World Wide Words -- 13 Feb 10
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Feb 12 18:04:20 UTC 2010
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 677 Saturday 13 February 2010
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Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Tumbarumba.
3. What I've learned this week.
4. Book Review: Barrelhouse Words.
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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RUB OF THE GREEN Mat Coward removed any surviving doubt about the
meaning of this expression as the BDO world darts champion used it
and which prompted the question about it last week. He wrote, "What
Wolfie Adams meant in this case is that he was (arguably) lucky to
win some of the early legs, because he wasn't playing as well as he
might, but that his survival was essentially his opponent's fault,
who had him at his mercy several times, and failed to deliver the
decisive shots. My detailed memory of the match might impress you
less if I confess I had a fiver on his opponent at 66-1. In current
sports-commentary-speak, to have the rub of the green invariably
means to have the greater share of any good luck going."
WHAT PADDY SHOT AT "In the US," e-mailed Phil Vassar, "at least
the southern part thereof, we have since time out of mind used the
expression, 'What the little boy shot at', signifying an effort
rewarded with nothing. The sense of it is that the little boy shot
his gun, as little boys will, at nothing at all - his only target,
you see, was the joy of shooting and the glorious noise it made.
Not, I grant, particularly complimentary to little boys, no more
than 'what Paddy shot at' is to the Irish. Still, to anyone who
grew up hearing and saying either phrase the image is graphic and
immediate."
I've added an extended version of my comments to the Web site. To
see it, go via http://wwwords.org?WPSA.
Mike Beisty asked about another cribbage term: "I encountered 'what
paddy shot at' in The Darling Buds of May when Pop declared it to
be his hand, but could not find out what it meant. Subsequent to
this Pop says 'Let's have a Parson's Poke!' but Ma replies 'No more
Parson's Pokes. Too many Parson's Pokes are bad luck.' I have
searched for its meaning but so far have drawn a blank. I have even
contacted the H E Bates society without reply. Could you shed some
light on this expression please?" I can't. Can anybody?
TWEET! I'm now on Twitter: http://twitter.com/worldwidewords.
2. Weird Words: Tumbarumba
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A tumbarumba is not a belly-dance to South American music, as a
contestant in an Australian words competition once suggested. Nor
does it directly address the small Australian town of that name
that lies south-west of Canberra in New South Wales, though some of
its inhabitants must surely tumbarumba without knowing that name
for it.
No, "tumbarumba" is another name for tmesis, one form of which is
that curious trick of stuffing one word into the middle of another.
"Abso-bloody-lutely", "a whole nother", "fan-bloody-tastic" and
"any-blooming-where" are classic cases, though many of the most
powerful examples include the F-word. For a reason buried in local
linguistic history it's a verbal tic Australians are fond of, who
insert their favourite adjective, "bloody", to great effect.
The origin of the term is disputed, but who can sensibly decry the
claim of this de-flaming-lightful poem:
"Howya bloody been, ya drongo, haven't seen ya fer a week,
And yer mate was lookin' for ya when ya come in from the creek.
'E was lookin' up at Ryan's, and around at bloody Joe's,
And even at the Royal, where 'e bloody NEVER goes".
And the other bloke says "Seen 'im? Owed 'im half a bloody quid.
Forgot to give it back to him, but now I bloody did -
Could've used the thing me bloody self. Been off the bloody booze,
Up at Tumba-bloody-rumba shootin' kanga-bloody-roos."
[The Integrated Adjective, or Tumba Bloody Rumba, by John O'Grady.]
3. What I've learned this week
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BLIZZARD WORDS There's no direct equivalent in the US of the UK's
Queen's English, but the nearest may perhaps be the language the
president uses. So when he called the snowstorms around Washington
last weekend SNOWMAGEDDON, we ought to consider it seriously as an
addition to the language. Certainly, it was widely reported in
newspapers worldwide. The other term often paired with it was the
equally inventive SNOWPOCALYPSE. Their users have, of course,
brought out existing terms from the dusty mental cupboard in which
such are stored against possible future application - the former
appeared before Christmas 2008 in the US and the following spring
in the UK, and the latter as the tag for a huge snowstorm in the
north-eastern US in October 2006. Others have been creative, with
terms such as SNOWNAMI, SNOWVERKILL and SNOWVERLOAD appearing.
TIME TO CHIT At this time of year, British gardening columns often
advise readers to start CHITTING their seed potatoes. It's not a
term in my vocabulary (not least because I don't grow vegetables in
our tiny garden) so I had to look it up when it turned up last
Saturday. Chitting is the process of putting the tubers in a warm
and light place to sprout them, which takes six weeks. The ultimate
origins of the term are unknown, though there used to be the noun
CHIT for a shoot or seedling. The obvious assumption is that it's
the source of "chit" as a contemptuous term for a young woman. But
in that sense (at first for the young of any animal) it is recorded
at least 200 years before the seed sense and may be from the same
source as "kitten".
ON THE ROAD Whenever the UK nears a general election, as we do at
the moment, polling companies rush to identify some man or woman
who epitomises the key floating voters in the forthcoming struggle.
They're often described alliteratively: in 2001, we had Pebbledash
People, married professional couples living in semi-detached houses
in the suburbs ("pebbledash" is an external roughcast rendering of
stones embedded in mortar; the Scots call it "harling"). In 1997
came Worcester Woman, a white-collar professional who swung from
Conservative to Labour, and Mondeo Man, a term coined by Tony Blair
- in reference to the Ford Mondeo - for a type of middle-income
homeowner whom Labour needed to attract. This year, the first such
sighting is of a relative to the last of these: MOTORWAY MAN. He's
young, childless, rootless and materialistic. He usually lives in a
newly built suburb in the English midlands conveniently close to
the main motorway networks, since he's a car-dependent middle
manager or sales rep who travels a lot for his job.
4. Book Review: Barrelhouse Words
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Written by Stephen Calt and reviewed by Dick Pountain.
(Dick Pountain is a British technical author and editor who wrote
both the New and the Concise Penguin Dictionaries of Computing; in
the 1960s he was involved with the situationist group King Mob and
wrote on politics, music and film for the underground magazines Oz,
Ink, Friends, Cream and more.)
While collecting vocabulary for this excellent blues dictionary,
lexicographer Stephen Calt faced a major problem: white folks done
stole the very words from the mouths of those poor (often blind)
rural singers who invented this popular art form in the first third
of the 20th century.
The blues enjoyed a brief fashion in the UK in the 1960s, which is
when I discovered it through the songs of Robert Johnson and Blind
Boy Fuller. In the US, of course, it became popular earlier,
crossing over from just black audiences to fans of folk and roots
music and forming the basis for rock 'n' roll; it has never gone
out of fashion there. Much has been written about its founding
contribution to white rock music, for example through its influence
on performers such as Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, Canned Heat, Jimi
Hendrix, the Beatles, Fleetwood Mac and the Rolling Stones.
Regrettably this process robbed blues lyrics of most of their bleak
and fragile poetry, emphasising only their hedonistic worship of
sex, booze and drugs. To sidestep this pollution Calt deliberately
restricted his search field to the period between about 1900 and
1930 when blues was still being made and consumed by black
audiences, either on 78rpm shellac records or live in the eponymous
"barrelhouse" (an illegal rural combination of bar, brothel and
gambling den).
Calt's tone is demythologising throughout, showing that the lexicon
of the blues was drawn almost entirely from everyday speech. Exotic
constructions such as "first thing smoking", "jelly roll" and
"diddy wah diddy" were actually common in the period and many can
be traced back to old English usages of the plantation owners. Calt
stresses that the concerns of the blues were the tribulations of
post-slavery rural poverty rather than artistic expression for its
own sake. Above all it was a music by and for grown-ups, albeit
struggling and deeply dissatisfied ones.
Consider the word "mojo". Calt explains that this originally meant
a lucky charm in the shape of a hand, often worn between the legs,
by gamblers and by women (against infidelity). It derives either
from the West African Fula word "moco'o", a medicine man, or from
Gullah "moco", meaning witchcraft or magic. It's now the name of a
successful magazine for middle-class white rock fans, and a jokey
term of macho boasting about one's power and influence that's used
by everyone from TV comedians to Wall Street brokers.
An enormous strength of his dictionary is that every definition is
illustrated with a complete stanza from a blues song in which it
occurs, making it a joy to read as well as a valuable reference.
For more than 40 years I've been puzzled by one line in Robert
Johnson's 1936 Come On In My Kitchen:
Aw she's gone, I know she won't come back,
I taken the last nickel, out of her 'nation sack.
but Calt explains it succinctly thus "A pouch worn by jukehouse
proprietors to collect proceeds from food and drink, hence its
formal name, 'donation sack'." Deciphering that term altered the
whole context of the song in my mind.
I found just one definition that I'd dare question, and that's
"rumble seat", which in Calt's definition has nothing directly to
do with the US term for a folding seat at the back of a vehicle (we
Brits would call it a dicky), but is simply a humorous euphemism
for the backside. I'd bet it specifically refers to an obsolete
style of underwear with a rear-opening flap, as in "Mississippi"
John Hurt's great line:
With rosy red garters and pink hose on my feet,
Turkey-red bloomers with a rumble seat.
[Richland Women Blues.]
Stephen Calt's book is not just a great contribution to blues
scholarship but a resource that any blues lover will want to keep
close by.
[Stephen Calt, Barrelhouse Words: A Blues Dialect Dictionary,
published by the University of Illinois Press in October 2009,
pp320; ISBN13: 9780252076602; ISBN-10: 0252076605; publisher's
price US$70.00 (hardback), US$26.96 (paperback).]
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5. Sic!
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A report on the bad weather around Washington last weekend appeared
in the Observer on Sunday: "The cable news shows ... sent dozens of
reporters out into the freezing cold to provide blanket coverage of
the blizzard." Did it help warm things up?
If the Archbishop of Canterbury had read, as Julane Marx did, a
heading in the entertainment section of MSN on Thursday, he would
no doubt have had a theologically appropriate comment to make. All
I can do is repeat it: "Gossip: Madonna reunites with Jesus".
A correction on the Web site of the Los Angeles Times reads: "In
some editions of Sunday's Section A, an article about Sarah Palin's
speech to the National Tea Party Convention quoted her as saying,
'How's that hopey, changing stuff working out for you?' She said,
'How's that hopey, changey stuff working out for you?'" It would
seem the article's writer didn't know that "hopey, changey" is an
anti-Obama slogan deriding his two principal election slogans,
"hope" and "change".
British newspapers reported this week on the failure of trials of
an amphibious bus to replace a Glasgow ferry. I didn't think such
vehicles were in use on oceans, despite Ian Harrison's forwarding
of this from News24 on 8 February: "Planes were grounded, trains
stood still and Greyhound buses weren't rolling in the Mid-Atlantic
on Sunday."
Eoin C. Bairéad thought a message posted to an archaeological list
worthy of the comment "Nuff said!" It announced that a Florida
research team was "seeking Submerged Prehistoric Archaeologists to
complement our expanding Maritime Division."
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