World Wide Words -- 18 Jul 09
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jul 17 16:33:31 UTC 2009
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 648 Saturday 18 July 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: Cockshut.
3. Q and A: Take a powder.
4. Q and A: Unputdownable.
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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ISSUE ERROR ALERT Norm Jensen wrote, "The last three issues of the
newsletter which I have received, dated 27 Jun 09, 04 Jul 09, and
11 Jul 09 have all shown ISSUE 645 at the top. Is this a test? If
so, do I pass? Probably just an oversight after you returned from
your holiday." Oh, dear. You're quite right, of course. I usually
double-check the issue number of this e-mail version against the
World Wide Words database but seem to have got out of the habit of
doing so. However, this issue is correctly numbered! (The numbering
of the online versions, by the way, has always been correct, since
those are automatically generated from the database.)
2. Weird Words: Cockshut /'kQk,SVt/
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Fear not, this isn't a risqué word. Cockshut time is the twilight
of evening. The word has a longish history, with this being the
first use on record:
Thomas the Earl of Surrey and himself,
Much about cock-shut time, from troop to troop
Went through the army, cheering up the soldiers.
[Richard III, by William Shakespeare, 1597.]
There are two ideas about where it comes from. One suggests that it
refers to the time of day when fowls are shut up in their coops for
the night, though why it should be "cock" rather than "chicken" or
some other word isn't explained.
Other writers point to the variant form "cock-shoot" and to terms
like "cockshoot net". These are fowl hunting terms that are said to
refer to the woodcock, a large wading bird with short legs. It's
nocturnal, hiding during the day in dense cover but coming out at
dusk, when it often flies low along paths and other openings in
woodland. At one time, people used to trade on this habit to catch
them in nets. This is the origin of several British place names,
such as Cockshoot in Herefordshire, Cockshut Hill in Birmingham and
Cockshoot Broad in Norfolk.
However, in his English Dialect Dictionary a century ago, Joseph
Wright included the hunting and twilight senses separately, hinting
there may once have been two distinct words that became confused
because they are linked to the same time of day. But it seems more
likely that the woodcock origin is the true one.
3. Q and A: Take a powder
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Q. I used the expression "take a powder" in front of my wife (who
understood it) and my son (who didn't). It's American I'm sure, and
I feel it's wild 1920s American gangster slang. Why would one take
a powder when one goes on the lam? [Jonathan McColl]
A. If a character was instructed to take a powder in old-time hard-
boiled fiction, he was expected to immediately leave, depart or
absent himself, often to avoid a difficult situation. It could also
mean to escape or abscond. As you've discovered, the idiom isn't
much known these days. Your dating is about right and this is an
example from its heyday:
Feeney smiled grimly. "He was yeller - tried to take a
powder on you, didn't he?" "He was talking of quitting,"
said Perelli indifferently.
[On the Spot, by Edgar Wallace, 1931.]
Having said that, the brief answer to your question has to be, "I
don't know". But then, neither does anybody else, though we aren't
short of theories.
One suggestion is that the person is being told to powder his nose,
as a dismissive reference to the polite female euphemism for going
to the place variously known as the bathroom, restroom, toilet or
loo. This seems unlikely, mainly because "take" here is the wrong
word. He may have been told to literally take a powder, with the
idiom being based on a medical instruction that is at least as old
as the eighteenth century. But what sort of powder? The medical
references were most commonly to headache remedies or purgatives.
The former is improbable but the latter, as Eric Partridge once
suggested, might refer to the "moving" powers of the remedy. This
might be supported by slightly older versions of the phrase: to
take a walk-out powder or take a run-out powder.
There is one further possibility. "Powder" is on record as an
Northern English and Scots regional word meaning a hurry or rush;
something done with a powder was in great haste or forcefully. It
might be a variation on "pother", a commotion or fuss, or it might
be a shortened form of "gunpowder". It seems that "powder" in this
sense continued to be known in the US into the twentieth century
and might be the origin of "take a powder".
Or possibly not.
4. Q and A: Unputdownable
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Q. Every person that has been caught up with an engrossing book
understands the meaning of "unputdownable". When did that word show
up in English? [Will Mason, USA]
A. The earliest example mentioned is usually the one in a letter by
Raymond Chandler, dated 5 January 1947, because that's the first
citation in the entry in the Oxford English Dictionary.
There are earlier examples, though they are in slightly different
senses. The first I know of, a century before Chandler, Chandler,
means a person with enough self-assurance (or insensitivity) that
he can resist being put down, that is, brought lower in self-esteem
through criticism:
"Maugh I never eat another dinner if augh don't dine
there too!" chuckled Peter, with un-put-down-able and un-
offend-able gallantry, "for augh'm sure my cousin Sarah
there would never be so inhospitable as to shut her doors
upon a relation with such a fule heart and empty stomach
as augh am suffering from at this moment."
[Cheveley, or, The Man of Honour, by Rosina Doyle
Bulwer Lytton, 1839. Lady Lytton, a legendary beauty, was
the wife of the famous novelist Edward George Bulwer
Lytton. He only took up that occupation because his
family cut off his income when he married her. They
separated after seven years and she also took up writing
novels, likewise to earn money. This satirical best-
seller is her best-known work. Note her attempt to
reproduce the upper-class vowels of the period, a
technique that soon becomes tiresome.]
A handful of other examples appear in the next 100 years, some in
the same sense in which Lady Lytton uses it. A couple have it as a
noun ("It was really an unputdownable, increasing in me the desire
for novels to the extreme"). I've also found a reference to an
unputdownable mutiny and several modern ones to irresistible food
("Of the Ecuadorean chocolate nemesis with crème fraîche: I had a
spoonful and thought it was fine, but not unputdownable"). But, as
you say, the modern sense is of a book that's so good you can't
bear to stop reading it ("The novel is highly readable and quite
unputdownable"). It has become such a cliché of the writers of
blurbs and reviews that it is frequently an object of mockery.
"Unputdownable" is worth noting in another way, as an example of a
rather rare method of forming words, from phrasal verbs - in this
case "to put down" in its various senses - by adding the adjective-
making "-able" to the end and "un-" to the front. Others include
its televisual equivalent "unswitchoffable"; "getatable", which is
known from the eighteenth century; and a variety of convoluted
formations that are intended as wordplay rather than be useful
additions to the language: "un-do-without-able", "unrelyuponable",
"untalkaboutable", "unwearoutable", "unpindownable", "un-keep-off-
able" and "unwipeupable" (hyphenation is largely a matter of the
period in which examples were recorded, as modern usage omits
them). Here's yet another example, coined as a play on your word:
Its size makes it hardly-pickupable; if not for that,
it would be unputdownable.
[The Economist, 21 Jun. 1997.]
Its inverse, "putdownable", is much rarer. It almost always turns
up as a humorous reference to its negative. In one case on record,
the writer accidentally returned the word to its first meaning:
Michael Crichton was a master of the unputdownable
novel. ... [Critics] regarded his novels as highly
putdownable - that is, worthy of putdowns.
[Wall Street Journal, 12 Nov. 2008.]
And an alternative inversion has been coined:
Downputable: An alternative to "unputdownable," to
describe a book that's not quite as compelling as it
might have been.
[In a comment by Laurence Hughes on Seven Deadly Words
of Book Reviewing, by Bob Harris, in the New York Times,
25 Mar. 2008. Among Mr Harris's terms to be avoided are
"poignant", "compelling", "intriguing" and "lyrical".
Readers suggested dozens of others.]
5. Sic!
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Slow learners take heart, says Liz Howard. On 14 July the Daily
Telegraph had the heading: "Get Fit in 14 Days. Week 3."
On 13 July, Kenneth Huey found this sentence in the Huffington Post
in a piece on steroids in sport: "Knowing his erasable personality,
Ty would most likely be a perfect example of 'roid-rage'." Having
your personality erased would surely make anybody angry.
Remaining with the Huffington Post, Sharon Crawford read a story
dated 16 July about a teacher accused of having sex with one of her
under-age students: "The student described how the relationship
escalated from Facebook flirtations to sexual intercourse during a
courtroom appearance."
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