World Wide Words - 06 Feb 10
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Feb 5 19:12:16 UTC 2010
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 676 Saturday 6 February 2010
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Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
http://www.worldwidewords.org US advisory editor: Julane Marx
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Chicanery.
3. What I've learned this week.
4. Q and A: Rub of the green.
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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BASEBALL My aside in the piece about "southpaw" ("I come from a
country in which baseball is almost never played") was challenged
by Dai Woosnam: "Have you any idea just how passionately fought-out
are the international matches between England and Wales (going back
generations), and the degree in which Liverpool and Cardiff are
hotbeds for the game?" I'd never heard of this. It transpires that
this game, though called baseball, is different to the American one
(underarm bowling, flat-edged bats, 11 players in a team), with a
separate history. The Wikipedia article I cribbed this from says
that it dates from 1892 "when the governing bodies of England and
Wales agreed to change the name of their sport from rounders to
baseball". My case rests.
BUSY, BUSY As well as the usual updates, I've added a new piece on
the World Wide Words Web site that formalises my note back in mid-
January on "crisitunity". I've also updated those on "panjandrum",
"petrichor" and "shovel-ready". For the next week, the links to
them will be on the home page: http://www.worldwidewords.org .
2. Weird Words: Chicanery /Si'keIn at rI/
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Still a common word, you may find it about equally in reports of
sporting trickery and financial double-dealing:
Chicanery is not always discovered and punished, but
the NFL spends millions in attempted enforcement of the
public's trust and then looks the other way after a team
turns its back on ticket-buyers and league partners by
refusing to put its reasonably best product on the field.
[New York Post, 2 Jan 2010.]
There's another association with sport that hardly anybody makes.
When a racing driver navigates a chicane, etymologically he's on
the same track as a trickster.
Both words can be traced to a set of French terms that includes
"chicaner", to make a fuss or squabble, "chicanerie", a squabble,
and "chicane", legal quibbling or delaying tactics. "Chicanerie"
seems to have been borrowed to fill a void in English - at least,
John Evelyn regretted in a letter in 1665 that we had no word that
fully expressed the sense of the French. He seemed not to know that
Sir Thomas Overbury had already borrowed it half a century before,
suggesting that it was only after Evelyn's time that it became at
all common.
Where the French words come from is uncertain. Dictionary makers
used to suggest that they derived from a Greek verb meaning to play
a game with sticks, something like golf or polo; this may be based
on a Persian word, "chaugan" or "chugan", which is the mallet in a
polo-like game. But this idea has lost support because no chain of
evidence exists to link the French with the Greek. Instead, modern
etymologists point to an ancient French onomatopoeic word rather
like "tchik". This indicated pettiness and gave rise to several
words, including "chiche", mean or miserly. With "chicaner", it may
have been crossed with "ricaner", which now means to snigger but
which used to mean "bray".
3. What I've learned this week
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LAST WORDS OF 2009 The Macquarie Dictionary of Australia is every
year the last past the post in the dictionary promotion stakes. Its
words of the year for 2009 were announced on Wednesday. The overall
winner is SHOVEL-READY, a building project that can be started as
soon as funding is assured. Susan Butler, editor of the Macquarie
Dictionary, said that the word was chosen by the Word of the Year
Committee because of its visually graphic nature. Six honourable
mentions went to TWEET (to post a message on Twitter); HERITAGE
MEDIA (traditional media, like print newspapers and television,
which are thought to be losing out in the face of changing methods
of communication); PETRICHOR (natural oils and terpenes released by
eucalypts which, when they're washed by rain into watercourses, is
a signal to fish, invertebrates, and other creatures that the
season is sufficiently wet to support breeding); HEAD-NODDER (a
supporter of a politician or other media figure who stands beside
them in the frame of a TV shot and nods his or her head in
agreement with what the speaker is saying); CYBERBULLY (a person
who bullies another by e-mail, chat rooms, social network sites,
etc.); and ROAR FACTOR (the influence that a home crowd has on a
referee or umpire in making decisions, from the roar of protest
from the crowd at a perceived infringement by a player).
WHO'S PADDY? Paul Winterbine e-mailed from Melbourne, Australia,
to mention a phrase his father used when they played cribbage. When
declaring a non-scoring hand he would say he had WHAT PADDY SHOT
AT. I'd not encountered this before, so went hunting. Unlike poor
Paddy, I bagged something useful. The saying is a deprecatory
comment about the supposed lack of firearms ability of Irishmen and
is still around, though the implied ethnic slur has made it much
less acceptable (it can now appear as "what Patty shot at", whether
from sensitivity or ignorance, I can't tell). It goes back a long
way: it turned up in a column of quips and aphorisms in a US
newspaper, the Boston Investigator, on 9 February 1838 and was
clearly well-known; the sentence is now topical again: "The pledged
sacred honor of the Banks - Just what the Paddy shot at." Another
appearance was in a work published in New York in 1850, The
Knockings Exposed, with subtitle "A spiritual examination of modern
pneumatology and thaumaturgic manifestations, together with a
spiritual critique on the claims of psychological-mesmerism and
clairvoyance." You may deduce that it was intended to be funny in
its typically ponderous nineteenth-century way.
DIGRESS, DEGREASE, DEGREES? I was reading the British Government's
Response to the Summer 2009 Consultation on Feed-in Tariffs this
week, a technical 52-page report of interest to me because my wife
and I have recently become the proud operators of an electricity
generating station (solar photovoltaic type) which is, as I write,
"feeding in" power to the electricity grid. The report used a verb
I'd never come across: to DEGRESS: "The tariffs that are available
for new installations will 'degress' each year." It apparently
derives from the noun DEGRESSION or the adjective DEGRESSIVE, which
are used by financial experts for a tax rate that is mainly fixed
but which progressively reduces below a certain point. In our case,
it refers to receipts rather than taxes and the writer seems to be
employing it merely as a highfalutin alternative to "reduce". The
Oxford English Dictionary knows "degress" only as a rare old term
for alighting from a horse.
4. Q and A: Rub of the green
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Q. The winner of the BDO world darts championship was quoted on
BBC's sports site on 10 January as saying of his opponent in the
final: "He maybe gave me too much rub of the green in the early
sets but I'm happy with that", presumably meaning that his opponent
had played poorly. Some sites say this is a golfing expression,
others that it comes from snooker. Would you care to comment? [Gary
Puckering]
A. I'm not so sure that that was what Martin Adams meant, though it
isn't at all obvious from the quote. He could have been saying that
his opponent was making life difficult for him as a result of his
excellent play. That's because "rub of the green" can mean either
good or bad fortune in some sports event. You can think of it as
being accompanied by a shrug. That's the way the cookie crumbles.
No accounting for how things turn out.
Presumably people associate it with snooker because of the green
baize of the table. But it can't be from that game because the
earliest examples of the phrase long predate the appearance of
snooker in the 1870s (it could be linked to billiards, as that game
is much older, but the story specifically mentions snooker). It is
often said to be associated with golf because the first known
example is this:
Whatever happens to a Ball by accident, must be
reckoned a Rub of the green.
[Regulations of the Game of Golf adopted by the St
Andrews Society of Golfers, 1812.]
Similar phrasing has appeared in the rules of golf pretty much ever
since, though in modern times it reads like a quaint survivor. The
evidence, however, shows that it is older and was at first applied
- as "rub" still is - to an obstacle in bowls (the sort that's
played on grass; they hadn't thought of the ten-pin variety back
then). This instance shows that a version close to the golfing
phrase was indeed around a lot earlier:
It spoils their game by an unforeseen rub in the
green.
[The Righteous Man's Refuge, by John Flavel, 1681.]
The main reason why we find the phrase obscure today is that we've
lost the relevant meaning of "rub". Even before Flavel's time, it
had a figurative sense of a non-material hindrance or difficulty:
We doubt not now, But every Rubbe is smoothed on our
way.
[Henry V, by William Shakespeare, 1599. There's also
the famous line of Hamlet's: "To sleep, perchance to
Dream; Aye, there's the rub."]
5. Sic!
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A quote from a police inspector on the BBC News Berkshire site on
1st February was read by Jim Carr: "This was a particularly viscous
robbery, however I would like to reassure residents there are
ongoing inquiries." And no risk of anybody coming to a sticky end.
At the start of the BBC Radio 4 World at One programme on Wednesday
a clip was played of the delightfully named Sir Jock Stirrup, Chief
of the Defence Staff in the UK. The clip consisted in its entirety
of his saying "The world never stays in one place." He later spoke
at greater length about changes in global defence needs.
We're slow reporting this one, but it was worth the wait. An AP
headline in the New York Times dated 26 January, spotted by Kathy
Heinke: "Cops Stop Cyclist With Butcher Knife-Pool Cue Axe".
Anthony Massey keeps his eyes peeled during his peregrinations in
the metropolis. A notice inside the windscreen of a police van in
central London read "Explosive Search Dogs". He plans to stand well
back when they next let them out.
The Associated Press frequently features here. One of its better
efforts appeared on Friday and arrived courtesy of Lucy Banks, who
saw the headline on Yahoo! News: "Man guilty of missing wife's
murder." Surely he's glad he did miss it?
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