World Wide Words -- 15 Aug 10
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Aug 13 11:24:28 UTC 2010
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 699 Saturday 14 August 2010
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Editor: Michael Quinion US advisory editor: Julane Marx
Website: http://www.worldwidewords.org ISSN 1470-1448
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Mournival.
3. Wordface.
4. Q and A: Nine days wonder.
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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INDECIDER Lots of people felt that there are already a number of
words in the language that obviate the need to create this new one:
vacillator, equivocator, ditherer, falterer. True, of course, but I
suspect the sociologist who invented "indecider" was seeking a new
word shorn of the existing associations surrounding all these. I
also suspect that she, and her sponsors, were hoping her creation
would improve the chances of her study being reported in the press.
But then, I'm just an old cynic.
2. Weird Words: Mournival /'mO:nIvl/
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A mournival beats a gleek. If we were playing poker, you might well
comment equivalently that four of a kind beats three.
We are, indeed, in the realm of card games, though gleek, which
takes its name from the threesome group in it, is one you have
probably never heard of. People are first recorded playing it in
England under that name early in the 1530s, though Henry VIII's
first wife, Catherine of Aragon, was reportedly fond of it in her
youth, which would take it back to the beginning of the century or
perhaps a little earlier. In fact, it's almost certainly the same
game as the earlier French glic.
It was a gambling game for three players, often called halfpenny
gleek, penny gleek or twopenny gleek, whose names refer to the
monetary value of each point scored, not the total bet. An English
penny was worth a lot at the time, so losing could be expensive -
in 1646, the poet and writer John Hall warned that "gleeke requires
a vigilant memory and a long purse". Samuel Pepys recorded in his
Diary in February 1662, "We played at gleeke, and I won 9s. 6d.
clear, the most that ever I won in my life. I pray God it may not
tempt me to play again."
One phase of the game involved declaring any gleeks or mournivals
of aces or court cards that you had in your hand, which gained
money from each opponent. In penny gleek, for example, a mournival
of aces got you eight pence from each of the other two players.
"Mournival" comes most probably from old French "mornifle" for a
group of four cards, which may be the same word as that for a slap
in the face (which might be the figurative effect of finding an
opponent has one). Gleek is also French, perhaps from an older
Dutch word that means "like". It's unconnected with the obsolete
English word of the same spelling, contemporary with the card game
sense, that refers to a joke or playing a trick on somebody.
3. Wordface
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FOOD FOR THOUGHT It's a mark of the northern-hemisphere's holiday
season that items of minor interest or wild invention are picked up
by the press and circulated widely. The nonsensical story last week
about the supposed vault of rejected words at the Oxford English
Dictionary is a classic of this silly season. In a busier period,
less attention would have been paid this week to a supposedly new
reputation builder, GASTRO-DIPLOMACY. It contains the idea that an
excellent way to enhance your country's renown abroad is to promote
your national cuisine. Reports this week say Taiwan has launched a
gastro-diplomatic campaign as a way to tell people about itself,
differentiate it in people's minds from China and demonstrate that
the country is more than just a big electronics factory. Neither
the idea nor the term is so very new: "gastro-diplomacy" was quite
widely used around 2002-03 in reference to a similar initiative by
Thailand and examples can be found a few years earlier. Campaigns
by North Korea, India, Malaysia and other countries have employed
the same technique. A South Korean push in the US has led to the
term KIMCHI DIPLOMACY in reference to the country's famous spicy
pickled cabbage.
FRIVOLOUS TIMES Mentioning "silly season" provoked me to look up
where it comes from. As you may guess from its current circulation
- the term is better known in Commonwealth countries than the US -
it was a British invention. The Oxford English Dictionary cites it
appearing first in the Saturday Review of London on 13 July 1861. I
can find no earlier example. The Morning Chronicle referred to the
term four days later, specifically mentioning the Saturday Review;
six months later The Sheffield & Rotherham Independent likewise
gave it as the source. Others followed. It would seem that it had
indeed been created by a writer on that journal. It referred to the
months of August and September, when Parliament and the law courts
were on vacation and anybody of substance was away. (Today, the
dates are variously specified to suit local conditions.) News was
sparse and to fill their columns journalists were forced to feature
less significant stories that they wouldn't bother with during the
rest of the year. National papers suffered, but local ones starved,
as was illustrated three years later:
The "silly season," as the Saturday Review calls it,
is at its height. Enormous gooseberries and marvellous
aerolites are in full force in local newspapers, and
happy are the sub-editors who can "congratulate their
worthy fellow-townsman, Mr. Such-a-One, on the beautiful
effect produced in his back yard by the painting of his
pump and water-butt."
[The Illustrated Times, Middlesex, 27 Aug. 1864. An
aerolite is a meteorite made of stone; let us hope not
too many were reported.]
4. Q and A: Nine days wonder
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Q. Tell me about "nine days wonder" for something whose popularity
is short-lived? I've always thought that it's related to Lady Jane
Grey, queen for 9 days in 1553. Is that likely, since most people
don't even remember that she existed? [Leslie Tomlinson]
A. It's a nice idea, but the expression doesn't date from the sad
and all-too-brief reign of Lady Jane Grey, since in essence it's
about two centuries older.
It's odd that the number nine should be so often associated with
extremes - we have "dressed to the nines", "cloud nine" and "the
whole nine yards". The same number turns up in lots of places: the
nine Muses, the nine orders of angels, the Nine Worthies, the nine
lives of a cat (and a cat o'nine tails), the nine tailors of bell-
ringing fame, and so on. There are also the proverbs: "possession
is nine points of the law", "a stitch in time saves nine" and the
old gardening saw that "parsley seed goes nine times to the devil"
before it germinates.
The most common suggestion is that the expression derives from the
Roman Catholic novena, a form of worship that consists of special
prayers or services on nine successive days. But there are so many
other expressions that include the same number that the source of
the phrase may lie elsewhere.
Whatever the thought behind it, as far back as the early fourteenth
century scoffers were saying that nine days, or nine nights, was
the period of time some novelty was likely to attract attention
before our minds turned to something else. By Shakespeare's time,
the idiom was firmly established, though he was the first to add
"wonder" to it:
I was seven of the nine days out of the wonder, before
you came.
[As You Like It, by William Shakespeare, 1616.]
The first example in the modern form is thought to be in a play by
Philip Massinger, A New Way to Pay Old Debts, of 1633. There has
been nothing short-lived about "nine days wonder".
5. Sic!
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The news ticker on the BBC site on Tuesday read "Police chase man
killed by train". This was not a report of post-mortem athleticism:
the first three words make up a noun phrase - the police chased a
man, who was then killed by a train. Thanks to everyone who sent
that in.
A similar confusion surrounds a headline that Don Wilkes found on
the website of the Vancouver Province on 5 August: "Archeologist
shoots dead rampaging polar bear".
The story in the Sydney Morning Herald last Monday, on the other
hand, which John Greenland told us about, is merely badly phrased:
"Turks are notorious for breaking out into gunshots to celebrate
weddings and sports victories." Is that like hives?
The headline on the website of The Daily Caller of Miami - noted by
Susie Elins on Monday - seems to imply a multifunction weapon: "Boy
chases away man who shot his dad with kitchen knife."
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