World Wide Words -- 19 Mar 2011

Fri Mar 18 18:06:50 UTC 2011

WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 728          Saturday 19 March 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: Manavilins.
3. Topical Words: Tsunami
4. Q and A: Flamenco.
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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APOLOGIES  I have been unwell. I'm hoping to be back to normal in a 
day or two, but next week's issue may be shorter than usual. A big 
backlog of mail has to be sorted through, too!

2. Weird Words: Manavilins  /m@'navilInz/
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Serendipity, ahoy! While searching for nautical foodstuffs, I came 
across the menu for the inaugural dinner of The Ancient Mariners, a 
society for former sailors, which was reproduced in the issue of 
the West Australian of Perth for 27 January 1914. The last item in 
the menu was manavilins, a word new to me. It turned out that it 
wasn't a specific dish but a whimsical use of an old sailor's term 
that could mean small items of tasty food:

    At sea, the monotonous round of salt beef and pork at 
    the messes of the sailors - where but very few of the 
    varieties of the season are to be found - induces them to 
    adopt many contrivances in order to diversify their 
    meals. Hence the various sea-rolls, made dishes, and 
    Mediterranean pies, well known by men-of-war's-men ... 
    all of which come under the general denomination of 
    Manavalins. 
    [White-Jacket, by Herman Melville, 1850.]

It was once fairly well known in Australia in a derived sense of 
odds and ends or any small things:

    Who the deuce ever built this gunyah and lived in it 
    by himself for years and years? ... He'd a stool and 
    table too, not bad ones either, this Robinson Crusoe 
    cove. No end of manavilins either. 
    [Robbery Under Arms by Rolf Boldrewood, 1889. "Gunyah" 
    is from an Australian aboriginal language and means a 
    hut, particularly a rough shelter improvised by 
    whites.]

"Manavilins" has always been plural - nobody seems to have ever 
wanted just the one manavilin - and is of unknown origin. It has 
been linked with "manarval", recorded only in Admiral W H Smyth's 
Sailor's Word-Book of 1867, in which he said it was the action of 
pilfering small stores. John Camden Hotten defined what must be the 
same word in his Slang Dictionary of 1864, despite spelling it 
"menavelings", as "odd money remaining after the daily accounts are 
made up at a railway booking-office, - usually divided among the 
clerks."

3. Topical Words: Tsunami  /tsu:'nA:mI/
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When news of the earthquake in Japan broke last week nobody needed 
to be told what a tsunami was. The devastation one can cause had 
been burned into our minds since the Indian Ocean earthquake of 
Christmas 2004.

It was that catastrophe that had brought the Japanese word into our 
common vocabulary. Before then it had largely been restricted to 
oceanographers and seismologists and to a relatively small literate 
group that had come across it and been intrigued (including the 
Manic Street Preachers, with their song of that title in 1999). 
Science-fiction writers had adopted it rather earlier, having 
seized on this exotic foreign word to help add that sense of 
otherness they and their readers crave.

An odd result was that it had become a figurative term in literary 
writing before its literal sense had widely penetrated. As far back 
as the 1970s, Science magazine declared that the Food and Drug 
Administration was "swimming through a tsunami of comments" on its 
drug strategy. In 1978, the New Yorker described a "tsunami of 
applause". In 2002, William Safire combined Japanese with Yiddish 
in the New York Times to generate a "tsunami of tsoris", a sea of 
troubles. Now we all know what one is really like, writers are 
going to have to be more careful with their metaphors.

"Tsunami" is made up from two Japanese words, "tsu", harbour and 
"nami", wave or waves ("tsunami" is singular and plural in that 
language). Out at sea the energy of a tsunami is dispersed through 
a tall column of water and the wave may be small enough to be 
missed. As it approaches land the shoaling water increases the 
height of the wave and speeds it up until it powers ashore. 
Japanese fishermen at sea wouldn't notice a tsunami passing them 
until they returned home and found their harbours destroyed by a 
wave that seemed to come from nowhere.

The word first entered English through reports of the Meiji-Sanriku 
earthquake and consequent tsunami in June 1896 which caused many 
thousands of deaths across the same region as this month's. But the 
term was used too rarely in reports to become widely known. Most 
people continued inaccurately to call such events tidal waves - 
tsunamis have no connection with tides - as they had since Charles 
Lyell called them that in his Principles of Geology in 1830.

4. Q and A: Flamenco
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Q. Having attended a flamenco show in Barcelona, my friends and I 
have been pondering the origin of the term. It appears from some 
desultory online research that there are several possible sources. 
A lot more explaining needs to be done before we're convinced of 
any of them. [Jim Veihdeffer]

A. You're right to be sceptical. Etymologists have puzzled over the 
word ever since it first appeared in English in the 1880s. A number 
of theories have been put forward to fill the gap, most of which we 
can dismiss out of hand (for example, that the word may go back to 
the Moorish period and could be from the Andalusian Arabic "fellah 
mengu", an escaped peasant). 

English travellers to Spain in the nineteenth century had been 
bringing back descriptions of the wild music and dances of the Roma 
(gypsies) of Andalusia ever since Lord Byron went there in 1819, 
but none of them used the word flamenco. In The Zincali: an Account 
of the Gypsies of Spain of 1841, George Borrow called the dances 
Romalis, which is just Romany for gypsy dance; Richard Ford in 1845 
commented in his travel guide Gatherings from Spain that the form 
was then called Ole by the Spanish. A book of 1995 about Silverio, 
the famous early populariser of flamenco, says that "flamenco" was 
first used in Spanish for the form in 1853. Before then, "flamenco" 
had many senses, which included petty criminal, smuggler, soldier, 
a type of knife, or a person who was irreverent and rebellious.

There are two other significant Spanish senses of "flamenco". One 
is for the bird we call a flamingo, known from some southern parts 
of the country. The other is of a Fleming, a person who lives in 
Flanders, at one time a separate country but which is now divided 
between Belgium, France and the Netherlands (the Spanish word in 
this sense is from Middle Dutch "Vlaminc", a Fleming.)

The flamingo sense has led some word hunters to equate the brightly 
coloured bird with the colourful dancers. One version of the story 
holds that at one time "flamenco" was used of the fair-skinned 
inhabitants of Flanders, who had flushed complexions, unlike the 
darker-hued Spanish, and that the word was transferred to the pink 
coloured flamingo. Nobody now believes any of this.

A direct Flemish connection is actually more plausible. From 1579 
to 1700 Flanders was part of the Spanish Netherlands and Spanish 
fighting men were based there. This is why one sense of "flamenco" 
in Spanish is of a soldier. It has been suggested that some of them 
were Roma and that on their return to Spain they were given special 
dispensation to live where they wanted and take any occupation they 
liked, unlike other Roma, who continued to suffer severe legal 
restrictions. In consequence, some Roma families of Andalusia were 
given the title of "los flamencos", the Flemish ones (George Borrow 
mentions this in Zincali) and the art form was taken from this.

Current dictionaries plump for the Fleming sense of "flamenco" as 
the origin, but have reservations about the reason for the link.

5. Sic!
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Janusz Lukasiak pointed me to a story on the website of a North 
London newspaper, the Islington Gazette, dated 7 March: "Holloway 
teen jailed after police discover crack in his bum." 

"It seems like they can get you for anything these days," commented 
Michael Lean from Australia. He had been reading the 3 March issue 
of Isis Town and Country of Childers, Queensland. A story about a 
series of drug raids by police in the Childers area reported that 
one woman was charged with "possession of instruments for smoking a 
dangerous drug, and also with possession of things." 

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