Latin "torquere", to twist. In English
the first sense was of something transverse or crosswise.
The early evidence is pretty sparse - it doesn't seem to have been
especially common - so the way it developed isn't altogether clear.
Early on, though, the idea developed of something that lay or was
put across the way, so hindering or obstructing one's progress.
Another early sense, recorded around 1250, was one borrowed from
Germanic languages of a person who was figuratively obstructive or
cross-grained - awkward, obstinate or stubborn. The verb, which
appeared about the same time, first meant to oppose or hinder. Our
modern sense, to successfully oppose another person's intentions,
appeared near the end of the sixteenth century.
The story of the boat "thwart" is curious. The basic idea is clear
enough: that the seat was across the boat, placed from side to side
or transversely (you might say "athwart", formed from "thwart" in
the same way that "across" came from "cross"). But the sense only
appeared in the early eighteenth century. Before that, the seat was
a "thoft" (from an ancient root meaning to squat), which changed in
the seventeenth century into a form that was spelled as "thought",
"thaught" or "thawt". By the eighteenth century it seems this word
had become unfamiliar enough that speakers assumed the "correct"
form was "thwart".
6. Sic!
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"Whatever he's selling, I want some!", Martin Wynne e-mailed, after
reading a BBC news report dated 8 January: "Edwin Booth is proud to
be at the helm of England's last surviving independent supermarket
chain. The 162-year-old upmarket grocer has 26 stores across
Lancashire, Cumbria, Yorkshire and Cheshire."
David Ashton received an email advertising a part-time proofreading
job with the Victorian Government Gazette. Key qualities required
by applicants included 'an eye for detail and good knowledge of
grammar, punctuation and grammar'. Thus confirming their urgent
need for a proofreader with an eye for detail.
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