World Wide Words -- 01 Aug 09

Fri Jul 31 15:48:28 UTC 2009

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 650          Saturday 1 August 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: Beghilos.
3. Elsewhere.
4. Q and A: Crêpe hanger.
5. What I've recently learned.
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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FACEBOOK  I've joined the twenty-first century and become a member 
of Facebook. Friends welcome!

TOAD-IN-THE-HOLE Hillary Goldsmith remembers a different usage of 
this term I discussed last time, which, however, tends to confirm 
its derivation: "Back in South Africa in my childhood a 'toad-in-
the-hole' referred to a slice of bread with the centre cut out. 
This was fried in butter and an egg placed in the hole and also 
fried. This breakfast treat was most popular amongst the kids of 
the 60s and 70s." Pat Gooley, who lives in the US, has heard this 
usage in Oregon, California and Virginia; Joseph Quinton found it 
under that name in a cookbook of the NW Philadelphia Interfaith 
Hospitality Network. Australians know it, too, James Perkins and 
Phoebe Ling informed me, the latter adding that it's "popular at 
morning barbecues".

I said I was suspicious of Captain Francis Grose's description of 
it in his Provincial Glossary of 1787 as "meat boiled in a crust". 
Jonathon Green, editor of Chambers Dictionary of Slang, gently 
remonstrated: "I think you impugn the great Captain's culinary 
sophistication. One need but look at his portrait to see that here 
was a major-league foodie who would have known boiled from baked 
any time. He was a trencherman of renown. More seriously, I refer 
you to the English Dialect Dictionary, one definition in which is 
'a small suet pudding cooked and served in broth'. That would seem 
to fit the Captain's menu?" True, and I should have checked the EDD 
(too many sources, too little time ...) but it's the second 
definition in the entry, the first being "a dish consisting of meat 
baked or fried in batter", which is nearer the conventional view.

TITIVIL Scott Langill and Barbara Berger pointed out that medieval 
scribes ascribed to Titivillus the jogging of elbows and skipping 
of pens that caused blots, false strokes, and ink smears when 
copying manuscripts. Scott Langill added that his picture is in the 
marginal decorations of a number of old manuscripts. Patrick Martin 
and several other readers mentioned a story by Michael Ayrton, 
Tittivulus or The Verbiage Collector, an account of the efforts of 
an obscure devil to collect idle words, which is also a satire on 
bureaucracy: "Tittivulus starts as a minor fiend paddling 
contentedly in the Styx and ends as the leader of a Stalinist coup 
to take over Hell itself."

OUT LIKE LOTTIE'S EYE Kristin O'Keefe found this story about the 
origin of the expression in the Dallas Morning News of 11 January 
1935: "Lottie Patterson was the lady's name and she was a sister of 
Billy Patterson. And when the famous assault on Billy Patterson was 
made, by an unknown assailant, Lottie came to the defense of her 
brother and got one of her pretty Irish eyes poked out." The story 
goes on to say that Billy was then the bouncer at a primitive night 
club, but was later elected to the Legislature. Perhaps a reader 
versed in Texas political history might be able to identify him. 
But "who struck Billy Patterson?" or "who gave Billy Patterson the 
blow?" were well-known joking enquiries in the US in the nineteenth 
century, supposedly originating in Boston and meaning "who did it? 
who was the guilty party?". One example is in a syndicated election 
report in the Galveston News of 12 November 1873: "They are pretty 
well agreed that the Republicans have been badly beaten, but 
dispute as to who it was that gave Billy Patterson the blow." I 
suspect that the Patterson in the Dallas Morning News story is 
fictitious.

Robin Wilkinson, originally from Texas, recalls a fine variation on 
the idiom, "Sometime in the 1990s, at a bridge game in Mississippi, 
an inadequate dummy was tabled and declarer exclaimed, 'Well, we're 
going down like Lottie's drawers!'"

2. Weird Words: Beghilos
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Grab the nearest digital calculator. Enter the number 50714938. Now 
look at the display upside down. With a little imagination, you may 
see the word "beghilos". (The calculator, of course, has to have a 
standard seven-segment display.) Calculators vary slightly in the 
way they display numbers - some leave out the bottom bar on the 
"9", which turns the word into "bebhilos". However, "beghilos" has 
become a rather rare slangy term for what is more formally known as 
calculator spelling. Nobody knows where it comes from or how old it 
is, though I've found an example in a Usenet posting dated 1994.

Kids have been playing with the word-creating possibilities of 
calculators since they started to appear in the 1970s. It didn't 
take long to discover that "0.7734" upside down made "hEllO". One 
of the earliest attested examples from this period is 5318008, 
which when turned over spells "boobies". If your display is big 
enough, you can enter 53177187714, which makes "hillbillies"; mine 
has only ten digits so I get "illbillies" (sick goats?) and so the 
longest word I can make is 378193771 (appropriately, "illegible"). 
Back in 1979, The Hollies issued an album with the title 5317704 
(which makes Hollies). The trick is known from other countries; for 
example in German 38317 spells "Liebe".

To be 37819173 to play this game in the 1970s, you had to be young, 
geekish and slightly bored.

3. Elsewhere
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The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that the language you speak conditions 
how you think, has long been controversial. An article in Newsweek 
(http://wwwords.org?SWHE) reports experiments that provide evidence 
for the hypothesis.

You may recall all the fuss a couple of years ago over the demotion 
of Pluto from planetary status. Some astronomers are trying to get 
the decision reversed, which will require textbook and dictionary 
editors to yet again change their entries. See this recent New 
Scientist article: http://wwwords.org?IPAP.

Jesse Sheidlower's book, The F-Word, about the rudest word in the 
language, was published in 1995 and in a revised edition in 1999. 
The updated and enlarged third edition is to be published in the US 
in September: http://wwwords.org?SHFW.

Every four years, Pamela Munro, professor of linguistics at the 
University of California, Los Angeles compiles a glossary of slang 
based on research by undergraduates. This collection may be said to 
be Obama, current student slang meaning cool. A brief report was in 
the Los Angeles Times on 29 July: http://wwwords.org?UCSD. The work 
(UCLA Slang 6) is available from UCLA: http://wwwords.org?UCSB.

4. Q and A: Crêpe hanger
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Q. I had always assumed that we had to use the German Schadenfreude 
because there was no English equivalent. I recently came across the 
phrase "crepe hanger", in a question to the Q&A column in the Daily 
Mail, which claimed that it meant Schadenfreude. Have you come 
across it? If so, what on earth is its origin? [Andrew Purkiss]

A. The questioner his got his semantic knickers in a twist. The 
phrase certainly exists, though it's hardly an everyday one. But it 
has nothing in common with the German "Schadenfreude", which means 
pleasure derived from another person's misfortune.

A "crêpe hanger" is the ultimate pessimist:

    "You Irish are in love with your sorrows. You are too 
    damned depressing." "I am not in love with my sorrows!" 
    "You're a f----- crepe hanger." "What is a crepe hanger?" 
    "You see the world draped in black. Nobody's sorrows are 
    worse than yours. You hang black crepe on everything."
    [The Immune Spirit, by Susan Ryan Jordan, 2001. 
    Expletive deleted to let this issue pass through e-mail 
    obscenity filters. See the online version (the link is at 
    the top of this issue) for the unexpurgated text.]

My reference books variously say it's from the 1940s or the 1920s. 
The earliest I've so far found is dated 1909 (from The Silver Hoard 
by Rex Beach). It seems to have become common shortly after that 
date. It has most often been spelled "crape hanger", or sometimes 
"crapehanger" - especially in early examples - to reflect the way 
that the word for the crinkled fabric was for centuries spelled in 
English. (In more recent times, we have returned it more nearly to 
its original French form by changing the "a" back to an "e"; in the 
UK we now also frequently include the accent.)

It's forgivable that moderns who encounter it are puzzled by the 
origin. Undertakers' assistants have long ago ceased to be literal 
crêpe hangers, engaged to drape black crêpe across the windows and 
mirrors of a house in which a person has died. Neighbours these 
days no longer follow the old custom of hanging crêpe in their 
windows as a mark of sympathy and respect. Nor is the customary 
clothing of a grieving female relative now characterised by crêpe:

    As for periods of mourning, we are told that a widow's 
    mourning should last eighteen months, although in England 
    it is somewhat lightened in twelve. For the first six 
    months the dress should be of crape cloth, or Henrietta 
    cloth covered entirely with crape, collar and cuffs of 
    white crape, a crape bonnet with a long crape veil, and a 
    widow's cap of white crape if preferred.
    [Harper's Bazar: 17 Apr. 1886.]

It's intriguing that the rise in popularity of the idiom roughly 
coincided with the date at which the extremes of mourning of the 
nineteenth century were going out of fashion. Perhaps before then 
it would have been regarded as inappropriate or even offensive.

Strictly, the term ought to mean "mourning", not "pessimism". It 
might be that the meaning came about through the conventional 
downcast face and lugubrious expression adopted by undertakers, 
which made them look as though they were expecting the worst rather 
than officiating at rituals to mark its already having happened. 
More probably, it started life in the sense "kill-joy", which in 
one way undertakers, mourning and funerals certainly are, and moved 
on from there.

5. What I've recently learned
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BABYDOLLS are a breed of miniature sheep, proving useful in a New 
Zealand vineyard because they keep the grass short but aren't tall 
enough to eat the grapes off the vines.

YUPPIEDROME is a caustic British nickname for a new-build flat (or 
apartment), presumed shoddily constructed. Another nickname given 
in the same article is "eurobox". 

Some amphibians, such as the Alaska wood frog, are able to survive 
being frozen during the winter, turning them into what some witty 
scientist has termed FROGSICLES.

The succession of human sculptures, organised by Anthony Gormley as 
a form of street theatre on the vacant fourth plinth in Trafalgar 
Square in London, have become known as PLINTHERS and PLINTHIANS.

ADOLESCE, the back-formed verb from "adolescence", which looked new 
to me when I found it in the Observer, is recorded at least as far 
back as Tono-Bungay, the 1909 novel by H G Wells.

6. Sic!
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An AP headline on Tuesday raised Harvey Pogoriler's eyebrows: "Man 
pleads not guilty in stolen violin case". He feels it must have 
been rather cramped in there.

Joseph Burlingame was surprised by an oriental business practice, 
implied by another syndicated AP report, which he found in the 
Canton Repository (the Ohio one) on 26 July: "Some 30,000 Chinese 
steelworkers clashed with police in a protest over plans to merge 
their mill with another company and beat the company's general 
manager to death." It appeared unchanged in the Annapolis Capital 
the same day but the Sydney Morning Herald's subeditor was on the 
ball and added the word "they" before "beat".

But the SMH isn't perfect, as John Lynch noted on its Web site on 
Monday: "The 1988 Lockerbie plane bomber, who has prostate cancer, 
wants to be freed from a Scottish jail where he is serving a life 
sentence on compassionate grounds." The paper later changed it.

Better punctuation would sometimes help, as this sentence from an 
article in Monday's Globe and Mail of Boston demonstrates: "Her 
slim legs are crossed elegantly at the knee and at her neck, a 
colourful scarf is arranged artfully over her shoulder." Tom Vogl 
would like to see this contortionist in action.

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