World Wide Words -- 15 May 10
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri May 14 16:57:50 UTC 2010
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 690 Saturday 15 May 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: Swoose.
3. This week.
4. Q and A: Give someone the sack.
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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TIME OUT My forthcoming holiday is such that it will be difficult
to keep World Wide Words running while I'm away. I'm also planning
changes to the e-magazine and the Web site, to reduce my workload
week by week, which will need time to prepare. Because of this, the
next issue will be published on 19 June. Apologies to everyone for
the long gap between issues.
SHEMOZZLE Many readers pointed out that "schlimazel" comes from
the same roots as the supposed origin of "shemozzle". However, the
words have very different senses, since a schlimazel is a person
who is chronically unlucky (as the folk saying has it, "when a
schlimazel manufactures shrouds, people stop dying.")
Slang guru Jonathon Green was certain that the Yiddish words which
I cited as from US English were earlier known in England. He quoted
the Jewish Chronicle of 12 August 1881, which lists some of them.
He commented, "That said, the sheer volume of US immigrant Yiddish
speakers means that such speech is more commonly found across the
Atlantic, then and since." He has found earlier uses of "shemozzle"
by the racing journalist Arthur Binstead, who penned "gloriously
non-PC" columns in the Sporting Times at the end of the nineteenth
century under the pseudonym "Morris the Mohel". (Mohel is a person
who is qualified to perform the Jewish rite of circumcision.)
Andreas Schaefer e-mailed from Cologne to tell me about the German
colloquial term "Schlamassel", a confusion or mess, so similar in
sense to "shemozzle". My etymological sources say it was borrowed
from the same Yiddish source as "schlimazel" in the eighteenth
century. It might be that the latter form came from the German of
nineteenth-century immigrants to Britain (only some of whom were
Jewish, of course), rather than from Yiddish, and that this might
explain the difference in spelling and confusion over its origin,
as well as the existence of both "schlimazel" and "shemozzle" side-
by-side in urban slang of late nineteenth-century England. This, I
have to say, is a guess on my part!
EARLY DOORS Steve Hodder is representative of several readers who
recalled the specifically pub-related associations of the idiom:
"Over 30 years ago in Keighley I was told that one pub did 'early
doors' because it opened, presumably illegally, at 5.00pm rather
than at the then statutory 5.30pm. This usage was thus in keeping
with its Victorian theatrical origins." Ian Ellard reports that it
is still about: "Pleasingly, it is still used for almost the exact
purpose that it was coined, as a time when one could leave the bar
and head to a nightclub in order to get in 'before the crush' and
get the drinks in without a long queue. Perhaps the theatricality
of the nightclub is not lost on young slang-slingers."
2. Weird Words: Swoose /swu:s/
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I was searching the Oxford English Dictionary for a collective term
for swans when I encountered this:
A bird prodigy of evil and hybrid character is the
despair of a Norfolk farmer. It rejoices in the name of
the "swoose", a portmanteau word indicating its origin,
for its father was a swan and its mother a goose. This
ill-assorted pair had three children - three "sweese".
[Daily Mail, 13 July 1920.]
It wasn't the earliest mention of this curious hybrid, the first
having been in the Harrison Times of Arkansas in 1911, though it,
too, referred to a bird accidentally bred in Norfolk. The name must
have been fairly widely known by 1920, since a horse named Swoose
was racing then. The Daily Mail mentioned the birds several times
during that year, reporting that the young sweese were terrorising
the farmyard and killing ducks. "Of late," the paper noted, "their
character has been relapsing into such savagery as may prove their
ruin." News of the birds spread widely. If we are to believe this
American report, their name briefly became part of the vernacular:
Much public interest is evinced in these queer birds
and nowadays when an ill-tempered husband rouses his wife
to the point of retaliation, she gives vent to her
feelings in the culminating insult: "You swoose!"
[Wisconsin State Journal, 5 Sep. 1920.]
A very few other sweese appeared in the 1920s and 1930s as crosses
between various breeds of goose and swan that were kept together on
farms. The word reached the hit parade in 1941 when Alexander the
Swoose, a song performed by the Kay Kyser band, reached number 3 in
the charts.
This led directly to the most famous swoose, a B-17 bomber that
American forces based in Australia had created by cannibalising
other aircraft and nicknamed the Swoose because of its hybrid
character. It was piloted by Frank Kurtz, who in 1944 named his
daughter after the plane. Swoosie Kurtz has become a well-known
actress. She was once asked whether she had thought of changing her
name: "Change it to what - Tiffany? It's been an advantage. It's
unforgettable. I'm the only one."
3. This week
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CLASH OF WORDS Ron Besdansky asked me about a word he came across
recently: ALLISION. Did I know it? No, it's new to me. The Oxford
English Dictionary, in an old entry, marks it as possibly obsolete,
but a search shows that it is still very much around, though only
in the US. In American maritime law, an allision occurs when a ship
hits a stationary object, such as a wharf or a ship at anchor or
docked. For you and me, that's a collision, but US law reserves
that word for an impact between two moving ships. This example is
from the US Federal News Service last August: "The three gentlemen
assisted the Coast Guard with the rescue of two boaters who were
injured following an allision between a 23-foot pleasure craft and
the Jekyll Creek jetties." The word is from Latin "allidere", to
strike against something. The distinction between "collision" and
"allision" was present in classical Latin, since the former is from
"collidere", to strike together. Both contain the root "laedere",
to injure, damage or hurt.
TERM OF TRADE Shiv Anand was introduced to a new word by one of
his colleagues: FIXTURING, another term I've never encountered. It
isn't in any dictionary he and I have consulted. A search, however,
shows that it's common in certain technical trades. Examples are on
record back to the 1950s at least. It seems to mean "the process,
technique or method of fixing" ("The tube can be placed in the
measuring cell in any aspect, so there is absolutely no need for
fixturing" -- Metalworking Production, 22 Mar. 2010). It is also
known in Australia for the process of organising a list of fixtures
in sports ("They were the high points of a match that reflected the
tough conditions and the round-one fixturing." -- The Australian,
15 Mar 2010.]
SMALL MISTAKE IN DICTIONARY, WORLD YAWNS Much has been made in
newspaper reports this week of the discovery by Dr Stephen Hughes
of the University of Technology in Brisbane of an error in the
Oxford English Dictionary. The passage of time has not been kind to
many of the OED's definitions, which were written a century ago or
more (as in continental drift: "the postulated movement of the
existing continents to their present positions", making it sound
like a crackpot theory, which at the time geologists thought it
was). Some technical definitions are so abstruse that they are
unintelligible to anybody who doesn't already know the answer. Try
your mental abilities on the one for "trondhjemite" ("Any
leucocratic tonalite, esp. one in which the plagioclase is
oligoclase"), which may bring to mind Dr Johnson's definition of a
network: "Any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances,
with interstices between the intersections." But Dr Hughes found
what he calls a schoolboy error in the OED's entry for "siphon",
written in 1911, which says it works by atmospheric pressure rather
than, correctly, by gravity. He commented, "An extensive check of
online and offline dictionaries did not reveal a single dictionary
that correctly referred to gravity being the operative force." My
check showed that many current works are indeed wrong, including
the Bloomsbury, Collins, Penguin, American Heritage, and Random
House Webster dictionaries. (I've also found that some books on
physics explain it incorrectly, which is even more worrying.) But
current Oxford dictionaries other than the OED get it right, so
that in telling the publishers about the mistake, Dr Hughes may be
preaching to the choir.
PERILS OF TRANSLATION Aniruddh Sankaran is a member of an online
forum for frequent flyers. Earlier this week, another member asked
about a sign he'd seen on the Web site of Mumbai Airport: CUPBOARD
DE MUTATION. A Web search finds only one other example, at Kolkata
airport: "Money and communications: There are banks and cupboard de
mutation in the terminals. A announce charge is also untaken." What
is this odd phrase? I'm fairly sure, based on the context and the
poor English of the Kolkata example, that somebody has made a hash
of translating the standard international term "bureau de change"
into English, turning the French "change" into English "mutation".
I surmise that "bureau" was assumed to be in the sense of a writing
desk, though how it then turned into a cupboard is anybody's guess.
It reminds me of Lewis Carroll's unanswered riddle, "why is a raven
like a writing desk?" Why is a bureau like a cupboard?
4. Q and A: Give someone the sack
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Q. What is the origin of "giving someone the sack" or "sacking
them"? None of my dictionaries are any help on this. [Aileen Kelly,
Australia]
A. The strangest thing about this colloquial expression is how
ancient it is. Though recorded in English only from early in the
nineteenth century, it's very much older in both French and Dutch.
In 1611, Randall Cotgrave recorded a French equivalent, "On luy a
donné son sac" in his French-English dictionary and explained it as
"he hath his passport given him (said of a servant whom his master
hath put away)". Clearly, the expression was even older, though it
has since died out in French in that form. A Dutch form "den zak
krijgen" was recorded even earlier.
The usual explanation is that a workman almost always had his own
tools, which were often very valuable. It's argued that presenting
a workman with a sack to carry them away in, either figuratively or
literally, was a well-understood signal of dismissal. It sounds too
much like an explanation created in desperation for us to accept it
uncritically, but I can find no other suggestion.
5. Sic!
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This sentence, Margaret Condy reports, appeared in the Peterborough
Examiner, Ontario, on 6 May: "Patrick Heeley pushed himself into
the Villa Auto Wash kiosk looking for money wrapped in a High
School Musical and armed with a mini red flashlight."
The same day, the Morning Sentinel of Waterville, Maine, reprinted
an article from the Bangor Daily News headlined, "Student stabbed
on Husson University Campus." Bob Gray tells us that a caption read
in part: "Wolk allegedly attacked the student in a parking lot with
a knife who sustained non-life-threatening injuries." Let's hope
the student's OK, too.
That Gaul gets everywhere. Padmavyuha submitted a photograph taken
at Liverpool Street Station in London of a sign advertising fare
discounts through the Web site of East Coast Rail: "Look out for
the discounted fares highlighted with a red asterix."
Sarah Hurst e-mailed from the US with her "Punctuation Goof of the
Week". She found it in federal grant proposal instructions: "The
statute highlights six barriers that can impede equitable access or
participation: gender, race, national origin, color disability, or
age." Apparently the colour-blind lobby is now very powerful.
Chris Wilcox reports: "The big news from Britain, according to Fox
News, is that the Queen is to be prime minister: 'Queen Elizabeth
accepted the invitation of Conservative Party leader David Cameron
to become Britain's new prime minister Tuesday night.'" It has
since been changed, quite probably to Her Majesty's relief.
The Web site of the Borrowdale Gates Hotel in Cumbria features this
introductory text, Val Perman tells us: "Several rooms with patio
doors lead directly to manicured lawns, some with balconies bathed
in sunshine and generous baths." He decided not to stay: he didn't
want the bath to be on the balcony, even to bathe in sunshine.
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