World Wide Words -- 26 Feb 11

Fri Feb 25 17:23:41 UTC 2011

WORLD WIDE WORDS        ISSUE 725         Saturday 26 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: Phrop.
3. Turns of Phrase: Unitasker.
4. Wordface.
5. Q and A: That's all she wrote.
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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PISS-POOR  As several readers told me, in the piece last week I'd 
conflated the literal and figurative meanings of the idiom. I ought 
to have made clear that the primary sense of "piss-poor" these days 
is of something third-rate, incompetent or useless. The quote from 
The Spectator that ended the piece used this figurative sense.

Many other terms include "piss-" as an intensifying prefix. Two 
additional examples provided by readers were "piss-awful" and 
"piss-weak". Others mentioned "piss-artist", a confirmed drunk, 
which strictly isn't an example because the prefix isn't an 
intensifier. There is also "pissant" for an insignificant or 
contemptible person or thing, which is from "piss" + "ant" and 
which started life in the UK to refer to the urinous smell of 
anthills.

The idiom "So poor he didn't have a pot to piss in" was quoted by 
numerous correspondents, sometimes in the fuller form "... or a 
window to throw it out of", who asked if this might be the origin 
of "piss-poor". I'm not familiar with that, as it's North American 
rather than British. It certainly feels old enough to have been an 
influence but it's hard to find early printed examples of phrases 
that were considered improper. However, a search found an example 
in Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, published in 1936. So it predates 
"piss-poor" and may well have been an influence, consciously or 
unconsciously.

Earle Robinson pointed out that the most famous taxer of urine was 
the emperor Vespasian in the first century AD. The infamous French 
public pissoirs were called vespasiennes as a direct link to him. 
Vespasian's son is said to have objected to the disgusting origin 
of the revenues, to which in legend his father replied "pecunia non 
olet", money doesn't smell, a tag still contentiously employed to 
argue that money isn't tainted by its origins.

2. Weird Words: Phrop
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So many of my attempts at finding the source of words end in 
failure that it's always a pleasure to encounter one whose origin 
is unequivocally known.

My introduction to it was in the pages of a book by Philip Howard, 
formerly literary editor of The Times and a continuing commentator 
on the vagaries and changing nature of English:

    Related to euphemisms are those lying reversible 
    phrases that mean the opposite of what they say. The 
    English, who are a notoriously hypocritical race, and 
    anxious to be liked, have a peculiar proclivity for these 
    phrases. The late Sir Arnold Lunn invented the name 
    "phrops" for these euphemistic phrases that do not wear 
    their true meaning on their face.
    [The State of the Language, by Philip Howard, 1985. 
    Sir Arnold Lunn (1888-1974) was a mountaineer, champion 
    skier and religious controversialist.]

Examples of phrops are "we must have lunch sometime", and "we must 
keep in touch", both of which actually mean "my life's ambition is 
never to meet you again". The academic and legal formulation "with 
all due respect" really communicates "I am about to demolish your 
argument and if at all possible your reputation with complete and 
utter disrespect". A polite "I regret that a previous engagement 
makes it impossible to accept your kind invitation" replaces the 
truthful "I would rather be gnawed by a rabid stoat." Any sentence 
that begins "no doubt" puts uncertainty into one's mind straight 
away. "Needless to say", "without fear of contradiction", "it is 
unnecessary to add" and "I would be the last to suggest" are all 
pretty much the opposite of a speaker's true meaning. A famously 
double-edged phrop, created by Benjamin Disraeli (it has also been 
attributed to Mark Twain, Groucho Marx, Henry James and John 
Maynard Keynes, among others) is "Thank you for sending me your 
book, I shall lose no time in reading it."

The first appearance of the word I can trace was in an article in 
the Daily Gleaner of Jamaica in October 1950. Sir Arnold seems to 
have created it as a short form of "phrase" + "opposite". It is 
still around, largely through Philip Howard's continuing affection 
for it in The Times, though it hasn't reached any dictionaries.

3. Turns of Phrase: Unitasker
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A unitasker is a tool or device that does only one thing. Before it 
meant that, it was a dismissive term for a person who does one job 
at a time before moving to the next, the opposite of a multitasker. 

It's one of those slow-burn words that seems to be creeping up on 
us in a variety of fields, becoming accepted because it's a useful 
term of abuse to describe those gadgets we buy because they seem 
like a good idea at the time. This is despite experience teaching 
us that their advantages don't justify their cost or the space they 
take up or that a general-purpose item could do the job as well. 
It's used in particular for specialist kitchen gadgets (electric 
gravy boat warmers, strawberry slicers, watermelon knives) and odd 
computing contraptions (USB foot warmers). "Unitasker" has been 
popularised by the American TV chef Alton Brown and the website 
unclutterer.com.

Not all unitaskers are bad, of course; some of them are invaluable 
and their limitations are a strength, not a weakness. What's wrong 
with a fire extinguisher? It does one job well. (OK, you can use it 
to prop the door open or brain a burglar, but we're talking about 
intended uses here.) And one person's useless unitasker is 
another's onion-ring holder or USB fragrance oil burner.

    While I'm skeptical of tools intended for only one 
    purpose, I like the Kindle because it's a unitasker. You 
    can't really use it for the Web or Twitter or e-mail: 
    It's for reading and that's it.
    [Macworld; Dec. 2010.]

4. Wordface
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HARDLY A HOLIDAY?  People who travel to another country for some 
purpose other than simple business or pleasure have led to writers 
generating terms for them, whose second element is "tourism". Among 
examples that have appeared in recent times are "health tourism" 
(travelling to another country to get cheaper medical treatment), 
"disaster tourism" (visiting the location of a calamity), "sex 
tourism" (obvious enough), even "wedding tourism" (getting married 
in another country). The dire financial state of Ireland is leading 
businessmen to spend time in the UK in order to qualify to take 
advantage of its much more lenient bankruptcy laws. It has become 
known as BANKRUPTCY TOURISM.

WHAT'S IN A NAME?  An opinion blog at the Los Angeles Times (which 
Duncan Morrow has forwarded) suggests that one group of people will 
be especially pleased when the ruler of Libya goes: copyeditors. 
There are problems transliterating names from Arabic and the blog 
says: "At the New York Times, he is Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. At the 
Wall Street Journal, and the Associated Press news service, he's 
Moammar Gadhafi. Reuters prefers Muammar Gaddafi. But the L.A. 
Times goes with Moammar Kadafi. And online, Wikipedia uses Muammar 
al-Gaddafi." I can add that a Boston Globe article on Friday had 
Moammar Khadafy. In the UK the usual form is "Colonel Gaddafi", 
though the Guardian's style guide specifies "Muammar Gaddafi" 
without an honorific.

GOURMET SEASONING  The grand term "sommelier" for a wine waiter has 
been in English for more than a century (it's from the French word 
for a butler; in the early days a greater variety of buttling was 
done than just serving wine). Much more recently, a word based on 
it has appeared: SELMELIER. A selmelier helps you choose the most 
appropriate gourmet salt to go with every dish. Salt is never just 
salt for a selmelier, who would hate you to have to season every 
dish with the same bland table salt. One recent book describes more 
than 150 different types of rock and sea salts, such as Icelandic 
hot springs salt, sel gris, Hawaiian Black Lava Salt and smoked sea 
salt. The word is most often linked to the American Mark Bitterman, 
who sells such salts from a series of specialist stores and who 
coined it in 2006, he tells me, by blending the French word for 
salt, "sel", with "sommelier". A delightful partner for it would be 
"peppier", supposedly a specialist waiter whose sole function is to 
walk about with an intimidatingly large pepper grinder asking 
diners if want their food seasoned. I've found examples of that 
from as far back as an issue of the Atlanta Constitution in April 
1985. As all references to it have suspiciously similar wording, I 
suspect a long-running joke. "Selmelier", however, is real.

5. Q and A: That's all she wrote
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Q. I couldn't find anything specific about "that's all she wrote" 
except that it might have a World War Two epistolary basis. Do you 
know anything definite? [Nicholas Brandes]

A. You want "definite"? With etymology, it's often difficult even 
to get as far as "vague". As it happens, it's easy to come to a 
firm conclusion about this one, so long as you fall in with the 
majority view. However, I'm always suspicious of the majority view 
and - as we shall see - there's some doubt about it.

Let's be clear to start with what the expression means. It always 
has an implication of finality about it, though it can be variously 
translated as "that's all there is", "it's finished", "it's over", 
"there's no more", "that's enough":

    When it starts to get really dark - when the sky goes 
    from blue to purple - I'm flipping back. That's it; 
    that's all she wrote. I'm not walking through these woods 
    after dark.
    [The Talisman, by Stephen King, 1984.]

    Skipper Tom meowing and hopping around like he had the 
    itch. Then dumped a load of cat crap all over a lobster 
    trap. Jack threw it overboard to rinse it, and that's all 
    she wrote buddy, he was jerked into the water.
    [The Shipping News, by E Annie Proulx, 1993.]

When I first came across it (it's not well known in the UK), I was 
puzzled by it. On the one hand it was obvious enough what it meant 
but why should anybody drag in a reference to an anonymous woman 
writer?

If you search the reference books for the answer, you'll probably 
come across the story you mention, that it's from a bitter joke of 
the Second World War. An American serviceman opens a letter from 
his wife or girlfriend and starts to read it to his mates: "Dear 
John". He stops. "Well, go on," his listeners urge him, "read us 
the rest of it." "I can't," he replies, "that's all she wrote."

Dumping letters were common enough to have been given the "Dear 
John letter" epithet at the time (see http://wwwords.org?DRJN), 
though it starts to appear in the record only in 1945. "That's all 
she wrote" begins at about the same time. It's a nice story, but 
it's a pity about the absence of any contemporary evidence for it, 
such as somebody on record as telling the joke or referring to it. 

Another suggestion is that "that's all she wrote" comes from the 
words of a popular song, perhaps one that linked "Dear John" to it. 
Back in 2003 (I keep good records), Colm Flannery told me about a 
verse in a song by Aubry Gass and Tex Ritter that was written in 
1950, the same year Hank Williams recorded it: 

    Now Jonah got along in the belly of the whale,  
    Daniel in the lion's den,  
    But I know a guy that didn't try to get along,  
    And he won't get a chance again,  
    And that's all she wrote, Dear John,  
    I've fetched your saddle home. 

That arrived on the scene too late to be the origin. But there were 
earlier ones. George Crawford penned That's All She Wrote, 'Cause 
the Pencil Broke in 1946, though the dating confirms the title came 
from the existing saying. There's also this tantalising snippet:

    Jimmy McHugh ... set to music "That's All She Wrote," 
    sent me by Corp. Tom Armstrong from south Pacific. Even 
    with my bad playing, it sounds good.
    [The Salt Lake Tribune, 27 Oct. 1944. Jimmy McHugh, 
    for those too young to remember, was a renowned American 
    composer of popular songs (On the Sunny Side of the 
    Street, I'm in the Mood for Love, etc.)]

Whatever happened to that song? Surely one with Jimmy McHugh's name 
on it can't simply have vanished? But I can't find any evidence for 
it and his name may just have been a whimsical interjection on the 
part of the writer. However, the reference does at least show the 
expression was known in 1944. But that's as far as I can go. That's 
all I wrote.

6. Sic!
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Irving S Schloss notes that last Saturday's New York Times reports 
the following about Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin: "For years, 
he has carried the same bagged lunch to work (two ham and cheese 
sandwiches on wheat) - a fact he has been fond of mentioning on 
campaign trails." They must be getting awfully stale by now.

>From the travel section of the same day's issue of The Guardian, 
featuring The Belrepayre Airstream & Retro Trailer Park: "The camp 
has a little stand selling staples such as bread and croissants, 
ping-pong tables and table football." 

Belinda Hardman tells us that on 22 February Fox News reported on 
events in Libya: "Mohammed Ali of the Libyan Salvation Front and a 
Tripoli resident, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of 
reprisals ..." Oops.

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