World Wide Words -- 29 Oct 11
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Oct 28 16:38:30 UTC 2011
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 760 Saturday 29 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: Ecdysiast.
3. Wordface.
4. Q and A: Knock seven bells out of someone.
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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WAITER'S TIP Following up my mention of this colloquial anatomical
term, Jim Muller wrote, "When I was at medical school in Cape Town
in the 60's and 70's the position of the hand in Erb's palsy was
referred to as the 'policeman's tip' position. Perhaps we were more
cynical about policemen in those days, and waiters did not have to
expect backhanded tips."
Marcia Wilson mentioned another once-popular medical term, the Ford
fracture, also called the backfire or chauffeur's fracture, which
referred to a broken wrist or arm: "The Model T Ford had to be
cranked by hand. Not only difficult, it could be frustrating and
occasionally dangerous. If you didn't have all the settings in their
proper place, the crank could spin in the wrong direction. It would
fly back at high speed, connecting with the nearest part of your
anatomy - usually the arm doing the winding."
WILDCATS From Jascha Kessler: "Your discussion of wildcat banks in
the 19th century reminded me, yet again, that things have changed:
specie, as it was known, really is no more, and our coinage is base
metals. Some folks tried to hold on, mainly in Nevada. In 1950, in
Reno, we stopped for lunch at a casino, and when I asked the cashier
for singles, wanting to break a $20 bill, she looked at me puzzled.
'Singles? What are they?' I said, being an Easterner, 'You know,
dollars, dollar bills.' Astonished she replied, 'You mean paper
money?' And in answer to my shrug, spilled out 20 silver dollars.
Weighty specie ... the faintest memory in our time."
"I've also seen wildcat used in the context of rail lines," wrote
Joe Orfant. "Outside of Boston, a rail line runs between the main,
parallel lines to Lowell and Lawrence. I recall a trip to Lowell
over thirty years ago when a frozen switch or some other problems
caused our train to be sent up the Lawrence line around the problem
to connect to the Lowell line via the seldom used 'wildcat spur'. I
was surprised to see it recently on a map of the MBTA commuter rail
system under that name."
GRAMMAR PUZZLE A sentence in last week's Sic! column - "His eyes
still shut, a dream dissolving and already impossible to recall,
Hector's hand sluggishly reached across the bed." - was claimed to
be ungrammatical. To the submitter and to me the sentence seemed to
suggest that Hector's hand had eyes. This provoked responses from
readers who believed the sentence was correct; a linguist, Arnold
Zwicky, whom I asked about the matter, agreed with them, arguing
that the initial "his" is exactly equivalent to "Hector's". You can
see that most clearly if you invert the two: "Hector's eyes still
shut ... his hand sluggishly reached across the bed." Despite that
verdict, the sentence would have benefitted from recasting.
CORRECTIONS The Rutland Herald is published in Rutland, Vermont,
not Virginia as I had it last week. A comment last time implied that
the European wild cat is a feral variety of the domestic feline;
it's a separate species, of course.
2. Weird Words: Ecdysiast /ek'dIziast/
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A writer for the Washington Post in August this year had it spot on:
"ecdysiast is a fancy word for stripper". It was coined in 1940 and
has had only sporadic success, perhaps being thought too odd-looking
a word or too high-falutin for so earthy a pursuit. Some reviews of
Gypsy, a musical about Gypsy Rose Lee, have said that the word was
created for her by H L Mencken, the American critic and author of
The American Language.
Not so. He created it in reply to a letter from Georgia Sothern, a
celebrated strip-tease artist from Baltimore (in 1968, in This Was
Burlesque, Ann Corio and Joseph DiMona wrote, "The mere sight of
this red-hot, redheaded temptress tossing her hips in fantastic
abandon to the wild music of the band caught up everybody in a
spell. You didn't shout from the audience to Georgia to take it off;
there was no time.") She wrote to Mencken:
Strip-teasing is a formal and rhythmic disrobing of the
body in public. In recent years there has been a great
deal of uninformed criticism levelled against my
profession. Most of it is without foundation and arises
because of the unfortunate word strip-teasing, which
creates the wrong connotations in the mind of the public.
I feel sure that if you could coin a new and more
palatable word to describe this art, the objections to it
would vanish and I and my colleagues would have easier
going.
Both practice and term were certainly disliked by many. At the time,
New York City prohibited any mention of strip-tease in publicity.
Mencken, as you might expect from an American gentleman of the old
school, sent a considered reply:
I need not tell you that I sympathize with you in your
affliction, and wish that I could help you. Unfortunately,
no really persuasive new name suggests itself. It might be
a good idea to relate strip-teasing in some way or other
to the associated zoological phenomenon of molting. Thus
the word moltician comes to mind, but it must be rejected
because of its likeness to mortician. A resort to the
scientific name for molting, which is ecdysis, produces
both ecdysist and ecdysiast.
[Letter to Georgia Sothern, 5 Apr. 1940.]
Miss Sothern, or her publicist, instantly adopted "ecdysiast". It
appeared in print for the first time 14 days later, in a syndicated
newspaper report about her forthcoming tour. Not only was Gypsy Rose
Lee not the recipient of the name, she hated it, perhaps because she
thought Mencken was a highbrow patronising her working-class roots.
She responded in an interview soon afterwards:
"Ecdysiast" he calls me! Why the man is an intellectual
slob. He has been reading books. Dictionaries. We don't
wear feathers and molt them off ... What does he know
about stripping?"
[Low Man on a Totem Pole, by Harry Allan Smith, 1941.
"Slob" often appears as "snob", on the assumption that it
was a transcription error. I suspect Ms Lee knew exactly
what she wanted to say.]
Whatever Mencken knew, he was certainly conversant with technical
vocabulary from classical sources. "Ecdysis" derives from Greek
"ekdusis", shedding or moulting. He presumably created "ecdysiast"
from it on the pattern of "enthusiast", which certainly described
Georgia Sothern.
3. Wordface
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DIGITAL OBTRUSIONS A query came from J R Wilco about the origins of
the simile STICK OUT LIKE A SORE THUMB, to be very conspicuous or
obvious. The source is obvious enough, I believe, as anybody who
has ever had pain in the joint of the thumb may attest. Any attempt
to bend it towards the fingers to grasp an object hurts enough that
it's better to leave it unbent. The Oxford English Dictionary finds
its first example in one of Erle Stanley Gardner's stories, The Case
of the Sleepwalker's Niece, published in 1936. The expression is
certainly American, but my searches found examples nearly a century
earlier, including one from a humorous book, The History of the Hen
Fever, by the writer and editor George Pickering Burnham, published
in 1855. Researchers with access to better American resources will
no doubt take it back even further.
IN ANCIENT DAYS I'm reading Richard Fortey's new book, Survivors:
The Animals and Plants that Time has Left Behind, and came across
the wonderfully complex adjective PALAEOICHTHYOLOGICAL, "relating to
the study of extinct and fossil fish". Take care not to confuse this
with PALAEOICHNOLOGICAL, "of the study and interpretation of fossil
footprints, tracks, and other trace fossils". The former term, once
you've stripped away all the beginnings and endings, is from Greek
"ikhthus", a fish (which also supplies a number of relatives in
English, including "ichthyic", a grandly scholastic term meaning
fishlike), while the latter is from "ikhnos", a footprint or track.
4. Q and A: Knock seven bells out of someone
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Q. In several reviews of the new movie Warrior I listened to on BBC
podcasts I heard the phrase "to beat seven bells out of somebody",
as in "this movie is basically about two men trying to beat seven
bells out of each other". I tried to find this phrase but it appears
in very few dictionaries. What are the origins of the phrase? I've
read somewhere a supposition that it may refer to bells measuring
the half-hour intervals during watches on a ship. [Monika Mazurek,
Poland]
A. It's almost exclusively a British expression today, still often
encountered, though more commonly as "knock seven bells". However,
"beat", "smack", "pound" and other verbs can be used:
Now we have bombed seven bells out of [Libya's] roads,
ports, airfields, and other infrastructure, who will
guarantee the rebuilding of everything that has been
lost?
[Evening Standard (London), 23 Aug. 2011.]
A warrior association is appropriate for this idiom, since the
origin is fighting ships and - as you have read - the ringing of
bells to mark the passage of time on board. This is the usual
explanation of its origin:
A total of eight bells are struck to end a watch; to
knock seven bells out of someone implies pretty severe
handling - without actually finishing him off.
[Jackspeak, A Guide to British Naval Slang & Usage, by
Rick Jolly, revised second edition 2007.]
At the beginning of the twentieth century, it appears several times
in works by the American author Jack London, which made me wonder
for a moment whether it actually originated in the US. But a British
source was confirmed by news reports in London newspapers in early
1850 of ill treatment on board an emigrant ship to Australia:
Mr Bainbridge, on returning to the vessel, was knocked
down by Mr Ross, and the captain wanted him or any of the
malcontents to stand before him "and he'd knock seven
bells out of them".
[The Examiner (London), 16 Feb. 1850.]
As no newspaper report featuring this report thought it necessary to
explain the idiom, it is surely older still.
5. Sic!
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An item dated 24 October - seen by Doug Cross - on castanet.net in
British Columbia, Canada, about the smashing of a glass door at the
South Okanagan BCSPCA, reported that the doors were "double pained
tempered glass" and that "A pair of turtles in a tank close to the
door ... were spayed with shattered glass". Too painful altogether.
On 24 October, Lisa Robinton tells us, Yahoo! News included a report
from ABC News, which included the line "From the front porch of a
Las Vegas home, which has one [of] the highest foreclosure rates in
the country ...".
John Pearson came across a headline on BBC News dated 21 October:
"NY bus accused of sex discrimination". He eagerly awaits the bus's
reply.
My wife pointed out a fashion item in the Guardian on 26 October:
"It started on the Miu Miu catwalk with a selection of printed
dresses with long sleeves that fell below the knee."
A headline on BBC News Cornwall dated 27 October startled Tony Hall:
"Dog helps lightning strike Redruth mayor".
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