World Wide Words -- 10 Oct 09

Fri Oct 9 17:25:30 UTC 2009

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 660         Saturday 10 October 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: Scrumping.
3. This week.
4. Q and A: Punchline.
5. Q and A: Grasp the nettle. 
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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YAHOO! PROBLEMS  I was told by Susan Smith of the Linguist List 
last Friday (too late to amend the following day's issue, which had 
already been sent) that Yahoo! had confirmed that it had resolved 
the issues affecting transmission. Special thanks go to her for her 
persistence in finding a solution to the problem. Many delighted 
subscribers e-mailed the following day to say they had received the 
issue promptly, in some cases for the first time in months. Let's 
hope the matter stays resolved! Many thanks to everybody for their 
forbearance while we sorted matters out.

2. Weird Words: Scrumping  /skrVmpIN/
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We are in apple-harvest time in England, which makes me think of 
the one-time rural childhood pursuit of stealing apples from 
orchards. That's what "scrumping" means over here (Americans have 
another, low-slang, sense of the word that need not concern us).

    He sighed, more in sorrow than in anger; in fact there 
    was hardly any anger at all, like vermouth in a really 
    dry martini. God probably sighed like that when he looked 
    at the tree and saw that someone had been scrumping 
    apples.
    [Earth, Air, Fire and Custard, by Tom Holt, 2005.]

It might sound like an immemorial practice, and probably is, but 
the word for it is surprisingly modern - the earliest example is 
from 1866. The source is uncertain but seems to be from a dialect 
term meaning something withered, shrivelled or dried up. It may be 
linked to the old adjective "scrimp", scanty or meagre, from which 
we get the verb "scrimp", to economise or be thrifty.

Support for this comes from an early meaning of "scrumping", which 
referred to taking windfalls or the small apples left on the trees 
after harvest. This evolved into illicitly taking any sort of 
apples. It can even more broadly mean theft of any kind, though 
this is rare:

    When wireless networking first kicked off in the 
    corporate world a couple of years ago, I honestly thought 
    the concept of loitering outside with a Wifi portable, 
    scrumping for free access would be incredibly short-
    lived.
    [Personal Computer World, Aug. 2004.]

If you're familiar with British cider, you will know "scrumpy" for 
a cheap and rough, though strongly alcoholic, variety which is a 
hazard to the unwary. Its name is a relative of "scrumping" in its 
oldest sense because it was often brewed from small or unselected 
apples. Modern brands that go by that name are mild compared with 
the vinegary farm-made sort of old, which a farmer described to me 
in Herefordshire many years ago as "squeal-pig cider", this being 
the noise you made when you tried it. "It used to take three people 
to swallow a mug of it," another old countryman told me, "One to 
drink and the other two to hold him upright."

The American adjective "scrumptious", for food that is appetising 
or delicious or which describes a very attractive person, seems not 
to be connected.

3. This week
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WHATEVER ...  On Wednesday, the Marist College Institute for Public 
Opinion of Poughkeepsie, NY, published the results of a telephone 
poll it conducted to find the words or phrases that most annoyed 
Americans. The word that came out top was "whatever" when used as a 
conversational term indicating indifference. Others mentioned were 
"you know", "it is what it is", "anyway", and "at the end of the 
day". A table of detailed results is via http://wwwords.org?MXPO.

OUT OF DATE?  Another survey published on Wednesday, this time by 
the charity Bookwatch in the UK, suggested that traditional nursery 
rhymes may be dying out because parents think them old-fashioned or 
uneducational. The survey found that only about a third of parents 
regularly read rhymes with their children; nearly a quarter said 
they had never done so. The survey was published to mark National 
Bookstart Day yesterday (Friday 9 October) in which a million books 
containing the nation's eight favourite nursery rhymes were to be 
distributed throughout the UK. Another survey by the same charity 
found that the top eight, in decreasing order of popularity, were 
Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Incey Wincey Spider, Round and Round 
the Garden, Baa Baa Black Sheep, The Grand Old Duke of York, If 
You're Happy and You Know It, Humpty Dumpty, and This Little Piggy.

4. Q and A: Punchline
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Q. Despite your concern about its linguistic entertainment value, I 
found your piece on "collapse of stout party" quite fascinating. 
Among other things it highlights just how different humour is in 
different cultures and times. The question it didn't answer for me 
though (and to be fair it wasn't asked) is which came first: Punch 
the magazine or punch the line?  [Greg Balding; related questions 
came from Peter Morris and Bruce Beatie.]

A. The question about the origin of "collapse of stout party" arose 
because of a crossword clue that included "punch line" as a hint 
and which led us to Punch magazine. It would be reasonable to guess 
that Punch, at one time the premier humour magazine in Britain, 
gave the language our term for the climactic final words or phrase 
of a joke or story.

But not only wasn't it the source of "collapse of stout party", it 
didn't originate "punchline" either. It isn't even British, since 
the first recorded usages - a century ago - are from the US. The 
Oxford English Dictionary's first example is from the Marion Star 
of Ohio in 1916, but the idea was around earlier:

    The play was 'The Power of Politics' and it had a 
    punch in every line.
    [Racine Journal-News (Wisconsin), 28 Feb. 1912.]

    It is true that ballads are deliberately written with 
    all sorts of mathematical calculation as to "punch lines" 
    and similar technical detail. But for all that success 
    remains an inexplicable incident.
    [The New York Times, 7 Sep. 1913.]

These confirm that it came out of show business and that the first 
senses were of delivering lines of a play or song to the greatest 
possible effect - punching them - or of creating lines to affect 
the hearer powerfully. Later it became applied in particular to the 
last line of a story that contains the point or joke. There can be 
no doubt that the figurative punches are from fists, the shock of 
receiving a blow being equated with the visceral response to 
hearing an unexpected or felicitous line.

Punch magazine, by the way, took its name from the puppet companion 
to Judy, which was borrowed from a buffoonish stock character in 
the Italian commedia dell'arte, usually known as Punchinello. No 
connection at all with punches of the physical sort.

5. Q and A: Grasp the nettle
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Q. Is there any chance you can solve the "grasp the nettle" versus 
"grasp the mettle" debate? With grateful thanks. [Alex Keenan]

A. Until you wrote, I hadn't heard there was a debate about this 
mainly British and Commonwealth idiom, which means to tackle some 
difficulty boldly. 

    We have got to grasp the nettle to try and prevent 
    tragic accidents like this one.
    [Highland News (Inverness), 1 Oct. 2009.]

But it transpires that a significant number of people believe that 
it's correctly "grasp the mettle" and that "grasp the nettle" is a 
meaningless corruption. The former version reaches the printed page 
often enough that it's clear this view is fairly widespread:

    At least there's a sizeable market for publishing 
    firms to go at, with an estimated 1.6bn internet users 
    across the globe. Only those that grasp the mettle will 
    prosper. 
    [Evening Gazette (Middlesborough), 29 Sep. 2009. This 
    form is far from new; the earliest example I've so far 
    come across appeared in the Burlington Hawk-Eye of Iowa 
    in April 1932.]

People are clearly puzzled by "grasp the nettle". Why would anybody 
want to do that? Nettles sting. If you want to advise somebody to 
boldly tackle some obstacle, surely "mettle", a person's ability to 
cope well with difficulties, would be a better choice?

The answer lies in a minor but intriguing bit of botanical lore. It 
is said that the hairs on the leaves of nettles sting you if you 
brush up against them but don't if you grasp them firmly. I haven't 
experimented myself and it's always possible that it's just an old 
wives' tale, or perhaps a wicked country joke on ignorant townies, 
though the story was first mentioned in Elizabethan times:

    True it is Philautus that he which toucheth ye nettle 
    tenderly, is soonest stung.
    [Euphues, by John Lyly, 1578.]

Whatever the truth of the belief, the idiom "grasp the nettle" is 
based on it.

The earliest example of the full-grown idiom in its modern form 
that I know about is in a British book of 1830. As a proverb, on 
the other hand, it is much older, and was put into verse in the 
eighteenth century:

    Tender-handed stroke a nettle, 
    And it stings you, for your pains: 
    Grasp it like a man of mettle, 
    And it soft as silk remains.
    [Works, by Aaron Hill, Vol 4, 1753. Hill was a 
    dramatist and poet and at one time manager of the Theatre 
    Royal, Drury Lane, where - in 1724 - he staged the first-
    ever performance of Handel's opera Rinaldo. The inclusion 
    of "mettle" might seem to give comfort to those who 
    prefer the "grasp the mettle" form, but it has obviously 
    been included for the rhyme.]

6. Sic!
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"My favourite ambiguous headline," Andrew Haynes wrote from London, 
"was written years ago by a colleague at the pharmacy journal for 
which I used to work. Luckily for the journal's reputation, it was 
intercepted at page-proof stage and did not reach the printed page. 
A piece about appointments to the Advisory Council on the Misuse of 
Drugs was headed, 'Two pharmacists on drugs misuse body'."

Ralph Caruthers e-mailed from Texas to mention a headline in a 
recent issue of Aviation Week & Space Technology: "China offers 
U.S. a first look at its next human spacecraft." He wondered for a 
while where they attached the rockets, but later discovered the 
headline had been changed to read "... its next manned spacecraft."

On 3 October, the Irish Times reported on the referendum about the 
European Union's Lisbon treaty. Peter Fellows-McCully found this 
sentence in it: "The group delivered 1.5 million leaflets to every 
house in the Irish Republic in the run-up to the EU reform poll."

The Web site of The Citizen newspaper of Gloucester had a story on 
2 October under the headline "Police found heroine on Gloucester 
driver". John Gray found that the story included a comment from his 
solicitor: "My client has made significant changes in his life." 
Clearly!

The sweet smell of failure: a large number of news outlets reported 
the sentencing on Tuesday of Ian Clement, a former deputy mayor of 
London, for fiddling his expenses. (Margaret Chandler read it on 
Yahoo! news.) Many of the reports noted: "Sentencing Clement, the 
judge said he 'fragrantly and arrogantly' abused public money to 
indulge himself with meals." Did the judge really say that, or did 
the Press Association (which wrote and circulated the story) make a 
mistake and nobody queried it?

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