World Wide Words -- 21 May 2011

Fri May 20 16:16:49 UTC 2011

WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 737           Saturday 21 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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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Weird Words: Scobberlotcher.
3. Wordface.
4. Q and A: Soap opera.
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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CARWHICHET  Readers provided many more examples of nonsense queries 
from their own experiences. From Canada, Marc Slingerland e-mailed, 
"I'm very glad to have the word 'carwhichet' to describe the kind 
of zany non-sequiturs that briefly flourished in our area during my 
adolescence! A representative example: 'As I was biking across my 
backyard in my canoe, the left wheel fell off. How many pancakes 
does it take to shingle a doghouse?" To which the correct answer 
was, "It depends if a snake has armpits." I've thought of these as 
'surrealist jokes', but 'carwhichet' is a nice compact term that I 
shall try to remember." 

"'Carwhichet' reminded me of a line my father would use on me as a 
child," Loren Crispell wrote. In an attempt to divert my boredom on 
long trips, he used to ask, 'When is a duck?' Answer: 'The higher 
he flies the much.'" Pádraig McCarthy and Lesley Shaw both remember 
another duck-related riddle: "Q: What's the difference between a 
duck? A: One of its legs is both the same." Ken Shaw added, "When I 
was in school in the late 1950s, the most familiar carwhichet was: 
'If a chicken and-a-half-can lay an egg-and-a-half in a day-and-a-
half, how long will it take a grasshopper with a wooden leg to kick 
his way through a dill pickle?'"

UPPER CRUST  "Just to note," e-mailed Kate Robinson, "that there is 
a French parallel to 'the upper crust', 'le gratin'. It too has a 
mildly pejorative sense, possibly because it implies 'the most 
delicious part' of the dish, and has a rather self-congratulatory 
feel. Of course it refers to the broiled, crispy, very rich top 
layer of dishes like gratin dauphinois."

2. Weird Words: Scobberlotcher
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The first recorder of this strange word was the antiquarian John 
Aubrey, who wrote in his Brief Lives about Dr Ralph Kettell, who 
had been President of Trinity College, Oxford, between 1599 and 
1643. Kettell had had an inventive way with invective, describing 
the undergraduates of the College as rascal-jacks, blindcinques, 
tarrarags and scobberlotchers. Of the last of these, his opinion 
was that:

    these did no hurt, were sober, but went idling about 
    the grove with their hands in their pockets and telling 
    the number of the trees there or so.
    [Brief Lives, by John Aubrey, c1697.]

We may assume that counting trees was a way to pass the time, like 
twiddling one's thumbs, not a herald of silvicultural ambition.

To waste the potential of this mouth-filling and mysterious word on 
idle boys is almost an affront against language. It would surely 
better fit a violent robber who strikes down unwary travellers or a 
mythical monster which terrorises remote Scottish glens.

The Oxford English Dictionary points, tentatively, to two old words 
as possible antecedents. One is the eastern English regional term 
"scopperloit", a time of idleness (perhaps from Dutch "leuteren", 
to idle, the source of English "loiter"). The other is the verb 
"scoterlope", to wander aimlessly.

This is another of its rare appearances:

    "Good-morrow, Master Richard!" hailed the man, in a 
    voice that matched his person. "What! not abroad yet, 
    thou bed-worm, thou scobberlotcher!" and leaning down 
    rolled a snowball in his massive hands, but desisted at 
    the last moment from throwing it at Dick's window lest it 
    should enter by mistake the adjoining room, where his 
    father and mother slept; and flung it instead with great 
    shrewdness at Sally, the pretty serving-maid, who was 
    sweeping the snow away from the top flight of broad front 
    steps. 
    [Dick Willoughby, by Cecil Day Lewis, 1933.]

3. Wordface
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NEWSPAPER NAMES  The advent of the electric telegraph, at first so 
called to distinguish it from its mechanical predecessor, led to 
huge changes in the way people communicated and in particular how 
the press was able to report events. In consequence, many 
newspapers adopted the word "telegraph" as part of their name. In 
James Gleick's new book, The Information, he describes the 
successor to the telegraph: "To employ the telephone, one just 
talked. A child could use it. In fact, it seemed like a familiar 
toy, made from tin cylinders and string. The telephone left no 
permanent record. 'The Telephone' had no future as a newspaper 
name." At once, people from the West Midlands of the UK rose up to 
disagree. "What about the Smethwick Telephone?" they cried. This 
was founded in 1884, in the very early days of the electric 
speaking telephone, as this new-fangled device would have been 
described at the time. After various amalgamations, in 1966 it 
became The Warley News Telephone, which closed in 1975. I've seen a 
reference to a newspaper in Arkansas called simply The Telephone, 
likewise founded in the 1880s. In addition a number of telephone-
based news outlets briefly existed a century ago as precursors of 
radio, generically called telephone newspapers.

4. Q and A: Soap opera
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Q. I feel there must be a very obvious reason for the common name 
of a long-running TV series, "soap opera", but I can't think of it 
just now. Is it to do with "kitchen sink" drama?! [Nick Child]

A. I can see why you introduced the idea, but there's no link 
between soap opera and kitchen-sink drama, a grittily realistic 
portrayal of British working-class life that appeared in the late 
1950s, for example John Osborne's Look Back in Anger and Arnold 
Wesker's Roots. Soap opera is an American form, though much copied. 
Most people these days would associate soap operas with television, 
but they actually began in the early days of radio.

By the late 1920s, evening prime-time radio was well-established, 
but radio stations and advertisers were unsure whether anybody 
would want to listen during the day. All they knew was that the 
audience would be overwhelmingly female, since in those days few 
women went out to work. The only model they had was the popular 
Amos and Andy, featuring the misadventures of two southern black 
men who had been transplanted to the south side of Chicago (written 
and performed, such were the times, by two white men), which had 
been running since 1926 and had been extremely profitable for its 
sponsor, Pepsodent Toothpaste. This had shown that a daily dramatic 
entertainment whose storylines ran over many episodes could hold an 
audience.

The first daytime serial, as the type was formally called, was The 
Goldbergs, written by and starring Gertrude Berg, which began in 
November 1929. However, radio historians would argue that it was 
actually the first sitcom and that the first true soap was Painted 
Dreams the following year, written by an ambitious Dayton 
schoolteacher and radio-struck actress named Irna Phillips. After 
these showed the potential, there was no stopping them and serials 
such as Myrt and Marge, Pepper Young's Family, Ma Perkins and The 
Romance of Helen Trent soon became long-term fixtures for millions 
of listeners.

This is an acerbic later view of the form:

    A soap opera is a kind of sandwich, whose recipe is 
    simple enough, although it took years to compound. 
    Between thick slices of advertising, spread twelve 
    minutes of dialogue, add predicament, villainy, and 
    female suffering in equal measure, throw in a dash of 
    nobility, sprinkle with tears, season with organ music, 
    cover with a rich announcer sauce, and serve five times a 
    week. 
    ["Soapland I - O Pioneers!", by James Thurber, in the 
    New Yorker, 15 May 1948.]

The advertisers who paid for these daytime serials were naturally 
enough those selling household products. The biggest spender by far 
was Procter & Gamble, makers of Ivory soap, whose advertising 
budget for radio in 1931 was nearly half a million dollars. To the 
cynics who saw nothing good in these daytime serials, to say they 
existed merely to sell soap was as good a put-down as any, all the 
better for being accurate. As James Thurber added:

    It is the hope of every advertiser to habituate the 
    housewife to an engrossing narrative whose optimum length 
    is forever and at the same time to saturate all levels of 
    her consciousness with the miracle of a given product, so 
    that she will be aware of it all the days of her life and 
    mutter its name in her sleep.

The name "soap operas" for them came along some years after they 
had become established, together with other sarcastic epithets such 
as "washboard weepers" and "dishpan dramas". Though some say "soap 
opera" may have first appeared in trade magazines such as Variety, 
the first example we know of in print is this:

    That sort of thing, the elite think, went out with 
    sound - or, at least, with the radio "soap operas".
    [New York Times, 12 Nov. 1939.]

The second half of the term is less obvious, though it's not far 
from the truth to say that they were called operas because they so 
obviously weren't. When you think about it, though, they did both 
dramatise overwrought emotional moments.

However, "soap opera" had actually been borrowed from a disparaging 
term for an earlier popular film and radio form, the western. These 
had been known as "horse operas" from 1923 at the latest. This was 
itself a transferred term, as it was first used nearly a century 
earlier in the UK and US for an equine public spectacle. This is 
its first known appearance, from London:

    M. Laurent has signed and sealed for COVENT-GARDEN 
    THEATRE, and will open with Jullien and his flower-
    gardens and monster quadrilles. It is said, that after 
    the Jullien era shall have ended, we are to have either 
    equestrian spectacles or a German opera; but that it is 
    not finally settled whether we are to have the Herrs or 
    the Horses - or either. We fear a German opera will not 
    pay, and we hope a Horse opera will not.
    [The Age And Argus (Middlesex), 31 Aug. 1844. The Age 
    and Argus was several times satirical at the expense of 
    Monsieur Jullien, a French conductor who created low-brow 
    but popular musical spectacles such as the English 
    Quadrille and the Destruction of Pompeii, which involved, 
    another newspaper reported, "the popping of guns, the 
    flashing of blue and red lights, the rolling of 
    theatrical thunder, and the extinction of the gas 
    [lighting], with which the audience seemed highly 
    delighted". He had come from a summer season at the 
    famous Vauxhall Gardens, which may explain the reference 
    to flowers.]

6. Sic!
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"What other outcome did they expect?" Barbara McGilvray asked. She 
had sent in a front-page headline from the Sydney Daily Telegraph 
of 17 May: "Family murder spree ends in tragedy".

Mark Thomas found this sentence in the London Evening Standard on 
Friday 13 May: "Mr. Collins said Labour's vote share last week, at 
37 per cent, was low for an opposition party - worse even than the 
party's least successful modern leader, Michael Foot, managed 30 
decades ago." 

What seemed at first to be a sexist grammatical error appeared in  
a headline that Peter Weinrich encountered in Science magazine on 
13 May: "He Not So Super After All". "He" turned out to be the 
chemical symbol for helium.

The Hobart Mercury of Tasmania, Gordon Bain reports, wrote about 
animal superheroes in its issue of May 13: "Fizo, a nine-year-old 
silky terrier, saved four young children from a brown snake by 
sacrificing himself. He survived." Super-super-hero, then?

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