World Wide Words -- 07 May 11

Fri May 6 16:19:59 UTC 2011

WORLD WIDE WORDS            ISSUE 735           Saturday 7 May 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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               Now on Twitter as @wwwordseditor

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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Filemot.
3. Turns of Phrase: Arab Spring.
4. Wordface.
5. Q and A: Piker.
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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HEROES AND GOATS  Lots of people mentioned the Peanuts cartoon, in 
which the term has appeared numerous times. This example, which was 
in the strip in June 1958, came courtesy of Mike DiCola:

    LUCY: The ball is coming down!
    CHARLIE BROWN: If I catch it, we'll win the 
    championship, and I'll be the hero! If I miss it, I'll be 
    the goat! I can hear it now ... "Charlie the goat 
    Brown!"

Jack Shakely wrote: "I believe you are mistaken that 'goat' in the 
phrase 'hero to goat' refers to scapegoat. I believe it comes from, 
of all places, the United States Military Academy at West Point. 
And it refers to intellectual prowess, not blame. Since the 
earliest years of the nineteenth century, the graduating cadets of 
West Point were assigned class rankings. The lowest-ranking member 
of the class was called the goat. Some famous goats through history 
include George Armstrong Custer and George Pickett, who led the 
disastrous charge at Gettysburg. To this day the Army cadets play 
an intramural football game between the Goats (the bottom half of 
the class) and the Engineers (top half). So whereas scapegoats are 
occasionally innocent victims, goats in sports (and West Point) 
earn their bone-headed reputation." In the eternal regress of 
etymological investigation, of course, it just takes the problem 
back one stage, since we don't know why the goats got their name.

HANDBAGGING  Henry M Willis gently handbagged me (or perhaps made 
me the goat), pointing out that one of the two persons mentioned in 
the Reuters report - the one doing the handbagging - was female, so 
my conclusion that the term no longer had sexist implications was 
incorrect. Victoria Leam concurs: "I think the sexist overtones do 
remain. It is now commonly used in the UK with the connotation that 
there is a disagreement over something silly and that the people 
involved, male or female, have reacted in a camp, histrionic or 
effeminate way. Two common examples are footballers starting to 
push each other around over some perceived slight or women getting 
'bitchy' with each other. The usual remark in both cases would be 
'oh dear, it's handbags' or 'it's handbags at dawn' as an amused, 
derisory comment."

2. Weird Words: Filemot /'fIlIm at t/
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This word is now so rare that people who write about it tend to 
quote from one of its last unforced appearances, Lew Wallace's Ben-
Hur from as long ago as 1880 ("each compartment crowded with 
labelled folios all filemot with age and use"). Here's another, 
from a little earlier still:

    October now. All the world swings at the top of its 
    beauty; and those hills where we shall live, what robes 
    of color fold them! Tawny filemot gilding the valleys, 
    each seam and rut a scroll or arabesque, and all the year 
    pouring out her heart's blood to flush the maples, the 
    great impurpled granites warm with the sunshine they have 
    drunk all summer! 
    [The Atlantic Monthly, Feb. 1860. We may perhaps 
    forgive the writer's strained and impassioned, even 
    impurpled, prose, since she goes on to say that she is to 
    be married at noon.]

You may by now have guessed that "filemot" (said, if you please, as 
three syllables, and not as "file-mot") is a colour, the russet or 
brown colour of dead autumn leaves.

It began as the French "feuillemorte", literally "dead leaf". It 
has occasionally appeared in that spelling in English, either as 
one word or two. However, the extraordinary ability of my English 
forebears to transmogrify any word coming from across the Channel 
has changed it into phyliamort, philimot, foliomort, fillemot and 
other forms.

You may instead, if you prefer good plain words, resort to pure-
bred English and refer to it as "dead-leaf brown".

3. Turns of Phrase: Arab Spring
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Demonstrations and protests in countries in North Africa and the 
Middle East in 2011 have led to this term being widely used. As a 
metaphor for change through popular uprisings, it has also been 
applied to countries not part of the Arab world.

It was used first for uprisings that led to changes of regime in 
Tunisia and Egypt, as a term of hope that a domino process might 
lead to changes elsewhere. Armed retaliation by the governments of 
Libya, Bahrain and Syria against their own populations has since 
taken some of the lustre off the phrase.

The term was coined early in 2005 in reference to unrest in Egypt, 
Syria and Lebanon, probably as a play on "Prague spring", the 1968 
democratic uprising in Communist Czechoslovakia.

    The Arab Spring, the great awakening, 2011's 
    equivalent of the fall of communism in 1989, is spreading 
    across North Africa and the Middle East like water 
    pouring from a broken dam. 
    [The Times, 19 Feb. 2011.]

    The frightening spiral of violence in Syria and the 
    determination of its ruler, Bashar Assad, to crush 
    peaceful opposition are a bleak reminder of how far the 
    Arab spring still has to go before summer arrives - and 
    how easily the region's hopeful mood could turn wintry 
    again.
    [The Economist, 30 Apr. 2011.]

4. Wordface
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CONSPIRATORIAL LANGUAGE  The US already has Birthers, who still 
don't believe President Obama is an American citizen, even though 
his full birth certificate has now been published, and Truthers, 
who reject the accepted explanation of the events of 9/11. A new 
weed has sprouted this week in the hotbed of conspiracy: some 
people are arguing that the decision not to release photographs of 
the dead Osama bin Laden proves that he wasn't killed in the 
attack, despite Al-Qaeda having confirmed it. We already have two 
words for this group, PROOFERS and DEATHERS (the latter having 
existed since 2009 in reference to the proposed reforms to health 
care), and they've spawned the linked nouns PROOFERISM and 
DEATHERISM.

PLAY IT WITH FEELING  Reports claim that the next generation of 
video games will include sensors to record the emotional states of 
the players by monitoring their heart rate, sweat and breathing. 
The results will be fed back into the game, perhaps to make it less 
difficult if a player becomes too stressed or make it harder if the 
player seems not to be emotionally involved with it. The technique 
is called AFFECTIVE GAMING.

DOMP DUMPED?  A search accidentally took me to a work of 1973, Need 
Your Doctor be so Useless? by Andrew Malleson. He mentioned DOMP, 
supposedly medical jargon for "Diseases of Medical Practice", or 
what the more scholarly among us would describe as iatrogenic 
conditions, caused by those charged with curing us. Online sources 
suggest DOMP may be expanded into "Days on the Market Property", 
whatever that may be, or "Delivery Order Management Plan", but 
never Dr Malleson's version. Was his ever part of the vocabulary of 
doctors, even if it were only whispered between colleagues in the 
privacy of the operating theatre? Or did he invent it?

5. Q and A: Piker
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Q. The other morning I told my husband that when it came to 
snoring, compared to him I was a piker. Then, as we often do, we 
had a rousing discussion of the possible etymology of the term 
"piker". Consulting the dictionary, we found more meanings than a 
bird has feathers, including a relationship to "pikey," which I 
personally don't agree with. In the States, it means "cheap," but I 
couldn't find a satisfactory explanation. [Rosemarie Wilson]

A. How good to learn that your household starts the day with an 
etymological investigation. Others please copy.

As you've already discovered, there are many meanings of "piker", 
including the variation you've rightly disregarded, the derogatory 
English regional slang term "pikey". That comes from "piker" for a 
tramp or vagabond who was always on the road, who travelled the 
turnpikes, the one-time toll roads of England. "Turnpike" derives 
from the long, swivelling pole (one sense of "pike") that barred 
the road at every tollhouse.

The consensus among dictionaries is that your sense of "piker" does 
come from "pike", but from the verb, not the noun. If somebody 
piked himself in late medieval times he had furnished himself with 
a pilgrim's staff - yet another sort of pike. Figuratively to pike 
oneself meant to travel on foot, go away or run away.

It may be, though the evidence is sparse, that through the idea of 
running away the verb came to suggest withdrawing from a situation 
through excessive caution. In the US in the 1850s it began to be 
attached to small-time gambling and a "piker" was a man who made 
very small bets, often hedging them. This is the first example on 
record:

    Piker is a man who plays very small amounts. Plays a 
    quarter, wins, pockets the winnings, and keeps at 
    quarters; and never, if he can help it, bets on his 
    winnings.
    [Vocabulum; or, The Rogue's Lexicon, by George W 
    Matsell, 1859.]

Some reference books suggest a completely different source. A piker 
in the US was also a poor white migrant from the southern states. 
The first pikers were migrants to California, around the time of 
the 1849 Gold Rush, from Pike County, Missouri. (The county was 
named after Zebulon Pike, the soldier and explorer who also gave 
his name to Pikes Peak in Colorado.) This version of the term came 
to mean a worthless, lazy, good-for-nothing person. 

The later history of "piker" in the US interwove these two strands 
so that they are now hard to separate. "Piker" became a disparaging 
term with several senses, describing a person as a shirker, stingy, 
cowardly, a cheat or simply insignificant. Your phrase "a piker 
compared to ...", for a person who pales by comparison with 
another, comes from this last sense but isn't often included in 
dictionaries. All these may be on the way out: they don't seem to 
be known to younger people.

[Thanks to Douglas Wilson for his help with this expression.]

6. Sic!
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A comment in the Daily Telegraph for 30 April was sent in by Al 
Segall: "Princess Beatrice ... was photographed running in the surf 
on the island of St Barts with her American boyfriend Dave Clark 
dressed in a blue bikini."

David Hatchuel was surprised at the multi-use weapon employed by 
the New Zealand police, as headlined in the New Zealand Herald of 3 
May: "Officers shoot man with knife". Lynn Whinery found another 
misreadable headline in the same issue: "Man shot dead neighbours 
at close range."

Michael Hocken tells us that the London Evening Standard of 3 May, 
reporting on the bin Laden killing, referred homophonously to the 
computer files, CD-ROMs and other electronic information gathered 
by the US as a "motherload of intelligence". Heavy, one presumes? 
Lawrence Krakauer spotted that the Boston Globe's story about the 
death included another homophone: "according to Islamic tradition, 
his body was washed, wrapped in a white shroud, and given burial 
rights." Joel May noted that the Daily Telegraph may have confused 
readers about the objectives of the attack: "Mr Panetta also told 
the network that the US Navy Seals made the final decision to kill 
bin Laden rather than the president." Perhaps, in the heat of the 
moment, the Seals muddled "Osama" with "Obama", as many newspapers 
did.

Rebecca Eschliman saw this headline in the Columbus Dispatch for 1 
May: "Taliban declare spring offensive". With all the tornados and 
floods this past month, many Americans must feel the same way.

Martha Kearney, introducing Friday's World At One on BBC Radio 4, 
reported that in local elections the day before, "Across England 
the Liberal Democrats have lost control of four councils and over 
300 councillors."

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