World Wide Words -- 18 Aug 12

Fri Aug 17 10:17:15 UTC 2012

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WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 798          Saturday 18 August 2012
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Weird Words: Wardour-Street English.
3. Wordface.
4. Q and A: Whipping-boy.
5. Sic!
6. Useful information.

1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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HOLIDAY BREAK  World Wide Words will not appear next week - my wife 
and I are taking a short trip away. The issue of 1 September is the 
next scheduled one. 

STRICKLE  Many readers noted that this tool resembled in function 
and name the "strigil", one with a curved blade that Romans used in 
the baths to scrape dirt and sweat off their bodies. The similarity 
is misleading, as no link exists: "strigil" is from the Latin verb 
"stringere", to touch lightly. The latter is the source of one old 
sense of the English word "stricture", likewise to touch lightly. 
(Its other senses are from another Latin verb of the same spelling, 
meaning to bind tightly.)

Another word with similar associations is "screed", a strip of wood 
or other material to set a level for laying concrete or applying 
plaster (we meet it more often in the sense of the result). This 
again has a different history: it once meant an edge or bordering 
strip, from which the current sense derives. It was earlier a strip 
or fragment cut or torn from a larger piece - the Old English 
original is also the source of "shred".

OUT OF SCHOOL  A quotation of 1833 in the piece on "talking out of 
school" last week referred dismissively to "riding schools and 
schools for scandal". The second allusion was obvious but the first 
puzzled me. I have clearly led too sheltered a lexicographical life. 
Bruce Napier suggested "riding school" was a low slang term of the 
time for a brothel. This is supported by the related term "riding 
academy" being on record in this sense. And you may not know that a 
confusion between the two meanings of "riding school" was the basis 
of a South African film of 1981, Birds of Paradise.

2. Weird Words: Wardour-Street English
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I caught myself using the obsolete word "withal" in an e-mail to a 
subscriber last week and out of interest looked it up. I was deeply 
chastened to find it dismissed as a "Wardour-Street word" in every 
edition of Fowler's Modern English Usage back to the first of 1926. 
It is not a compliment.

In my younger days, London's Wardour Street was a metaphor for the 
British film industry, which was based in and around it. No longer. 
As the Sunday Times wrote in May 2012, "The movie companies, which 
had great window displays all along Wardour Street, have gone." To 
men of an earlier generation, such as H W Fowler, the associations 
of the street were instead with dealers in antique furniture and 
imitations thereof.

"Thereof": I am doubly reproved. Henry Fowler included it alongside 
"withal" in his collection of Wardour-Street words, alongside "wot", 
"thither", "varlet", "howbeit", "belike", "albeit", "betimes" and 
numerous others. He wrote of them in sarcasm of deepest hue:

    As Wardour Street itself offers to those who live in 
    modern houses the opportunity of picking up an antique or 
    two that will be conspicuous for good or ill among their 
    surroundings, so this article offers to those who write 
    modern English a selection of oddments calculated to 
    establish (in the eyes of some readers) their claim to be 
    persons of taste & writers of beautiful English.
    [A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, by H W Fowler, 
    1926.]

Wardour-Street words are borrowed especially by the authors of bad 
historical fiction who adopt the "Prithee, sirrah!" and "Have at ye, 
thou scurvy varlet!" schools of exposition. They follow writers of 
an earlier age, above whom towers Sir Walter Scott, who single-
handedly invented the historical genre and resurrected many antique 
words with which to decorate it.

"Wardour-Street English" sounds like a phrase that Fowler might have 
invented. But it's older. Its creator, writing in Longman's Magazine 
in October 1888, was a historian named Archibald Ballantyne, who had 
the year previously published a biography of the eighteenth-century 
statesman Lord Carteret. 

He was ridiculing attempts by a group that included the Dorset poet 
William Barnes to expunge foreign elements from the language. Their 
ideal was to return to the "purity" of pre-Conquest "Anglo-Saxon" 
English through inventing replacement terms on Old English roots, 
such as "fireghost" for electricity, "gleecraft" for music or "high-
deedy" for magnificent. Ballantyne also mocked William Morris, in 
particular his translation of the Odyssey, full of terms such as 
"thrall-folk", "dight" and "yeasay". He wrote of it, "This is not 
literary English of any date; this is Wardour-Street Early English - 
a perfectly modern article with a sham appearance of the real 
antique about it."

In the same way that an unscrupulous dealer might distress a modern 
piece of furniture to create a spurious impression of age, argued 
Ballantyne, so writers who clothe their prose in the cast-offs of ye 
olde Englyshe are producing poor fakes. Elderly lexicographers who 
spend so much of their time reading old texts that they have picked 
up obsolete turns of phrase may surely be excused this condemnation.

The term is less used than it once was but may still be found:

    Massie then settles down into a species of Wardour 
    Street English not seen since the days of W.H. Ainsworth 
    and G. P. R. James, in which a horse is always a trusty 
    steed or even a "palfrey", the wretched Alory, absconding 
    bearer of the Oriflamme, is branded 'a coward and a 
    poltroon' and Elgebast warns the esquires Ivor and Yves 
    that "if you play me false I shall split the pair of you 
    from gizzard to guts".
    [In a review of Charlemagne and Roland by Allan Massie 
    in the Spectator, 11 Aug. 2007.]

3. Wordface
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WHERE THE TOAD SUCKS ... This column doesn't often feature toponymic 
matters, but I can't resist noting the results of a survey published 
last week which named the 10 most unfortunate place names in the US, 
as voted upon by visitors to a genealogical site. Top of the list 
came the estimable Arkansas community of Toad Suck. The others, in 
decreasing ranking: Climax, Boring, Hooker, Assawoman, Belchertown, 
Roachtown, Loveladies, Squabbletown and Monkey's Eyebrow. There are 
many others worldwide. Don't tell me about them, please ...

4. Q and A: Whipping-boy
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Q. I've just read that somebody had become a "whipping-boy". Where 
does this come from? Was he ever a real boy? [Jonas Withers]

A. He was, and it's one of the stranger stories in word history.

First off, a whipping-boy is a scapegoat, a person who suffers 
punishment because of the faults of somebody else. Here's a recent 
example:

    Sorkin is well aware that he is a whipping-boy for a 
    swathe of America - he's the preppy liberal with a big ego 
    they love to hate.
    [Sunday Times, 8 Jul. 2012. The context is Aaron 
    Sorkin's TV show The Newsroom.]

These days, "whipping-boy" is as figurative a term as "scapegoat". 
We don't any longer load all the sins of a community on to a goat 
and send it into the wilderness and similarly we don't chastise a 
child for the naughtiness of another. But we once did.

The term seems never to have been attached literally to anybody much 
below the companion of a prince. The earliest on record - though no 
doubt there were previous examples - was an Irish lad named Barnaby 
Fitzpatrick (or Fitzpatric or Fitz-Patric). His father sent him - at 
the age of six or thereabouts - to the English court in 1543 to be a 
companion to Prince Edward, later Edward VI. He was said to have 
been regularly punished for Edward's misdeeds. A play early the 
following century about Henry VIII and the young Prince Edward 
features a fictional version of him:

    Prince: Why, how now, Browne; what's the matter?
    Browne: Your Grace loyters, and will not plye your 
    booke, and your tutors have whipt me for it.
    Prince: Alas, poor Ned! I am sorrie for it. I'll take 
    the more paines, and entreate my tutors for thee.
    [When You see Me You know Me, by Samuel Rowley, 
    1604.]

It has often been suggested that the system grew up because the 
prince's tutors daren't lay a hand on the prince and so punished his 
companion. It's more probable that it was a better way of keeping 
the prince well-mannered than direct punishment, since he knew that 
if he transgressed his companion would suffer instead. 

It must have been difficult for young Barnaby, but he briefly did 
well out of it. He became an intimate of the future king and was 
sent to France to complete his education. However, Edward VI died in 
1553, aged only 15, and hope of preference vanished. Half a century 
later, in 1603, another boy, the even younger William Murray, was 
placed by his father in a similar situation with Prince Charles, 
later Charles I. Murray did better than Fitzpatrick: he later became 
the first Earl of Dysart and a confidant of the king, working even 
after Charles's execution to put Charles II on the throne.

The term "whipping-boy" wasn't around at the time of either of these 
boys - it was sometimes known as "punishment by proxy". The first 
known user of "whipping-boy" was a clergyman named John Trapp in a 
Biblical commentary in 1647.

5. Sic!
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A BBC piece on 6 August, headlined "High flying technology to map 
Peru ruins", delighted Stephen Conroy with this sentence: "Small 
enough to fit in a backpack, Professor Adams hopes the device would 
be able to be used by any researcher."

A report on MoneyWeb in South Africa, seen by Colin Day in Cape 
Town, quoted a comment by a firm of attorneys: "The warrants have 
been issued unlawfully and unconstitutionally and in fragrant 
violation of our client's rights."

Freudian slip? Chas Blacker read a comment from one of Britain's 
veteran medal winners in the Independent on 7 August: "'My hip's 
great,' said Skeleton, 'It's my back that's the problem now.'" The 
speaker was actually show-jumper Nick Skelton.

Thanks go to Richard Kuebbing for sending us this report on Yahoo! 
News, dated 14 August, which began "A nearly 400-foot deep sinkhole 
in Louisiana has swallowed all of the trees in its area and enacted 
a mandatory evacuation order for about 150 residences for fear of 
potential radiation and explosions." 

Definitely a headline to make you read it twice - Richard Moloney 
found it in the Irish Times on 14 August: "Cruise ship makes maiden 
stop in Dublin". Accidental wording, or sub-editor's joke?

6. Useful information
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