World Wide Words -- 23 Oct 10
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Oct 22 16:17:13 UTC 2010
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 709 Saturday 23 October 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: Culpon.
3. Wordface.
4. Q and A: Thrown for a loop.
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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SIXPENNY NAILS Peter Harvey pointed out another case of currency
being used as a measure. In Scotland, it has long been common to
refer to "seventy-shilling beers", "eighty-shilling beers" and the
like. These are references to their alcoholic strength and derive
from the excise duty that was charged on a barrel in the latter
part of the nineteenth century.
2. Weird Words: Culpon /'kVlp at n/
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Those of us faced with cutting a joint to serve at the table would
no doubt refer to it as carving, no matter what variety of animal
was concerned.
It was very different in Tudor times, if we are to believe a book
of 1508 by Wynkyn de Worde, once an apprentice to William Caxton,
England's first printer. Its title was The Boke of Keruying. It
started "Here begynneth the boke of keruynge and sewynge and all
the feestes in the yere", which in modern English would be "Here
begins the book of carving and serving and all the feasts in the
year". Under the heading of "Terms of a Keruer" appeared a long
list of the terms for carving any type of flesh, fowl or fish.
The attentive reader (who was intended to be the master of a big
household, not a presumably illiterate servant) was instructed that
one should break a deer, disfigure a peacock, dismember a heron,
lift a swan, unjoint a bittern, unbrace a mallard, thigh a pigeon,
splat a pike, scull a tench and culpon a trout. But never, never
carve.
If all this reminds you a little of the long lists of collective
terms for birds (murmuration of starlings, unkindness of ravens,
tiding of magpies, exaltation of larks) which were first listed in
The Book of St Albans of 1486, you may guess that a lot of these
carving terms were intended more for the pleasure of readers with
time to savour the delights of the English language than for their
servants to use at table. The list was repeated in later centuries
in many works, such as Hannah Woolley's The Compleat Maidservant or
Young Maiden's Tutor of 1685 and Edw Smedley's Encyclopaedia
Metropolitana of 1845.
"Culpon", meaning a piece cut off, a portion or slice, is first
recorded in Chaucer's Prologue to the Canterbury Tales in about
1386. It's from Old French "colpon", via Latin "colpus" from Greek
"kolaphos", a blow with the fist. In the early nineteenth century -
by then "culpon" was obsolete - the French word was borrowed again
as "coupon", which etymologically speaking is a thing cut out.
3. Wordface
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A BASKET CASE Richard Brock asked me about a word that baffled his
book group: FISH-BASS. It appears in A Month in the Country by J L
Carr, published in 1980: "Then I set off half-heartedly, as best I
could sheltering my spare clothes (which were in the straw fish-
bass) under my coat." The term seems to be unique to Carr, but its
second part, "bass", was once fairly common. It referred to a type
of basket made of bass, strictly the inner bark of the lime, but
more loosely the leaf-stalks of various plants, such as split
rushes or certain types of palms (or, in this case, straw). A fish-
bass is presumably a basket made of bass that is designed to hold
fish, though in Carr's story it contained tools as well as clothes.
OF CATS, DOGS AND FROGS "Here in Australia," Michael Shannon e-
mailed, "we've got a history of coming up with unusual turns of
phrase for various everyday things or events. Back in the Nineties,
the Home Hardware group created a couple of mascots, two dogs named
Rusty & Sandy. Because they were dogs there was no way they would
tolerate the stores issuing sales brochures with the ignominious
name of catalogue, so they decided to call theirs the DOGALOGUE.
The dogalogue has been a running joke in the hardware industry ever
since. It seems like someone in the marketing department of the
Australian Geographic Society thought it was good enough to
imitate. Recently, I was walking past one of their retail shops
only to discover they've released a FROGALOGUE, featuring the
photogenic and endangered green tree frog. I'm almost dreading what
the next invention will be. Might we be in for a rush of
wombatalogues, platypusalogues, or wallabyalogues?"
4. Q and A: Thrown for a loop
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Q. I am wondering about "thrown for a loop", which means to be
greatly surprised. Can you tell me where it comes from? [Barry
Bloom, California]
A. All sorts of suggestions have been put forward - with greatly
varying levels of certitude - about the image behind this American
expression. The most popular ones include an aircraft looping the
loop, a person being physically knocked head over heels, or a calf
brought down by a lariat looped around a leg. In an entry written
many years ago, the Oxford English Dictionary suggests that it may
derive from passengers looping the loop in an early roller coaster.
(It charmingly calls it by the obsolete term "centrifugal railway",
this name having been given to several looping rides in the early
nineteenth century, originally in France but then from the 1840s in
the UK and the USA.)
Part of the problem is that there are actually two forms of the
expression, "knock somebody for a loop" and "throw somebody for a
loop", and various meanings for both. You might be saying that you
have surprised, astonished, shocked or confused a person, caught
them off guard, or made a strong impression on them. You might even
be saying that that they've actually been knocked down.
The written evidence - which is all we've got to go on - dates from
the early 1920s. There's no doubt that the first form was "knocked
for a loop" and was a sporting term, especially in boxing:
Round after round, the fight goes on with continued
reports of heavy punching, suddenly followed by a loud
roar from the crowd. Father: "Listen! Somebody got
knocked for a loop sure as guns!"
[The Wireless Age, Aug. 1921. This is part of its
report into the historic broadcast of the Dempsey-
Carpentier heavyweight championship prize fight by the
WJY station of New York on 2 Jul. 1921.]
Casey Is Knocked For a Loop Early By Everett Boxer
[A headline in the Oakland Tribune, 22 Jul. 1922.]
This suggests that the original idea may have been a punch that was
heavy enough to lay out an opponent by making him fall backwards
and roll over. It may always have been a metaphor; certainly it's
already become so even in these early appearances - the report
under the headline in the Oakland Tribune refers to an easy win,
not to a specific blow. Another early use shows that it had already
been in the language long enough to gather the sense of something
that surprises or astonishes:
"Cut the bread," she commanded, "and I'll make some
bacon sandwiches that will knock you for a loop." He
wheeled toward the bread-box and reached for a loaf.
[The Last Mile, by Frank A McAlister, 1922.]
Throwing somebody for a loop, on the other hand, doesn't appear for
about another decade and seems always to have had the idea behind
it that you mention - primarily surprise. Did its early users want
a more forceful saying than the baseball-originated "throw someone
a curve"? Or did they have judo in mind? Or had they just created a
variation on "knock for a loop" without thinking about it? I rather
suspect the last of these. But trying to get inside the minds of
casual creators of idioms 80 years after the event is always going
to be difficult.
5. Sic!
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An online advert for Virbac Yard Spray, Robert Bendesky discovered,
lists the following as one of its benefits: "Kills fleas and ticks
that infest your yard, and then your pet".
Joe Orfant was surprised to learn from a headline in the Lowell Sun
of Massachusetts on 20 October that "Gum crime has held steady in
Lowell."
Jeremy Busch passed us the sentence with which Slate.com ended its
summary of a story about rapper TI talking a suicidal man down from
the ledge of a building: "After being busted on drug charges in Los
Angeles last month, a federal judge will decide on Friday whether
to rescind his probation and send the rapper back to prison."
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