World Wide Words -- 12 Feb 11

Fri Feb 11 17:00:15 UTC 2011

WORLD WIDE WORDS        ISSUE 723         Saturday 12 February 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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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Materteral.
3. Turns of Phrase: Religitigation.
4. Wordface.
5. Q and A: Saucered and blowed.
6. 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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DOWN TRAINS  Several readers well versed in the minutiae of British 
railways systems contest the opinion of others, quoted in the last 
issue, that trains to London from Oxford or Cambridge do so in the 
down direction. Tim Bourne tells me that he has timetables for the 
Oxford line covering various dates, including one from 1865, all of 
which show the London direction to be the up line. We've had quite 
enough about British railways now, I rather feel.

DASHBOARD  Steve Lawson asked how I could possibly have forgotten a 
famous appearance of the word in song, as a characteristic of the 
surrey with the fringe on top in Oklahoma: "The wheels are yellow, 
the upholstery's brown / The dashboard's genuine leather."

2. Weird Words: Materteral  /m@'t@:t at rl/
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Down the years, numerous readers have asked me for a word that was 
the female equivalent to "avuncular", characteristic or typical of 
an uncle. At the time, I had to reply that I knew of no equivalent 
term meaning aunt-like. I am now better informed.

"Materteral" is first recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary 
from a journal of 1823. The OED's citation is so brief it doesn't 
give much of a flavour of the original but you can see why the 
editors truncated it:

    A venerable matron and her virgin sister, who had 
    passed the grand climacteric, happening to cast their 
    eyes over the plates of these volumes as they were lying 
    on our table, and seeing the Herculean attitudes of some 
    wrestling, others balancing, some climbing the column of 
    pegs, the rope or the mast, others taking the long leap 
    with the pole, and vaulting over the bar, exclaimed with 
    maternal and materteral anxiety, that the legislature 
    ought to prohibit such dangerous sports; since the 
    unavoidable accidents, to which human life and limb are 
    exposed, are quite sufficient without increasing the 
    number of them by wantonness and temerity.
    [The Monthly Review, Dec. 1823. A review by W Taylor 
    of two books on teaching gymnastic exercises.]

They don't write stuff like that any more, thank heavens. It was in 
a spirit of pedantic humour that "materteral", was conceived (if I 
may be permitted to use that word in the company of ladies who have 
"passed the grand climacteric") and it continued in that vein in a 
book of 1867, Spindrift, in Munsey's Magazine in 1901 and in The 
Aunt's Cook Book of 1922. A couple of modern works have used it 
seriously but it is otherwise unknown.

The late William Safire, who wrote the On Language column in the 
New York Times, didn't know "materteral" either. He was struck by 
the lack of a potentially useful adjective for matters auntish and 
asked his readers for suggestions to correct the omission. Replies 
included "auntique", "tantular" and "tantative". One reader noted 
that Latin "amita", one's father's sister, wasn't the root of any 
English word and so Safire settled on "amital", though he noted "it 
sounds to me like a barbiturate". It has been used, though almost 
as rarely as "materteral".

There's an argument for having both. Scholars know that the Latin 
root of "avuncular" refers specifically to one's mother's brother 
and "materteral" to one's mother's sister. So we could use "amital" 
for the paternal aunt and create "patruitic" (from Latin "patruus", 
father's brother) to fill the final niche. If they catch on, do 
remember you read it here first.

3. Turns of Phrase: Religitigation
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It takes a moment to work this out. "Religitigation" is a blend of 
"religion" and "litigation". It is a specifically British term that 
refers to legal action that sets the faith-based views of religious 
groups against human-rights and other legislation that prohibits 
discrimination. Someone engaged in such a case is a "religitigant".

Recent cases include that of a Christian registrar who failed to 
exempt herself from conducting civil partnerships ceremonies for 
gay couples. A Jewish school in London took a case to the supreme 
court over its decision to refuse admission to a pupil but lost on 
the grounds that its decision amounted to race discrimination. An 
airline employee lost her claim to the right to wear a crucifix at 
work. A Muslim child in Wales failed to claim the right to wear the 
jilbab at school when school rules specified the shalwar kameeze. 
Two Christian hoteliers lost a discrimination case against a gay 
couple whom they refused to allow to occupy a double-bedded room. 

The term has been around for at least the past couple of years. It 
is currently restricted to legal and human-rights circles and it is 
rare to see it in the press. 

4. Wordface
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CHANGING WAYS OF SAYING  The Telegraph reported on 5 February on 
what were described as interim findings of a study by the British 
Library of the way that British speakers pronounce certain words. 
The results are actually some early indications from data being 
collected in conjunction with the Evolving English exhibition at 
the British Library, in which visitors are encouraged to record 
their reading of a set text. Regional libraries are taking part, 
too, and online it's open to English speakers worldwide: go to 
http://www.bl.uk/evolvingenglish/ and click on "map your voice". 
(Go to http://www.bl.uk/evolvingenglish/maplisten.html to listen 
to the recordings others have made.)

The data so far is unsurprising. The pronunciation of "controversy" 
with the stress on the second syllable is said to be used by 75% of 
respondents. That's the continuation of a trend that has been noted 
for decades: in a survey of pronunciation in 1988, Professor John 
Wells of University College London found that it and the older form 
with the stress on the first syllable were even then roughly equal 
in number of users; by 1998 60% of speakers used the "conTROversy" 
stress. Although the shift has been blamed on American influence, 
Americans will know this isn't so, because they put the stress on 
the first syllable as British speakers traditionally did. However, 
Brits are increasingly saying "schedule" in the American way, with 
an initial "sk", rather than "sh". Again, that's hardly new - Prof 
Wells noted a decade ago that it was being heard quite widely, with 
65% of under-35s preferring the US pronunciation.  (James Thurber 
wrote in the 1930s about British opposition to this pronunciation 
that it was all a matter of schooling.)

Jonnie Robinson, a curator of the exhibition, tells me that - in 
spite of the tone of the piece - the evidence collected so far for 
six key words shows very little evidence of American influence: 
"garage" continues to be said as "garridge" and not in the American 
way, "attitude" shows no sign of moving towards the US "attitood", 
and "scone" is still widely rhymed with "gone", though social and 
regional differences in the UK mean that the US-preferred form with 
the vowel of "bone" is also common.

5. Q and A: Saucered and blowed
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Q. Any thoughts on the phrase, "saucered and blowed"? This referred 
to coffee, too hot to drink until it was poured into the saucer for 
a moment, blown on, and then drunk from the saucer. I've heard this 
phrase all the time in West Texas and New Mexico. [Dave Hester]

A. The expression is certainly American, turning up at various 
times in the south and west of the country. I can't find the exact 
form you mention earlier than this syndicated page-filler joke:

    Don Herold tells of the woman bus passenger hurrying 
    into a restaurant stop for a quick cup of coffee. It was 
    too hot to handle. So an observing and gallant longhorn 
    next to her shoved his cup over with: "Take mine, mam. 
    It's been saucered and blowed."
    [Logansport Pharos-Tribune (Indiana), 28 June 
    1935.]

The joke was widely repeated in various forms around this date and 
in the following decades. The implication, of course, was that only 
hicks from the sticks did such an ill-bred thing. William Morris, 
writing in one of his Words, Wit and Wisdom columns in September 
1966, repeats a similar story and comments that he had heard it 
long before in Tennessee. 

By this date, the phrase - also "saucered and blown" - had become 
well-enough known that it had turned into an idiom, implying that 
some project had been completed or that everything had been taken 
care of and so there was nothing left to do. In the negative it 
meant something hadn't yet been made fully ready - a football coach 
commented on one of his young players in the Charleston Gazette in 
1972 that "He has a long way to go. He hasn't been saucered and 
blown yet." Here's a more recent example:

    Besides, I couldn't have won the governor's election 
    anyway, since it was, in the Arkansas vernacular, 
    "saucered and blowed" - over before it started.
    [My Life, by Bill Clinton, 2004.]

The idea goes back a long way, of course, much further than the 
expression itself. A squib appeared in a British newspaper nearly 
two centuries ago, in which a Frenchman asked a friend to advise on 
the correctness of his manners at dinner:

    "And the coffee?" "There I am certain I was right; it 
    was boiling hot, and I poured it in small portions into 
    my saucer." "Which was what no one else did; every body 
    takes his coffee in his cup, and never in his saucer."
    [The Courier (Middlesex), 21 Mar. 1826.]

A similar action was common among working-class people in Britain 
in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth - it was thought 
acceptable to pour small quantities of hot tea into your saucer to 
cool it and then to sip from the saucer. However, the American joke 
implied that saucers in that country were then big enough that the 
whole cupful could be saucered at one go; British saucers were too 
small for this.

6. Sic!
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Jenny Drayden reports. "Last Friday, this message appeared on our 
intranet: "This weekend will see the replacement of our reception 
doors. The doors will remain lock at all times, and you will need 
your access card to enter our demise."

On 2 February, The Gloucestershire Echo startled Tim Nott with its 
headline, which included a quote from the principal of Cheltenham 
Ladies College: "Girls' schools still offering 'something special' 
- head".

Padmavyuha received an e-mail from Tate Modern, which announced 
that "We've our latest show Watercolour opening at Tate Britain on 
16 February. See works spanning 800 years, from Turner to Tracy 
Emin!" Might they be J M W Turner (1775-1851) and Tracy Emin 
(1963-) or two other artists altogether?

Destined for the folder marked "could have been better expressed" 
is this sentence from the Daily Mail of 3 February, sent in by 
Julie Wetherell: "Written in 1959 and reprinted this year by 
celebrated U.S. fashion designer Anne Fogarty - who died in 1980, 
aged 61 - the iconic book, harks back to an era of hats, gloves and 
girdles."

Martin Kuskis found an intriguing sentence on the New South Wales 
Roads and Traffic Authority website: "Final pavement works for the 
southern section of the project will commence in unrest from the 
start of 2011." Mr Kuskis was under the impression that the project 
was proceeding peacefully.

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