World Wide Words -- 25 Jul 09
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jul 24 16:42:08 UTC 2009
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 649 Saturday 25 July 2009
-------------------------------------------------------------------
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
-------------------------------------------------------------------
A formatted version of this e-magazine is available
online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/onco.htm
To leave the list or change your subscribed email address, see
Section A below or go to http://wwwords.org?SUBS. Don't e-mail
me with subscription matters unless you are having problems.
This e-magazine is best viewed in a fixed-pitch font.
For a key to phonetic symbols, see http://wwwords.org?PRON
Contents
-------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Q and A: Out like Lottie's eye.
3. Weird Words: Titivil.
4. Q and A: Toad-in-the-hole.
5. Sic!
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
-------------------------------------------------------------------
TAKE A POWDER Many interesting comments arrived following my try
at explaining this puzzling American expression last week. Readers
noted that my attempt to dismiss the sense of going to the powder
room because "take" was the wrong word was probably unsustainable
in the light of other US excretory expressions that include the
verb.
Many other readers recalled elderly relatives taking headache
powders, common in the days before pills became widely available,
and agreed this was a strong possibility for its origin. Several
mentioned in particular BC powder, a pain reliever first sold in
1906 and still available today. This was popular enough early in
its history that it may have been part of the background for the
figurative expression.
John Roland Elliott commented, "I always thought that 'take a
powder' was an invitation to self-administer some pain relief
product to relieve one's apparent agitation. I thought it would
roughly translate to 'chill out' or Jon Stewart's 'settle down'."
Missy Gaido Allen remembers it used this way: "My grandmother, born
in Florida in 1908 and raised in Texas, used 'take a powder' as a
variation of 'relax'. She explained it to me as taking medication.
I grew up in Texas in the 1970s and we used that phrase - it was
understood as 'calm down'."
Australians tell me that they have also used the expression in this
sense. Darren Schliebs wrote, "I was unaware of the US usage of
'take a powder' and had always thought that it was intended to mean
'calm down', on the assumption that it was related to taking
analgesic 'powders' of the 1950s." Others have told me that these
were similar to the American BC powders and were sold under the
name Bex; a comedy revue in 1965 had the title "A Cup of Tea, a Bex
and a Good Lie Down", a sweetly sarcastic reference to the
Australian housewife's remedy for many ills.
Donald Kaspersen remembers an extended version of the expression,
based on a deliberately paradoxical logic: "The oldtimers in New
York City, if they were annoyed with you, would sometimes say, 'Yer
givin' me a headache. Why don't ya go take a powder?' But, more
often, the first sentence would be dropped, as, at least at one
time, everyone knew it anyway."
Two French readers noted an intriguing cross-language similarity.
Jean-Charles Khalifa, lecturer in linguistics at the University of
Poitiers, wrote: "French has a quaint idiom 'prendre la poudre
d'escampette', literally 'take the powder of escampette', the last
word being now extinct but for the idiom, and deriving from an also
extinct verb 'escamper'; this has been transformed into 'décamper',
still in use, meaning 'to flee in a hurry' [the source also of the
English verb 'decamp' -- Ed]. As far as I know, the reference to
'powder' goes back at least to the 17th century, when doctors
(famously caricatured in many Molière plays) used to order all
sorts of powders made from weird ingredients (French still has a
nice idiom 'poudre de perlimpinpin' for any sort of quack remedy)."
Josée Bégaud made similar points and added, 'Unfortunately, none of
my dictionaries explains why it should be 'poudre'. Instinctively,
I understand it as 'take a magic powder that allows you to flee
very quickly', but that's entirely personal."
2. Q and A: Out like Lottie's eye
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. My wife's grandmother used to say someone was "out like Lottie's
eye" when they were dead asleep, or perhaps passed out drunk. I
have heard that Bonnie from Bonnie and Clyde once famously used the
phrase, but nobody seems to be able to tell me where it came from,
or who Lottie is. [Pete White]
A. It was actually Clyde Barrow who used the expression, according
to most accounts, including this one:
Clyde made the choice to run for freedom. He never
deceived himself about the ultimate outcome, however, and
later told his sister Nell, "I'm just going on 'til they
get me. Then I'm out like Lottie's eye."
[The Lives and Times of Bonnie & Clyde, by E R Milner,
1996. Here Clyde clearly means death rather than some
temporary unconsciousness.]
Both Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were from Texas and I wondered
if your wife's grandmother might also be from there (though you
have since told me she isn't). That's because the earliest examples
that I know about are all from that state. None, alas, give any
clue as to who Lottie might have been, or why her eye should have
become significant.
There are theories, of course. Lot's wife from the Bible has been
mentioned, though her story hardly matches. A speakeasy in Chicago
called "Lottie's Pub" has been mentioned, because it supposedly
turned a blind eye to what was going on inside. This doesn't fit
the early history and seems to be no more than the usual kind of
folk invention. In her book To Wed a Texan, Georgina Gentry
suggests that Lottie Deno had been "a legendary saloon girl who
lost an eye in a brawl"; perhaps she's confusing the lady with the
Lottie Deno who was a famous professional gambler in Texas after
the Civil War, but I can't find she ever lost an eye.
One writer has asserted that the idiom has a very long history,
back into colonial times, but that is extremely doubtful. The first
example I've been able to turn up is this:
Times when I thought my luck had went out like
Lottie's eye. But it don't do to give up.
[The Wind, by Dorothy Scarborough, 1925. Her writings
are particularly associated with Texas, continuing the
links with that state.]
Here's one from a little later:
The cat is out of the bag! The deep, dark mystery is
solved! The truth is out - out like Lottie's eye, for
like somebody or other said "you can't fool all of the
people all of the time".
[The Morning Avalanche (Lubbock, Texas), 28 Jul. 1931.
It's clear from the writer's play on the expression that
it was one he expected his readers to know.]
A faint possible hint comes from an article by James H Warner, A
Word List from Southeast Arkansas, which appeared in the language
journal American Speech in 1938. He included "go out like Lottie's
eye" but defined it as running very fast and added the illustrative
sentence, "That horse is going out like Lottie's eye." Might Lottie
have been a racehorse?
3. Weird Words: Titivil /'tItIvIl/
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Back in 1938, Paul Harvey wrote in The Oxford Companion to English
Literature that "Titivil was evidently in origin a creation of
monastic wit."
He was thinking of the earliest sense of the word. A titivil was a
very specific kind of tale-bearer. He was a devil whose job was to
collect up the fragments of words or phrases that monks skipped or
mumbled while they were reciting divine service. He took them down
to Hell, where they were logged against the offender. Might he have
been invented as a way to scare the less conscientious members of
monastic congregations into saying their prayers properly? It seems
more than likely.
He wasn't English to start with. He turns up in continental Europe
in the fourteenth century under various names, including Titinillus
and Titivillus. He's mentioned in a sermon dated to the early 1300s
by a Dominican monk named Petrus de Palude who became Patriarch of
Jerusalem: "Fragmina psalmorum Titiuillus colligit horum. Quaque
die mille vicibus sarcinat ille" (Titivillus collects up fragments
of these psalms. Every day he fills his bag a thousand times.) One
guess is that his name was from the Latin word "titivillitium" used
by the Roman comic dramatist Titus Maccius Plautus and which seems
to have meant a mere trifle or a trivial bit of gossip.
Titivil escaped from the cloisters into the medieval mystery plays
and from there into the colloquial language as a mischievous tale-
bearer or more generally a ne'er-do-well or scoundrel. He vanished
from common usage around the beginning of the seventeenth century
and this is among his last appearances:
Coquette: A pratling, or proud gossip; a fisking or
fliperous minx; a cocket, or a tatling housewife; a
titifill, a flebergebit.
[A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues, by
Randle Cotgrave, 1611. The definition is worse than the
original word for modern readers because so many of the
terms are unfamiliar: "pratling" is from "prattle" and
meant gossiping; "fisking" meant flighty or frisky; the
OED does not define "fliperous" and it appears nowhere
else but here; "cocket" is just an early English spelling
of "coquette"; "tatling" meant passing on tittle-tattle;
"flebergebit" would now be spelled "flibbertigibbet". And
"proud" then meant haughty or arrogant.]
4. Q and A: Toad-in-the-hole
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. Though English gastropubs are sprouting like toadstools in New
York, last week was my first encounter with toad-in-the-hole. After
seeing it for myself, the story of how it got the name - that the
sausage ends, peering out of their pastry basket, resemble toads -
seems a stretch. Can you offer a more plausible etymology? [Dave
Cook]
A. How this humble dish got its name regularly puzzles students of
English traditional cookery. A word of explanation may be in order
for readers who have not encountered what Mrs Beeton described as a
"homely but savoury dish". Toad-in-the-hole consists of sausages
baked in a batter that is much the same as that for another classic
English dish, Yorkshire pudding. It's usually served with onion
gravy and vegetables.
The tale you heard is the most common try these days at explaining
where the name comes from. It fails not so much on etymology (which
has nothing to say about the matter) but on culinary history. The
fact is that sausages are a very recent ingredient. Until well into
the twentieth century recipes mention meat of various kinds, but
not sausages. It is not unknown today for the dish to be made with
uncased meat and you may come across "sausage toad" as an unlovely
way to distinguish that version from the older type.
The first reference to it by name is in Captain Francis Grose's A
Provincial Glossary of 1787, though under the older name of "toad-
in-a-hole"; he defined it as "meat boiled in a crust". (I wonder,
was he correct, or just unversed in cookery? Nobody else mentions a
crust, or boiling.) In a letter to a friend ten years later the
novelist Fanny Burney quoted a conversation that she had had with
Princess Augusta, who said she never saw the dish without feeling
angry about "putting a noble sirloin of beef into a poor paltry
batter-pudding". In her Book of Household Management of 1861, Mrs
Beeton includes beef and kidneys in one of her recipes, producing a
result that's close to a steak and kidney pudding, though in batter
rather than suet. Another recipe of hers employs mutton in place of
beef. In A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes, published
the same year, Charles Elme Francatelli goes for "bits or pieces of
any kind of meat". It would seem the ingredients varied a great
deal. But definitely no toads.
At least one other dish has been similarly prepared in a pudding of
batter and given a related name - Hannah Glasse had a recipe for
pigeons-in-a-hole in her Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy in
1747. In an issue of Notes & Queries for January 1900, a writer,
identified only by the initials CCB, notes toad-in-the-hole "used
to be a favourite dish in farmhouses in Nottinghamshire. It is, if
I remember rightly, a batter-pudding with a hole in the middle
containing meat, beef by preference." This clue to the origin of
the first part of the name is supported by the definition that
James Halliwell-Phillipps gave in his Dictionary of Archaic and
Provincial Words in 1840: "a piece of beef placed in the middle of
a dish of batter, and then baked".
The reference to toads sounds extremely uncomplimentary, since they
have universally been regarded with mild disgust and have been the
source of numerous legends, not least that they give people warts.
On the other hand, the dish was tasty and used good materials, so
the name could hardly have been an insult. The explanation must lie
in a natural history observation. Toads hide during the day in damp
places, especially in burrows in soft ground to which they will
return time after time. They like to sit just inside the entrance,
ready to pounce on any passing insect. The similarity of the form
of the original dish - meat in the centre of a batter surround - to
a toad in its hole must have been sufficiently striking more than
two centuries ago for the name to have stuck.
5. Sic!
-------------------------------------------------------------------
John Smoleskis was looking through the jobs on monster.com. One was
for a "literacy tutour", which rather confirms the need. It begins,
"Our client who are a Training Provider ...". Which doubly confirms
the need.
Mike Page thought he had caught New Scientist out in a dreadful
grammatical mistake when he read this headline: "Ares I Grounded".
But it turned out to be an article about a Mars rocket, Ares One.
Irene Johnson read a report in the Daily Telegraph on 23 July about
Alcohol Disorder Zones (to clarify the ambiguous name, the idea is
to discourage disorder), a government scheme that hasn't been taken
up anywhere: "Commenting on the lack of interest shown by local
councils ... a Home Office spokesman said, 'The fact that there are
not any Alcohol Disorder Zones does not suggest that they are not
working.'"
The Web site of First Coast News, based in Florida, had a headline
on 21 July, "Missing Boaters Get Checked By Doctor". Lesly Arnold
asks if medical men are now being trained in ESP.
A. Subscription information
-------------------------------------------------------------------
To leave the list, change your subscription address or resubscribe,
please visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/index.htm .
You can also maintain your subscription by e-mail. For a list of
commands, send this message to listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org:
INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS
This e-magazine is also available as an RSS feed, which you can
read at http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/newsletter.xml .
Back issues are at http://www.worldwidewords.org/backissues/ .
B. E-mail contact addresses
-------------------------------------------------------------------
* Comments on e-magazine mailings are always welcome. They should
be sent to me at wordseditor at worldwidewords.org . I do try to
respond, but pressures of time often prevent me from doing so.
* Items for "Sic!" should go to wordsclangers at worldwidewords.org .
Submissions will not usually be acknowledged.
* Questions intended to be answered in the Q and A section should
be addressed to wordsquestions at worldwidewords.org (please don't
use this address to respond to published answers to questions -
e-mail the comment address instead).
* Problems with subscriptions that cannot be handled by the list
server should be addressed to wordssubs at worldwidewords.org . To
allow me more time for researching material, please don't e-mail
me asking for simple subscription changes you can do yourself.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words
-------------------------------------------------------------------
The World Wide Words e-magazine and Web site are free, but if you
would like to help with their costs, there are several ways to do
so. Visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/support.htm for details.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2009. All rights
reserved. The Words Web site is at http://www.worldwidewords.org .
-------------------------------------------------------------------
You may reproduce brief extracts from this e-magazine in mailing
lists, newsletters or newsgroups online, provided that you include
the copyright notice given above. Reproduction of substantial parts
of items in printed publications or Web sites needs permission from
the editor beforehand (wordseditor at worldwidewords.org).
-------------------------------------------------------------------
More information about the WorldWideWords
mailing list