World Wide Words -- 04 Feb 12

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 772          Saturday 4 February 2012
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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: Standing pie.
3. Wordface.
4. Article: The Words of Dickens.
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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MACMILLAN COMPETITION  We came third. The English Club was second. 
The winner was Wordsmith, the home of Anu Garg's A Word A Day, which 
came romping up from behind at the last minute. But then his daily 
e-mail newsletter has rather more than a million subscribers, which 
makes World Wide Words's 50,000 readers look paltry. I'm delighted 
he has won: he deserves to. Many thanks to everybody who supported 
World Wide Words. And a special welcome to all who have subscribed 
through learning about us via the competition.

HAYWIRE  Several readers argued that there was a specific reason why 
"going haywire" took on its sense of being out of control. Ken Shaw 
commented: "I was taught that when something went haywire, it was 
not only not working properly but was also dangerous. Hay bales are 
bound very tight. If the haywire snapped or was cut to open the 
bale, the ends whipped around and could inflict serious injury." 

Others suggested that the term referred to the way in which baling 
wire left to its own devices would at once form a tangled mess. As 
David Means remembers, "When [farmers] would 'bust' a bale to use as 
feed for the livestock, typically the used loop of wire was tossed 
into an old washtub or a certain corner of the barn, where it was 
available for re-use somewhere else on the farm. Once there were a 
number of these wire pieces in the pile, they tended to get tangled 
when someone attempted to pull one out. This snarled mass was always 
difficult to work with, and that is the sense of the term 'haywire' 
that was passed to me: something that was almost hopelessly beyond 
repair or so contorted that it would take a long time to rectify."

John C Britton recalled another expression: "I heard as a child that 
something was held together with bubble gum and baling wire, being a 
by-gosh and by-golly emergency repair, that became the permanent 
fix, by gum." 

CAN ANYBODY HELP?  A query came from Anne Osborne in the UK: "An 
expression long in use in my family is 'going on teacakes and 
haybands'. It is usually used about a clock behaving erratically, 
either gaining or losing. Does anyone else use it?"


2. Weird Words: Standing pie
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This old regional English term is now known mainly to cooks who have 
historical interests. A century ago, it was better known:

    Hotels and inns provide a huge game pie for their 
    customers, 'standing pies' they are called, being nearly a 
    foot high, and filled with the choicest morsels of hare, 
    rabbit, pheasant, &c.,
    [Folk-Lore, by Edward Nicholson, 1890.]

The origin lies in a technique, known from medieval times, in which 
a pastry case was created separately from its contents. Coarse flour 
and water were moulded like clay into the shape required and then 
baked hard. It was inedible in itself but served in the absence of 
suitable ceramics to hold whatever was being baked, which might be 
almost anything - meat or fish as well as game. They were called 
standing pies because the pastry cases stood by themselves. Such 
constructions were often ornate showpieces at banquets. The cases 
were usually thrown away after one use, though one source has stated 
that they were "given to the hounds or to the poor", which seems 
hard on the teeth and stomachs of either.

The standing pies of rural communities were more modest than those 
Mr Nicholson described. They usually contained a mixture of beef and 
suet seasoned with apples and dried fruit. Such pies were the high-
energy food of hard-working farmers and agricultural labourers, as 
described here by one farmer in the Cumbrian dales a century ago, 
using his local dialect form of the term:

    The other sort is a "stannin' pie," made like a pork 
    pie and often as hard to cut into as a brick. This will 
    keep any length of time, and the housewife finds it handy 
    to offer cold to any chance visitor, if only she can hide 
    it from the lads; but they have as keen a nose for sweet 
    pie as they have for the rum butter we make at a 
    christening and hide from them.
    [Manchester Guardian, 26 Dec. 1903.]


3. Wordface
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WORDS OF 2011  The results were announced on Wednesday of the 
Macquarie Dictionary's Australian Word of the Year awards for 2011. 
It's the most complex of all the public voting contests, with votes 
requested for lists of words in 16 different categories. The Word of 
the Year is selected from among the category winners by the Word of 
the Year Committee, which is chaired by the Vice-Chancellor of the 
University of Sydney, Dr Michael Spence. 

The overall winner (and I chose that word with care) was BURQINI 
(often written as BURKINI), the all-enveloping modest swimsuit 
designed for Muslim women, whose name is a blend of "burqa" and 
"bikini". It has been around since at least 2006 in the UK, when it 
was mentioned in the Independent on Sunday by columnist Deborah 
Ross; its relevance to Australia in 2011 is due to the British 
cookery broadcaster and writer Nigella Lawson, who wore one on Bondi 
Beach in April. One of the committee, David Astle, commented, "As a 
wordsmith I am delighted by a word that has Q without U and ends 
with an I."

Another winner, The People's Choice Award, derives from the voting 
on the website. This year, the word is FRACKING, in the news in the 
US and UK as well as Australia. It's a shortening of "fracturing" 
and is the process by which gas and oil are extracted from shales 
underground by applying chemically treated water under pressure. 
It's mostly linked in the public mind with stories of groundwater 
contamination and earth shocks. A report (http://wwwords.org?FRAK) 
by Jonathan Fahey of the Associated Press on 26 January said that 
the industry prefers "frac" and "fraccing" and argues that the "k" 
was added by opponents to make it more like the F-word and suggest 
the violent connotations of words such as "smack" and "whack".

Three of the winners of the individual categories drew the attention 
of the committee. A PATCHWORK ECONOMY refers to a country in which 
some parts are doing well while others are less prosperous. As a 
phrase, it has been common in several countries for many years, but 
became part of the Australian political vocabulary in April 2011 
when it was used by the prime minister, Julia Gillard. The Macquarie 
Dictionary's publisher, Sue Butler, commented in the Sydney Morning 
Herald on 31 December that the phrase is "more homely and domestic" 
than others such as "two-speed economy". 
 
DAIRYNESS, from the Agriculture category, was a strange choice. It 
refers, the Macquarie Dictionary says, to the productivity of a cow 
in terms of the quality and quantity of its milk, assessed by udder 
shape and size, pedigree, genomic screening and other factors, which 
are used as judging criteria in competitions. As a specialist term 
it has been recorded in North America since the 1950s but a search 
of the newspaper archives of Australia that I have access to found 
no trace of it.

The last was ANNOUNCEABLE, not an adjective but a noun from 
Australian politics. Again, it's not that common in newspapers, 
though when it does turn up it's clear that it's firmly established. 
This is how the Courier & Mail of Brisbane explained it in July 
2010: "One state politician has been known to stride into the office 
on a bad news day demanding: 'Christ, what a stuff-up. Get me some 
announceables.' Put simply, for politicians, an announceable is 
something you go public on to make you look good. The announceable 
is something you trot out when you need a distraction. The 
announceable is something for when the 'merde' hits the fan."


4. Article: The Words of Dickens
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Next Tuesday, 7 February, is the 200th anniversary of the birth of 
Charles Dickens. It has been impossible to avoid knowing about this 
impending event for several months because of way that the British 
media has anticipated it, with its usual concern to get ahead of its 
competitors. Boredom has set in for many British readers and 
viewers, few of whom these days read him.

I was going to pass over it in silence, not wanting particularly to 
add to the hoopla. But then, in an idle moment of curiosity, I fired 
up the Oxford English Dictionary to learn more about the linguistic 
legacy the man has left us. He wrote such delightful and insightful 
descriptions of London and its people that I wondered if his verbal 
inventiveness matched his artistic abilities. 

Dickens is highly rated by the OED. He is the 13th most frequently 
quoted source, well ahead of his contemporaries, though this may in 
part reflect his extraordinary output rather than his creativity. 
Among the 9,218 quotations from his works in the OED, 265 words and 
compounds are cited as having been first used by him in print and 
another 1,586 as having been used in a new sense.

Life's too short to look at them all; let's concentrate on the 265 
new words and phrases. He's credited with inventing such standard 
English terms as "boredom", "flummox", "rampage", "butter-fingers", 
"tousled", "sawbones", "confusingly", "casualty ward", "allotment 
garden", "kibosh", "footlights", "dustbin", "fingerless", "fairy 
story", "messiness", "natural-looking", "squashed", "spectacularly" 
and "tintack".

Anybody who cites these based on the OED's evidence risks being 
regarded as out of touch. Most of the entries haven't been revised 
since they were compiled a century ago. Our etymological knowledge 
has improved greatly since then and has had a huge boost from the 
introduction of searchable digitised archives. I trawled the British 
Library's archive of nineteenth-century newspapers to check how 
original these words really were. A lot weren't.

"Boredom", for example, which Dickens included in Bleak House in 
1853, is known from the Theatrical Examiner of April 1841; he used 
"casualty ward" in Sketches by Boz in 1836 but it's known from 
Jackson's Oxford Journal dated January 1825; "footlights" is in the 
same work but is earlier in the Morning Chronicle of December 1822; 
"natural-looking" is likewise from Sketches by Boz but a Mr T Hood 
advertised "natural-looking wigs" in the Morning Post a quarter of a 
century earlier, in November 1810; "confusingly", from a letter of 
May 1863, is in the Morning Post of February 1852; "sharp practice" 
comes from The Pickwick Papers of 1837 but is trumped by The Bury 
and Norwich Post of February 1810; "fairy story", which Dickens 
included in David Copperfield as an alternative to the older "fairy-
tale", may be found in the London Standard in December 1827; 
"snobbish", in The Old Curiosity Shop of 1841, appears likewise in 
the London Standard, in May 1836; "kibosh", also from The Pickwick 
Papers, has been backdated several years by recent careful research 
(see my piece at http://wwwords.org?KBSH).

Other terms are certainly his to claim, including "butter-fingers", 
"sawbones", "messiness", "spiflication", "whizz-bang", "seediness", 
and "unpromisingly". "Flummox" appears in The Pickwick Papers of 
1837 but was also included by James Halliwell-Phillipps in his 
Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words in 1846 - it seems that 
Dickens breathed new life into an old dialect word. "Tousled", as 
"touzled", is in Dombey & Son of 1848, but appeared four years 
before in the Manchester Times and Gazette of December 1844; 
however, this is in a story with the title Trotty Veck and the Nor'-
Wester, by one Charles Dickens, so he has neatly antedated himself.

None of this detracts from Dickens's skill in using language. He is 
the first recorder of many items of slang (one contemporary critic 
called him the professor of slang), which he didn't invent but which 
his sharp ear for colloquial speech lovingly noted. In other cases 
he popularised colloquial terms that might without him have died 
out, such as "kibosh" and "devil-may-care". He had a trick of making 
new compound adjectives from existing words that concisely expressed 
a thought: "angry-eyed", "hunger-worn", "proud-stomached", "fancy-
dressed", "coffee-imbibing" and "ginger-beery", as well as new 
compound nouns such as "copying-clerk" and "crossing-sweeper".

As these examples show, we must always be sceptical of claims about 
who invented a word. Deeper digging often demonstrates that others 
had got to them first. But nobody is going to be less attracted by 
Dickens through knowing that.


5. Sic!
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The San Francisco Chronicle's website had a headline on 31 January 
(sent in by Jim Tang from Hawaii): "Ranger zaps off-leash dog walker 
with shock weapon". I've long suspected that it's the owner who's on 
the leash, not the dog.

Darren Zanon tells us the Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan is 
advertising for a director of software development. Among the post's 
duties: "Works with end users to establish efficient processes and 
excrement customer care." 

Will Gout e-mailed about a short-lived sentence on the ABC News 
website on 30 January: "The ACT bomb squad has closed a Canberra 
street after auspicious packages were found at the Israeli and 
French embassies."

An Associated Press story dated 31 January was spotted by Richard 
Collins on the website of the Wisconsin State Journal: "Woman killed 
in car accident facing prison time". That was, of course, before she 
was killed.


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