World Wide Words -- 02 Apr 11

Fri Apr 1 16:35:06 UTC 2011

WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 730          Saturday 2 April 2011
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Editor: Michael Quinion             US advisory editor: Julane Marx
Website: http://www.worldwidewords.org               ISSN 1470-1448
-------------------------------------------------------------------

      A formatted version of this e-magazine is available 
      online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/dmyo.htm

     This e-magazine is best viewed in a fixed-pitch font.
   For a key to phonetic symbols, see http://wwwords.org?PRON

Contents
-------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Tilly-vally.
3. Wordface.
4. Q and A: Bounty hunter.
5. Sic!
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.

1. Feedback, notes and comments
-------------------------------------------------------------------
LUSTRUM  Peter Ingerman and Andrew Fisher pointed out that in 
writing about this word I had missed an opportunity for including 
yet another weird word: "suovetaurilia". So far as I know only the 
Chambers Dictionary includes this Latin mouthful, which is formed 
from "sus", pig, "ovis", sheep, and "taurus", ox. It refers to the 
sacrifice of a sheep, a pig and an ox at the lustrum ceremony.

I mentioned the Robert Harris novel entitled Lustrum. David Larkin 
e-mailed from Cape Cod, "Except, of course, in the US, where Simon 
& Schuster, in their never-ending battle to protect us from big 
words, renamed the novel Conspirata, which isn't a word at all. I 
assume their publicists felt it had more marketing, er, luster."

"'Lustrum' may be an odd ball on that side of the pond," wrote John 
Fentner, "but us Yanks learned it from the movie Rooster Cogburn of 
1975: 'Judge Parker: You have served this court for almost two 
lustrums. Rooster Cogburn: What's a lustrum, Judge? Judge Parker: 
Five years. Don't interrupt me.'" Tony McCoy O'Grady pointed out 
that the word lingers in Catholic Church circles: "Archbishops and 
bishops from around the world have to report to Rome (on the state 
of things in their dioceses) every five years, and these trips are 
known as lustral visits."

On "censor", Anne O'Brien Lloyd wrote from Saskatoon: "The teacher 
responsible for discipline in a French school was known as Monsieur 
le Censeur. Should the person responsible be a woman, she was known 
as Madame le (not la) Censeur, because otherwise the kids would 
turn her into a lift: Madame l'Ascenseur, and such disrespect was 
at all costs to be avoided."

2. Weird Words: Tilly-vally
-------------------------------------------------------------------
No language can ever have too many words with which its speakers 
may deride an assertion as hogwash, codswallop, baloney, poppycock, 
twaddle, cobblers, bosh, tosh or stuff and nonsense. "Tilly-vally" 
is a member of this set, these days usefully obscure, so it may be 
employed without too great a risk of dire consequences. It also has 
the imprimatur of having been employed by our greatest playwright, 
though in an older spelling:

    HOSTESS QUICKLY: Tilly-fally, Sir John, never tell me; 
    your ancient swaggerer comes not to my doors.
    [Henry IV, Part Two, by William Shakespeare, 1597-8. 
    He uses it again in Twelfth Night.]

It's fairly common in writings down to the nineteenth century, but 
in recent times we have preferred more boisterous epithets with 
which to express our disapprobation, letting it fall away with such 
other derogatory expressions as the imitative "pshaw!".

Various forms are known, such as "tillie-vallie", "tilley-valley" 
and "tillie-wallie" as well as "tilly-fally". The source is quite 
remarkably obscure. Some older dictionaries insist it's Scots in 
origin. Other authorities have claimed it was a hunting phrase 
borrowed from the French (presumably connected with "tally-ho!") or 
that it was a mere minor variation on "fiddle-faddle". Sir Walter 
Scott had a character suggest that it derives from the Latin word 
"titivillitium", a trifle or a trivial item of gossip. Modern 
etymologists have wondered about a connection with "dilly-dally"; 
Anatoly Liberman commented in his Oxford Etymologist blog in 2007 
that "The sound group 'dil', along with 'till-', suggests something 
frivolous. It alludes to meandering and useless work."

    "So please your Ladyship, we do not think of marrying 
    her as yet," returned Susan, in consternation. "Tilly 
    vally, Susan Talbot, tell me not such folly as that. Why, 
    the maid is over seventeen at the very least!"
    [Unknown to History, by Charlotte M Yonge, 1882.]

3. Wordface
-------------------------------------------------------------------
V2G  This abbreviation is likely to be appearing more often in the 
future. It's short for VEHICLE-TO-GRID and is being promoted as a 
way to boost renewable energy sources. It's based on the fact that 
electric vehicles all contain powerful storage batteries, which are 
connected to a power supply for charging when the vehicles aren't 
being used. V2G connects the batteries to the electricity grid and 
exploits the energy stored in them to temporarily supplement the 
electricity supply instead of, for example, firing up another power 
station. The vehicle batteries would then be topped up using off-
peak power, perhaps from renewable resources such as wind turbines, 
whose generated power would otherwise be going to waste. The term 
and the concept have been promoted for at least the last decade but 
are only now becoming more widely known as the number of electric 
vehicles grows.

BANKRUPT  The word BROSHERING turned up in one of the late Ivor 
Brown's books on language and led me down unfrequented pathways to 
ancient public-school slang. I found it in only one other place, 
Reminiscences of Eton by the Reverend Charles Allix Wilkinson of 
1888, "'Appius', so-called, had been the head of a conspiracy for 
'broshering' their dame, that was, eating her out of house and home 
- eating and drinking everything that was on the table, and what 
was sent up afterwards, and still always asking for more." (At Eton 
College, a dame was a matron - in the language of the time this 
meant a married woman, especially one of mature years - who kept a 
boarding-house for boys at the school.) Doug Wilson of the American 
Dialect Society suggested that it was the same word as "brosier" 
and indeed in Farmer and Henley's Slang and its Analogues of 1890 
"brosiering my dame" was described as Eton College slang in this 
way: "At Eton, when a dame keeps an unusually bad table, the boys 
agree together on a day to eat, pocket, or waste everything eatable 
in the house. The censure is well understood, and the hint is 
generally effective". Other sources note it was originally Cheshire 
slang for a bankrupt and that an Eton boy who had spent all his 
pocket money was said to be "brosiered". Such is the school slang 
of yesteryear, of which there is nothing deader.

4. Q and A: Bounty hunter
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. A friend has circulated an e-mail that suggests that the term 
"bounty hunter" comes from the search for HMS Bounty, the famous 
ship captained by William Bligh that mutinied in April 1789. It 
also suggests that Captain Edward Edwards of HMS Pandora, who 
captured ten of the mutineers on Tahiti, was the original bounty 
hunter. What do you think? [Ray Hattingh, South Africa]

A. The facts of the story about Captain Edwards being sent out to 
hunt down the mutineers and return them to England for trial are 
correct. His mission was only partly successful. He did capture 
some mutineers on Tahiti, but he failed to find the uncharted 
Pitcairn Island, his ship was wrecked on Australia's Great Barrier 
Reef and he and the surviving crew and mutineers were forced to 
make a long voyage in open boats, much as Bligh had had to after 
the mutiny. It's an extraordinary story but it has nothing whatever 
to do with the term "bounty hunter".

Bligh's ship was named for the fruitfulness of nature or generosity 
of God. Bounties were also cash rewards to encourage some activity. 
For example, they were given to recruits on joining the army or 
navy. The American colonies offered bounties from about the middle 
of the eighteenth century for the scalps of American Indians and 
for wanted criminals taken dead or alive. The following century, it 
was common in the US to offer cash bounties for the pelts or scalps 
of some unwanted or dangerous species of animal, such as bears, 
wolves, skunks or coyotes.

After a Supreme Court ruling in 1872, individuals outside formal 
law enforcement bodies could track down fugitives from bail to get 
a reward, especially those that the law had trouble apprehending 
because they'd skipped across county or state lines. Civilian 
bounty hunters are still known in the US (the only country apart 
from the Philippines that permits them); they go by names such as 
bail enforcement agent or recovery agent. Most early bounty hunters 
remained anonymous for very good reason. A very few were famous (or 
infamous), such as Jack Duncan of Texas and Charlie Siringo of the 
Pinkerton Agency. More recent fictional ones, such as Rooster 
Cogburn of True Grit, were based on their stories.

When I began to look for the written evidence for the term, I was 
surprised by what turned up - or more correctly by what didn't. 
There's no evidence that the early real-life "bounty hunters" were 
called that by their contemporaries. The term came late into the 
language and the first examples are all references to hunters of 
wild animals, not humans. This is the earliest I've found:

    Cheyenne _Leader_, 23rd: A trifle over $500 worth of 
    warrants were issued at the court house yesterday in 
    favor of bounty hunters. From 8 o'clock in the morning 
    until the closing hour in the afternoon boys and men were 
    continually visiting the county clerk's office with 
    installments of gopher scalps, varying from the small 
    boy's mite of fifty-two to the professional's 
    contribution of 500.
    [Salt Lake Daily Tribune, 26 June 1887.]

A shift from a hunter of animals to a hunter-down of criminals is 
easy to understand but you have to come a lot nearer the present 
day to find examples. An ambiguous example dated 1930 is in the 
Oxford English Dictionary's entry, but the first I've been able to 
find that explicitly refer to the apprehension of humans are the 
1954 film The Bounty Hunter, which starred Randolph Scott on the 
track of three murdering train robbers, and Elmore Leonard's book 
of the same title in the same year.

Even if Captain Edwards had been paid a bounty for capturing the 
Bounty's mutineers - which he wasn't - he couldn't have been called 
a bounty hunter. To apply the term to the pursuers of fugitives in 
the late nineteenth-century US is equally anachronistic.

6. Sic!
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Norton described the sentence in a Washington Post report on 
23 March as "the higher mathematics": "The two planes that landed 
without tower help were the last three inbound commercial flights 
until 5 a.m., the source said."

This is from an item in the New York Times of 28 March, courtesy of 
Belinda Hardman: "Researchers using brain imagining technology have 
since found that foods high in sugar or fat activate the same 
reward system as cocaine and other drugs."

On 25 March, Connie Schmitt tells us, The Capital of Annapolis, 
Maryland, reported that "Veterinarian says diabetes is easy to 
catch if you know the signs".

Gordon Schochet found a rather grisly headline in an article with 
an Associated Press byline on FindLaw, dated 28 March, which I have 
filed under "could have been better expressed": "Fla [Florida] 
parents charged with killing daughter in court."

A. Subscription information
-------------------------------------------------------------------
To leave the list, change your subscription address or resubscribe, 
please visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/index.htm 

You can also maintain your subscription by e-mail. For a list of 
commands, send this message to listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org:

  INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS

This e-magazine is also available as an RSS feed, whose source is 
at http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/newsletter.xml .

Back issues are at http://www.worldwidewords.org/backissues/ .

B. E-mail contact addresses
-------------------------------------------------------------------
* Comments on e-magazine mailings are always welcome. They should 
  be sent to me at wordseditor at worldwidewords.org . I do try to 
  respond, but pressures of time often prevent me from doing so. 
* Items for "Sic!" should go to wordsclangers at worldwidewords.org .
  Submissions will usually be acknowledged.
* Questions intended to be answered in the Q and A section should 
  be addressed to wordsquestions at worldwidewords.org (please don't 
  use this address to respond to published answers to questions - 
  e-mail the comment address instead).
* Problems with subscriptions that cannot be handled by the list 
  server should be addressed to wordssubs at worldwidewords.org . To
  allow me more time for researching material, please don't e-mail
  me asking for simple subscription changes you can do yourself.

C. Ways to support World Wide Words
-------------------------------------------------------------------
The World Wide Words e-magazine and website are free, but if you 
would like to help with their costs, there are several ways to do 
so. Visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/support.htm for details.

-------------------------------------------------------------------
World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2011. All rights 
reserved. The Words website is at http://www.worldwidewords.org .
-------------------------------------------------------------------
You may reproduce brief extracts from this e-magazine in mailing 
lists, newsletters or newsgroups online, provided that you include 
the copyright notice given above. Reproduction of substantial parts 
of items in printed publications or websites needs permission from 
the editor beforehand (wordseditor at worldwidewords.org). 
-------------------------------------------------------------------