World Wide Words -- 14 Apr 12
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Apr 13 15:57:03 UTC 2012
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WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 782 Saturday 14 April 2012
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A formatted version of this e-magazine is available
online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/jgec.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Weird Words: Tosticated.
3. Wordface.
4. Q and A: Tin Pan Alley.
5. Sic!
6. Useful information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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ROZZER Lots of readers told me about a sentence that, to my regret,
I hadn't previously encountered: "It's crackers to slip a rozzer the
dropsy in snide." Thereby hangs a tale. Many people came across it
as a nonsense phrase in various issues of Mad magazine in the 1950s.
It has since become something of an online catchphrase and is cited
in the Yale Book of Quotations. The source is the British writer
Margery Allingham, in her detective novel of 1938, The Fashion in
Shrouds. The statement is uttered by the wonderfully named former
burglar Magersfontein Lugg, factotum to Allingham's sleuth Albert
Campion, as an example of something that might be said. It may be
translated as "It's foolish to bribe a policeman with counterfeit
money", a sentiment as true today as it was then. The significant
words were all British slang of the period: "crackers" derives from
"cracked", in the sense of a damaged brain; "dropsy" is from "drop",
as in "drop a bribe"; "snide" is originally US slang from the 1850s
for fake money, which Jonathon Green (Green's Dictionary of Slang)
suggests may be from German "schneiden", to cut, or "aufschneiden",
which can mean to boast, brag or show off (the standard modern
English sense of "snide", slyly mocking, is from the slang term).
To add to the long list of slangy terms for British police, I was
told by several readers about the Liverpudlian "scuffer". This is
recorded in the 1860 edition of Hotton's Dictionary of Modern Slang
as "scufter" and was at one time widespread in northern Britain.
Various British dialect origins have been proposed: "scufter", a
scramble or disturbance, or "scuff" in several distinct senses - the
verb to strike, a mean or sordid fellow, or the scruff of the neck
(by which the cop might seize a malefactor).
BATHTUBBING You may gather I didn't spend a lot of time researching
the antecedents of this word, which appeared last week in a list of
my recent encounters. Readers rapidly corrected my assertion that it
had been invented recently in Wales. They pointed to various earlier
events, especially the bathtub races in Nanaimo, British Columbia,
which date from the Nanaimo to Vancouver Great International World
Championship Bathtub Race of 1967. As the philosopher said, there is
indeed nothing new under the sun.
ZEMBLANITY James Campbell communicated something I might well have
put in the piece itself: "This is presumably a reference to Nova
Zembla, the Dutch name for the Russian arctic islands of Novaya
Zemlya. Zemlya simply means 'earth, land' in Russian, which seems a
rather prosaic, unbarren and unflintlike root for a word that's
supposed to be the opposite of serendipity." John Thomsen mentioned
the appearance of the fictional country called Zembla in Pale Fire
by Vladimir Nabokov. As the Novaya Zemlya islands were at one time
commonly called Nova Zembla in English writing, we may assume it's
this source that William Boyd had in mind.
VOTING World Wide Words has been nominated in the LSOFT Choice
Awards (the Mailys). The contest is organised as monthly heats from
April to August; the winner of each becomes a finalist. To vote,
every day if you wish, go via http://wwwords.org?LSOFT .
2. Weird Words: Tosticated /'tQstIkeIt at d/
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Like so many slang or dialect words of previous generations, this
one is now very rarely encountered. It gained some publicity in 2011
through being listed by the publishers of Chambers Dictionary as a
word with a pleasing sound.
When it appeared in the language - in the middle of the seventeenth
century - it was a sadly incompetent attempt to say "intoxicated",
perhaps under the influence of drink ("I'm not so tosticated as you
think I am"). An influence may have been the even older "tosspot", a
person who habitually tossed back his pot of drink, hence a heavy
drinker or drunkard.
I fancy thou art a little intoxicated tonight.
Tosticated! Tosticated! I scorn your words, cries Deborah.
I defy the best man in Bath, to say black is my eye; or
that I was ever consarned in liquor, since my name was
Deborah. Tosticated! No; God help me! I have drunk nothing
to-day, but a little tea for breakfast, and half a pint of
ale at my dinner.
[The Spiritual Quixote: or, the Summer's Ramble of Mr.
Geoffry Wildgoose, by Richard Graves, 1773.]
Rather later, the symptoms of that state became confused - under the
influence of the first syllable of the word perhaps - with those of
being tossed about, and took on the idea of being perplexed or
distracted.
Variously spelled, as "tossicated" or in other forms, recorders of
English dialect near the end of the nineteenth century found it to
be widely distributed, from Cumberland and Yorkshire down to
Somerset and Devon. But by then it had vanished from the printed
word. Chambers is the only British dictionary that continues to
include it.
3. Wordface
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MEDICAL MATTERS Being asthmatic, I was intrigued to discover this
week that the condition is a member of a group which the British
National Health Service lumps under the abbreviation ACSC. It stands
for the awful jargon AMBULATORY CARE-SENSITIVE CONDITIONS, those
that patients should be able to manage either themselves or with the
help of their GPs without needing hospital admissions. Then I came
across another medical term, VIRTUAL WARD. This is a treatment
method in which a patient doesn't go to hospital but remains at home
under the care of a multidisciplinary team that provides support
mainly by telephone. Through my work with a local voluntary
organisation, I've also come across SOCIAL PRESCRIBING. It expresses
the idea that family doctors go beyond treating symptoms to cure
causes. They use sources of support within the community to help
resolve non-medical problems that contribute to a patient's ill
health, such as social isolation, poor budgeting skills, inadequate
nutrition or lack of exercise.
4. Q and A: Tin Pan Alley
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Q. Can you give me any ideas about the origin of "Tin Pan Alley"?
I've read that there's one in London. Is that the original? [Will
Stevens]
A. Definitely not. Tin Pan Alley is American. In an article in The
World in 1903 it was said specifically to be the area of Twenty-
eighth Street in New York between Broadway and Sixth Avenue and to
be the home of most of the notable US music publishers.
Later, "Tin Pan Alley" became a figurative term for the whole US
music publishing business. Much more recently it was borrowed for
Denmark Street in London, which similarly housed many of the UK's
major music publishers, but that area was usually referred to as
"London's Tin Pan Alley", as a nod to the original. This was after
the Second World War, I believe - the earliest instance that I can
find is dated 1950.
How the original Tin Pan Alley got its name is an interesting story.
The evidence - mainly discovered by US researchers Barry Popik and
Fred Shapiro - suggests that three strands of colloquial usage
contributed to its formation.
The fundamental one, of course, is employing a tin pan as a raucous
and discordant noisemaker. As every household had at least one tin
pan and a wooden spoon or such with which to bang it, the material
with which to contribute to a cacophonous communal row was always at
hand. It might have been a demonstration marking a marriage, the one
known at various times and in different places as a shiveree,
charivari, skimmington or tin-kettling (for more about these, see
http://wwwords.org?SKMNT). (The Cambridge City Tribune of Indiana
recorded on 30 April 1874: "Johnny O'Brien, the cow doctor, is
married again. The boys gave him a touch of tin pan music.").
Building on that was the use of "tin pan" to describe a piano of
indifferent quality, especially one being played by an amateur (as
in the Muskogee Phoenix of Oklahoma, dated 8 May 1890: "You have
often compared my playing to the sounds of beating on an old tin
pan."). An early example is this deeply sarcastic description of a
touring musical troupe:
The party consists of the following "star" performers:
a yearling calf, a whining pup, an old violin, a creaking
well chain, an ancient accordeon [sic], a squealing pig, a
tin-pan piano and an old maid's voice.
[Janesville Daily Gazette (Wisconsin), 6 Jul. 1860.]
That would seem enough to determine the origin of the music term, as
the newspaper report which gives us its first recorded use asserted:
It gets its name from the tin-panny sounds of pianos
that are banged and rattled there by night and day as new
songs and old are played over and over into the ears of
singing comedians, comic-opera prima donnas and single
soubrettes and "sister teams" from vaudeville. Now, "Tin
Pan Alley" is considered a term of reproach by the Tin Pan
Alleyites. They prefer to designate it as "Melody Lane."
But that is a poetic fancy that those who go down that way
to hear the "new, big, screaming hits" do not indulge
in.
[The World (New York), 3 May 1903. Incidentally, "tin-
panny" was widely used for the tinkling piano, I guess in
ironic contradistinction to "timpani".]
But there's another contributing element. Several newspaper reports
record "tin-pan alley" in American cities for what seems to have
been an area with a poor reputation, presumably one with noisy and
illicit goings-on:
WATCH REPORT. - Night clear and cold. A slight row
occurred in "tin pan alley," and a colored ball in
"Petersburg" was broken up, but no arrests were made at
either.
[Alexandria Gazette (Virginia), 17 Mar. 1869.]
There was a rumpus among a number of women in Tin Pan
alley on Wednesday and the result was that Mrs. Eleanor
Church and Mrs. Mamie Arthur were before the city court
this morning charged with a breach of the peace on each
other. Tin Pan alley branches off from Wallace Street and
is, so a witness told Judge Pickett this morning, the
worst place in town.
[New Haven Evening Register, 8 Aug. 1890.]
Perhaps it's going too far to describe the New York centre of the
song-writing industry as a place of ill repute - raffish is as far
as we may in fairness go - but this association of the term may well
have contributed to the sarcastic undertones of "Tin Pan Alley" when
it first appeared.
5. Sic!
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Randall Bart wrote, "I caught a bit of a TV show on the Barbie doll
and heard this fascinating tidbit of Barbie history: 'Like Barbie,
Ken was named after the designer's son Kenneth.'"
The New Milford Spectrum of Danbury, Connecticut, Kip tells us, had
this sentence in an item of 28 March: "There will be a new face in
the superintendent's seat at Region 12 come July."
In a recent issue of the Sunday Times of Johannesburg, Gerhard
Burger came across this: "Founded in 1883 as a general interest
magazine, Luce - a canny publishing entrepreneur who created Time
magazine in 1923 - bought Life in 1936 for its all-encompassing
name."
A New York Times article of 7 April on England's no-fault divorce
laws included this sentence, spotted by David Hancocks: "Sometimes,
Ms. Lloyd Platt said, it is hard to keep a straight face, as in the
case of the petition claiming 'the respondent is unreasonably
demanding sex every night from the petitioner, which is causing
friction between the parties.'"
"Here's a lovely dangling modifier for you," wrote Nick Wilshere. He
found it in the Sun of 11 April, about the "chief taste tester" for
Marmite, St John Skelton: "Despite being loathed by millions across
the world, St John can't get enough of the stuff and eats it almost
every day."
6. Useful information
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ABOUT THIS E-MAGAZINE: World Wide Words is written and published by
Michael Quinion in the UK. ISSN 1470-1448. Copyediting and advice
are provided by Julane Marx in the US and Robert Waterhouse in the
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