World Wide Words -- 17 Dec 11

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 767         Saturday 17 December 2011
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Author/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/ycdv.htm

       Now on Twitter: http://twitter.com/wwwordseditor

     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: Waywiser.
3. Wordface.
4. Q and A: Yedsirag.
5. Sic!
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
--------------------------------------------------------------------
TOODLE-OO  Ron Hann asked me if I'd ever encountered another term 
for goodbye that also ends in "oo" - the distinctive and delightful 
Australian "hooroo". I hadn't but I'm glad that I now know it. It's 
from "hooray", first recorded in the specifically Australian sense 
of goodbye in 1870. Over time it changed into "hooroo", which is the 
form you will find in the Macquarie Dictionary, but it can lose its 
initial "h" to make "ooroo". 

Another of similar shape is "napoo", which is used to mean goodbye 
in a famous First World War music-hall number that several readers 
mentioned, whose refrain is "Bonsoir, old thing, cheer-i-o, chin, 
chin, / Nah-poo, toodle-oo, Goodbye-ee." In reality, "napoo" meant 
that something was over, finished or done for; it's another of those 
mangled French expressions I mentioned last time, in this case from 
"il n'y en a plus", there's no more.

Dennis Kiernan asked about "ta-ta", a British colloquial term for 
goodbye, best known globally in the abbreviation "TTFN" ("ta-ta for 
now") that was popularised by the 1940s radio programme Itma. This 
defeats the etymologists; all we know is that it first appears early 
in the nineteenth century and is a variant of the much older "da-
da", which was used mainly to children.

CORRECTION  The French phrase "à tout à l'heure" has a grave accent 
on both a's.

TOILET PAPER?  New subscriber B J Smith works for the US National 
Center for Atmospheric Research. He responded to my standard request 
to know how he had heard of World Wide Words: "Somewhere in this 
building you have a devoted reader who prints out the e-magazine, 
staples the three or four pages together, and takes it with him to a 
stall in the men's room to read as he goes about his business. 
That's where I found it, in a magazine holder next to the toilet. I 
suppose you could call that a personal endorsement, in a way."

CHRISTMAS BREAK  As usual, I'm taking a little time off. There will 
be no issue of World Wide Words on 24 and 31 December. The next will 
be on 7 January 2012. Seasonal greetings to everyone. See you in the 
new year. 


2. Weird Words: Waywiser
--------------------------------------------------------------------
You've probably seen one of these being trundled along the road by a 
surveyor, though it's unlikely that either he or you will call it a 
waywiser. It consists of a wheel at the end of a handle, with a 
counter to measure the number of turns the wheel makes. It's a quick 
way of measuring a distance and has been known in various forms 
since antiquity - the Roman architect and military engineer 
Vitruvius described one in detail in the first century BCE.

To name it, British surveyors of the seventeenth century borrowed a 
German word, "Wegweiser", meaning literally something that shows the 
way, a signpost, but changed its sense. "Waywiser" was also given to 
what we now call a pedometer, which measures distances by counting 
the number of steps a person takes. The famous scientist Robert 
Hooke invented yet a third device with the name:

    It was one part of a way-wiser for the sea; the whole 
    engine being designed to keep a true account, not only of 
    the length of the run of the ship through the water, but 
    the true rumb or leeward way, together with all the 
    jackings and workings of the ship.
    [An account by Robert Hooke, delivered at the meeting 
    of the Royal Society on 28 Nov. 1683, quoted in The 
    History of the Royal Society of London by Thomas Birch, 
    1757. "Rumb" would now be spelled "rhumb", meaning "a line 
    or course followed by a ship sailing in a fixed 
    direction".]

Today the road version is usually given the trivially accurate name 
of surveyor's wheel. It has had others - clickwheel, trundle wheel, 
cyclometer (on a bike) and odometer (sometimes hodometer) - though 
this last one turns up today more often for the closely related 
device in your car that indicates how far you've driven.

In earlier times there was yet another name for it: perambulator. 
This has only a limited connection with the carriage for conveying 
babies. The waywiser sense derives from the old meaning of 
perambulator for somebody who walks about for leisure. In the 
seventeenth century "perambulator" was applied to a person who 
carried out a formal circuit on foot to record the boundaries of an 
area (a perambulation), hence a type of surveyor. The term later 
shifted from the person to the measuring device or pedometer he 
used.


3. Wordface
--------------------------------------------------------------------
WORDS OF THE YEAR  This week, it was the turn of publisher Merriam-
Webster to pick one. It chose "pragmatic". A curious choice, you 
might think, since it doesn't directly apply to any event of 2011. 
The publisher selected it because it was the word most often looked 
up in its online dictionary during the year. There were two peaks, 
one in the weeks before the US Congress voted in August to increase 
the nation's debt ceiling, and again as its supercommittee tried to 
craft deficit-cutting measures this autumn. John Morse, the firm's 
president, suggested it sparked dictionary users' interest because 
it captures the current American mood of encouraging practicality 
over frivolity. Most people who recorded a reason for looking it up 
said that they wanted to confirm that it was meant positively.


4. Q and A: Yedsirag
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. I have just read Lifting the Latch, which is the story of Mont 
Abbott's work on the land in Oxfordshire in the first half of the 
20th century. The sentence "Brusher were the yedsirag over all the 
steam ploughs" appears in it. The glossary defines "yedsirag" as 
meaning head man, foreman. I can't find any reference to this word 
on the web, can you shed any light on its origin? [Roger White]

A. This is an interestingly obscure expression, known only from 
English dialect, which survived until fairly recently in the speech 
of a few very old people. Mr Abbott must have been one of the very 
last to know and use it. In that spelling it only turns up a couple 
of times in the records I've been able to search. The book has 
another example:

    Chisel were the only true ringer among us so we made 
    him yedsirag, Captain of the Tower.
    [Lifting the Latch: a Life on the Land, Based on the 
    Life of Mont Abbott of Enstone, Oxfordshire, by Sheila 
    Stewart, 1987.]

It took some delving to find the source because it's not recorded 
well and because most appearances are phonetic transcriptions of 
local dialect speech. Researchers for the English Dialect Dictionary 
of the late nineteenth century recorded it in a variety of spellings 
across a swathe of central England. Here's another example:

    He was gooin' orderin' an' mesterin' abait, just for aw 
    the world as if he'd bin top-sawyer an' yed-sirag o' the 
    lot.
    [The Folk-Speech of South Cheshire, by Thomas 
    Darlington, 1887. "Mesterin'": acting like a master, an 
    employer.]

There's no mystery about "yed", which is a common dialect form of 
"head". The rest is a locally modified version of the phrase "Sir-
Rag". You may be surprised to learn that there's an entry for this 
in the Oxford English Dictionary, but it was at one time a fairly 
common colloquial term.

To be called "Sir-Rag" was hardly a compliment. The "sir" here was a 
mildly mocking familiarity, borrowed from the usual form of address 
for a titled person. "Sir-Rag" might suggest that you adopted airs 
above your station but more probably that you were a supervisor of a 
group of workers of low status:

    "This strange word Sir-Rag is common in the Midland 
    Counties, and has been for very many years. I knew it, and 
    very often heard it, when a boy. The chief of a band of 
    servants or workers, a foreman or overseer, or any one in 
    authority over others, is the "sir-rag." Sometimes he or 
    she is the "head sir-rag."
    [Thomas Ratcliffe of Worksop, writing in Notes and 
    Queries, 15 Aug. 1891.]

Another contributor to the same issue supplied a different sense of 
the phrase, "A dusty set of tatterdemalions ... constantly attend 
fairs and racecourses, and these poor scarecrows used to be called 
in my young days 'Sir-Rags.'"

After all that, you now have most of the information you need to 
translate "Brusher were the yedsirag over all the steam ploughs". 
This is a fuller quote:

    I were on the last lap of the day, longing for me tea 
    and our Mam's roly-poly, when 'Brusher' Becket came into 
    the field waving a telegram. Brusher were the yedsirag 
    over all the steam-ploughs.


5. Sic!
--------------------------------------------------------------------
A headline over a Reuters story of 5 December intrigued Bob Kottage: 
"Protester shaves year-old beard with new Belgian government."

"This is from a mystery I resorted to last evening as distraction 
from work," e-mailed Gloria Varley. "A young woman has just bought a 
take-away cup of coffee. 'Valerie Lathem's snug green cargo pants 
paused on the sidewalk to touch her full lips to the edge of the 
lid. A shiver of delight followed ...'." Ms Varley didn't say, but 
the book is Through the Grinder by Cleo Coyle of 2004.

Yvonne Russell encountered what she described as an interesting 
concept in the Wall Street Journal of 8 December: "Steve Metz of 
Houston cuddled up with his wife Jackie and slept as they flew to 
New Zealand on a small futon." 


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). 
-------------------------------------------------------------------