World Wide Words -- 11 Aug 12
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Aug 10 16:45:16 UTC 2012
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WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 797 Saturday 11 August 2012
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Weird Words: Strickle.
3. Topical Words: Whiff-waff.
4. Q and A: Speaking out of school.
5. Sic!
6. Useful information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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BINDING CHEESE Jon Ackroyd commented, "A dear friend of ours in
Vancouver used this very expression in conversation with us 45 years
ago. I was about to mention this, but then I saw your comment from
Mr Urdang in which he uses the phrase in the very context in which I
first heard it. So I won't mention it." Thank you for not doing so.
A robust refutation of Lawrence Urdang came from Paul Witheridge,
who was born in 1943 in Toronto: "Rubbish! I've been familiar with
the expression in Canada since boyhood and never heard it describe
improved conditions. Rather, it is used as your correspondent cited:
tighter or more challenging situations. My understanding of it has
always been the constipation connection." You may perhaps now better
understand why the phrase confused me so much!
ADVERBS IN -LILY Following up my snippet last week on "friendlily",
Arnold Zwicky pointed me to a Language Log column of his from March
2007 in which he includes a delightful extract from a piece by James
Thurber about the utter unacceptability of such forms. You'll find
it at the end of his article: http://wwwords.org?LILY. Anthony Allan
e-mailed, "This item reminded me of instances when I'd wanted a more
compact way of saying 'in a timely way'. 'Timelily' seemed awkward,
but a South African friend suggested 'timeously'. Would you care to
elucidate?" With the aid of my trusty Oxford dictionaries, I can
confirm the word exists, albeit mainly in Scottish use, with the
sense "in good time; sufficiently early". So it would be a useful
substitute, if only it were more likely to be understood and less
likely to be confused with "timorously".
CORRECTION The wind in California I mentioned in the "williwaw"
piece was wrongly spelled. As Clark Stevens put it, "Around these
parts, Santa Anna with a double N is the Mexican general remembered
from Alamo times. The fire-fanning, east-to-west California wind is
less one N, the Santa Ana." This is taken by the reference books to
be from the name of the Santa Ana canyon, down which the winds blow,
though they are known over a much wider area. Intriguingly, several
readers argued it was neither, but "santana", from the Spanish "los
vientos de Satanas", Devil winds. Some sources argue for yet a third
source, "Sanatanas", a corruption of a word from an unknown Native
American language. I couldn't possibly comment.
2. Weird Words: Strickle
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For us moderns, this word hides its light under a bushel, which is
appropriate because "bushel" and "strickle" go together like a horse
and carriage or fish and chips.
A bushel is an ancient volume measure for dry commodities, wheat in
particular, equivalent to eight English gallons or about 36 litres.
In the proverbial phrase the bushel is the container for measuring
out the wheat, eminently suitable for a light to shyly hide under. A
true bushel was level measure, not heaped. The container was filled
to overflowing and a straight-edged piece of wood, the strickle, was
used to push off the surplus corn that stood above its edges.
The Oxford English Dictionary traces it to Old English, though then
it meant a pulley or a teat. It is very probably not the same word.
Wooden tools of similar kind are recorded in English dialect under
names such as "strike", "stroke", "strick" and "stritch". Scots have
"straik" in senses that match, such as "straik measure" for level
measure; this seems to be from "stroke". It's more likely that
"strickle" is from the action of "striking off" surplus material.
However, the bushel container was also known as a strike, from the
old Anglo-French term "estrike", so "strickle" and its variations
may instead be from that.
The otherwise incomprehensible English pub name Bushel and Strike
comes from the measuring process, though it's uncertain whether it
refers to the container and its wooden tool or to two names for the
container.
Strickles have turned up in all manner of trades, such as a tool in
thatching or for trimming flax, a pattern or template in carpentry
or a straight-edge for levelling sand in moulding. Another
agricultural sense is linked to haymaking and harvesting. This
description of it is from a historical novel set in the time of King
Arthur:
It was hard work done with a short sickle that had to
be sharpened constantly on a strickle: a wooden baton that
was first dipped in pig's grease, then coated with fine
sand that put a keen edge on the sickle's blade, though
the edge never seemed sharp enough for me.
[The Winter King, by Bernard Cornwell, 1995.]
3. Topical Words: Whiff-waff
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Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, Mayor of London, has had a good
Olympics. He was in the news almost every day through his popping up
in bumbling good humour in the media and at many events. Even his
being stuck on a zip-wire 15ft above the ground on the banks of the
Thames for several minutes, which would have been a humiliating
catastrophe for most politicians, was salvaged by his banter with
the watching audience.
Another frequent reference to him in news reports in the past two
weeks has been to his speech at a party to mark the handover of the
Olympic flag at the end of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. He declaimed,
"Ping-pong was invented on the dining tables of England, ladies and
gentlemen, in the 19th century. [CHEERS] It was, and it was called
whiff-whaff." Experts jumped on him at the time, telling him he'd
got his facts wrong. Chuck Hoey, Curator of the International Table
Tennis Federation's Museum in Lausanne, wrote a heavily illustrated
article setting out all the facts, which he entitled Boris Johnson
and the Whiff-Waff Gaffe.
Yes, "Whiff-Waff". No second "h". Every journalist who has written
of "Whiff-Whaff" in recent weeks has spelled it wrong (including
those on 28 July who reported the claim by the French ambassador to
London, Bernard Emié, that table tennis was invented in France,
which led to a furious rebuttal by Johnson). We probably can't blame
Boris for the way the Beijing reports were spelled, as his comments
were on TV and reporters naturally wrote it the way it sounded
through the overwhelming influence of standard word reduplication.
However, Boris did use the "whiff-whaff" spelling in his book
Johnson's Life of London of 2011. There's nothing new in the error -
every reference I've found on both sides of the Atlantic going back
to the 1930s has included both "h"s.
Mr Hoey explained that Whiff-Waff was actually a latecomer to the
game, being registered as a trademark by the British manufacturer
Slazenger on 31 December 1900. I have failed to find any newspaper
references to the product or even any advertisements for it, so must
assume it was utterly unsuccessful. The name survived better in the
US than in the UK, which is perhaps why one French website suggests
that it was an American invention. Unlike Whiff-Waff, the name of
the competitor trademarked by Hamley Brothers of London four months
earlier has entered the language: Ping-Pong. A onomatopoeic allusion
to the sound of ball on bat and table, the name seems to have been
known rather earlier to describe an improvised indoor version of
lawn tennis (in tradition, played by bored army officers using balls
made from champagne corks and bats fashioned from cigar box lids).
Jaques and Son, also of London, brought out Gossima in 1891, which
had some success, though a decade later it was incorporated into
Ping-Pong, being sold for a while under both names. The true creator
of the game, Mr Hoey explained, was the unsung David Foster, who
patented a version in 1890 but had no commercial success with it.
Incidentally, the name now standard for the game, table tennis, is
recorded from the late 1880s for a number of games, including one
whose description reads like a cross between tabletop lawn tennis
and billiards (using cues, not bats), and one that was in essence
tiddlywinks. But when Gossima was noted in The Graphic on 3 December
1892, it was described as "a new table-tennis game", which showed
that the word had by then become known to mean something near its
modern sense - illustrations show Gossima was essentially the game
we now know.
The one unexplained issue is why Slazenger should have come up with
such an odd name as Whiff-Waff. The Ogden Standard-Examiner of Utah
reported in 1966 that the US Table Tennis Association had said it
was because of the knitted web ball it used. (Before celluloid ones
were introduced in 1901, players had used rubber balls or cork balls
covered with a net.) That may explain the "whiff" (a slight gust of
wind) but not the "waff", though that's a Scottish word meaning a
waving movement, as of the hand, a relative of "waft". It's just as
likely (that is, not very) that it's from the English dialect term,
"whiff-whaff", known also in the US at the time, meaning trifling
words or actions. That really would put the game in perspective.
4. Q and A: Speaking out of school
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Q. I have searched your site but can't find information on the
phrase "speaking out of school". In my experience it is used to
indicate that the speaker may not have the right to give the
information they are about to give, or even that they are not
certain the information is correct. Where did this odd phrase
originate? [Kristin Hatcher, Michigan]
A. I know of three versions of this saying, the other two being
"talking out of school" and "telling tales out of school".
The last is by far the oldest: it's recorded from The Practice of
Prelates, a bitter polemic by William Tyndale that was ostensibly
about whether Henry VIII's divorce from Catherine of Aragon was
valid. In it, he says, "So what cometh once in may never out for
fear of telling tales out of school." It was presumably by then
already a well-known aphorism, as John Haywood included it in his
Dialogue Containing the Number in Effect of all the Proverbs in the
English Tongue only 16 years later, in 1546.
The usual meaning is, don't gossip indiscreetly or reveal private
matters, secrets or confidences. "Telling tales", revealing the
misdeeds of a colleague or fellow pupil, has of course anciently
been a heinous crime, since it broke the bonds of fellowship and
mutual support.
The other two versions are by comparison mere Johnny-come-lately
upstarts on the linguistic scene, no more than restatements of the
older form. "Talking out of school" is by a few decades the older. I
have an example from a US newspaper in 1863, but it's recorded -
rather obliquely - a little earlier from a British publication:
School politics in Prussia. -- The Prussian State
Gazette contains an ordinance prohibiting all talking
about politics in schools. We are unable to inform our
readers whether riding-schools and schools for scandal be
included in this prohibition. It, however, appears to us
that it would have been much wiser to have prohibited
politicians from talking out of school.
[The Athenaeum, 17 Aug. 1833. "Schools for scandal" is
clearly enough a reference to the Sheridan play, but is
there some unsavoury connotation to riding schools?]
Your version, "speaking out of school" seems to be natively from the
US, as it very rarely turns up in British sources even today, and
then usually in the quoted speech of Americans. Here's a recent
example of it:
So, if Biden wasn't acting at the behest of the White
House, the next question is whether he was simply speaking
out of school, which he has turned into something of a
cottage industry over his long political career, or
whether he was doing a bit of 2016 positioning.
[Washington Post, 11 May 2012. Vice President Joe Biden
had announced his support for same-sex marriages before
President Obama did so.]
5. Sic!
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Spence Putnam wondered if his local law had gone on a binge after
reading this police press release in the Burlington Free Press of 4
August: "Although apparently intoxicated, Vermont law does not allow
for someone to be charged with DUI [Driving under the influence] for
operating an electric personal assistive mobility device." (The
"electric personal assistive mobility device" turned out to be a
motorised shopping cart.)
On a similar theme, the caption to a news video on news.com.au,
dated 2 August, surprised Susan Bradley: "A Smart car has been in an
unusual chase with Houston police after the driver evaded police
driving under the influence."
Bob Coulter writes: "On August 5, a travel feature on Canada's CTV
News website referred to the Maldives as 'a group of choral islands
situated in the Indian Ocean.' If we can't get there to hear them
live, do you think we could buy a CD?"
Following the incident at the Olympics 100 metres final on 6 August
when a bottle was thrown onto the track, we learn - thanks to Pete
Jones and Anthony Massey - that a headline on the BBC News website
ran: "Olympics: Man accused of 100m bottle throw". If he's that
good, he should be in the Olympics rather than the dock.
Leslie Tomlinson found an Olympics report on the website of the
Toronto Star about a Canadian horse named Victor being found to have
a "boo-boo" on its front left hoof, as a result of which it was
refused permission to compete. The report stated, "There was no
accusation of malpractice but the judge was deemed unfit to compete
by the Games jury." Which was very much the view of the Canadian
team, I believe.
6. Useful information
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