World Wide Words -- 17 Apr 10
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Apr 16 16:44:04 UTC 2010
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 686 Saturday 17 April 2010
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Topical Words: Boughten.
3. Weird Words: Harum-scarum.
4. This week.
5. Q and A: Lazy Susan.
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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TICKY-TACKY Several correspondents pointed out that my description
of Malvina Reynolds' song Little Boxes was inadequate. Its theme is
the boring uniformity of suburban housing and the bourgeois nature
of its inhabitants. But, despite some comments, "ticky-tacky" does
mean inferior or cheap materials, especially in suburban building.
2. Topical Words: Boughten /'bO:t(@)n/
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It started when I read a report by Jon Henley in the Guardian on 7
April. As part of the current British election campaign, the leader
of the Conservative Party, David Cameron, was visiting a bakery in
Bolton, Lancashire. He made a lame joke about his failure to make
his own bread which Jon Henley rendered as "So it'll be back to
boughten loaves in future, he promised."
"Boughten" is an adjective formed from the irregular past tense of
the verb "to buy" and refers to something that's commercially made
or shop-bought, as opposed to made or grown at home. If Mr Cameron
actually said it, he was using it correctly. However, he comes of
upper-middle-class stock, educated at Eton and Oxford, and it's
highly unlikely that "boughten" is natively his.
Two hundred years ago, "boughten" had a brief literary moment, used
poetically by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey. Otherwise
it has never been part of standard British English. It was formerly
in some dialects in southern England but has now almost totally
died out, with only a few very elderly men and women - especially
in the West Country - still having it in their vocabularies (a
newspaper report ten years ago in Bristol quoted "boughten" as an
example of Somerset dialect that survived among old Bristolians;
that may no longer be so). It has in the past been rather more
widely known in North America and many examples turn up in American
writings of the nineteenth century, whereas it's almost completely
unknown in their British counterparts. I'm told that it's still
used to some extent in north central parts of the US, such as
Michigan - where "shop-boughten" may also be heard - but most
Americans would consider it rustic or old-fashioned if they ever
heard it.
There are a few other such relic adjectives ending in "-en" still
in daily circulation, as Prof Larry Horn pointed out to me when I
asked about "boughten" on the American Dialect Society's mailing
list. They often turn up in set phrases: "graven image", "new-mown
grass", "unproven allegations", "clean-shaven face", "misshapen
bodies". But "boughten" has largely vanished from their number.
It was so surprising that this odd old term should be linked with
David Cameron - and that it didn't appear in any other report of
the Conservative leader's speech - that I went hunting for further
information. Jon Henley admitted that Mr Cameron hadn't actually
said it; he had included "boughten" in his paraphrase because he
liked the sound of it and because for him it had a flavour of "up
north". He knew it because his granny in Folkstone, Kent, used to
say it. That certainly fits its southern England profile, though
the English Dialect Dictionary of a century ago didn't include Kent
among the counties in which "boughten" had been recorded. Andrew
Massey of BBC News tells me that what David Cameron actually said
was "So I'm going to be back in the stores buying your bread."
I have this vision of lexicographers a century hence finding Jon
Henley's piece and concluding that if an educated Englishman used
the word in 2010 it must have still been extant. I wonder how many
of our current etymological conclusions, based on newspaper reports
of a century ago, are likewise biased by reportorial archaisms?
3. Weird Words: Harum-scarum /'he(@)r(@)m'ske(@)r(@)m/
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It's a fine example of a rhyming doublet. It started life in the
seventeenth century as a way to describe reckless or careless
persons, often young men.
These days it's much more often applied to unruly football games
("There was a harum-scarum finish to what had looked like a harum-
scarum game"), reckless undertakings ("Every few years they come up
with some harum-scarum scheme to get around our Constitution or do
away with it"), unrestrained musical performances ("Staccato raw
guitar harum-scarum stuff about a deluded bloke whose girlfriend
left him"), and disorganised offices ("Day-to-day operations remain
harum-scarum in the department"). It's becoming less common to find
an example directly attached to a person:
What you can expect is a braggadocio celebration of
the vices attributed to harum-scarum artists throughout
time.
[Windy City Times (Chicago), 23 Sep. 2009.]
The word is usually considered to be a combination of two verbs,
"hare" and "scare". The latter is obvious enough. The former may
have reminded its coiners of the zigzag track a hare takes when
it's being chased, often doubling back to deceive its pursuers, or
it may perhaps just be a reference to the speed with which it can
move - literally haring along. Dictionary makers think this because
early examples are written "hare'um scare'um" ("hare them and scare
them").
Curiously, however, the very earliest form is "harum starum", which
might have come from a rather different idea. This stayed around
for a while and was used as part of a famous character reference
during the American Revolution:
He is Clever, and if any thing too modest. He seems
discreet and Virtuous, no harum Starum ranting Swearing
fellow but Sober, steady, and Calm.
[A letter by Eliphalet Dyer to Joseph Trumbull, dated
17 Jun. 1775. The man concerned is George Washington.]
4. This week
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IN HOT WATER? I was reading an advertising supplement in my daily
newspaper about the value of expert witnesses, as one does, when
HOT TUBBING caught my eye. It turns out to be an Australian jargon
creation - how could one doubt it? It's a technique in which expert
witnesses for each side take the witness box together and give
their evidence concurrently. This can result, the writer said, in
"a helpful and productive dialogue". I can imagine other outcomes.
COOKERY CLASS John Rostron came across the word MAGIROLOGY, which
was said to be the science of cooking. It was marked as rare on the
one Web site he consulted that contained it and he asked whether
I'd ever come across it in real life. Never, Mr Rostron. There's no
doubt that it's a word more written about than ever actually used,
with its being cited in books with titles such as Word Nerd and The
Endangered English Dictionary. The Oxford English Dictionary has
added an entry for it online, but has only one example, from 1814,
in The School for Good Living: "From the very first appearance of
magirology in Greece, it produced effects absolutely magical."
(Though I prefer the other example in the same work, "Many of the
understrappers also were admirable professors of magirology",
because of "understrapper", an underling, whose origin is the old
verb "strap", to work hard.) The words derive from the classical
Greek "mageiros", cook or butcher. That 1814 book also includes
MAGIROLOGICAL, skilled in cookery, and MAGIROLOGIST, which the OED
points out is equivalent in meaning to MAGIRIST, an expert in the
art of cooking. Should you want to say any of these, the "g" is
soft, as in "magic".
5. Q and A: Lazy Susan
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Q. I've come across an article in the Los Angeles Times, dated 25
March, which describes the origin of the term "lazy Susan" as a
domestic mystery. Do you agree? [Toby Blyth, Australia]
A. This name for a revolving tray on a table for holding condiments
and the like has become known throughout the English-speaking world
in the past century. But nobody knows who named it or who Susan
might have been.
The usual sources point to an advertisement in Vanity Fair in 1917
as the first known record of the term "lazy Susan". I have found
earlier examples, which also illustrate the social milieu in which
the term - and the device - began to be fashionable in the early
years of that decade. One article appeared under the odd headline
"Giving an Automatic Dinner":
The other day a charming and capable woman gave a
formal dinner to a party of eight guests without any help
of servants. A superficial glance at the automatic
dinner-table reveals nothing extraordinary. One is
pleasantly aware of the sparkle of silver and glass, the
hospitable glow of lamplight, the rich shine of mahogany.
There is a beautiful lace centerpiece around which covers
are laid in the usual way. Knives and forks and the
service plate, napkins and glasses are where one expects
to find them. Even the raised silver disk in the center
surmounted by a vase of delicate clematis stars might be
intended solely for decoration. But this raised silver
disk is precisely the borderland between the old fashion
and the new. It is the turn-table or "Lazy Susan," the
characteristic feature of the self-serving
dinner-table.
[Christian Science Monitor, 25 Sep 1912.]
The household here is clearly well-off and able to afford servants,
but the hostess has either chosen to dispense with them, or perhaps
been unable to recruit them. Within a year, the fashion had spread
some way west:
Mrs. Curtis has inaugurated ... the "Lazy Susan"
method of serving, which has solved most beautifully the
problem of service without an extra maid.
[Lima Daily News (Ohio), 31 Dec 1913.]
This is currently the first known reference to the device:
John B. Laurie, as the resuscitator of "Lazy Susan,"
seems destined to leap into fortune as an individual
worker. "Lazy Susan" is a step toward solving the ever-
vexing servant problem. She can be seen, but not heard,
nor can she hear, she simply minds her business and
carries out your orders in a jiffy.
[Boston Journal, 8 Nov 1903. Mr Laurie was a
carpenter, who made a lazy Susan at the request of a
lady. Thanks to Barry Popik for finding this.]
There are various misconceptions about the origin of the device. It
is much older than the name "lazy Susan", examples being known from
the early eighteenth century in the UK. It was then called a dumb-
waiter, for good reason:
Tom Waitwell, a Footman, complains, that he and his
Brotherhood have had the Honour to wait on the Quality at
Table; by which King of Service they became Wits, Beaus,
and Politicians, adopted their Masters Jokes, copied
their Manners, and knew all the Scandal of the Beau-
Monde; but are now supplanted by a certain stupid Utensil
call'd a Dumb Waiter, which answers all Purposes as well,
except making Remarks, and Telling of Tales, and this for
this very Reason they are preferr'd.
[The Gentleman's Magazine, Apr. 1732; reprinted from
the Weekly Register, 15 Apr. 1732. It was a century
later, in the 1840s, that the term "dumb-waiter" was
transferred in the US to a little lift for moving food
between floors.]
Some stories attach the invention of the dumb-waiter to Thomas
Jefferson; dating makes this impossible, since he was born only in
1743. The term "lazy Susan" is sometimes said to be an opprobrious
epithet applied to Susan B Anthony, an early campaigner for gender
equality, but there's no evidence for this. The Oneida community, a
nineteenth century utopian commune in New York State, is known to
have used (or possibly reinvented) the device sometime before its
dissolution in 1877, but despite claims to the contrary there's no
record of their using the term "lazy Susan" for it. A plausible
suggestion is that "Susan" was a generic term for a servant and
that her name was humorously transferred to the tray.
All in all, calling it a domestic mystery is pretty much correct.
6. Sic!
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Several people mentioned a report in the international edition of
the magazine Spiegel Online of 7 April: "German trainers ... paint
a disastrous picture of the quality of Afghan security forces. Too
many police, they say, can't read or write, can't shoot straight or
take bribes."
Sean Brady felt that the irony was missed in a recent television
trail: "The Day of the Kamikaze - a one-off special for Discovery
Channel."
A heading in the Grand Canyon News of 24 March: "Canyon Mule Rides
Under the Microscope." Jane Rogers suggests this was either a very
small mule or a very large microscope.
"Feeling a bit reckless, I decided to break my diet for the day,"
Elos Gallo tells us, "I went to a nearby Chinese restaurant. Their
menu had the perfect dish, Wanton Noodles."
Brian Barratt read a report in Monday's Independent, headlined "Man
admits having sex with horse and donkey". The accused man's counsel
asked the magistrate to release him on bail, but admitted that "The
defendant does not have a stable address." A good thing, under the
circumstances.
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