World Wide Words -- 30 May 09

Tue May 26 17:43:07 UTC 2009

WORLD WIDE WORDS            ISSUE 641          Saturday 30 May 2009
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Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK      ISSN 1470-1448
http://www.worldwidewords.org       US advisory editor: Julane Marx
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Galimatias.
3. Recently noted.
4. Q and A: The Andrew.
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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HOLIDAYS  I'm away. By all means send your questions and Sic! items 
as well as comments on the items in this issue, but don't expect to 
get an answer until at least the middle of June. Net connections 
permitting, I shall continue to post short issues while I'm away, 
but the Web site will not be updated until 20 June.

2. Weird Words: Galimatias  /galI'matI at s/
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The word means gibberish, meaningless talk, or nonsense. It appears 
in English first in 1653 in Sir Francis Urquhart's translation of 
the works of the French author François Rabelais: "A Galimatia of 
extravagant conceits." Later writers have always put an "s" on the 
end, though it's a singular:

    Mrs. Tramore stared, as if at a language she had never 
    heard, a farrago, a galimatias.
    [The Chaperon, by Henry James, a short story published 
    in his collection The Real Thing and Other Tales in 
    1893.]

It is in French that we must look for any enlightenment about its 
origins, since the word still exists in that language with the same 
sense. The number of theories about its origin is dauntingly large, 
however, strongly suggesting little firm information. We do know 
that it's first recorded in that language in 1580 in a work by 
Montaigne, but in the sense of an obscene song. For this reason, 
the most common view of its origin is that it's from the low Latin 
"ballematia", which had the same sense (old Italian had this last 
word, too, but for songs or melodies in a dance style).

Some writers point to an even older French word, "gale", enjoyment, 
which joined up with a verb meaning to eat too much to create the 
noun "galimafrée" for an unappetising dish (English "gallimaufry", 
a jumble or confused medley, is from the same source). It has also 
been said "galimatias" was originally a disparaging slang term of 
the sixteenth century for the disputations prescribed for doctoral 
students at the University of Paris (from Latin "gallus", cockerel, 
plus the Greek ending "-mathia", learning). Another writer has 
suggested a link with a Provençal word for an imaginary country. 
The experts now dismiss all of these out of hand.

The same word appears in Russian, presumably borrowed from French.

3. Recently noted
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STORM IN A YOGURT POT  A reporter from the Daily Mail contacted me 
on Monday, canvassing my views on how to spell "yogurt". 

This turned out to be a follow-up to a letter in the current issue 
of The Grocer, the UK magazine for food and drink retailers. The 
letter came from Clare Cheney, director general of the Provision 
Trade Federation, the trade body that represents food companies in 
Britain, including importers. She suggested The Grocer should bring 
itself up to date by leaving the "h" out, since its manufacturers 
have now standardised on "yogurt".

At this point Americans may be puzzled, as they have for more than 
a century spelled the word without an "h" and probably regard the 
spelling "yoghurt" as a curious Britishism, let alone "yoghourt", 
another once-common form. Both were based on the Turkish word they 
come from. This is written as "yogurt" in modern Turkish but with a 
hacek over the "g" to mark a guttural consonant that doesn't exist 
in English. This was transliterated as "gh" when it appeared in 
English in the early seventeenth century. Spellings with the "h" 
were still usual when the product began to appear widely in Britain 
in the 1960s. The Times wrote in April 1967: "Fruity yoghourt is 
enjoying a market boom unparalleled by any other dairy product in 
existence." Most Commonwealth countries still seem to prefer the 
form with the "h", though Canadians have the hybrid "yogourt", 
presumably under the influence of French.

The evidence from dictionaries, newspapers and books is that the 
spelling "yogurt" has become the most common form in the UK but 
that "yoghurt" is also still very much around ("yoghourt" is now 
rare). Interestingly, even The Grocer uses "yogurt" a lot of the 
time - a search of its Web site found 1376 examples of "yogurt" as 
against 678 of "yoghurt" (none of "yoghourt").

Following Ms Cheney's letter, Food Manufacture, another magazine, 
said it was going to standardise on "yogurt". It would seem that 
"yoghurt" is threatened in its homeland.

The Daily Mail, I suspect, was hoping I would denounce the creeping 
insidious influence of American English and argue that this was 
another example of the individuality of our native tongue being 
lost. Good heavens, no. I suggested, on the basis of a hunch rather 
than firm evidence, that the change might not have been through 
American influence at all, but an example of "spell-as-you-speak" 
working on an unfamiliar word, which was presumably how Americans 
came by their spelling.

4. Q and A: The Andrew
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Q. Do you perhaps know the origin of the term "Andrew" for the 
Royal Navy? [Andrew Jackson, London]

A. I don't. Nobody does, not for sure.

The story most commonly told is that the source is one Lieutenant 
Andrew Millar. It's said he was in charge of a press-gang during 
the Napoleonic Wars and that he was so zealous and pressed so many 
men that sailors thought the Navy belonged to him. However, the 
National Maritime Museum says that no such officer has been traced. 
The nearest I've found from the Navy Lists, which is not very near, 
is that a Dr Andrew Millar was the staff surgeon based at Plymouth 
dockyard in 1848. We must presume Lieutenant Millar is imaginary.

On the other hand, "Andrew" was a sixteenth-century slang term for 
a merchant ship. Shakespeare used it in The Merchant of Venice, 
"And see my wealthy Andrew dockt". One story is that it was named 
after the Genoese admiral Andrea Doria, whose name has been given 
to two celebrated twentieth-century ships. There are no written 
examples of the term after Shakespeare's time, which may suggest it 
went out of use and can't be the source of the modern term. Or it 
might have been lurking in the spoken language - we have no way of 
knowing.

The expression "Andrew Millar" was well known in the nineteenth 
century. It turns up in print here first:

    ANDREW MILLAR'S LUGGER, a king's ship or vessel.
    [A Vocabulary of the Flash Language, by James Hardy 
    Vaux, July 1812. Vaux was then a transported criminal in 
    New South Wales and wrote the work in his free moments 
    from the hard labour by which he was punished following 
    some transgression in the colony. He hoped by it to 
    mollify the governor. "Flash" is an obsolete term 
    referring to thieves, prostitutes, or the underworld.]

Half a century later, John Camden Hotten similarly recorded in his 
Slang Dictionary of 1864 that an Andrew Millar was a ship of war. 
Three years later, a key variation was recorded:

    ANDREW or ANDREW MILLAR. A cant name for a man-of-war 
    and also for government and government authorities.
    [The Sailor's Word-Book, by Admiral W H Smyth, 
    1867.]

This was an early indication that the term was moving from being a 
reference to a single warship to the whole navy. By the end of the 
century, lower-deck ratings were commonly calling the Royal Navy 
the Andrew and the name has stuck.

However, researchers have to confess themselves baffled by it.

5. Sic!
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Jenny O'Brien tells us the St Cloud Times of Minnesota reported on 
Friday 22 May: "A fire started by an old electrical chord caused 
smoke damage late Thursday to a mobile home in southeast St Cloud." 
Sounds like an A Minor fire.

Thanks to Art Scott, we learn that the Daily Telegraph site had a 
story on 26 May about Gaping Gill cave: "It takes one minute to 
reach the floor of the cave, which is so large the knave of the 
York Minster could be contained inside it." 

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