World Wide Words -- 19 Sep 09
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Sep 18 16:02:19 UTC 2009
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 657 Saturday 19 September 2009
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Jorum.
3. What I've learned this week.
4. Q and A: Topsy-turvy.
5. Book Review: It's all in a Word.
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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GULL My passing mention of this old slang term for a dupe (also as
a verb meaning to deceive) provoked many readers into asking if it
might be derived from "gullible". It looks very plausible, but the
evidence shows the link is the other way: "gullible", "gullibility"
and related words all derive from "gull". "Gullible" isn't recorded
until 1825 and is probably a back-formation from "gullibility", a
word that dates from 1793. In turn this is from "gull", as a joke
on the long-dead "cullibility" with the same sense. That derives
from "cull" or "cully", a simpleton, fool or dupe or a prostitute's
customer. The story of "gull" and "cull" are clearly intertwined,
but it's impossible to work out how.
PANDICULATION I'm grateful to Michael Turniansky and Daniel Olson
for resolving the minor mystery of the size of the pandiculator,
mentioned last time. They found an illustration of the device in an
advertisement, which that the size mentioned was of it folded for
storage. I've added the advert to the item, which is online via
http://wwwords.org?PDLR.
2. Weird Words: Jorum /'dZO at r@m/
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"None so knowing as he, / At brewing a jorum of tea!", wrote Sir
William Gilbert in one of his Savoy Operas, The Sorcerer. The vicar
was brewing a pretty potent potion.
A jorum, as you may have gathered, is an old word for a large bowl
or jug used for serving drinks such as tea or punch. By Gilbert's
day, the word had been around for about 150 years. It appeared for
the first time in another lyric, in a play by Henry Fielding, The
Author's Farce and the Pleasures of the Town, first performed at
the Haymarket Theatre in London in 1730.
Nobody knows for sure where Fielding got it from. It has no clear
connection with any other word in the language. The experts point,
a little cautiously, at this as a possible source:
Then Toi sent Joram his son unto king David, to salute
him, and to bless him, because he had fought against
Hadadezer, and smitten him: for Hadadezer had wars with
Toi. And Joram brought with him vessels of silver, and
vessels of gold, and vessels of brass.
[Second book of Samuel 8:10, from The King James
Bible, 1611.]
(This may remind readers of the names for sizes of wine bottle that
I wrote about back in June - see http://wwwords.org?WBSZ.)
Charles Dickens was very fond of it. He used "jorum" in five of his
novels - The Pickwick Papers, Great Expectations, The Old Curiosity
Shop, Martin Chuzzlewit and Oliver Twist - as well as in several of
his other works, including Pictures from Italy and The Seven Poor
Travellers. The nineteenth century seems to have been the heyday of
the word, on both sides of the Atlantic:
The amiable creature beguiled the watches of the night
by brewing jorums of a fearful beverage, which he called
coffee, and insisted on sharing with me; coming in with a
great bowl of something like mud soup, scalding hot,
guiltless of cream, rich in an all-pervading flavor of
molasses, scorch and tin pot.
[Hospital Sketches, by Louisa May Alcott, 1863. This
account of her time as a nurse at a hospital in the
District of Columbia was a popular success.]
It is now rarely encountered.
3. What I've learned this week
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AD WHAT? In asking about its history, Ed Vanderkloet introduced me
to a phrase I'd not come across before: "ad infinauseam". A punning
blend of the Latin phrases "ad infinitum" and "ad nauseam", it has
been around for longer than you might think. There's a hint that it
appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1942 (I can't confirm the date
on the snippet in Google Books) but the earliest example that I can
identify for certain is this one:
But what is most annoying about this is their habit of
saying good-by in fifteen different ways: "Bye-bye,
honey-bunch; Toodle-de-do, sweet; I give you a teeny-
weeny bye kiss, lovely one; Bye, honey, now will you
think of me?", and so on ad infinauseam.
[What Men Don't Like About Women, by Thomas D Horton,
1945.]
Mr Vanderkloet asks, "Would you consider it to have progressed
beyond cute or clever to the point of becoming recognized as a
term?" Probably not. It has never become popular and its position
as a niche witticism is unlikely to change, especially as knowledge
of Latin is now so patchy among English speakers.
SPOTTED EUPHEMISM In an issue back in 2001, I briefly reported
that the British supermarket chain Tesco was undertaking a survey
to find out if the traditional dish Spotted Dick should be renamed
Spotted Richard to spare its more easily embarrassed customers. (An
item in the Daily Telegraph in 2002 said Tesco had changed the name
but had later changed it back.) The issue resurfaced in a story in
many UK newspapers on 9 September and was also picked up in US news
media. They reported that the pudding has been thus renamed in the
Flintshire County Council canteen at Mold in North Wales. A council
spokesman agreed that it was correctly called Spotted Dick but that
canteen staff had renamed it "because of several immature comments
from a few customers". It's "spotted" because of the dried fruit
dotted through it but nobody knows who Dick might have been. One
theory is that it's a reformulation of "dough" (another dish, plum
duff, has a similar origin).
SAFOT (Snappy Acronyms For Our Time) Most of us are familiar with
such well-established humorous initialisms as YUPPIE, from "Young
Urban Professional", DINKIE, "Dual Income, No Kids" and even
HOPEFUL, "Hard-up Older Person Expecting Full Useful Life". This
week, two further examples came my way. One was in a report in the
Observer last Sunday about a consequence of our recent economic
woes, which has forced unemployed young people to turn to their
ageing parents for financial support. There are so many of them
that they're become known as KIPPERS, which expands to "Kids In
Parents' Pockets Eroding Retirement Savings". The term goes back at
least to 2003. In his New York Times blog on 10 September, Ben
Schott noted an Australian member of the class, which does seem to
be new: NETTEL, a person having "Not Enough Time To Enjoy Life". It
refers to families in which both parents work full-time, juggling
work and child care to maintain a high standard of living. It is
said to have been coined by the social researcher Bernard Salt.
4. Q and A: Topsy-turvy
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Q. In your piece on "murder" (http://wwwords.org?MRDR), meaning to
eat with gusto, you advert to the title of the film, Topsy Turvy.
This quaint expression for upside down or dishevelled, or "all
ahoo" as Patrick O'Brian often calls it, must have an interesting
history? [Colin Burt, Australia]
A. It certainly does, though nobody is quite sure exactly what it
is.
That's because the expression is so old that some detective work is
needed to identify its components. It's first recorded in 1528 but
is almost certainly a lot older. Right from the beginning of its
known history it could mean either upside down or utter confusion.
We may guess that the former was the earlier sense and that the
latter came along later as an extension from the idea of things
being thrown about and ending up in a chaotic jumble.
The Oxford English Dictionary comments that "numerous conjectures
and suggestions (many of them absurd and impossible) have been
offered". One result is that the word has been written in dozens of
different ways to reflect writers' ideas about where it came from
and what the "correct" form ought to be. One curious idea was that
it referred to a practice of laying sections of cut turf (British
plural "turves", hence adjective "turvy") face down to keep them
fresh; another that it was once "t'other way"; a third that it was
some way connected with "topsail" (often said /tQpsl/, with the
second syllable swallowed). So we have recorded forms like "topset
torvie", "topside turfway", "tipsy-turvy" (a drunken lawn-layer?),
"topside thother-way", and the Scots "tapsalteerie".
The consensus is now that the source of the first element is the
obvious "top". The second part is probably from the long-obsolete
verb "terve" or "tirve", to overturn, which may derive from the Old
English verb "tearflian", to roll over and over or to wallow. The
remaining puzzle is the "-sy" ending on the first word. It might be
that an early form was something like "top-so-terve", matching the
pattern of "up-so-down", an old form of "upside-down". The OED also
points out forms like "arsey-versy" as possible parallels.
So there are unanswered questions, as so often with old terms. But
the framework is clear enough.
5. Book Review: It's All in a Word
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A British Sunday newspaper used to say on its masthead "All human
life is here". Vivian Cook's book might similarly be subtitled "All
English language is here".
In 321 pages Professor Cook (he's professor of applied linguistics
at Newcastle University) packs 121 little chapterettes with themes
that include medical slang (gassers are anaesthetists and slashers
are surgeons, while TEETH expands to "Tried Everything Else, Try
Homeopathy") and the differences between the lyrics of the Beatles
and the Rolling Stones (the latter are tougher and more streetwise,
employing words such as "hiding", "rocking" and "flying", while the
Beatles' ones are more touchy-feely with "loving", "feeling" and
"holding").
If you'd like to know how the vocabulary for ways to cook your food
differ between English and Japanese, learn which words were first
used by Geoffrey Chaucer, discover Basic English, review your jazz
slang, learn regional British words for alleyways, such as snicket,
vennel or ginnel (though he doesn't include the one I learned as a
child in Sussex: twitten), you'll find them all here in bite-size
chunks. You can take a brief lesson in Pig Latin (the examples are
taken from titles of Abba songs) and a semantic differential test
illustrated by a quiz on what Queen Elizabeth II means to you
(there are lots of quizzes, for example to test your vocabulary or
discover how good you are at guessing unfamiliar words from
context).
However, some comments are surprising, such as his assertion that
"around 700" words are first found in Shakespeare's writings. This
is an underestimate: the OED lists 1,869. Writing about the
vocabulary of poets, he supports his very reasonable view that
Eliot's "aetherial", spirit-like, is not a word in current everyday
use by telling us that the OED has no twentieth-century examples.
It hasn't, but then the entry that includes it hasn't been revised
since it was first published in 1891. In a discussion of the
variations in numbers of words for colours in different languages,
he asserts that Welsh only has two basic colour words, for black
and white - it certainly has fewer than in English but a look at
any Welsh dictionary will show a good selection.
This, you will have realised, is not a read-right-through book, but
a dipping-into miscellany, a potpourri or gallimaufry. If you are
feeling unkind, you might call it a mish-mash of itsy-bitsy items
(he has a section on reduplicated words, including dialectal ones
such as "borus-snorus", in Dorset formerly meaning happy-go-lucky,
which Thomas Hardy employed in Under the Greenwood Tree).
The word "quirky" might have been invented for this book. You're
intended to have fun with it. But if your desire is for more meat
on your linguistic bones, you may be disappointed.
[Vivian Cook, It's All in a Word, published in the UK by Profile
Books on 17 Sep. 2009; hardback, 321pp; ISBN-13:9781846680069,
ISBN-10: 1846680069; publisher's UK price GBP10.99.]
AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK
Amazon UK: £6.04 http://wwwords.org?AIAW9
Amazon US: Not yet available
Amazon Canada: CDN$19.52 http://wwwords.org?AIAW3
Amazon Germany: EUR12,99 http://wwwords.org?AIAW6
[Please use these links to buy. They get World Wide Words a small
commission at no extra cost to you.]
6. Sic!
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"I can't get the image out of my mind!" e-mailed Cathy Varney from
New Mexico. She had just read an AOL Travel item dated 12 September
about pirates attacking a cruise ship: "Though that was a scenario
akin to Chihuahuas attacking a Great Dane, [as] anyone who has ever
met a viscous Chihuahua knows, they have sharp teeth."
Classic greengrocer's apostrophes were spotted by Pat O'Halloran on
a sign in a shop in Eyam, Derbyshire - "Ice creams, discount's for
school's". Were the discounts in exchange for grammar lessons?
Jennifer Atkinson winced, as most women would, on reading a report
in the Hobart Mercury, Tasmania, on 11 September: "Because of her
injuries, Corbin was told she would never have children. But she
again proved doctors wrong when she gave birth to twin three-year-
old girls...".
Julane Marx sat down to read last weekend's Home section of the Los
Angeles Times, to find that the lead article on the front page
described a small architectural gem built in a Malibu canyon with
spectacular ocean views and an additional feature: "Come night,
coyotes make their plaintiff cries under a sky filled with more
stars than you can count." Typical, she notes, of litigious Los
Angeles!
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