World Wide Words -- 06 Aug 11
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Aug 5 16:20:08 UTC 2011
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 748 Saturday 6 August 2011
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Author/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: Tagarene.
3. Turns of Phrase: Ethical fading.
4. Q and A: Basket case.
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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GIMCRACK Numerous readers sought to make a link with the African-
American song of the 1840s, Blue-Tailed Fly, whose chorus in a
frequently sung version repeats the line "Jimmy crack corn and I
don't care". I claim no expertise in interpreting folk songs about
black slavery but I do know that those first three words have been
much puzzled over, with at least six suggestions having been made.
It's been argued that "cracking corn" meant snoring, or boasting
("crack" supposedly being the same word as the Irish one now often
spelled "craic", meaning enjoyable gossip or conversation) or that
it was a variant of "corncracker" or "cracker" for a poor white
farmer of southern US states. Some early versions have "Jim crack
corn" and one theory does say it's a variant of "gimcrack", in a
related sense of something flimsy or badly made, so "gimcrack corn"
possibly referred to moonshine whiskey.
RED-HEADED STEPCHILD Several readers thought that I was wrong to
dismiss the bastardy implications. Carolyn Murphy wrote, "On red-
headed stepchild I think you miss the meaning entirely - at least
as it is used in the southern U.S. It is, in fact, an allusion to
the fact that the child in question does not look like any of the
other children in the family and hence, may not be the child of the
woman's husband - and is a bastard, or the husband's 'stepchild'.
There are so few redheads that when one unexpectedly turns up in a
family with no other redheads - well, there's some explaining to do
by the mother."
ADAM'S BATH I asked about this phrase last week on behalf of James
Grebe, who had read in the memoirs of Gerald Brenan that Brenan had
described his London flat as having an "Adam's bath". Many good
suggestions came in. I have now found the context, from Gerald
Brenan's Personal Record, 1920-1972. He describes his London flat:
"I had blue panelling on the walls, an eighteenth-century fireplace
full of mousetraps, a wash-hand-stand in a cupboard, a sofa and a
sofa-bed, a gas ring and an Adams bath". Note no apostrophe in
"Adams", which rules out a reference to the biblical Adam. Other
suggestions were that it referred to a bathroom designed by the
Adams brothers, the eighteenth-century Scots architects, or that it
had been made by a long-established Staffordshire Potteries' firm,
either William Adams and Company or Adamsez. The description
implies a run-down eighteenth-century property, so the first of
these may be the best bet.
ANATOMICAL SNUFFBOX Last week I quoted a reader who claimed that
the radial fossa could not be an alternative name for this feature
of the wrist. Several readers were swift to correct the corrector.
They all pointed out that the radial fossa is at the thumb end of
the radius, one of the two bones of the forearm. (Latin "fossa" is
used in medicine for a depression or hollow; in Latin it means a
ditch.)
2. Weird Words: Tagarene
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You're unlikely to know this word - variously spelled - unless you
come from north-east England, especially the Newcastle area. But it
does occasionally pop up in prose that gains a wider audience:
"Now help me tidy up, this place looks like a bloody
tagarene shop." Another one of her expressions. I had no
idea what a "tagarene shop" was, although it clearly
described the disorder and chaos that always threatened
to overwhelm the house if we didn't clear up after my
mischievous younger brother.
[Broken Music: A Memoir, by Sting, 2003. This
appearance isn't so surprising, since Sting was born in a
suburb of Newcastle named Wallsend (called that because
it's at one end of Hadrian's Wall).]
A tagarene shop was a kind of junk shop, sometime specialising in
old clothes but often carrying a much wider range of miscellaneous
oddments, particularly marine scrap. The tagarene man who ran it
did much of his trade with ships:
A "tagareen man" has a floating shop which he rows
about the tiers of ships, announcing his presence by a
bell. His dealings are carried on by barter or cash, as
may be convenient; and old rope, scrap-iron, or other
similar unconsidered trifles, are exchanged for the
crockery or hardware with which the boat is stocked.
[Northumberland Words, by R O Heslop, 1894.]
Such collections of bric-a-brac, oddments and general detritus were
likely to have made a tagarene shop an excessively untidy place and
it's easy to see how the phrase came to refer to a muddle.
Nobody knows its origin. The Oxford English Dictionary tentatively
suggests it's based on "tag". Local people remember "tagger" in the
sense of marine scrap, though the evidence doesn't show whether
it's the origin of "tagarene" or a shortening of it. One suggestion
is that it's Arab in origin. Some Moors in north Africa have that
name; it's been proposed that it was adopted by them after they had
been expelled from Spain in medieval times. (A link to "Tangerine",
a person from Tangiers, which gave its name to the orange exported
from that city, is improbable.) It's unlikely to be true, but the
suggestion isn't as daft as it sounds, because the Newcastle area
has long had an Arab community.
3. Turns of Phrase: Ethical fading
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This has been in the news recently, in part because it was featured
in a book published this year, Blind Spots, by Max Bazerman and Ann
Tenbrunsel and because it has proved a useful term when discussing
the phone-hacking accusations concerning News International.
Sometimes, unethical behaviour in business - fiddling expenses,
overcharging, hiding unwelcome facts (say about an unsafe product),
bribery or corruption, putting workers at risk through cutting
corners, or paying police for tip-offs and hacking people's phones
- becomes accepted as part of an organisation's culture. This may
be because it's unchecked by management, sometimes because it seems
to be the only way to get the job done, sometimes because it's
known that telling a dictatorial boss about a problem is a good way
to get fired. "Ethical fading" refers to an erosion of the ethical
standards of a business in which employees become used to engaging
in or condoning such behaviour.
The term is new to most commentators, but it was created in the
article Ethical Fading, the Role of Self-Deception in Unethical
Behavior, by Ann Tenbrunsel and David Messick, which appeared in
Social Justice Research in 2004.
When we are busy focused on common organizational
goals, like quarterly earnings or sales quotas, the
ethical implications of important decisions can fade from
our minds. Through this ethical fading, we end up
engaging in or condoning behavior that we would condemn
if we were consciously aware of it.
[New York Times, 20 Apr. 2011.]
The academics describe a process of "ethical fading"
in businesses where maximising returns is encouraged over
fairness to fellow employees and customers. The result is
that right and wrong go out of the window. Read about the
culture at the News of the World and "ethical fading"
certainly comes to mind.
[Guardian, 18 Jul. 2011.]
4. Q and A: Basket case
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Q. The phrase 'basket case' is quite commonly used to describe
failing economies nowadays. I think it would originally have been
applied to describe dysfunctional individuals. Any thoughts on its
origins? [Graham Rooth, UK; Michael Drake, New Zealand]
A. You're partly right, though the nature of the dysfunction was
much more severe than you might be thinking. The term started to
appear quite suddenly in American newspapers at the end of March
1919.
The press was reporting an official denial of rumours that were
circulating widely among ex-servicemen back from the First World
War. They claimed that some soldiers had been so seriously injured
that they had lost both arms and both legs and were left as living
heads and torsos who could only be transported in a basket:
Maj Gen Ireland, Surgeon General of the army, said
today there was no foundation for widely circulated and
persistent reports of basket cases in army hospitals. A
basket case is a soldier who has lost both legs and both
arms, and therefore cannot be carried on a stretcher. "I
have personally examined the records," said Gen Ireland,
"and am able to say there is not a single basket case
either on this side of the water nor among the soldiers
of the American Expeditionary Forces. Further, I wish to
emphasize that there has been no instance of an American
soldier so wounded during the whole period of the war."
[Boston Evening Globe, 27 Mar. 1919.]
The term echoed a standard usage of the time. A literal basket case
was a hamper, a woven container for dry goods. The new sense played
on "case" in the medical sense of an instance of disease or injury.
The term almost completely vanished in the inter-war years but in
1939 the concept became the focus of a harrowing anti-war novel by
Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun, about a First World War veteran,
Joe Bonham, who was blown up and lost not only his limbs but also
his face and who was denied the right to die. It was made into a
film in 1971. The book doesn't use "basket case" but it does
describe Joe Bonham being transported in a wicker basket.
Rumours that there were many examples of such casualties similarly
circulated among US forces in the Second World War - particularly a
widely syndicated report of December 1943 that stated, "The real
candidate for Time mag's 'Man of the Year' should be the 21-year-
old basket case in the Army's Percy Jones Hospital at Battle Creek,
Michigan" - and brought a similar denial from the Surgeon General
of the time, Major General Norman T Kirk, who said in April 1944
that "There is nothing to rumors of so-called 'basket cases'." Time
magazine noted in August 1945, however, that the Army man in Percy
Jones Hospital existed and named him as Master Sergeant Frederic
Hensel, who went on post-war to become a chicken farmer with the
help of donations from the public. In May 1950, the same magazine
noted that US Army pilot Jimmy Wilson was the other quadruple
amputee of the war.
The senses of a person or thing regarded as useless or unable to
cope and of a country that is unable to pay its debts or to feed
its people came along shortly after the war. The first I've found
is the title of a cartoon in the Hamilton Daily News Journal in
January 1946, commenting on the decline in value of the dollar
[reproduced in the online version of this issue]. Both senses have
continued to be widely known and used and have spread worldwide.
Britain is an economic basket case, while Scotland,
with its government's quixotic obsession with windmills,
is even worse.
[Daily Mail, 11 Jul. 2011. To clarify, the windmills
are wind turbines.]
5. Sic!
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A curiously appropriate homophonic error appeared in the Guardian
on 1 August: "Surely all politicians have an eye on the top of the
greasy poll?"
"I'll see your missing hyphen [from last week's issue] and raise
the stakes," wrote Anthony Douglas. "A number of years ago, I did
some proofreading for an academic who was writing a commentary on
1 Corinthians. I was glad to be able to point out, pre-publication,
that the apostle Paul was not condemning 'extra marital sex', but
'extra-marital sex'."
Academic vigour? A report on MSN on 3 August featured research that
suggested Earth's moon once had a companion. One sentence surprised
Richard Brown: "A number of explanations have been proposed for the
[Moon's] far side's highlands, including one suggesting that
gravitational forces were the culprits rather than an impact from
Francis Nimmo at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his
colleagues."
Great headlines of our time, an occasional series: "Harry Potter
dwarf spared jail over juggler's hat sex act". Acquired from the
Daily Telegraph of 29 July via David Langford's Ansible newsletter.
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