World Wide Words -- 04 Jun 11
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jun 3 16:35:32 UTC 2011
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 739 Saturday 4 June 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: Sphexish.
3. Q and A: Lush.
4. 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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SUMMER BREAK I'm about to take a holiday. In previous years, I've
stopped publication of World Wide Words, but as the break this year
would be four weeks, this is too great a gap between issues. So I'm
trying something different. Each issue from 11 June to 2 July will
contain a revised version of an article that appeared in my book
Gallimaufry (now out of print; apologies to those readers who have
bought it and for whom these will be familiar). The only issue for
which problems might occur is that of 25 June, when internet access
could be difficult. Normal service will be resumed on 9 July. As
it's automatically generated, the Word File will go out as usual on
RSS and Twitter each weekday throughout. But don't stop writing -
in particular offerings for the Sic! column will continue to be
very welcome during my absence.
CRITICASTER From Andrew Haynes: "Your Weird Words piece mentions
some other words that use the '-aster' ending but it omits one that
may be useful in that it no doubt describes some of the people you
encounter through World Wide Words. That is 'grammaticaster', a
contemptuous term for a petty or inferior grammarian, which now
appears only in dictionaries of weird words but does have the
cachet of having been used by Ben Jonson, who wrote in a work
entitled Poetaster: 'He tells thee true, my noble Neophyte; my
little Grammaticaster, he does.'"
AS THE CROW FLIES As a side effect of writing about this idiom I
am now much better informed about the habits of corvids, thanks to
the many readers who took the trouble to educate me. I've learned
that the North American crow is gregarious, unlike its British
relative, though I'm told that the latter isn't quite as solitary
as country lore would suggest.
Susan Bryan was one of the many who commented: "I live in British
Columbia and I guess the crows here haven't heard they shouldn't
flock. In agricultural areas, they can be found in early morning
roosting in what we call crow trees or nesting trees. They leave at
early light and come back at dusk. No one would like one of these
trees in their yards as they can hold what appear to be up to 100
or more birds at a time, reminiscent of Hitchcock's The Birds."
A couple of readers suggested that the idiom derived from the tale
of Noah in the Bible. Most people who know the story, including me,
remember that at the end of the flood Noah sent out a dove to test
for dry land, which was why I didn't mention a possible link. Not
being a regular reader of Genesis (Chapter 8, Verses 7-8), I hadn't
realised he had first sent out a raven. The folk tales about seamen
using crows to search for land may be based on this. But they might
equally be memories of old navigational practices. Ned Ludd told me
that the Vikings released ravens to point them towards land. This
is known, for example, from the saga of Floki, also called Ravna-
Floki (Raven-Floki), because he took three ravens with him in his
journey from Shetland to search for Iceland. However, the two folk
tales cited in my piece remain etymologically false.
2. Weird Words: Sphexish /sfeksIS/
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Scholars of ancient languages will immediately spot that this word
has something to do with a wasp, since "sphex" is the name of that
insect in classical Greek. In more modern times, it has been given
to a genus of solitary digger wasps. Therein lies a tale.
When such a wasp returns to its burrow with a paralysed cricket to
feed its grubs, it will leave it at the entrance while it checks
inside that all is well. It then comes out again and drags its prey
inside. This gave a naturalist with a cruel streak an idea for a
bit of behavioural research. He moved the cricket a little way away
while the wasp was in its burrow. When the it surfaced and found
its cricket was missing, it searched for it and returned it to the
entrance to its burrow. It then repeated its search of the inside.
No matter how many times the cricket was moved, the wasp repeated
the same steps robotically without working out what was going on.
Douglas Hofstadter recounted the story in one of his Metamagical
Themas columns in Scientific American in 1982 and coined "sphexish"
for this unthinking deterministic or pre-programmed behaviour, in
which the wasp was at the mercy of its instincts and environment.
In a book derived from his columns, Hofstadter later suggested that
humans might likewise exhibit such robotic behaviour:
To the extent of having an individual style, any
artist is sphexish - trapped within invisible,
intangible, but inescapable boundaries of mental
space.
[Metamagical Themas, by Douglas Hofstadter, 1985.]
So far as I know, the term hasn't appeared in any dictionary, but
it has some circulation among behavioural psychologists. Daniel
Dennett created the related noun "sphexishness" in 1984. Hofstadter
coined "antisphexishness" in his book for the opposite state: free
will.
[Thanks to Barry Rein for telling me about this word.]
3. Q and A: Lush
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Q. It's getting a bit old-fashioned nowadays, I think, but it has
always intrigued me that one word for a confirmed drunkard is
"lush". How did that come about? [Jonathon Hargreaves]
A. Let me tell you a story.
Once upon a time, there was a London club. Its members were actors
and variety artists, who met for the purposes of convivial drinking
in the Harp Tavern in Great Portland Street. (Stage hands and other
theatre technicians excluded from joining banded together in the
same pub around 1822 and formed a friendly society now called The
Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes.) The club was organised on
humorous lines after the model of the governance of the City of
London, electing a "lord mayor", four "aldermen", who presided over
"wards" called Juniper, Poverty, Lunacy, and Suicide, and lesser
officers with names such as City Physician, City Taster and City
Barber. The club called itself the City of Lushington.
The idioms "Lushington", "Alderman Lushington", "voting for the
Alderman", "dealing with Lushington" and "Lushington is his master"
were used from the early 1820s for a person who habitually imbibed
not wisely but too well. Here's an example of the first of these
terms from a little later in the century:
For this club-room tippling induces drinking habits in
some young men, confirms them in others, and affords
convenient opportunities for indulgence to those who are
already confirmed "lushingtons."
[Some Habits and Customs of the Working Classes, by
Thomas Wright, 1867.]
Some writers have asserted that these slang terms come from the
name of a prominent London brewer who has, however, never been
identified. They must instead surely derive from the humorous
rituals of the club.
You might deduce from all this that "lush" is an abbreviation for
"Lushington". It's an attractive and plausible idea. "Lush" began
to refer to a drunkard in the early 1820s, around the same time as
the "Lushington" expressions appeared. By the 1850s it had arrived
in California and it was in the US that it flowered into a long-
lived common deprecatory term. But the truth about this suggested
origin depends on the chronology of "Lushington" and "lush", which
in the current state of knowledge is hard to work out.
Some reports put the founding of the City of Lushington club in
1750. This can't be confirmed, though Pierce Egan, in his Real Life
In London of 1821, described it as "this ancient city". That would
put it well before "lush" and suggests that the club's founders
based its name on something else, perhaps that unrecorded London
brewer. But Egan added, "we doubt not our numerous readers will
discover that its title is derived from an important article in
life, commonly called Lush." Egan means "lush" in an associated but
older sense - that of alcoholic drink, specifically strong beer.
It seems probable - albeit based on incomplete evidence - that the
slang "lush" for alcoholic drink came first, that the club's name
of Lushington was based on it, presumably as a joke on the family
name, and that its members' fondness for drinking to excess helped
"lush" to shift from drink to drunkard.
If "lush" did come first, we then have to work out where it comes
from. Jonathon Green, in Green's Dictionary of Slang, suggests that
it might be from German "Loschen", which also means strong beer, or
possibly from "lush" in the Irish traveller argot Shelta, which
meant to eat and drink.
4. Sic!
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Sally Springett told us of a letter to a columnist in the Rochester
Democrat and Chronicle of New Jersey, dated 28 May: "Dear Edith: I
found a multi-unit house with four tenants for sale."
A juxtaposition of links on the BBC news website on 28 May struck
Robin Dawes as unfortunate: Bin Laden Killed | William and Kate.
A paragraph in a church newsletter from Orland Park, IL, reminded
Richard Olson of Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal: "The first
Saturday of every month we will be cooking and serving 60 homeless
in Roseland." It reminds me of a James Thurber quip about using
verbs; a hostess remarked, "In this house, we can sleep 18 but we
can only eat 10."
A. Subscription information
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B. E-mail contact addresses
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* Comments on e-magazine mailings are always welcome. They should
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C. Ways to support World Wide Words
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