World Wide Words -- 16 May 09
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri May 15 18:10:52 UTC 2009
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 639 Saturday 16 May 2009
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Slumgullion.
3. Recently noted.
4. Book review: I Love It When You Talk Retro.
5. Q and A: Cocksure.
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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THAT'S CUTE! My list last week of quaint American expressions that
included "cute" brought forth questioning responses, such as this
one from Anne Virtue: "Is cute really used with all of those terms?
I've heard some of them but never heard cute used in the following
expressions: 'snug as a bug in a rug', 'slippery as a weasel' and
'smart as a fox'." Other readers have supplied further variations:
"cunning as a fox", "cunning as a shithouse rat" (an Australianism)
and so on. In the "cute" forms, as I mentioned, the word could have
its old sense of clever, shrewd or quick-witted, which has survived
longer in British English than in American ("she might be too cute
to fall into the trap", Agatha Christie once wrote). People have in
some cases very understandably changed "cute" into "cunning" or
"smart" so that the expressions continue to make sense.
All the examples I quoted have appeared in print, even "cute as a
bug in a rug", for which I could supply three dozen cases, despite
the belief of at least that many readers that it doesn't exist. But
I also concur with Charles Earle Funk in Heavens to Betsy (1955):
"Sometimes the expression [cute as a bug's ear] is paraphrased into
'cute as a bug in a rug', but this is a poor foist of new upon old.
'Snug as a bug in a rug', the utmost in contentment and comfort,
dates back two hundred years."
Claire Trazenfeld extended my list: "When I was a child growing up
in New Hampshire in the 1940s, the expression 'cute as a trout's
tit' was not uncommon. I often heard it used by my father, who was
from northern Vermont and born in the late 19th century."
PHANTASMAGORIA Steve Doerr and Marc Picard tell me that French
sources suggest the second part of this word is from "allégorie",
allegory, rather than from "agora", a place of public assembly, as
the Oxford English Dictionary suggests. The two are connected, of
course, as "allegory" comes in part from a Greek verb that once
could mean "harangue", and which derives from "agora".
2. Weird Words: Slumgullion /slVm'gVlj at n/
sl{revv}m{sm}g{revv}lj{schwa}n
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The word sounds vaguely unpleasant, a good example of form matching
meaning, since Americans have for 150 years used it for a variety
of things that are unpleasant to various degrees.
Dictionaries often say this was its first appearance in print:
Then he poured for us a beverage which he called "Slum
gullion," and it is hard to think he was not inspired
when he named it. It really pretended to be tea, but
there was too much dish-rag, and sand, and old bacon-rind
in it to deceive the intelligent traveler.
[Roughing It, by Mark Twain, 1872.]
A slang dictionary two years later defined slumgullion as "any
cheap, nasty, washy beverage". Another, roughly contemporary,
memory is this:
The meals are all alike - a potato, a slice of something
like bacon, some gray stuff called bread, and a cup of
muddy, semi-liquid coffee like that which the California
miners call "slickers" or "slumgullion."
[Travels in Alaska, by John Muir, 1915, describing a trip
he made in 1879.]
Today it means a cheap stew made by throwing anything handy into a
pot with water and boiling it, an improvised dish which has had
many other names, such as Mulligan stew and Irish stew. Other
senses include fish offal or the waste from processing whale
carcasses (in Moby-Dick, published in 1851, Herman Melville called
it "slobgollion").
We now know the word is a good deal older than the Mark Twain book.
Many early examples refer to yet another old sense listed in the
dictionaries, for the muddy waste left after washing gold ore in a
mining sluice.
Were those who were instrumental in wilfully creating
this unconstitutional debt ... compelled to shovel
tailings and clean reservoirs half full of slumgullion
until it was paid?
[Mountain Democrat, California, 3 Jan. 1857. Tailings are
ore residues.]
>From this and other appearances, including the diaries of forty-
niners, it seems certain that the word originated in this sense in
the California gold fields, probably around 1850. It may be the
same word as Melville's (the similarity in form is persuasive),
suggesting that miners borrowed it from an older unrecorded word
that also provided Melville with his version. They later applied
"slumgullion" figuratively and disparagingly to foodstuffs that
were muddy or semi-liquid.
American dictionaries guess that it may be a combination of "slum",
an old English term meaning slime (nothing to do with a squalid
urban area, the word for which is an old bit of slang of unknown
origin) plus "gullion", English dialect for mud or a cesspool. This
is still known in Scots and is probably from the Irish goilín for a
pit or pool. This certainly fits the mining context of early uses.
3. Recently noted
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FLIP! Since the start of the twentieth century, "flip" has had a
second career as a euphemism for the F-word. Another use appeared
in 2007, for purchasing the latest must-have item with the aim of
immediately selling it for a profit via the Internet. The scandal
concerning expenses claims by MPs now rocking the British political
establishment has led to a further meaning appearing in the press.
MPs whose constituencies are some way from Westminster are allowed
to claim running costs of a second home. To flip is to change the
place one claims as this second home to maximise the potential for
claiming expenses. One MP, we learned, changed hers three times in
one year, charging for repairs on each. Others have altered the
status of their second homes, after claiming expenses for repairs
and improvements, to avoid paying tax on the proceeds of selling
them. Though this slang sense is common in the news at the moment,
it's hardly likely to become a settled part of the language.
BAD HAIR DAY While we're on British parliamentary slang, another
term came up last week during a briefing for lobby correspondents.
In a question about an article critical of the government written
for the Observer newspaper by Hazel Blears, a government minister,
a journalist asked the official spokesman, "Did the prime minister
give her a 'hair dryer'?" This turned out not to refer to a gift,
but to a Downing Street insiders term for a severe dressing-down.
As a candidate for permanent inclusion in English, this has to be
counted a total failure.
4. Book review: I Love It When You Talk Retro
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Waves of technological advance can leave English phrases washed up
on the shore, flotsam with no obvious origins for those too young
to know what generated them. We still dial telephone numbers and
hang up the phone even though the verbs refer to types of phones
that have been out of use for decades. We may refer to the flip
side of a situation or describe a person as talking like a broken
record or of being stuck in a groove, even though gramophone
records are obsolete.
Similarly, common phrases often have their origins in popular
cultural references that are opaque for those who weren't around to
experience the originals: double whammy, show me the money, I'll
have what she's having, the $64,000 dollar question, the seven year
itch, Stepford wife, will it play in Peoria?, the Twinkie defense,
where's the beef?
Ralph Keyes calls such verbal fossils retroterms. This book has
hundreds of them, at the risk of taking readers to the brink of
indigestion. They're arranged in chapters by themes such as sport,
politicians, films and comics and the workplace, ending with a look
at phrases of today that might turn up in a future edition of the
book. Most are from the US, but some older ones are part of the
common currency of all English speakers.
Mr Keyes is good on his American popular culture, but stumbles when
etymology is involved. Though "skeleton in the closet" was indeed
introduced by Thackeray (and "closet" was what he wrote, though the
British form today is "skeleton in the cupboard"), it is extremely
unlikely that it came about through the practice of doctors keeping
the skeletons of bodies they had dissected locked in a closet out
of public view. Why would they want to keep them? It's surely a
folk etymology. It is improbable that "reading between the lines",
to look for a hidden meaning, derives from the use of invisible
inks to send a secret message hidden in an innocuous one. Folk
etymology again.
"Old fogey" for a person with antiquated views is not from a US
military term, "fogey pay", for long-service pay. "Fogey pay" is
known, of course, but dates from the latter part of the nineteenth
century; "old fogey" is 100 years older - it's in Grose's Classical
Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue of 1785, where it is said to mean
an invalid soldier; our standard English sense and the military one
both derive from it. Did "third degree" for harsh questioning by
police derive from a harrowing induction rite for the highest grade
in freemasonry? It has been known since Shakespeare's time as a
simple grade or level and was used for the classification of burns
before it turns up in the interrogation sense. As the US legal term
for the least serious grade of a particular crime is also earlier,
it's more likely to be the origin. "Yellow journalism" and "yellow
press" didn't derive from William Randolph Hearst's sponsorship of
a bicycle race across America in 1896 (participants wore yellow
jerseys) but from Joseph Pulitzer's experiment in colour printing
in the New York World in 1895 in which a child in a yellow dress
("The Yellow Kid") was a figure in a cartoon.
Many other examples could be cited, which demonstrate the pitfalls
faced by an expert in another field who attempts etymology without
sound preparation and being primed to question the origins given in
his sources. Such errors spoiled the book for me. Readers prepared
to take his etymological assertions with a large pinch of salt may
still find this a pleasant trip down nostalgia alley.
[Ralph Keyes, I Love It When You Talk Retro; St Martin's Press; 1
Apr. 2009; hardback, 310pp. including index; ISBN 9780312340056;
list price US$25.95.]
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5. Q and A: Cocksure
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Q. I've just discovered your web site and it's immensely enjoyable.
I have a word that came to mind, "cocksure", and I wonder if you
might know of its origin? [David Nix]
A. It's good to hear you like the site. Just for once I can repay a
compliment by providing a straightforward answer, though it's more
complicated than it looks.
It seems obvious at first sight that "cocksure" means "as sure as a
cock", as an allusion to the arrogantly self-confident strut of a
barnyard cockerel. That would fit the form of phrases like "coal-
black" or "stone-deaf". The problem is that "cocksure" has changed
what it means down the centuries and the obvious answer doesn't fit
the facts.
Back in the sixteenth century, if you said you were cocksure you
meant that you were absolutely safe, free from danger or secure in
your position. This example, a late one in this sense, would be
misunderstood by us today:
All such persons as shall be nominated by the Parliament,
shall be cock-sure in their Authority.
[The History of the Wicked Plots and Conspiracies of our
Pretended Saints, by Henry Foulis, 1662.]
The word evolved through the idea that somebody was trustworthy or
reliable, or absolutely certain to do something, to today's sense
of being dogmatically certain in one's own mind about some matter
or of being presumptuously or arrogantly confident.
So where does it really come from? It seems certain that the "cock"
in "cocksure" is a euphemism for God, which appeared in a variety
of medieval oaths down to the time of Shakespeare, including "cocks
bones", "cocks passion", "cocks wounds" and "cocks bodikins". So
the original meaning of "cocksure" was that a person enjoyed a
security or quality of rightfulness equivalent to that of God.
6. Sic!
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Proving that you can't keep a good man down, Mike Troy reports that
an obituary in the Journal News (White Plains, NY) on 30 April said
that "Philip was survived by his predeceased father, Domenick."
On a related note, the subject of a UN Wire e-mail of 14 May was
"Guatemala in crisis as slain lawyer blames president". On reading
the item Rebecca Katumba learned the lawyer had recorded a video
just before his murder telling viewers to blame Alvaro Colom, the
president of Guatemala, in the event of his death.
Allan Richardson was reading the Lonely Planet guide to California.
On page 30, he learned that "A rarer sight are desert tortoises,
whose slow pace has landed them on the endangered species because
they're often overrun by cars."
Thanks to Nancy Shepherdson, we now know that Wednesday's Daily
Herald newspaper, which serves the northern suburbs of Chicago, had
a grammatically correct but misleading headline: "Battery charges
dropped against wife."
It's a side of the Taliban one often doesn't see, commented Dave
Muir, having read this sentence in the Wessex edition of Compass
magazine for May 2009: "Lahore is so far untouched, but the Taliban
are said to be setting up crèches of arms in every city, even as
far south as Karachi."
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