World Wide Words -- 31 Jul 10
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jul 30 18:59:13 UTC 2010
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 697 Saturday 31 July 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: Roister-doister.
3. Wordface.
4. Q and A: Bread-and-butter letter.
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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CURTAIN LECTURE Several readers pointed out that the same idea
occurs in German: "Gardinenpredigt", literally a curtain sermon.
Robert Rovinsky found it defined in the German dictionary Duden as
a stern night-time lecture, delivered by a housewife from behind
the bed curtain to her drunken husband on his return from the pub.
Hasso von Samson asked "Who copied the term from whom?" I suspect
independent creation.
ONPASSING To judge from incoming comments, "onpassing" is fairly
widespread and common in newspapers and broadcasting and goes back
decades. Doug Fisher, a former AP news editor, noted, "AP had an
internal message wire on which such usages were frequent, such as
'wx' for 'weather,' 'whether' or 'Washington'; 'onpass'; 'upsend';
'overhead' (meaning to use the phone, not the wire); 'sappest'
(meaning urgent, easier to type than the all-cap ASAP, I guess). As
a result, it also became common jargon in many newsrooms." Chips
Mackinolty and Jonathan Kern both noted the word in the similar
compressed language, often called telegraphese or cablese, used for
cables to and from reporters overseas. These were charged by the
word and the need for economy in phrasing led to inventiveness.
The late William Safire supplied another example in an On Language
column in the New York Times in 2004: "I recently ordered the Bush
administration to 'downhold nondefense spending.' Readers who could
not find this verb in their dictionaries were outraged. It is
newspaper telegraphese. The old United Press, which wanted to hold
down its costs, used to wire its overseas correspondents, 'Downhold
expenses,' thereby saving the cost of a word." Evelyn Waugh has a
number of examples in Scoop, his 1938 satire about Fleet Street
practices, such as: CONGRATULATIONS STORY CONTRACT UNTERMINATED
UPFOLLOW FULLEST SPEEDILIEST. A famous example, surely apocryphal,
was sent by a London news editor worried about the silence from a
foreign correspondent: WHY UNNEWS. The reporter wired back UNNEWS
GOODNEWS, to which the editor replied UNNEWS UNJOB.
Yet another example leaked into an article in the Guardian last
Monday: "But all too soon, the party conference season will be here
and so it feels the right moment for an up-sum."
2. Weird Words: Roister-doister
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This curious reduplicated noun turns up from time to time, almost
always in British sources. Its meaning may be deduced from a couple
of examples:
He said he'd think nothing of quaffing ale all night
and coming home at 5 a.m., smashing windows. He said he
was a bit of a roister-doister, not like these white-
livered people today who can't hold their drink.
[Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett, 1988.]
I am due to talk to the veteran Hollywood roister-
doister - a serially married, reformed and relapsed
alcoholic, who was famously arrested, wild-haired and
drooling, while driving under the influence of the date-
rape drug GHB in 2002.
[Evening Standard, 30 Jun. 2005.]
Students of English literature may recall a play by Nicolas Udall
of about 1553 with the title Ralph Roister Doister, a comedy that
featured the eponymous Ralph, a swaggering buffoon who thought he
was irresistible to women. It features a letter to the virtuous
widow whom Ralph is wooing, written for him by somebody else.
Appropriately for a play written by the master of Westminster
College for his pupils to perform, the script makes a teaching
point: Ralph reads it aloud with the wrong punctuation, so that it
comes out as a string of insults instead of flatteries.
Udall coined the epithet "roister doister" for him, based on the
existing "roister" with the nonsensical rhyming "doister" added.
"Roister" is an older form of the word that we would write today as
"roisterer", an extended version that entered the language when Sir
Walter Scott wrote it that way in Abbotsford in 1820.
3. Wordface
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YET ANOTHER OLOGY A couple of newspaper reports this week quoted
British government ministers uttering the word PROCESSOLOGY. They
used it in derisive terms for journalists who, in the opinion of
the speakers, devote more time to studying the way decisions are
arrived at than in reporting the decisions themselves. Tony Blair's
former official spokesman, Godric Smith, has been credited with
introducing it into British political jargon soon after he was
appointed in June 2001, though it has also been linked to his
predecessor, Alastair Campbell.
FAST FOOD TERM On Monday, the Guardian featured a short item on
miniature cattle. The report said that animals shorter than 92cm
tall are known as TEACUP CATTLE. They may be to the breeder who was
interviewed, but all of the 90 examples from various publications
in several languages I found with a Google search were less than 24
hours old and all obviously derived from the Guardian report. If it
becomes a standard term, we will know where it started.
4. Q and A: Bread-and-butter letter
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Q. I was recently writing a short thank-you note to my hostess for
a lovely weekend at her house, and thought of it as my "bread-and-
butter" letter, as that's what my mother had called it when I grew
up in Canada in the 1950s. I have the impression that it was the
recognised phrase for such a letter that is one's plain duty as a
guest to write. But why "bread and butter"? Because it's always
done, as putting bread and butter on the dinner table would have or
may have been? I detest folk etymology and don't want to be guilty
of it myself. Was this phrase used in England? [Carolyn Clarke]
A. It has indeed been used in the UK; it still is to some extent.
It turns up from time to time in print, as here in a humorous quiz
about etiquette:
After a weekend in the country, should you: a) Write
your hostess a charming "bread and butter" letter. b)
Send a large basket of Fortnum & Mason cheese and hams.
c) Dash off a quick text before you've got to the end of
their drive, saying: "Thx 4 a gr8 w/e xxx".
[Daily Telegraph, 16 Sep. 2008.]
However, it's most definitely North American in its genesis and
continues to be used there more than anywhere else. My earliest
example is this:
Outside of one's own room there is seldom more for a
visitor to do than to arrange the flowers for the
hostess, to send her a "bread and butter" letter when one
has left her house, and a present on Christmas
proportionate to the length of the visit.
[The Art of Visiting, an article by Kate Gannett Wells
in The Chautauquan, Jan. 1892.]
"Bread and butter letter" figuratively extends the literal meaning
of "bread and butter" to refer to hospitality in general. I suspect
that it was originally a flippant reference by some young person,
bored with the chore of having to write such a letter to his or her
hostess and equating it with work. It echoes the older figurative
use of "bread and butter" to refer to what one does to earn the
money to buy the necessities of life: "it's my bread and butter",
one might say.
We do know from occasional references that the term was "society"
slang in the US early on. It moved across the Atlantic with some
speed and became established in the UK. In 1910 an enquiry in the
British journal Notes and Queries states it is by then the common
term for a thank-you letter.
The writer of that enquiry was puzzled about an unfamiliar term for
the missive, one that has long since died out, but which I might
mention as an intriguing linguistic aside: a Collins. It appeared
in Chambers's Journal in 1904 but vanished again some time after
1940. It's a literary joke based on William Collins, an elaborately
polite character in Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, published
in 1813: "The promised letter of thanks from Mr. Collins arrived on
Tuesday, addressed to their father, and written with all the
solemnity of gratitude which a twelvemonth's abode in the family
might have prompted."
The item in Chambers's Journal that introduces Collins mentions yet
a fourth term for the missive, a "board-and-lodging letter". This
seems never to have become quite as popular, though references to
it may be found in print, including one in Lady Troubridge's Book
of Etiquette, published in London in 1926.
5. Sic!
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The July issue of the British magazine Juke Blues had an article
about the soul record producer Willie Mitchell. Its first sentence
read, "Born on 1 March 1928, in Ashland, Mississippi, the Mitchell
family moved to Memphis, Tennessee when Willie was just two years
old." "What an odd family," commented Reinhard Fey. "Parents and
children born on the same day."
The website of the Courier-Mail of Brisbane on 26 July headlined a
story thus: "Motorbike rider killed after hitting 170km/h before
slamming into car and crashing through sound barrier." Thanks to
Colin Burt for spotting that. Sound must travel slowly in Brisbane.
Chuck Crawford, in Louisville, Kentucky, could hardly believe his
ears when a weight-loss-regimen company ran an advert on TV for its
meals. A supposedly happy woman gushed: "The first meal I tried was
delicious, and I found that each one was better than the next!"
The International Edition of the New York Times reported on 25 July
on a combined South Korea and US naval war game, quoting Kim Yong-
hyun, a North Korea analyst: "North Korea will try to fend off the
mounting joint pressure from the United States and South Korea by
retching up tensions in stages."
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