World Wide Words -- 12 Sep 09
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Sep 11 14:40:28 UTC 2009
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 656 Saturday 12 September 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: Pandiculation.
3. Q and A: Past master.
4. Book Review: The F Word.
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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BITTER END Anja Jessen pointed out that the expression is the same
in German: "Bis zum bitteren Ende". "Bitts" in German are "Poller",
so there's no possibility of a maritime link; the sense must derive
from a bitter taste. The parallel with my proposed source for the
English expression is seductive.
OSTROBOGULOUS James Tapper e-mailed from The Mail On Sunday to
gently correct me. The word appeared in an interview with Professor
Christian Kay in its sister paper, the Daily Mail, specifically on
13 July this year. He also found that most rare of examples, one
intended to convey meaning rather than be a topic of amusement. It
also illustrates an additional meaning:
I started out making toys because it was something I
could do with no money, an artistic family and a
Victorian sewing machine. In the evenings I made
'ostrobogulous' toys, a term my mother used to mean
harmlessly mischievous, and sold them in Heal's, where I
worked by day.
[The Times, 8 Nov. 2003.]
This matches a usage known to Graham Hill: "When I was at secondary
school in the late 1960s ostrobogulous was used as an alternative
name for a gonk." (For those too young to remember, or who live in
a country in which they never caught on, a gonk was a small furry
soft toy, popular at the time.)
2. Weird Words: Pandiculation /'pandIkjU,leISn/
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You do this. You just don't know that you do. When you're tired to
the extent of yawning in fatigue, you may stretch your arms and
neck to ease them. That's pandiculation. Writers have been known to
use the word just for yawning, but properly that's an associated
action, not the thing itself. This example might be correct, or it
might not, it's hard to say:
Nothing new, nothing fact, nothing different. Result:
ennui, followed by pandiculation and into the arms of
Morpheus.
[Evening Independent (Massillon, Ohio), 14 Oct.
1931.]
It comes, as you might guess, from Latin - from "pandiculatus", the
past participle of "pandiculari", to stretch oneself. The ultimate
origin is the verb "pandere", to stretch. That verb has also given
us "expand", plus some other much rarer words.
"Pandiculation" isn't encountered often. But variations on it were
once used for a quack remedy:
"Pandiculate for Health! Grow Tall! Get Well! Be
Young!" Exuberant ads like this, running in health-fad
magazines since 1914, have proclaimed the virtues of a
spine-stretching device called the "Pandiculator." The
Post Office last fortnight barred the promoter of this
fraud from using the U.S. mail. A rectangular box about
four feet long, worked on the principle of a medieval
rack, the Pandiculator has T-shaped iron posts at each
end, one fixed, the other movable on a cable pulley
system. To pandiculate, all a gull had to do was lie down
on the box, strap his head to the fixed post, his feet to
the adjustable one; when he turned a wheel on the side,
he could stretch his legs and hear the joints crack. The
promotion copy claimed that this Procrustean bed would
cure "every conceivable condition."
[Time, 20 Apr. 1942. "Gull" is in the sense of a
person who is fooled or deceived, a slang term dating
from the sixteenth century whose origin is unknown. If
the device was really only four feet long, was it
intended solely for persons of short stature? Perhaps
they particularly needed stretching?]
3. Q and A: Past master
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Q. Seeing your article on "bated breath" (http://wwwords.org?BABR)
made me think of "past master". Journalists seem to use it to mean
that a person is an expert at something. I believe this is in fact
a corruption of "pass muster", which is to say that the person is
competent, that he or she has or would successfully pass the army
training or parade in the subject. Do you have any comments? [Simon
Field]
A. "Past master" is a puzzling idiom because of a confusion over
spelling. But it's not derived from "pass muster", which means to
pass an inspection of uniform and equipment at an assembly of
troops, a muster.
As you say, "past master" often means a person who is particularly
skilled at some activity or art:
Irish writer John Boyne is a past master of fictional
representation of history in his novels
[The Age (Melbourne), 24 Aug. 2009.]
But it isn't the only sense. Another is at least as common and is
about a century older. It's the much more straightforward one of a
person who has previously been a master, that is, filled an office
with that title. It's most often used of a former master of a
Freemasons' lodge, although it has broader applications. As a
result of the very common confusion between the adjective "past"
and the past tense and past participle "passed", it's not unknown
for this second sense to be written as "passed master".
That confusion is at the heart of your sense of "past master". A
verb "to pass master" once existed, which meant to graduate in a
scholastic field or become qualified in a skill. In the former
sense, it was linked to the higher degrees of master of arts and
similar qualifications; among artisans, it meant that a man had
completed his apprenticeship and his period as a journeyman and had
become officially a master of his craft.
Though the verb "to pass master" has long since vanished from the
language, the noun derived from it survives. It ought to be "passed
master" and this spelling is known, though rare. The standard form
is "past master". Undoubtedly, this became accepted as a result of
the existing institutional sense of "past master".
4. Book Review: The F Word
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Reviewed by Jonathon Green, editor of Chambers Slang Dictionary.
Lecturing in 1851 on The Morality in Words, Richard Chenevix Trench
- dean of Westminster and pioneer of what would become the Oxford
English Dictionary - referred to "the language of the vulgar", in
other words, slang. He testified, reluctantly but surely with some
admiration, as to "how much cleverness, how much wit, yea, how much
imagination must have stood in the service of sin, before it could
possess a nomenclature so rich, so varied, and often so heaven-
defying as it has." It is unlikely that "fuck", the longest-serving
slang synonym for copulation, was at the forefront of his thoughts,
but of all slang's lexicon, this curt monosyllable, the "dirtiest"
of "dirty words", is for many people emblematic of an entire
vocabulary.
It is certainly the one slang word that might be deemed worthy of
an entire book, thanks to its taboo status (however that has been
diminished in a more libertarian world), the vast range of its
compounds, derivations and phrasal uses, the endless debate over
its etymology, and its history of clashes with censorship.
It may be, and I consciously play the faux-naïf, that such a book
is slightly otiose: as the ads currently visible in the London tube
suggest: "Some people are gay - get over it." Some people, most
people probably, say "fuck". What's the problem? But of course
there is a "problem" - at least for Anglo-Saxons; the French do
these things rather differently - and while I have long since tired
of what always seems the highly manufactured moralising that seems
to accompany any use of the word by someone even remotely in the
public eye, thus is life.
Jesse Sheidlower, New York-based editor-at-large for the Oxford
English Dictionary, published the first edition of The F Word in
1995. A second appeared in 1999, and now comes this major revision,
twice the size of the original. The book offers uses of "fuck" from
the major anglophone countries and backs up the lexicography (270
pages of headwords, every one underpinned by citations drawn from
the earliest discovered use onwards) with a weighty introduction
that provides a masterly analysis of every aspect of the word. The
author deals with the word's etymology (and the variety of palpably
inept folk etymologies that have accompanied it), its incorporation
into the list of taboo terms, its appearance in every form of media
and (it seems) in every century. The information is solid but never
without wit: his discussion of its role, usually euphemised, in pop
titles such as Britney Spears's "If You Seek Amy" is particularly
pleasing.
However, as a fellow lexicographer (and, I must admit, a friend -
slang is a small world) what impresses me most is the excellence of
the overall treatment. The subject happens to be "fuck", but this
is how any such study should be conducted and sadly so rarely is.
Not via the slipshod infantilism of the Net's Urban Dictionary, but
disinterestedly, seriously and in depth. The F Word, I would
suggest, is a template that we would all be wise to follow.
I offer two criticisms: although he has a number of euphemisms
("frig", "fug", "frak") he has resisted, perhaps deliberately,
"naf", as in Princess Anne's much-reported exclamation "Naf orf!"
Nor can I find the dismissive "fuck that for a game of soldiers".
But that doesn't mean he has overlooked it, it simply doesn't
appear as a headword. Dictionaries, naturally, do not offer
indexes.
In short, The F Word is a gem in its lexicographical expertise and
its scholarly explication. There will be nothing better, at least
until Jesse Sheidlower produces a fourth edition.
[Jesse Sheidlower [ed], The F Word; Third Edition; published by
Oxford University Press, New York, September 2009; hardback, 270pp;
publisher's list price $16.95; ISBN13: 9780195393118; ISBN10:
0195393112.]
AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
Amazon UK: Not yet listed
Amazon US: US$11.53 http://wwwords.org?TFW4
Amazon Canada: CDN$14.56 http://wwwords.org?TFW2
Amazon Germany: EUR12,99 http://wwwords.org?TFW7
[Please use these links to buy. They get World Wide Words a small
commission at no extra cost to you.]
5. Sic!
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"Orlando Bloom had a wide smile on his face as he helped girlfriend
Miranda Kerr into his car last night," began a story in the Daily
Mail on 4 September. It went on, "Australian supermodel Miranda
showed off the long limbs which helped her bag an A-list boyfriend
in a short pink strapless dress, with matching court shoes." The
photograph that accompanied the report, Philip Franklin comments,
suggested that Mr Bloom had had time to change into something less
revealing.
An example of a headline that misleads through brevity appeared in
the Washington Post on 4 September: "Gates May Be Open To Troop
Increase". Many thanks to Ed Sundt, who helpfully explained for
foreigners like me that Robert M Gates is the US Secretary of
Defense.
"The British National Party leader, Nick Griffin," began a report
in the Guardian on 4 September, "said yesterday that the far-right
organisation should change its whites-only membership rules." He
added, appropriately but surely inadvertently, "Failure to adapt
would lead to our being bled white through the courts."
Sometimes a missing apostrophe changes the meaning, Eoin C Bairéad
notes. He saw a sign on a shop in George's Street in Dublin: "Were
open". A casualty of the recession?
Vanda Hamilton read a report on the Australian Yahoo! site on 4
September about a man who was shot in a Sydney suburb: "'His body
was lying next to the car," Ms Norris told reporters... [She said]
it was the last thing she expected to see when she arrived home.
'Yeah, it's a really quiet street, I mean it's a dead end.'"
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