World Wide Words -- 11 Feb 12
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Feb 10 17:54:58 UTC 2012
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 773 Saturday 11 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: Halt.
3. Turns of Phrase: Human safari.
4. Q and A: Putter or potter.
5. Sic!
A. Manage your subscription.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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STANDING PIE Several readers noted that "stand pie" is known in
northern England. Nick Munton wrote: "The term is still in use here
in Leeds, although perhaps less so now. A stand pie is a large pork
pie, one that would be shared between a number of people. 'Order
your Stand Pie for Christmas' certainly used to be a common sign in
butchers' windows before Christmas when I came to live in Leeds in
the late 70s." Mike Sykes pointed me to an article in the Yorkshire
Post dated June 2007: "[Pork] pies were a childhood treat - the
bigger version, the stand pie, was an essential part of Christmas,
complete with home-made piccalilli", saying also that another local
name for a pork pie was "growler". "Stand pie" is almost certainly a
shortened form of "standing pie", as recipes exist under that name
which describe making the same kind of hard-baked pastry cases.
However, modern recipes make the case edible.
BURQINI A chiding missive came from Greg Balding: "Michael, really,
are you trying to stir us Aussies up? The burqini's relevance to
Australia is not because some pommy cook wore one on Bondi Beach.
It's because it was designed by an Australian, Aheda Zanetti,
initially for the large number of Australian Muslim women." It's
also a registered trade mark in that country, I now learn.
OLD SAYING Last week, I relayed a query from Anne Osborne about the
expression "going on teacakes and haybands" about a clock behaving
erratically, asking whether others knew it. Some Yorkshire readers
remember older relatives employing similar terms. Chris Rendle wrote
that his mother, born in Yorkshire in 1917, used the form "it ran on
teacakes and stopped at every currant". Ian Dilley likewise wrote
that his parents, also from Yorkshire, would say that a clock was
"running on teacakes".
That last form appears online in reference to an athlete nearing
exhaustion and the irregular running of buses, among other erratic
enterprises. In Bearly Believable: My Part in the Paddington Bear
Story, by Shirley Clarkson, appears the line "The factory must have
been running on teacakes", meaning it was severely short-staffed.
These suggest that "running on teacakes" equates to "running on
empty". I did wonder if teacakes were considered to be an inadequate
form of nourishment but a Yorkshireman of my acquaintance has firmly
told me that it isn't so.
Perhaps there was another origin. Thinking of a recent item, Jim
Newland surmised that "going/running on teacakes and haybands" is an
English form of "held together with chewing gum and baling wire",
since both teacakes and chewing gum are next to useless as long-
term, or even impromptu, repair materials.
Nigel Rees, of BBC Radio's Quote ... Unquote fame, told me about the
expression "laughing teacakes"; examples online show that speakers
mean by this that they are overjoyed. He also mentioned that Eric
Partridge (and the English Dialect Dictionary) records "teacake" as
a term for a baby's bottom. These surely have no direct link with
"teacakes and haybands" but suggest that teacakes are a fertile
source of linguistic invention for northern English speakers.
2. Weird Words: Halt
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"Halt" in the expression "the halt and the lame" is a different word
to the one meaning to stop and has long been obsolete except in this
one usage (the Oxford English Dictionary described it as archaic a
century ago and it has become even more obscure since).
If asked, I'd guess most people would plump for a biblical origin
for the expression. It turns out not to be so. The individual words
"halt" and "lame" certainly figure in the King James version of
1611, but nowhere together. This is one appearance of "halt":
It is better for thee to enter into life halt or
maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet to be
cast into everlasting fire.
[Matthew 18:8]
The word is a Germanic one that Old English spelled as "halt" or
"healt"; it's from the verb "healtian", which meant to walk with a
limp. A writer in 1868 who noted that "He halted slightly in his
walk" didn't meant that he kept stopping, but that he limped a
little.
That, you will notice, makes "the halt and the lame" a tautology. We
might excuse it if it was created in recent times, when the meaning
of "halt" had largely been lost, but it appears in the historical
record in the seventeenth century in phrases such as "the Widdows,
the Halt and the Lame" (1659) and "the servant is commanded to bid
the poore, halt, and blind, and lame, to come in" (1645). This may
be simple ignorance, but it was more likely a rhetorical device to
emphasise a concept by combining different words for it. This is the
earliest conjunction of the two words I have so far unearthed:
The fourth of August (weary, halt, and lame)
We in the dark, to a town called Sedbergh came.
[The Pennyles Pilgrimage, by John Taylor, 1618. Taylor
was a London waterman, best known under his sobriquet of
The Water-Poet, who chronicled a series of exotic journeys
in verse. "Pennyles" = "penniless".]
The expression has appeared so many times down the centuries since
that we may put it in the category that H W Fowler named "sturdy
indefensibles".
3. Turns of Phrase: Human safari
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In human safaris, tourists are taken to isolated tribal communities
for intrusive and sometimes salacious entertainment. The practice is
far from new but the term has become widely known this year as a
result of an investigation by Gethin Chamberlain for The Observer, a
British Sunday newspaper.
The communities concerned are on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in
the Bay of Bengal, particularly the Jarawa on the Andaman Islands.
The tribe has long resisted external interference, but the building
of a major road has opened up their tribal lands to outsiders to
devastating effect. Though the Indian government prohibits any
contact with the Jawara, including feeding or photographing them,
the ban has been ignored and they have been exploited. The appeal
for some tourists is their habit of going naked.
Though "human safari" has been known as a nonce formation for some
years (in 2003 The Scotsman described a human safari through Bel Air
and Beverly Hills to catch a glimpse of the homes of stars such as
Keanu Reeves and Leonardo DiCaprio), the current sense and specific
association with the islanders dates to an article of 2008 in
another British newspaper, The Telegraph, in which it was said to be
a humorous term used by the local tour guides and taxi drivers.
Video footage capturing the daily "human safaris"
through the forest home of the islands' recently contacted
Jarawa tribe has provoked worldwide outrage. The footage,
in which an off-camera police officer orders partly naked
Jarawa women to dance for tourists in return for food, was
described in India as a "national disgrace".
[The Observer, 15 Jan. 2012.]
A charity has renewed its calls for a boycott of
sightseeing tours in the Andaman Islands because, it says,
they put the indigenous Jarawa tribe at risk. Survival
International describes tours that use the Andaman Trunk
Road, which passes through the tribe's ancestral land, as
"human safaris".
[The Telegraph, 1 Oct. 2011.]
4. Q and A: Putter or potter
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Q. Watching the movie of Carousel recently, we heard (during the
song about the clam-bake) that "We weren't in a mood to putter". Was
this word merely concocted to rhyme with "butter" or is it a
recognised US expression? [Leslie Stephens, France]
A. It is a well-known North American expression. It's also common in
other parts of the English-speaking world, though people outside
North America prefer to spell it "potter". It has no connection with
"butter", unless you choose to interpret that word to mean "one who
butts", as with the head.
The earliest meaning of "potter" (I'll stick to that spelling) was
the action of poking or prodding something repeatedly.
I have been pottering about with my stick, and my
family have all been on their knees grubbing i' the
ashes.
[Family Secrets by S J Pratt, 1797.]
It appears in the seventeenth century but derives from the Old
English "pote", to push, thrust or butt. "Potter" evolved from it by
a shift in the vowel and adding the "-er" ending that meant doing
something again and again. It's connected to "poke" and in some
senses with "put".
Today, "potter" means to occupy oneself in a desultory but pleasant
manner or to do something idly to pass the time. How we got to that
from poking or prodding is unclear. A century ago it had several
other senses in Scottish and English dialects, such as walk slowly
or feebly or do something awkwardly or ineffectually. Confusion with
another old verb, "pother", led to "potter" at times meaning to
trouble, perplex, worry or bother.
Many examples attached it to a person's advancing years and loss of
capabilities ("He potters about in his old age"; "Mart does potter
now; he can't stand work much longer"). The image may have been of
an old man with a stick idly poking at things on the ground. The
word is recorded in books and newspapers from the early nineteenth
century in a number of senses, including ineffectual actions.
5. Sic!
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On 7 February Robyn Ramm found a report on the iHeartRadio website
about a fire: "Eight people were all sleeping inside when unattended
food on the kitchen stove spread to the cabinets and then the
attic."
My area, in common with much of Britain, has had some cold weather
recently. John Gray tells us The Gloucestershire Citizen reported on
5 February, "In Bourton On the Water, Cheltenham, Bream, Winchcombe
and Tetbury firefighters were called out after the chilli conditions
saw water pipes burst and tanks ruptured."
Russell Erwin e-mailed from New South Wales. He had found an advert
in the Town & Country Magazine of 30 January announcing an auction
sale. The reason for the sale was given as "Due to disillusion of
Partnership".
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