World Wide Words -- 06 Mar 10
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Mar 5 18:09:08 UTC 2010
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 680 Saturday 6 March 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. Turns of Phrase: Chillwave.
3. Weird Words: Infra dig.
4. What I've learned this week.
5. Q and A: See-saw.
6. 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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SNIP? Several people asked me about my comment in one of the Sic!
items last week: "With that outlook it's a snip at £84,995." Margie
Van Handel commented, "Did you really mean 'snip'? If so, would you
explain the reference?" Gladly. "Snip" here is a British slang term
recorded from the 1920s meaning a bargain or something surprisingly
cheap. "Snip" has had other - conflicting - figurative senses down
the centuries, including a swindle or deception, a sure thing, an
insignificant person, and an easy task.
IT'S NOT A NOTTLE Several ingenious suggestions were submitted for
a derivation of "nottle", the variation on the bottle I mentioned
last time. The most common, and plausible, was "nozzle" + "bottle".
However, I finally managed this week to contact the firm mentioned
in the article, only to be told that it was a misprint, for the
rather better known "tottle".
Arnold Zwicky told me of another variation, HOTTLE (a hot bottle).
Jocelyn Dodd introduced me to the FOTTLE, a folding bottle. Hottles
are still around but fottle never caught on. These sounded
intriguing, so I've looked into their history and written a piece
about them - adding quotations, pictures, a couple of humorous
poems and a joke - which is on the Web site. You can reach it via
http://wwwords.org?NTLL. Its tone may be deduced from the title:
Notta Lotta Nottle, which is a reference to an old advertisement
from the UK's Milk Marketing Board, "Milk's Gotta Lotta Bottle".
Several readers were sufficiently persuaded by my comment that my
searches for "nottle" were bedevilled by references to Gussie Fink-
Nottle that they kindly told me about ways to eliminate such false
results. Many thanks to you all, but perhaps I should have made it
plainer that my comment was a facetious reference to the continuing
popularity of one of Wodehouse's characters rather than a serious
complaint. There are more formidable obstacles to finding examples
of such words, especially all the misprints for "bottle". These are
so common, or so often manufactured through indistinct text being
read by optical-character-recognition software, that searches for
words like "hottle" and "fottle" are difficult in digital archives.
But at least I now know why I couldn't find examples of "nottle".
GOING TO THE DOGS Readers with good knowledge of the Bible pointed
out a number of references, especially Exodus 22:31: "And ye shall
be holy men unto me: neither shall ye eat any flesh that is torn of
beasts in the field; ye shall cast it to the dogs." The idea of
something that is fit only for dogs is clearly an ancient one.
2. Turns of Phrase: Chillwave
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Unless one is immersed in the pop-music scene, genres can come and
go before you've noticed them. This one appeared in the summer of
2009 and within three months was being described as past its peak,
though references to its demise have proved premature.
It has also been derided as one of the dafter genre coinages, and
that's in a scene that has grunge, goat metal, psychobilly, gabba,
shoegazing, grebo and grindcore. Other names that have been applied
to it are "lo-fi" (though that's a generic term dating from the
1980s and didn't catch on), "glo-fi" and "hypnagogic pop".
As so often with derivative musical forms, it's difficult to define
chillwave. One writer has called it "mellow, cooled-out, laid-back
beach music". Another tried "lo-fi but pop; dance-influenced but
bedroom-based; summery but melancholic." Tracks considered to be
definitive include Feel It All Around, by Washed Out, Bicycle by
Memory Tapes and Psychic Chasms by Neon Indian.
There is now a name for the latest game in indie rock.
"Chillwave" describes those low-fi electropop newbies who
deal in hazy, stoned, warped retro grooves.
[The Irish Times, 4 Dec. 2009.]
It's a highly anticipated album from a one-man lo-fi
band that defines the term "chillwave." These washed-out
electronic beats and smooth melodies will make even the
most Minnesota of winters feel like a lazy summer day.
[Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), 31 Jan. 2010.]
3. Weird Words: Infra dig /'Infr@ 'dIg/
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It refers to something that's beneath one's dignity. We hear and
read this originally British term much less than we once did; it's
used now more often outside Britain than within it. That's largely
because in the UK it has become a cliché, linked to historical
class attitudes that are commonly derided. The result is that it's
hard to employ it other than facetiously. Sometimes, an attempt at
humour leads to its appearing in a weaker sense of a thing that's
merely unfashionable:
Where rosé used to be infra dig, it's now de rigueur.
[Daily Telegraph, 13 May 2009.]
It belongs to an earlier age, in which some actions or activities
were beneath one's dignity or demeaning to one's station in life, a
view taken seriously by the middle classes in particular. Commerce
was the classic example; to be thought "in trade" would once have
been mortifying. To undertake anything artisanal other than as a
hobby was also inconceivable.
[Charles Darwin] was taught to see the oppressed black
as a "brother". This explains why, when he went to
Edinburgh University at 16, he could apprentice himself
to a freed Guyanese slave to learn the art of bird
preservation without thinking it infra dig.
[The Times, 22 Jan. 2009. The former slave was named
John Edmonstone.]
"Infra dig" is a colloquial Latin abbreviation of the phrase "infra
dignitatem", beneath (one's) dignity. One example shows that a
snobbish antipathy has not always been solely the preserve of the
British:
It would be regarded as _infra dig._, I am told, for
an American professor of English to concern himself too
actively with the English spoken by nearly a hundred
millions of his countrymen. He may, if he will, devote a
lifetime to the English dialect of Norfolk or Dorset, but
he may not waste his time and his dignity upon the
dialect of his janitor, his barber and his trousers-
presser.
[The American Language, by H.L. Mencken, 1921.]
4. What I've learned this week
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STEAMING ON A once-favourite expression in Britain, coined at the
dawn of the television age, was "steam radio" for the older medium,
implying it was a technological fossil (http://wwwords.org?STRD).
It's becoming very apparent that the rise of new media is leading
to scheduled channel-based television being adversely compared with
the new-style online, digital, non-linear, watch-it-when-you-want
type. In the UK this has led by analogy to "steam television" being
created as a pejorative epithet. But the comparative rarity of its
appearances suggests that writers are independently reinventing it
at need. The earliest I've found was in the Glasgow Sunday Herald
in June 1999: "[He] expressed his lack of enthusiasm for digital,
based on concern about quality of reception, and advocates that
viewers should stick with 'steam television' for the time being."
It also appeared in the Guardian last Saturday: "It was said that
'steam television' would die, but most people still watch their TV
live and the 'mixed diet' of channels still works."
5. Q and A: See-saw
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Q. At the age of 37 I can't believe that I have never queried or
pondered the origin of the word "see-saw", the child's playground
toy, known to the Americans as a teeter-totter, until the other
night when reading a book to my daughter in which two bears were
playing on one. I had assumed it to be a nonsensical reduplicated
compound (I learned that phrase from you!) but the picture in the
book made me think of the visual sense of "see" and "saw". The bear
at the "up end" of the see-saw had a good view whilst the one at
the "down end" didn't, thus "up bear" could see but "down bear"
saw, past tense. Is it as simple as that? [Alistair Archibald]
A. You're right that "see-saw" is a reduplicated compound. But the
evidence says it's the "see" part of the expression that's the
nonsensically reduplicated bit and that "saw" refers to the wood-
cutting tool, not to having seen something.
The connection was first mentioned in a play by Richard Brome, The
Antipodes, first performed in 1638. Later references support the
idea that it may have been part of a chant, a work song, used by
pairs of sawyers to keep their rhythm while pushing and pulling a
big two-handled saw. They might have been working on the level or
they could have been pit-sawing, with one man above the other.
Brome's version of the chant went "see saw, sacke a downe", while
another from about 1685 had "see saw, sack a day". A third was in
another play the following century, Gammer Gurton's Garland, as
"See Saw, sacaradown, / Which is the way to London town?" With this
example it had turned into a children's rhyme, with a version of
another rhyme, "See-saw, Margery Daw", turning up in the same play.
Nobody knows when the playground see-saw was invented. The evidence
from "see-saw" is very late, with the first explicit references
under that name not found before the early nineteenth century. But
there's a much older word, the splendid "teeter-totter" that you
mentioned Americans have retained. It has had several spellings,
one from East Anglia being "teeter-cum-tauter". The oldest is
"titter-totter", which appears in John Palsgrave's Lesclarcissement
de la Langue Françoyse of 1530. Palsgrave gives it as the English
equivalent of the old French "balenchoeres" (now "balançoire"),
from "balancer", to balance.
6. Sic!
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A leaflet arrived in the post on Monday about events at my local
garden centre. For March it says "Grow your own potatoes". For
April "Grow your own month". A nice bunch of Junes would suit me.
Ross Mackenzie tells us that a National Statistics Publication for
Scotland dated 24 February had the title "Children Looked After
Statistics 2008-09". Was the Scots government reintroducing child
labour? The publication, it transpired, was reporting statistics
for children in care, those being "looked after".
On Friday, the Guardian included this correction: "On the page of
news briefs, a small photo purported to show 'Lady Gaga, wearing a
jewel-encrusted lobster on her head'. A reader notes: 'She is
wearing a crayfish.' Of course."
The Associated Press reported on Friday about claims in a new book
that Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il spent millions on "everything from
luxury cars, carpets and exotic foods, to monitors that can detect
heartbeats of people hiding behind walls and gold-plated handguns."
Peter Weinrich wondered if North Koreans were really that small.
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