World Wide Words -- 28 Apr 12

Fri Apr 27 16:09:40 UTC 2012

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WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 784           Saturday 28 April 2012
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Weird Words: Cantankerous.
3. Wordface.
4. Review: Dictionary of American Regional English.
5. Sic!
6. Useful information.

1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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QUINION  In my Weird Words piece last week I briefly discussed the 
origin of "quire". John Davies wrote, "When I delivered the Coventry 
Evening Telegraph as a lad in the 1950s, the papers arrived at the 
shop in quires, but of 26 not 24.  This was explained to me at the 
time as being the equivalent of the baker's dozen, a way of giving 
the newsagent an extra discount. I was told it was standard in the 
newspaper industry. None of my dictionaries, including the OED, 
mentions that usage."

HAT-DROPPING  Following last week's piece, Michael Templeton noted 
another story about the origin of "at the drop of a hat" was as a 
starting signal for a duel (other sources suggest the dropping of a 
handkerchief instead). He found this dismissed in an issue of the 
delightfully named US publication The Great Round World and What is 
Going On in It, dated 1898. The author very reasonably pointed out 
that duellists waiting to exchange fire were unlikely to want to 
turn away from their opponents to watch for a visual signal.

BOLSHIE  An aside in this piece explained "bolshie" as rather dated 
slang. This was challenged by Suzanne Earley, who pointed out that 
it may be so in Britain but it "remains common usage in Australia - 
someone is bolshie, I'm in a bit of a bolshie mood - interchangeable 
with 'stroppy' for women."

SIC! SICCED!  It is a minor sadness when, having produced some 1,700 
words in the last issue, the one that gains the most responses is my 
misspelling of "Colombia" in the Sic! section. I can only be glad 
that nothing more serious was found. Clark Stevens seems to know my 
readership: "Maybe something from Flanders and Swann's At the Drop 
of a Hat will cheer you up after those who would criticize at the 
drop of a hat get done belaboring you for 'Columbia'."

VOTING  World Wide Words has been nominated in the Mailys, the LSOFT 
Choice Awards. As the contest is organised as monthly heats, this is 
my last chance to ask you to ensure we win the April one. To vote, 
go via http://wwwords.org?LSOFT. The rules allow you to do so every 
day if you wish.

2. Weird Words: Cantankerous /kan'taNk at r@s/
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I was looking at this word in some book or other a while ago - my 
ageing memory fails to remind me which - and wondered how such a 
collection of letters could have come together to make an adjective 
that meant bad-tempered, argumentative or uncooperative.

On looking into its antecedents, I found that "cantankerous" isn't 
especially old by historical timescales. It appeared here first in 
something that resembled its modern form:

    That's because you don't know her as well as I. Ecod! I 
    know every inch about her; and there's not a more bitter 
    cantanckerous toad in all Christendom. 
    [She Stoops to Conquer, by Oliver Goldsmith, 1773.]

A curiosity of this passage is that it appears in numerous places as 
"bitter cantankerous road", an unfortunate error that led the late 
Ivor Brown to base a molehill of discursiveness on this pimple of 
misinformation by reasoning falsely that it could apply to things as 
well as people. The fault is traceable to a misprint in volume two 
of Farmer and Henley's Slang and its Analogues of 1891, which quotes 
only the last part of the excerpt, so denuding it of the context 
that would expose the error. (We may forgive the absence of the 
second "c" from "cantanckerous", which modern editions of the play 
also omit.) The error has been perpetuated by writers who borrow the 
quote without troubling themselves to check the original.

It must indeed have been new in Goldsmith's day, for the good Doctor 
Johnson didn't give it house room in his Dictionary of 1755. It may 
be that he felt it was too slangy for him - Farmer and Henley called 
it "colloquial" more than two centuries later. But for Goldsmith it 
already had the sense we know today, of a person with a quarrelsome, 
cross-grained, ill-natured personality.

One proposal is that it was a blend of two words, each of which by 
itself suggested its sense: "contentious" and "rancorous". But it's 
also argued that it can be traced to the Middle English "conteke", 
contention or quarrelling, via its compound "conteckour", a person 
who causes strife. The latter word may have later changed spelling 
under the influence of these other words.

Either way, its sound is appropriate to its sense, evoking jangling 
metal objects, and that may be why it has survived and prospered, 
even without that extra letter.

3. Wordface
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LIFE IMITATING FICTION  A rather splendid word has entered the UK 
political lexicon in recent weeks. It was uttered in the House of 
Commons during Prime Minister's Questions on 18 April by the Labour 
leader of the Opposition, Ed Miliband. He described the coalition 
government as an OMNISHAMBLES because of several recent allegedly 
serious policy and public-relations blunders, including the press 
excitement over a trivial dispute about whether the Conservative 
Prime Minister, David Cameron, had ever eaten a Cornish pasty and 
where (this inevitably became known as PASTYGATE). The Daily Mail 
commented that omnishambles "described the combination of tragedy 
and farce that characterises modern politics" and the word has been 
gleefully taken up by many commentators, some in the Conservative 
press. It began life in The Thick of It, a satirical BBC TV series 
about Westminster politics created by Armando Iannucci; it was said 
in an episode in October 2009 by the foul-mouthed government head of 
communications Malcolm Tucker, played by Peter Capaldi, though he 
meant by it one particular person's incompetence in everything she 
did ("you are a f****** omnishambles, that's what you are!"). The 
word appeared a few times after the broadcast but Ed Miliband's use 
set it trending, as they say over on Twitter. Its popularity is 
indicated by compounds that are already being coined, including 
OMNISHAMBOLISM and OMNISHAMBOLIC.

4. Review: Dictionary of American Regional English
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It is one of the hallmarks of lexicography that those who engage in 
it are destined for the long haul. A marked tendency exists for the 
initiators of dictionary projects to suffer the fate of Moses and 
not survive to witness the end of their endeavours. James Murray 
never saw the Oxford English Dictionary in its completed state. 
Likewise Professor Fred Cassidy, who began the work of compiling 
what has become an extraordinary five-volume work, the Dictionary of 
American Regional English, died some years before the final volume 
went to press.

But now we have all five volumes, a stack 11in (28cm) high weighing 
28 pounds (13 kg), comprising some 5,500 pages. Such crudely gross 
measurements do little to communicate the labour of nearly half a 
century that has been put into editing and compiling the work. In 
strict truth, the project had been put in motion more than a century 
ago, in 1889, when the American Dialect Society was founded to make 
a work that would rival Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary. 
A great amount of material had already been collected in a rather 
haphazard way when in 1962 Professor Cassidy, Professor of English 
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was appointed editor by the 
Society. Fieldwork began in 1965 and took five years. Researchers 
went to more than a thousand communities in all 50 states, asking 
hundreds of questions of 2,777 individuals about their words for 
everything from time and weather to domestic animals to courtship 
and marriage to children's games. These interviews were augmented by 
a volunteer reading programme of newspapers, diaries, biographies, 
letters, histories, novels and government documents. More recently, 
the vast resources opened up through documents being digitised and 
made available online has made the compiler's job - as the preface 
to this final volume comments - "much more challenging while at the 
same time distinctly more rewarding".

In those 5,500-odd pages we now have a record of the regional speech 
of the US, taken at a time when the march towards conformity through 
widespread exposure to the national media hadn't progressed as far 
as it has today. However, that snapshot has been updated with much 
subsequent research work, particularly in the later volumes, which 
confirms that regional American speech is still very much alive.

What comes across most strongly is its diversity. The survey found 
79 names for the dragonfly, for example, including mosquito hawk, 
snake feeder, ear-cutter and sewing needle. The fluff under the bed 
may be described as dust kitties, dust bunnies, woolies or house 
moss. A sandwich may be a po'boy, hoagie, sub, grinder, hero or 
torpedo. A remote locality can be the boondocks, the puckerbrush, 
the tules or the willywags. The strip of grass between what I call 
the pavement (American sidewalk) and the kerb (or curb) can be the 
berm, devil's strip, parking, street lawn, tree box, tree lawn, tree 
court, tree terrace, parkway, double strip, parking strip, verge or 
swale. (The only British name I know for it is verge, in full grass 
verge. UK readers may feel deprived.)

In this fifth volume alone appear spatzie for a sparrow; Tom show, a 
travelling production of Uncle Tom's Cabin; yes-ma'am or thank-you-
ma'am, a sudden or startling dip or bump in the road, and upscuddle, 
a noisy quarrel. In the southern states to step off the carpet, or 
just to step off, is to get married; out west at one time a horse 
that bucked violently was said to unwind; a century ago a squirrel 
load was a very small drink of hard liquor; in Wisconsin on the 
other hand a whoopensocker is a large or strong drink but also an 
extraordinary thing; if you're caught in the Wewoka switch you are 
utterly lost, though you will be in Oklahoma, the only state where 
the expression is recorded; a tin can alley is a poor or shabby part 
of town (so first cousin to one of the early meanings of tin pan 
alley); and in the south Appalachians a swarp is a blow or an 
attempt. Once you start reading entries you're lost.

The pity is that the cost of the complete set ($545.45) is beyond 
the pockets of most readers, who will have to hope that some nearby 
library has the funds to acquire one. There is a proposal to put the 
whole dictionary online next year, which will be wonderful if it's 
priced economically. We can hope that it will add an invaluable 
research tool that's impossible in the printed volumes: the ability 
to extract vocabulary by state or region, so enabling researchers to 
study the work by locality and allow writers to ensure that their 
language is geographically consistent.

[Joan Houston Hall [ed.], Dictionary of American Regional English, 
vol 5; Hardcover, pp1296; published by the Belknap Press of Harvard 
University Press, 20 March 2012; ISBN: 9780674047358; publisher's 
price $85.00. Earlier volumes are also available, at $124.50 for 
vols I-III and $89.95 for vol IV.]

AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK 
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Amazon Germany: EUR68,99    http://wwwords.org?DARE9 
[Please use these links to buy. They get World Wide Words a small 
commission at no extra cost to you.] 

5. Sic!
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On 21 April the CBC News website had the headline "Vancouver airport 
pilot to expand". Or it did when James Helbig saw it. The text now 
reads "Vancouver airport self-serve pilot expands". Possibly better.

Carter Jefferson informs us: "The MetroBoston newspaper ran the 
following headline on 19 April: 'Stray bullets nearly miss 9-year-
old'. Inside the paper 'nearly' gets changed to 'barely'. The kid 
survived."

"On my way to work this morning," e-mailed Pat O'Halloran, "I was 
amused as I passed a house in Snainton, North Yorkshire which had 
the following sign on the verge outside, 'Keep off, newly sewn 
grass'. It must have been hard work."

John Clarke sent the first sentence of a report on the Huffington 
Post on 24 April, which makes sense if you read it carefully: "Sky 
News has come under fire for revealing the name of the woman raped 
by Sheffield United footballer Ched Evans by accident in a live 
broadcast."

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 
UK. Any residual errors are fault of the editor. The linked website 
is http://www.worldwidewords.org.

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