World Wide Words -- 07 Nov 09
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Nov 6 14:56:26 UTC 2009
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 664 Saturday 7 November 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: Acersecomic.
3. What I've learned this week.
4. Q and A: Muggins.
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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WITCHING HOUR Alison Hill wonders if the phrase, and the time of
day to which it refers, could have been influenced by another of
Shakespeare's plays, A Midsummer Night's Dream. In act 5, Scene 1,
Theseus says:
The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve.
Lovers, to bed; 'tis almost fairy time.
The humans all leave and Puck enters:
Now it is the time of night
That the graves, all gaping wide,
Every one lets forth his sprite.
Several readers mentioned other religious groups which believe that
the most significant hour of the night is 3am. Andy Barss noted of
some Pagans of his acquaintance, "The idea is that it is halfway
between midnight and dawn, an intermediate point where the two
worlds may more easily mix."
NAMES FOR TOOLS Several subscribers introduced me to other senses
of "spud". Andrew Sellon mentioned that in the early days of farm
tractors, it was used for lugs fitted to their smooth metal main
wheels to provide grip in wet conditions. David Warnick recalled,
"When I was a young man, I worked in the oil fields of Texas and
Oklahoma. No one was able to tell me why the beginning of drilling
was called 'spudding in', but everyone used the term, and everyone
involved knew exactly what it meant. If a 'spud' is for digging, it
makes perfect sense." John Britton told me about a 'spud wrench',
used by scaffolders: "It has a fixed wrench (spanner) head on one
end and a spike on the other. The spike is used to align holes in
the structural steel piece being added to the existing structure,
so bolts may be inserted and tightened up." Roger Williams, on the
other hand, knows this tool as a "plodger", which he notes has
other uses in engineering.
The spid brush, which I wrote about in another item, baffled almost
everybody. However, Bill Snow found that it's a trade name owned by
a firm in Italy, the Societa' Italiana Tecnospazzole. Where they
got it from is unknown. He found a picture (on eBay) in which the
word Spid appears on the handle. Problem solved.
SIC UN-SIC'D In a Sic! item last week, a firm advertising soap-
free soap was presumed to have made a mistake. It's certainly an
odd turn of phrase, but it turns out that a rationale exists for it
through the regulations of the US Food and Drug Administration. Ben
Zimmer wrote about it in his blog last weekend, which led him to a
discussion of the semantics of marked and unmarked categories. (Go
via http://wwwords.org?SFSP for his piece.)
COLCANNON NIGHT Several American readers pointed out that in New
England the night before Halloween is known as "cabbage night", in
which young people make mischief, sometimes extending to outright
vandalism (this practice is known in several countries and goes
under names that include Mischief Night, Gate Night, Devil's Night
and Mizzy Night). The Dictionary of American Regional English finds
its first example of "cabbage night" from 1975 and implies that the
name is from the practice of throwing cabbages and other refuse. A
link with "colcannon" instead is plausible. On the other hand, this
turned up in a search:
An old gentleman told me that when he was a boy
Hallowe'en was often called "cabbage" night, perhaps from
the fact that one of the ways of finding one's true love
is to go into a cabbage patch and pull off the heads,
those having long, straight roots signifying life
partners of fine character, with the course of true love
running straight and true; but if a crooked root comes up
the reverse is to be expected.
["Dame Curtsey's" Book of Party Pastimes for the Up-
to-date Hostess, by Ellye Howell Glover, 1909. The author
(an American about whom I can discover nothing) was a
prolific creator of books on domestic matters in the
early 1900s, including "Dame Curtsey's" Book Of Salads,
Sandwiches, and Beverages, "Dame Curtsey's" Book of Candy
Making, "Dame Curtsey's" Book of Etiquette, and "Dame
Curtsey's" Book of Beauty Talks.]
The old gentleman was probably hazarding a guess out of a childhood
memory of an unrelated custom. What this extract does say is that
the term "cabbage night" goes back further than anybody realised.
SITE UPDATES As usual I've added the main pieces from last week's
issue (see the home page for links to them). I've updated pieces on
"nihilartikel" and "anfractuosity" and added an extended new one on
"tabnabs" from the issue of two weeks ago. Links:
Nihilartikel: http://wwwords.org?NIHI
Anfractuosity: http://wwwords.org?ANFR
Tabnabs: http://wwwords.org?TABN
2. Weird Words: Acersecomic /'as at r,sekQmIk/
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The legitimacy of this word rests entirely on two appearances in
dictionaries, in 1623 and 1656. It seems never to have been used
seriously and ever since has been held up as an example of an odd
word, in modern times in works with titles like The Joy of Lex,
Poplollies and Bellibones, Have a Word on Me, and Dimboxes, Epopts,
and other Quidams.
It means a person whose hair has never been cut. Though that may
appear comic to some, there's nothing humorous in its etymology.
The word derives from the classical Latin "acersecomes", a long-
haired youth, a word borrowed from an earlier Greek one that was
made up from "kome", the hair of the head (which is where "comic"
comes from in the ending), "keirein", to cut short, and the prefix
"a-", not. Though this sounds like a aged curmudgeon's way to talk
about unkempt youngsters who weren't like that in his day, it was
actually neutrally descriptive - it was usual for Roman and Greek
youths to wear their hair long until they reached manhood.
Greek "kome" has given us one sense of "coma": a diffuse cloud of
gas and dust surrounding the nucleus of a comet. The same "-comic"
ending turns up in two terms that, if possible, are even rarer:
"acrocomic", having hair at the tip, as in a goat's beard ("acro-"
means tip) and "xanthocomic", a person with yellow hair (from Greek
"xanthos", yellow).
3. What I've learned this week
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NON-INVASIVE New Scientist magazine mentioned a term that I've
since learned has been around since about 2003 but which is not
well known. That may in part be because it's specialist, but also
because its subject matter is gruesome. Autopsies are very messy
procedures, involving extensive post-mortem surgery that by its
nature is destructive. Some religious groups don't allow them. So
much depends on the skill and observation of the pathologist, who
may miss things. A team at the Institute of Forensic Medicine at
the University of Berne in Switzerland has been working for the
past decade on creating a virtual alternative that doesn't involve
cutting into the body, making use of non-invasive techniques such
as MRI and CT scans, which can be recorded and re-analysed later by
an independent specialist. Guided by these scans, a surgical robot
can then take samples for analysis. They've given the name VIRTOPSY
- a virtual autopsy - to their set of techniques.
BEAUTIFUL BY NAME AND NATURE A report in the Observer introduced
me to a recently discovered tiny hummingbird from Colombia, which
has the delightful name of the GORGETED PUFFLEG. It was discovered
in 2005 in a small patch of rainforest now endangered through the
cultivation of coca for cocaine. "Gorgeted" refers to the bird's
gorget, its iridescent throat patch, a term that began life for a
piece of armour for the throat (Old French "gorge", throat) and was
transferred to an item of clothing for the same area. The puffleg
part is due to the fluffs of white feathers on its thighs.
In the edition of the BBC natural-history series Life last Monday,
David Attenborough told viewers about an equally intriguing but
more puzzling animal name: SARCASTIC FRINGEHEAD. It's an elusive
fish of the waters off California, with tufts of tissue on its
head. It's notoriously bad-tempered, fearless, aggressive and ugly,
but hardly sarcastic. It's hard to imagine a fish being sarcastic,
though how could you tell? A couple of Web sites say they're called
that because they're highly temperamental, but that doesn't equate
with being sarcastic - might the coiner of its name have had a
fault in his mental thesaurus? They gape their mouths incredibly
wide in aggressive displays; could that be the origin? An enquiring
mind wishes to know.
BEYOND THE GRAVE On 29 October many newspapers reported a survey
that showed that Yves Saint Laurent earned more last year than
Michael Jackson or Elvis Presley. But they're all dead, you may
protest. Yes, that was the subject of the survey, Forbes's annual
list of the Top-Earning Dead Celebrities. The report called them
DELEBS (a modification of "celeb"), a word which has been recorded
for a year or so. The income of some delebs (Michael Jackson has
already earned $90m since his death) proves the truth of the old
saying - sometimes death really is a good career move.
LIFE, THE UNIVERSE AND BORING COLOURS "With its jewel-like star
clusters, swirling galaxies and orange suns," the Daily Telegraph
emoted on Monday, "pictures of the universe are usually impossibly
beautiful and brightly coloured." Nevertheless, two astrophysicists
at NASA whimsically announced this week that the universe is, on
average, beige. Beige? Yes, that characterless yellow-fawn colour
that you might instead call buff, oatmeal or café au lait. Now you
have an excuse to paint your walls that colour - you're reproducing
the true hue of the cosmos. The two scientists, Dr Karl Glazebrook
and Dr Ivan Baldry - both British, dammit, my heart swells with
pride - took the colours of the light that's emitted by 200,000
galaxies, averaged them out and determined its composite shade. A
contest was held among astronomers to name it; they came up with
BIG BANG BUFF, COSMIC KHAKI, SKYVORY and UNIVEIGE, among others,
but COSMIC LATTE was the winner. To see the true colour of the
universe, go via this link: http://wwwords.org?BEIG. I'd call it
magnolia myself, the wall colour of every newly built house in
Britain.
4. Q and A: Muggins
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Q. What is the origin of the (British) term "muggins"? I saw a
reference to it as a surname, so I'm wondering if it's from an old
play or historic event - especially as it always seems to be used
in the first person. And is it related to any of the meanings of
"mug"? [Leslie Tomlinson]
A. As you say, it's usually said by a person about himself, as a
slightly bitter indication that he feels he has allowed himself to
be exploited:
But did the MP offer to put the fare on his expenses?
Aye, right. He stepped imperiously from the car, leaving
muggins here to pick up the tab.
[Daily Mail, 11 Oct. 2008. As in this example, the
word is often followed by "here", with the speaker
literally or figuratively pointing to himself.]
It's not just British, though: Australians know of Billy Muggins.
It appears as a family name several times in eighteenth-century
literary works - in particular by Tobias Smollett, John O'Keefe,
Oliver Goldsmith, and Charles Dibdin - often for an exciseman (an
English government official who collected excise duties and
attempted to prevent smuggling) or some other person who is foolish
or easily tricked. The earliest example in the Oxford English
Dictionary is from 1703.
The OED also points out that Muggins belongs with a small set of
supposed family names that indicate unsophisticated country
attitudes, or a person easily imposed upon or lacking common sense.
There's Bumpkin (often generalised as "country bumpkin"), which
probably comes from a Dutch word for a short, stumpy person, and
Juggins, a nineteenth-century equivalent (and which, unlike the
others, is a real family name). Some writers have suggested that
this last name comes from "jug", which led them to argue that
Muggins is indeed from "mug".
Neither seems likely. "Juggins" is one of a number of variants of
the Cornish or Breton family name "Jekyll". And although "mug", in
its earlier sense of an unattractive face, is recorded from 1708
and so is contemporary with "Muggins", "mug" meaning a stupid or
gullible person is later, not being recorded in print until 1857.
We just don't know the full answer.
5. Sic!
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"I learned a new word this week," wrote Randall Bart, "then I had
to unlearn it. In an article on Problembär, the people supporting
the reintroduction of bears in Italy and Austria were referred to
as 'ambientalists'. Was it a new word for people who support the
reintroduction of species? I eventually determined that it's the
Italian word for environmentalist ('ambientalista') mistranslated."
In the "brevity is the soul of wit" department, Brian Mason noticed
a sentence in the section of a pamphlet giving the biographies of
candidates for the board of directors of the Canadian Centre for
Policy Alternatives: "[He] now writes for the one-line journal
theTyee.ca."
On Friday morning, Lesley Beresford spotted a headline on Google
News which came from The Brisbane Times, Australia: "Drink driver
caught 19 times over the limit". Lesley commented, "I was amazed
somebody with a blood alcohol level of 0.95 could still breathe,
let alone drive. Closer examination of the story revealed that it
was the nineteenth time the same chap had been caught!"
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