World Wide Words -- 04 Dec 10
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Dec 3 18:06:23 UTC 2010
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 715 Saturday 4 December 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: Collywobbles.
3. Wordface.
4. Q and A: The whole shebang.
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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WIDDIFUL Several British readers commented that at first glance
they expected this to be a media description of the performance of
the former Conservative MP Ann Widdicombe on the BBC TV series
Strictly Come Dancing. She is very popular with viewers despite
getting very low scores from the judges. Warren Edwardes redefined
"widdiful" as "the wilful insistence on participating in something
for which one is hopelessly unqualified and incompetent." Ouch.
TOLFRAEDIC As numerous numerate readers pointed out, last week I
got my number systems confused. The ancient Babylonian one that has
bequeathed us units in multiples of 60 (seconds, minutes, angles)
is the sexagesimal system.
WEBSITE This week's pieces online updated with new information are
those on BIG CHEESE (http://wwwords.org?BIGC), DOG AND PONY SHOW
(http://wwwords.org?DGPN) and GOBSMACKED (http://wwwords.org?GBSM).
Reach them via the home page or by following the links.
2. Weird Words: Collywobbles /'KQlIwQb(@)lz/
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To have the literal collywobbles is to experience an upset stomach,
a bellyache or the gripes. Its risible form may be the reason why
it's most often used for children's minor ailments rather than for
the indispositions of adults. In books and newspapers it's almost
always employed figuratively to refer to that fluttering in the
stomach caused by nervousness or apprehension.
But it's that terrible, tooth-furring nervousness of
the BBC; the corporation gets the collywobbles whenever a
programme is essentially serious.
[The Spectator, 6 Nov. 2010.]
The first known use in print is from 1823, in an edition of Francis
Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue that Pierce Egan
revised and updated.
It may have been created from "colic" plus "wobble", which implies
that some humour was attached to it from its beginnings. This seems
inappropriate for a term that was linked at the time to a genuinely
serious intestinal upset. Another theory says it was the result of
folk etymology, in which uneducated people converted the medical
term for cholera, "cholera morbus", into something that seemed to
make more sense. As so often, nobody knows for sure.
There remains one small puzzle, however. I found this while looking
for examples:
I entreat you by no means to think of undertaking a
review when I publish any thing; if you print any
criticisms upon it, I will colly-wobble your arguments
into nothing.
[In a letter by Barré Charles Roberts to his mother
from Christ Church, Oxford, 1 May 1807, reprinted in
Letters and Miscellaneous Papers by Barré Charles
Roberts, 1814. Roberts died in 1810, only two years after
graduating, but had already become a sufficiently notable
antiquary and numismatist that after his death his coin
collection was bought by the British Museum for a
substantial sum.]
What did he mean, if other than a teasing nonsensicality? All we
can say for certain about Mr Roberts's usage is that it confirms
the term was known earlier than Pierce Egan's recording of it in
1823, which is hardly surprising.
3. Wordface
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OED ONLINE To celebrate this week's relaunch of the online Oxford
English Dictionary, whose features now include a list of the 1,000
sources with the largest number of quotations cited, two British
newspapers boasted about their contributions. The Times noted that
it tops the list of sources, beating Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott,
John Milton and other literary luminaries. The Daily Telegraph (at
number 11 in the list) boasted that for 251 words it is the source
of the first printed usage, ranging from AGEIST (1970) through
INCISIVENESS (1865) and UNDERDOG (1887) to ZEDONK (1971). But they
haven't all endured: very few of us now need BALLOONACY (the 1860s
ballooning craze) or VOTRESS (a humorous term of 1894 for a female
voter). In its print edition, the Daily Telegraph invented the word
LEXICONATED, perhaps with an eye to its 252nd appearance. It would
seem to mean "being the first recorded user of a word that later
appears in a major dictionary". It has generated a lot of comment,
though it's surely destined to vanish unmourned within a few days.
Just for the hell of it, and knowing that many OED entries haven't
been updated recently, a number of us word sleuths have looked into
the 251 words using today's electronic resources: I've found that
"balloonacy" is recorded in Punch in 1852, "incisiveness" in the
London Daily News in 1850, and "zedonk" in the Lima News of Ohio in
1961. "Underdog" appears in a much reproduced poem in US newspapers
in 1859. Make that 247 and rapidly reducing.
While we're all boasting, let me point out that I was likewise the
first user in a published source of a word in the OED. It's PLORE
(defined as "An exhibit in a science museum which the visitor is
encouraged to handle or otherwise explore; a hands-on exhibit").
It's short for "explore". It and EXPLORATORY for a science centre
were invented by the late Professor Richard Gregory when developing
one in Bristol in the early 1980s.
WORDS OF THE YEAR, GERMAN STYLE This week a jury of journalists
and young people organised by the Langenscheidt publishing house
chose Germany's Youth Word of the Year: NIVEAULIMBO. This is a
newish slang term, roughly meaning "limbo level", for the ever-
decreasing quality of TV programs or the decline in the value of
conversation at parties. The second prize went to ARSCHFAX, for a
visible label on underwear. Internet voters preferred SPECKBARBIE,
a deeply pejorative term that may be translated as "bacon Barbie",
a young woman dressed to the nines in clothing that's much too
tight. The young people on the jury got it down to fourth place
because they thought it was too rude.
In Switzerland this week, a six-member jury made up of media and
entertainment personalities selected AUSSCHAFFUNG (expulsion) as
its word of the year, a few days after the Swiss voted to expel
foreigners who had committed crimes in the country. The unword of
the year is FIFA-ETHIKKOMMISSION, the ethics commission of FIFA,
the world governing body of football, a choice that will resonate
with British soccer fans still saddened by the England's failure
this week to be selected to host the 2018 World Cup, amid charges
of corruption among members of FIFA's governing body.
4. Q and A: The whole shebang
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Q. I found myself using the phrase "the whole shebang" the other
night within earshot of my 8-year-old grandson, and when he queried
me as to its meaning, I was stumped for a definition, as I could
not reconstruct the word's origin from its spelling, in whole or in
pieces. The dictionaries I consulted were of no help, nor did I
find any treatment of it on World Wide Words. Any insights? [Edward
Shaw; a related question came from Peter Fowles]
A. It's possible to say a surprising amount about this American
expression, though nobody has yet unequivocally traced it to its
source.
It starts to appear in printed sources in the early 1860s, as a
term on the frontier and among the military for what Samuel Bowles
described in his book of 1865, Across the Continent, as "any kind
of an establishment, store, house, shop [or] shanty". One type of
establishment was an inn or saloon, a use of "shebang" that was
previously known only from later in the century but which I have
now found from the 1860s. This is the earliest so far:
Along all the roads on the reservation to all the
mines, at the crossing of every stream or fresh-water
spring, and near the principal Indian villages, an inn or
"shebang" is established, ostensibly for the
entertainment of travellers, but almost universally used
as a den for supplying liquor to Indians.
[Annual Report of the US Department of the Interior,
1862.]
It was also a term of frontiersmen for a shanty or rough cabin and
by soldiers (this is the Civil War period, remember) for a bivouac
or other temporary accommodation. The poet Walt Whitman wrote in
his diary in December 1862 about the terrible conditions of the
soldiers following the first battle of Fredericksbug, often living
in "shebang enclosures of bushes".
Lexicographers share your puzzlement about where it comes from. It
appears quite suddenly with no obvious antecedents. It's tempting
to suggest a link with "shanty" but it is hard to see how the shift
in pronunciation could occur. One early report in an army context
writes of shebangs, as the soldiers called them, "especially those
of the Teutonic persuasion". This is, I suspect, a red herring.
As some very early examples refer to drinking establishments, it is
tempting to look to the Irish "shebeen", an unlicensed and often
disreputable drinking place (in origin the Anglo-Irish síbín, from
séibe, a mugful) as its origin. A shift from "shebeen" to "shebang"
has been seriously suggested by the experts and seems to be a very
plausible origin.
Other senses come along later. By 1867, the word had moved from its
military and outdoorsman setting to become part of the vocabulary
of ordinary people, meaning a dwelling house, albeit one of poor
quality. In 1872, Mark Twain was the first of several writers to
use it for a hired vehicle. This might be from a quite different
source, the French "char-à-bancs", a carriage with benches (which
became the British English "charabanc": http://wwwords.org?CHAR).
It may well have been influenced by "shebang" already existing in
other senses.
Whatever the source, "shebang" took on yet a third sense early on
to mean something like "the business" or "the current concern", so
leading to "the whole shebang", the entire setup, or whole affair
or matter, which is recorded from 1870:
But it floated bravely - bravely enough, as Evan,
coming back for Luti, assured her, "to take the whole
shebang at once, only Morgan refused to let the trial be
made."
[Sea Drift, by Marian Reeves, 1870.]
The most likely source is again military. Officers are recorded
during the Civil War as "running the shebang" (for example in a
diary of 1864 reproduced in Susanne Wilson's compilation Column
South of 1960), in which "shebang" seems to refer to the whole of
an encampment or other military establishment, a straightforward
extension of the idea of a single bivouac.
5. Sic!
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Michael Grosvenor Myer was exercised by a statement in the obituary
in The Times of the Norfolk turkey producer Bernard Matthews that,
after a while in insurance, he "quit Commercial Union and became a
turkey farmer, producing his own eggs with the help of a turkey
cock".
Irritable weather in Melbourne. Susan Bradley heard the weather
bureau senior forecaster Scott Williams say last Sunday that a deep
low-pressure trough pulling moisture from the tropics would ease to
showers on Monday but would soon return. "We're not out of the
woods in terms of potential to exasperate this flooding," he said.
"There's justice for you," wrote Stella McDowall about this report
from the New York Times on Wednesday: "Interpol has placed Julian
Assange, the founder of the WikiLeaks whistle-blowing organization,
on a so-called red notice wanted list following allegations of
sexual misbehavior by a Swedish prosecutor."
A note appeared in the Corrections and Clarifications column of the
Guardian on 4 December: "'How does that work exactly?' asked a
reader, on being informed [in a Diary item on 25 November] that 'an
unauthorised autobiography of London's mayor' was in the works.
This was an editing error."
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