World Wide Words -- 09 Jan 10
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Sat Jan 9 07:02:02 UTC 2010
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 672 Saturday 9 January 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: Jollop.
3. What I've learned this week.
4. Q and A: Twenty-three Skidoo.
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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SICCED! Lots of readers told me that the toboggan worn in the last
Sic! item last week wasn't an error. It's an American regionalism
for a knitted hat, known best in the southern states. Some said
that it's much the same as the watch cap worn in the US Navy. Don
Kaspersen commented from North Carolina: "The AP reporter who wrote
the article would have used the word naturally, unaware of its
oddity to other English speakers both here and abroad. When I first
came to the South, and heard mothers adjure their children to put
their toboggans on their heads before they went outdoors, I had the
same bemusing image you might have had." I am now much better
informed, for which I thank you all.
PEARLS OF WISDOM John Barrs pointed out that the essence of the
idea discussed last time is older than I said. Like "pearls before
swine" it's Biblical, from the book of Job (28:18). The King James
Bible of 1611 translates the verse as "No mention shall be made of
coral, or of pearls: for the price of wisdom is above rubies."
UPDATED PIECE I've considerably revised the item on "bee's knees".
You'll find it at http://wwwords.org?BSKN.
GOING TO ITS ETERNAL REST Oxford University Press has just told me
that it is about to remainder both the hardback and paperback of my
book Gallimaufry. If you want a copy, this may be your last chance
to buy! See http://www.worldwidewords.org/gallimaufry.htm.
2. Weird Words: Jollop /'dZQl at p/
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You may know it better as "jalap", since "jollop" is principally a
British spelling. It's a liquid medicine of some sort, particularly
cough syrup or a laxative.
"Listen," said Granny, "If you give someone a bottle
of red jollop for their wind it may work, right, but if
you want it to work for sure then you let their mind make
it work for them."
[Equal Rites, by Terry Pratchett, 1987.]
The "jollop" pronunciation was known in English dialects for many
decades before it began to be put into writing. A century ago, the
English Dialect Dictionary found it in Lincolnshire and Lancashire
and recorded that it then meant "a semi-fluid mess of anything; a
big mess of food, a 'dollop'." That hints that it's a variation on
"jalap", under the influence of "dollop". The pronunciation is at
least a hundred years older:
JALAP. The pronunciation of this word, as if written
_Jollop_, which Mr. Sheridan has adopted, is, in my
opinion, now confined to the illiterate and vulgar.
[A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, and Expositor of
the English Language, by John Walker, 1791. The person he
censures is the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who
was most certainly neither illiterate nor vulgar.]
"Jollop" has been recorded in American dictionaries as a slang term
for a measure of strong liquor. The American Century Dictionary of
1895 said that it was an English provincial term for the cry of a
turkey, which no British dictionary admits to knowing about. On the
other hand, "jollop" was at one time a name for the wattles of the
bird, probably from "dewlap".
The older "jalap" arrived in English about 1675 via French from the
Spanish "purga de Jalapa", where the last word is one name of the
city in Mexico that's also called Xalapa or Xalapa-Enríquez. It was
a purgative obtained from the roots of a species of convolvulus.
3. What I've learned this week
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The senior contest is the one organised by the American Dialect
Society, now in its 20th year, which may therefore ultimately be to
blame for the plethora of such announcements these days. My excuse
for mentioning so many of them is that they are a useful way to
mention some of the words of the year that I haven't got around to
discussing here. Last evening (Friday) in Baltimore, the Society
not only voted on the words (and phrases) of 2009 in various
categories, but also determined the word of the decade. In doing
so, the ADS is concerned to stress that "members act in fun and
don't pretend to be officially inducting words into the English
language. Instead they are highlighting that language change is
normal, ongoing, and entertaining."
The Word of the Year is "tweet" (a short message sent via the
Twitter.com service, and the act of sending such a message) and its
word of the decade is "google" (a generic form of the trade name
Google, meaning "to search the Internet", which Google's trademark
lawyers will wince to read).
The thematic winners were: "fail" (Most Useful; An interjection
uttered when something is egregiously unsuccessful); "Dracula
sneeze" (Most Creative; covering one's mouth with the crook of
one's elbow when sneezing, seen as similar to popular portrayals of
the vampire Dracula, in which he hides the lower half of his face
with a cape); "sea kittens" (Most Unnecessary; fish, according to
PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, who have been
running a campaign arguing that if fish were called sea kittens,
people would be less likely to hurt them); "death panel" (Most
Outrageous; a scare phrase from the recent US controversy over
health plans, a supposed committee of doctors or bureaucrats who
would decide which patients were allowed to receive treatment,
ostensibly leaving the rest to die); "hike the Appalachian trail"
(Most Euphemistic; to go somewhere to have sex with one's illicit
lover, which follows a statement by the Governor of South Carolina,
Mark Sanford, who said he was going hiking when he really went to
Argentina to visit his mistress); "twenty-ten" (Most Likely to
Succeed; a pronunciation of the year 2010, as opposed to saying
"two thousand ten" or "two thousand and ten"). The words deemed
least likely to succeed were any names of the decade 2000-2009,
such as Naughties, Aughties or Oughties. (But see below for the
very different view from the UK.)
AUSTRALIAN WORDS OF 2009 The Australian Macquarie Dictionary has
begun online public voting for its own Word of the Year. You can
choose from 17 sections, each having six words or phrases (oddly,
mainly phrases: of the 102 terms, two thirds (68) have more than
one word). To someone reading them outside Australia, it is an odd
mixture. Some have been well known in the US or UK for many years
(petrichor, shield law, bodywarmer, slacktivism, wet room, lighting
pollution, social phobia, brain fade). Of the rest, only a minority
are specific to 2009. I would have expected "swine flu" to be in
the list, but instead the Dictionary has gone for the formal
"pandemic influenza A" that identifies the H1N1 strain, a term that
has been in wide use at least since the middle of the decade. See
the lists at http://wwwords.orgMCQ0. The result, together with the
Dictionary's own choice, will be announced on 3 February.
WHAT DECADE IS THIS I SEE BEFORE ME? The press - at least in the
UK, and presumably elsewhere, too - has been much engaged over the
holidays with an analysis of the first decade of the century, which
everybody except pedantic calendarists believes has just ended. In
Britain, it universally came to be known as the "Noughties" (which
I assume was coined as a pun on "naughties", though heaven knows
that the past decade hasn't been much fun). Some journalists have
turned their minds to how we might identify the decade that we've
just begun. Historically, the second ten years of a century has
never had a name. A columnist in the Galveston Daily News of Texas
wrote last Monday, "Most agree that this fresh decade will be
called the '10s". Possibly. Or perhaps not. Other suggestions this
week, from the UK, are "Teenies" and "Teens", which imply that the
next ten years will be moody, untidy and unwilling to get up in the
mornings.
4. Q and A: Twenty-three Skidoo
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Q. Can you please tell us about the popular phrase "23 skidoo" from
the "roaring twenties"? [William Mathis]
A. It does usually evoke the period of the flappers and speakeasies in
the US, though its heyday was really the first decade of the century;
by the 1920s it was already rather passé. Today it's defunct in daily
speech, though it is remembered and writers resurrect it as an easily
recognised flag for the period (the wrong period, as I say, but never
mind); "skidoo" by itself has a faint residual existence and has been
borrowed as a trade name for a motorised toboggan. Both "skidoo" and
the full phrase "23 skidoo" mean to "go away", "beat it", "scram" or
suggest the person addressed should get out while the going's good.
The usual story about its origins, quite certainly fictional, takes us
to the corner of Twenty-third Street and Broadway in New York City.
This is the location of the famous Flatiron Building, constructed in
1902 and later nicknamed for its triangular shape that resembles an
old-fashioned flat iron. This corner - it is said - became notorious
as an especially windy spot, partly due to the shape of the building.
Young men would gather in the hope that a gust would blow a woman's
skirt up to provide them with a momentary voyeuristic thrill; it is
also said that the local cops would chase them away with a shout of
"Twenty-three skidoo!" Don't believe a word of it. However, there's
some slight supporting evidence for a numerical link with Twenty-third
Street - though not the Flatiron building - from an early Edison film
of August 1901, What Happened on 23rd Street, New York City. A young
couple deep in conversation walk towards the camera; the woman steps
on a ventilation grille in the pavement, which blows her floor-length
skirts to knee height, a titillating image for the period. The Edison
catalogue described it like this:
The young lady's skirts are suddenly raised to, you
might say an almost unreasonable height, greatly to her
horror and much to the amusement of the newsboys,
bootblacks and passersby. This subject is a winner.
That salacious comment says it all. Even if it wasn't an influence on
the development of the expression (which it certainly wasn't), I'll
bet my bottom dollar it contributed to the gestation of the story
about where it came from.
There's no difficulty over the true origin of "skidoo", since it's
almost certainly a variant of "skedaddle", a nineteenth-century word
of unknown origin that has the sense of "go away, leave, or depart
hurriedly", as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it. "Skidoo" is
recorded from early in the century:
"Now, that's enough," interposed Maudo, "let's
skidoo." And they skidooed with smiles and backward
glances.
[Washington Post, 25 Dec. 1904.]
A puzzling fact that doesn't fit the "skedaddle" origin is that a
barque called Skidoo was reported as arriving in New York from Norway
in May 1872 and that a yacht of the same name took part in races off
New York from the late 1870s into the early 1900s. Perhaps the word
had a meaning now lost to us?
The evidence suggests that the "23" part came along a little before
"skidoo" and was a distinct slang term with much the same sense:
By the way, I have come upon a new piece of slang
within the past two months and it has puzzled me. I just
heard it from a big newsboy who had a "stand" on a
corner. A small boy with several papers under his arm had
edged up until he was trespassing on the territory of the
other. When the big boy saw the small one he went at him
in a threatening manner and said: "Here! Here! Twenty-
three! Twenty-three!" The small boy scowled and talked
under his breath, but he moved away. A few days after
that I saw a street beggar approach a well-dressed man,
who might have been a bookmaker or horseman, and try for
the unusual "touch." This man looked at the beggar in
cold disgust and said: "Aw, twenty-three!" I could see
that the beggar didn't understand it any better than I
did. I happened to meet a man who tries to "keep up" on
slang and I asked the meaning of "Twenty-three!" He said
it was a signal to clear out, run, get away.
[Washington Post, 22 Oct. 1899. The speaker is George
Ade, a newspaperman from Chicago, whose book Fables in
Slang had just been published. The article wrote of it,
"Mr Ade has gathered up the vernacular of the period, the
irreverent metaphor, the far-fetched simile, and the
words coined in the street." Note the quotation marks
around "keep up"; in the sense of staying abreast of a
topic, it was then new and slangy.]
Nobody has been able to suggest a plausible origin for this numerical
interjection. Many suggestions have been put forward, such as the two
that follow, none of which are supported by even the slenderest
evidence:
* The Only Way was a stage adaptation of Charles Dickens's A Tale
of Two Cities by two Irish clergymen, Freeman Wills and Frederick
Langbridge. In the last act, it is claimed, a woman knitting at the
guillotine counted off the victims as they were executed and that
the hero Sidney Carlton was the twenty-third, that number being the
final words of the play. The implication is that theatre-goers
adopted the number as a synonym for "going home", from where it
spread and changed its meaning. The big problem with this much-
quoted origin that the play was first performed - at the Lyceum
Theatre, London - in February 1899; it is improbable in the extreme
in the days before mass communications that only a few months later
it could have reached Chicago.
* Eric Partridge suggested it might be a hangover from the slang of
telegraphers, who used numerical codes as abbreviations of common
expressions; "30" was "end of message", for example, which American
journalists still on occasion put at the end of pieces, though the
rationale for doing so has long since passed. It is said that "23"
meant something like "go away!". Sadly for such an ingenious idea,
code dictionaries of the period do not use "23" in any way that
could be turned into the slang sense.
What we do know is that, by 1906 (several years earlier according to
some anecdotal reports), the two halves of the phrase had been
conjoined to make the even more expressive doubled epithet:
Fire companies are having troubles of their own in
getting music for the next biennial parade. One company
negotiating with a band out of town has been informed
that if it wants that particular brand of music it will
have to pay $6 per man for the ordinary musicians and $12
for the leader for the day with expenses. If the engine
company is independent enough it will wire to the band
"23 skidoo" according to the members' idea in the
matter.
[New Brunswick Daily Times, 21 Mar. 1906.]
An accidental result of the creation of "23 skidoo" has been the
bafflement of generations of researchers. We're now much nearer an
answer than ever before, but the crucial bits of evidence to settle
its origin may elude us for ever.
5. Sic!
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Barry Rein came across this sentence in an e-mail that was sent to
faculty and students at Occidental College in Los Angeles about a
lost dog: "I placed this dog with a lady who lives on Alumni Ave
and she had a harness on but struggled out of it when she got out
of the car and broke loose."
Several online news media outlets copied the headline to a story
that K I Plotkin saw via Google News on the site of KOMO News of
Seattle on 28 December. It was about a killing in that city: "Man
charged with killing girlfriend, baby arrested."
"The recipe for tiramisu on the back of a package of ladyfingers,"
e-mailed Helen Thursh, "suggested that unsweetened cocoa could be
sprinkled on top 'for garish'. Just in case one might think that
was a misprint, it then added that curls of unsweetened chocolate
could also be added for garish. I always thought that the cocoa and
chocolate curls were decorative, but I never thought they exceeded
the bounds of good taste. To the company's credit, the mistake has
since been corrected."
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