World Wide Words -- 22 Oct 11

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 759          Saturday 22 October 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: Cascabel.
3. Wordface.
4. Q and A: Wildcat strike.
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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LICK-WIMBLE  "'Tosspots, bench-whistlers, and lick-wimbles'", cried 
John Orford. "What a beautiful set of fine old words - they convince 
me that no word should ever be considered obsolete, even if it be 
archaic. I thought we liked old things - why does this not include 
words? I propose that a lick-wimble was one on his uppers who had 
exhausted the benevolence of his friends and was reduced to licking 
those wimbles that had been used to bore into barrels of beer - or 
even brandy. There is, of course, absolutely no evidence to back 
this up."

GAINSAY  Several readers were reminded of the argument sketch in 
Monty Python's Flying Circus, in which the customer says: "Argument 
is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic 
gainsaying of anything the other person says." Ed Vanderkloet 
recalled, "That's probably the only time I've encountered the word 
'gainsaying' and I've remembered it for decades, so I suppose you 
could conclude that comedy can be educational."

Stephen Brown commented, "I was surprised in a way to see that 
'gainsay', which feels a perfectly normal word to me, made it into 
the bulletin at all, but that probably says more about me than the 
newsletter! However, I expected the noun 'gainsayers' to feature in 
the examples of its use, since this way of referring to a group of 
(perhaps frustrating) opponents strikes me as one of the more common 
ways the word appears."


2. Weird Words: Cascabel  /'ka:sk at bel/
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You might judge the age and geographical origin of a dictionary by 
looking up the definition of this word. Modern ones, especially 
those with an American focus, are most likely to tell you it's the 
name of a medium-hot chilli (though, being American, they will spell 
it chili). Older ones, especially British, will more commonly say 
it's the knob on the back end of a muzzle-loading cannon.

The source in both cases is the same, the Spanish "cascabel", which 
means a little round bell, a child's rattle, or a rattlesnake. Its 
origin is unknown, though it has been suggested it may be from the 
medieval Latin "cascabellus", a little bell, or Latin "scabellum", a 
kind of castanet played with the foot, which may be a diminutive of 
"caccabus", a pot. The chilli was given its name by the Spanish in 
America because when dried the seeds inside rattle when it's shaken. 
The Spanish also named the protrusion on the cannon, from its shape. 
(It's there, by the way, so ropes or slings can be attached when the 
cannon is being moved.)

The most famous association of cascabel is with the Victoria Cross, 
the highest British honour for bravery. It has often been claimed 
that all the crosses ever awarded have been cast from the bronze 
cascabels of two cannon captured from the Russians during the 
Crimean War of the 1850s, though recent research has thrown doubt on 
this.


3. Wordface 
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FROM JOURNEY FAR  An English MP, Sir Peter Bottomley, having had a 
discussion over dinner about word origins, asked me to clarify. 
Could I confirm that TUNDRA doesn't come from Finnish? A hunt in the 
dustier corners of my online and offline libraries turned up the 
information that the word was imported from Russian in the early 
nineteenth century (the OED says 1841, but that entry is old and I 
found it in a travel work, Narrative of a Pedestrian Journey through 
Russia and Siberian Tartary by John Dundas Cochrane, dated 1824). 
Captain Cochrane spelled the word the French way, as "toundra", and 
some further delving confirmed that the word was known in French 
before English. It may have been imported from that language, though 
parallel introduction is also possible. Russian got the term from 
the Sami people, who live in northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and 
western Russia. The direct source was Kildin Sami, spoken around 
Kola, near Murmansk. Though Sami belongs to the same language family 
as Finnish and "tunturi" in the latter language is related, the 
source of "tundra" isn't Finnish. So transmission was from Sami to 
Russian and then to English, possibly via French. As an aside, 
"tundra" is the only word in English which is known for sure to 
derive from Sami.

MEDICAL CURIOSITY  I recently mentioned the anatomical snuffbox, a 
small depression on the wrist that was once a convenient place to 
put a pinch of snuff for snorting up one's nose. I've now found 
another odd medical term, WAITER'S TIP for a neurological condition 
that's caused by damage to one of the nerves in the neck. The arm is 
limp and the elbow straight but the wrist is bent over. It reminded 
doctors of the posture of a waiter taking a backhanded tip. The 
official name seems to be Erb's palsy.


4. Q and A: Wildcat strike
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Q. Where did the phrase "wildcat strike" originate? That it means an 
illegal strike of some kind is known, but I cannot find out where it 
originated. [Desmond Klein]

A. The term began to appear in the US at the beginning of the last 
century. This is an early example:

    Unions in all the building trades are rapidly voting in 
    favor of the proposed Structural Building Trades Alliance 
    of America, which aims to combine 500,000 workers in one 
    compact body. The object is to put a stop to "wildcat" 
    strikes.
    [Daily Gazette And Bulletin (Williamsport, PA), 19 Apr. 
    1904.]

It's a late example of an idiomatic phrase that includes "wildcat". 
In Europe this refers to a wild variety of the domestic feline, but 
in North America it's been applied to a couple of larger cats. One 
is the Canadian lynx; the other has more names than any one species 
surely has a right to - among them puma, mountain lion, catamount, 
cougar and panther. 

In Britain, "wild cat" became a term for a  savage, ill-tempered, or 
spiteful person and this sense was carried over into North America 
but became attached to the native big cats of the continent. In the 
nineteenth century it extended to any untamed or unreliable person, 
or someone who undertakes a risky or unsafe project, especially one 
that preys on innocent people.

The earliest use from which all others followed was "wildcat bank". 
Such banks flourished in the period before 1863 when states were 
allowed to set them up. They issued banknotes; at the time, these 
were promissory notes, convenient IOUs exchangeable at the issuing 
bank for real money called specie - coins, especially gold. Some 
technically still are - over the signature of the chief cashier, 
Bank of England notes quaintly say "I promise to pay the bearer on 
demand the sum of ...". Banks frequently issued far more banknotes 
than they had capital to redeem them. A run on the bank could ruin 
them and many ended their short lives that way.

When Michigan became a state in 1837, it went further than most by 
allowing banks to be established without specific permission from 
the state government. Criminals flourished. This is an extract from 
a letter from a firm in Detroit to one of its customers:

    We have had nearly sixty new Banks start into operation 
    within about the last three months. They are called the 
    "Wild Cat Banks" - the notes they issue are called "Wild 
    Cat Money" - our state is full of it; if you take Five 
    dollars to-day, perhaps to-morrow, four of the five may be 
    good for nothing - a dollar in specie is almost as rare as 
    a swallow in mid-winter.
    [Rutland Herald (Rutland, Virginia), 20 Mar. 1838.]

Two stories are told about the origin of the term. One says that 
notes issued by one of those early Michigan banks featured a drawing 
of a panther. I can't corroborate that. It seems unlikely because 
the term appeared too widely and too soon after statehood for it to 
be associated with a specific bank. The other story seems more 
probable, that banks were deliberately set up in out-of-the-way 
places, thought of as haunts of wildcats, to restrict the number of 
banknote holders who sought to redeem them. This fitted the 
prevailing view that human wildcats were cunning, stealthy 
predators, like the wild animal. This is one view from personal 
experience:

    Some thirty banks or more were the fungous growth of 
    the new political hot-bed; and many of these were of 
    course without a "local habitation," though they might 
    boast the "name," it may be of some part of the deep 
    woods, where the wild cat had hitherto been the more 
    formidable foe to the unwary and defenceless. Hence the 
    celebrated term "Wild Cat".
    [A New Home - Who'll Follow? or, Glimpses of Western 
    Life, by Caroline Matilda Kirkland (Mrs Mary Clavers), 
    1839.]

A writer to the New York Tribune in April 1841 sarcastically 
outlined rules for a successful new bank, among them that its grand 
offices should be in the middle of town but that "Redemption [was] 
to be somewhere in the backwoods that a catamount could not climb to 
without breaking his neck". 

Later in the century, the term was applied more widely and loosely, 
for example to an extra train running outside the normal schedule, 
to itinerant theatrical troupes who picked up engagements as they 
toured and to distillers of moonshine whisky. It came most commonly 
to be used (as it still is) for speculators who explored for oil 
away from areas of known reserves.

    When an operator goes into an undeveloped field, and 
    puts down a test well, he naturally desires to have the 
    profit of his risk. It costs him something like $6,000 to 
    put down that wildcat well, for which in most cases, he 
    gets no return, for the majority of wildcat wells produce 
    nothing.
    [The Sun (New York), 17 Jul 1883.]

The rare successful finds were "wildcat strikes", which by their 
nature were unexpected. This last term began to appear in print in 
the early 1900s and it seems it was almost immediately transferred, 
possibly unconsciously but perhaps as a bitter joke, to a sudden and 
undisciplined downing of tools.


5. Sic!
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Neil Hesketh wrote, "My brother, who works for the US Department of 
Agriculture, sent me a Daily Tech article dated 13 October with the 
headline 'Ethanol Production Used More Corn than Farmers in Past 
Year'. Being an agricultural scientist, he confirms that corn is 
more useful than farmers for making ethanol, although farmers are 
fairly good at making corn."

"A grammatical error in the first sentence of the book!" complained 
Brian Miller. The book was The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas and the 
sentence was: "His eyes still shut, a dream dissolving and already 
impossible to recall, Hector's hand sluggishly reached across the 
bed."

A colourful permanent sign recently erected close to my home reads 
in part: "Streamside signage produced by Castle School studens, in 
conjunction with Thornbury Town Council. For more imformation on the 
walk please use leaflet available from the Town Hall." Count the 
errors.

Bruce Napier e-mailed, "The more I hear about News International, 
the scarier it gets." He referred to a piece of 17 October in The 
Independent about the influence of the Murdoch press on Home Office 
policy. It said: "The 'Sarah's Law' campaign was started by the 
newspaper under the editorship of Rebekah Brooks and was continued 
by her predecessors." 

"That's some dense shark meat!" commented Robbie Gibson, having seen 
this sentence in a Yahoo! UK news report about shark fins: "At up to 
300lbs a kilo, they are increasingly popular with China's new rich."

Laurence Horn noted on the American Dialect Society list that on 
Thursday the Huffington Post had the headline "Muammar Gaddafi 
Killed, Captured In Sirte". Jesse Sheidlower of the OED noted, "We 
should celebrate this. It's not often one gets to use the term 
'hysteron-proteron', after all."


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