World Wide Words -- 30 Apr 11
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Apr 29 17:08:56 UTC 2011
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 734 Saturday 30 April 2011
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Editor: Michael Quinion US advisory editor: Julane Marx
Website: http://www.worldwidewords.org ISSN 1470-1448
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Now on Twitter as @wwwordseditor
A formatted version of this e-magazine is available
online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/pmts.htm
This e-magazine is best viewed in a fixed-pitch font.
For a key to phonetic symbols, see http://wwwords.org?PRON
Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Mumchance.
3. Wordface.
4. Q and A: From hero to goat.
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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POTCHKY Shayna Kravetz, a fluent Yiddish speaker (her given name
means "beautiful"), wrote from Canada: "Potchky is not just about
dabbling; it also means to take something that's finished and keep
tinkering with it, adding unnecessary or incongruous bits." She
added: "You missed a chance to address one of my favourite words:
'ongepatchked' (both Es are pronounced as schwas). Its root is the
same word. It refers to anything ornate or overdecorated. It is an
insult; you would not tell your friend that her bridal gown was
ongepatchked - at least, not if you wanted to stay friends."
PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR The assiduous Michael Templeton has again
come up with earlier evidence, in this case for "private detective"
and "private investigator" in the sense of a private detective:
"You're mistaken," said his friend. "It's Windround,
the private detective, or Investigator, as he calls
himself. He's just now engaged for my house." ... "That's
by no means my view of the case, Mr. Pikeham. Please to
remember that I'm not one of the detective police; I'm a
private investigator."
[The Ringwoods of Ringwood, by Mervyn Merriton, a
pseudonym of Henry Coe Coape, 1873.]
Coape was an interesting character, by the way. At first sight, he
was the very model of a moneyed upper-middle-class English
gentleman: the eldest son of a sugar refiner who had amassed an
enormous fortune of £300,000, he married into the Irish peerage,
became a justice of the peace, served as a captain in the Royal
Berkshire Yeomanry Cavalry and as Deputy Lieutenant of Essex. Court
records and news reports show he was also what his contemporaries
would have described as a cad and a bounder. He was made bankrupt
in 1855, spent a year in prison, was accused but acquitted of fraud
and was divorced by his wife for adultery, a public and scandalous
matter at the time (his wife alleged in the divorce-court hearing
that he insisted on bringing his lover on holiday with them to
Rome, ostensibly as her maid). He wrote several novels and an
opera, The Fairy Oak, performed at Drury Lane in 1845.
LOGODAEDALUS Larry Nordell wrote: "I don't think I had ever come
across this word before I read World Wide Words, and today I have
come across a variant. I am reading Oreo by Fran Ross, published in
1974." The eponymous heroine is challenged by her tutor, Professor
Lindau, to work out the supposed etymology of a term. When she
succeeds: "The professor was impressed but not struck dumb. 'I am
phonofounded,' he said logodaedalyly."
2. Weird Words: Mumchance /'mVmtsA:ns/
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This is a rare recent appearance:
His attendance was perfect. He attended every possible
meeting. And he sat mumchance throughout every meeting. I
suppose it's how you define work. You can sit like a lump
throughout hundreds of meetings. Or you can engage your
brain to question and to challenge.
[Selkirk Weekend Advertiser, 11 Mar. 2010.]
You may deduce that to remain mumchance is to stay silent, with a
hint that to do so may be a sign of inferior intellect. In fact, in
some English dialects its main sense has been remaining stupidly or
solidly silent.
However, its first meaning was of a game of dice:
But, leaving cardes, lets go to dice a while,
To passage, treitrippe, hazarde, or mumchance.
[Machivell's Dog, an anonymous satire of 1617. The
second of these games is frequently spelled "trey-trip",
because success in playing it depended on the casting of
a trey, a three.]
Nobody now seems to know the exact rules, though as it was often
mentioned in the same breath as the dice game hazard, ancestor of
craps, it's assumed that it was similar.
The form and meaning of "mumchance" suggest it ought to be a close
relative of "mum" in phrases like "keep mum", stay silent. There is
indeed a close connection, though the words have different origins.
"Mum" is an imitative term known from the fourteenth century, while
"mumchance" is sixteenth century, from Middle Dutch "mommecanse",
which has cousins in other Germanic languages and in French.
Paradoxically, the link between the dice game and silence is the
notoriously noisy carnival, since it was traditionally played in
the Netherlands during such festivities, in particular by mummers,
masked actors in dumb-show. Mumchance was always played in silence,
hence the sense.
The game of hazard, by the way, is the source of our word meaning a
risk or danger. Mumchance seems to have been similarly perilous, as
it evolved to mean a high-risk venture and continued in use in that
sense after the dice game had been forgotten. The same name was
also given to a card game, whose rules are as poorly recorded as
those of the dice game, but which was also played in silence.
3. Wordface
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WHAT I'VE LEARNED THIS WEEK If you should ever need the adjective
relating to a pumpkin, you could try CUCURBITACEOUS, though it may
be applied equally to gourds, cucumbers, melons and other trailing
or climbing plants in the family Cucurbitaceae. On the same theme,
PUMPKINIFICATION means being turned into a pumpkin, used especially
for the elevation to divine status of the Roman emperor Claudius
because it was given that name by Seneca the Younger in a political
satire. A species of fish, found in waters off southern Asia and
northern Australia, is known as the WHITEMARGIN STARGAZER, in part
because it hides in the sand of the seabed, staring upwards. A
medieval torture instrument was called a BARNACLE, an instrument
formed from two hinged pieces, which derived from one for clamping
the noses of recalcitrant horses to restrain them during shoeing.
The closure of the M1 motorway in north London because of a fire
had linguistic interest because a mad young man in a dressing gown
ironed a shirt in the middle lane of the deserted road. He was
described as an EXTREME IRONER.
WORD BAG A headline on Sky News read "Iron Lady's bag to go under
hammer", a puzzling reference for anybody unversed in the oddities
of English idiom or of British politics of the 1980s. Former prime
minister Baroness Thatcher is auctioning for charity her famous
Asprey handbag, which she carried to meetings with Ronald Reagan
and Mikhail Gorbachev as well as to cabinet. It became so central
an image of her notoriously tough approach to political opponents
and to recalcitrant ministers (hence the epithet "Iron Lady") that
it led to a new figurative verb entering the language: to handbag.
Some wit quipped that Margaret Thatcher used to keep order among
her ministers by hitting them with her handbag. From The Times of
13 June 1988, "The Foreign Office told her she could not get 'our
money' back from the Common Market. Mrs Thatcher handbagged her way
through an EEC summit in Dublin and won us rebates." It's still to
be found; this is from a Reuters tennis report of 20 January this
year: "The highlight came afterwards when the third seed handbagged
the courtside interviewer over a text message that he had sent to
another player." As both the participants were male, it would seem
that the verb has lost its original sexist overtones.
4. Q and A: From hero to goat
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Q. I was wondering about the origins of the expression "from hero
to goat". [Warren Macnab]
A. Unlike you, Mr Macnab, I've never wondered about its origins.
That's because until you wrote I'd never come across it. As I have
commented previously, writing this e-magazine is educational for
its author, whatever its value to its readers.
So I started my answer from a position of total ignorance, not by
any means a bad jumping-off point. It became clear straightaway
that "from hero to goat" is fairly well known in north America and
means that by his actions a person has in short order shifted from
success to failure, with a concomitant move from praise to blame.
It's common in sports:
Before the final twist, Mack, who led all scorers with
30 points, looked as if he'd go from hero to goat in that
split second when he fouled Brown, who led Pitt with 24
points. He admitted he was guilty of the infraction.
[New York Daily News, 19 Mar. 2011.]
though it turns up in other fields, particularly finance:
Thain has gone from hero to goat in a matter of
months, first saving Merrill Lynch by selling to Bank of
America and then taking the fall when the brokerage
reported a staggering $15 billion quarterly loss that
forced bank executives to seek more financial help from
the government.
[Boston Globe, 23 Jan. 2009.]
It seems clear from its history that the goat is the proverbial
scapegoat, originally the animal sent into the wilderness after the
Jewish chief priest had symbolically laid the sins of the people
upon it. The expression may also be connected with the slightly
older "to get one's goat". (See http://wwwords.org?GTMGT.)
Unsurprisingly, we've no idea who invented it. The first examples
in the modern form turn up in the middle 1920s - the first one I
can find was in the Baltimore Sun on 29 November 1927. All early
examples are from football or basketball. A football story a year
later, though not using the exact form, makes its meaning clear:
But from none of this does one gather that Mr. Wilton
is one of those colorful young men whose deeds in a big
game always give room for praise due a hero - or raps due
the goat - after the game is over.
[Logansport Press, 15 Nov. 1928.]
That example makes such a play on the words "hero" and "goat" that
the expression must surely have been widely known by then. This is
one precursor:
There is no denying the fact that the accident made
Bindley the hero and Alfred the goat.
[Watch Yourself Go By, by Al G Field, 1912.]
6. Sic!
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Susan Nuernberg described what she read in the online University of
Wisconsin Oshkosh Today as a sentence construction mishap: "Both
peregrines can be seen coming and going from their nesting site,
having meals, overlooking the city of Oshkosh and laying eggs
through the University's live webcam."
Homophone alert, from Medical News Today on 21 April, spotted by
Gerald Etkind: "A new joint team of scientists from both Japan and
Europe have determined that there are three bacteria groups in a
person, which is teaming with microorganisms and microbes."
Mathematics revisited, via Norman C Berns. "SmartPlanet can count
fractions (reporting the Canadian winner in Shell's eco-marathon,
'This vehicle gets 2,564.8 miles per gallon') but it comes up short
on addition. 'Prototype entries included 39 vehicles powered by
internal combustion engines. Of those engines, 32 were gas powered
and the remaining 6 entries were split between ethanol and
biodiesel.'"
John Samphier reports that on the ABC24 news in Sydney on 26 April
the newsreader said that a "motorcyclist was killed when he hit a
car not wearing a helmet."
Over-compressed headlines continue to cause confusion. "Man Shot By
Off Duty Cop in Coma" appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer on
Wednesday, and "US criticizes leak of Guantanamo detainee briefs"
was in the Jerusalem Post on Monday. Thanks to Bill McDermott and
John Chandler for those.
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