World Wide Words -- 25 Feb 12
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Feb 24 17:44:25 UTC 2012
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 775 Saturday 25 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: Somniloquent.
3. Wordface.
3. Q and A: Playing gooseberry.
4. 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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SIC! To misquote a famous Guardian correction, the absence of this
column last week should not be taken as evidence of any sudden onset
of accuracy in the world's press.
GOD WILLING AND THE CREEKS DON'T RISE Lesley Shaw wrote to say that
it's not only Americans who know this: "When I was growing up in a
small Queensland bush town you often heard people say: 'See you if
the creeks aren't up' and they meant exactly that. We always had
enough food on hand (I still do in suburban Brisbane!) 'in case the
creeks come up'. But it just as often had a metaphorical meaning."
Murray Ball confirmed that it was "common when I was a lad growing
up in rural Manitoba (Canada) in the 1940s and 1950s. Since the
aboriginals in rural Manitoba were Cree or Sioux, it definitely had
nothing to do with Creek Indians."
An abbreviation with the same sense was cited by Australian readers:
"DVWP", from "Deo volente" (God willing) + "weather permitting". Ama
Bolton mentioned that her mother, born in Devon in the 1880s, used
"DV+WP" instead and this form is also known in Australia. Although
"DV" is common enough among churchgoers, the longer abbreviation is
rare in print: I've come across just one example, in a letter to the
Glasgow Herald in 1999.
ALAMAGOOZLUM Mary Louise Lyman recalled: "During Depression days at
our house no food was allowed to go to waste, which often resulted
in some rather odd but mostly tasty stews/casseroles that dad always
called 'magoozlum'. I never heard it in connection with maple syrup
or an alcoholic drink." It isn't common in print, but I found it in
The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler: "I've written twelve best-
sellers, and if I ever finish that stack of magoozlum on the desk
there I may possibly have written thirteen." It has been defined as
hooey, nonsense, tosh, tripe, twaddle or tommy-rot. Etymologists
have suggested it may derive from the cartoon character Mr Magoo or
from magoo, Hollywood slang for the gooey insides of custard pies
(the throwing sort), but it seems at least as likely that it's a
shortening of alamagoozlum.
Several readers have told me that, despite what I wrote in this
piece last week, gomme syrup is still available, from the French
company Monin.
CHANGE IN FORMAT As an experiment, next week's issue will be sent
in both plain text and formatted versions in one message. Which you
will see depends on your mail system and perhaps your settings. Most
online mailers (such as Google Mail, Hotmail and Yahoo!) will show
you only the formatted version. Offline readers (such as Outlook,
Thunderbird, etc) should give you a choice of format to view. In
case it all goes pear-shaped, I'll tell you now that next week's
issue will be online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/nbdg.htm .
Your comments, as always, will be welcome. However, since no two
mail readers agree about which formatting they support, requests to
amend some part of the formatting are unlikely to be implementable.
Formatting-wise, it's "keep it simple" all the way.
2. Weird Words: Somniloquent /sQm'nIl at kw@nt/
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We are with sleep-talkers, a less often encountered term than sleep-
walkers, even though the former are more common. Medical terminology
has dignified words for them both: somnambulants and somniloquents.
Some sufferers have been known to do both at once: you might call
this the Lady Macbeth syndrome.
Both words begin with a derivative of the Latin "somnus", sleep. The
second parts are respectively from "ambulare", to walk, and "loqui"
to speak. The former is best known in perambulate, to walk about in
a leisurely way, and in the rather rare noctambulant, somebody who
walks at night; he or she might be somnambulant but could equally be
insomniac. As to the second, if you talk a lot while awake, you are
better described by its relative loquacious.
The nouns belonging to them are somnambulism and somniloquy. (Though
most somniloquies are also soliloquies, it's best not to confuse the
two.) Somniloquacious is a pleasant expansion which trips off the
tongue. Nathan Bailey included it in his dictionary in 1731 with the
same sense as somnliloquent. It hasn't been encountered in the wild
since, though a music magazine did feature somniloquaciously some
decades ago.
3. Wordface
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POO CORNER Would you be happy to read, or even perhaps be seen in
the company of, a book entitled Cooking With Poo? Or perhaps one
with the intriguing title of The Great Singapore Penis Panic and the
Future of American Mass Hysteria? Or even possibly one subtitled The
Memoirs Of A Japanese Chicken Sexer in 1935 Hebden Bridge? These are
three of the seven shortlisted books announced yesterday (Friday)
for the 32nd annual Bookseller Diagram prize for the oddest book
title of the year. The other titles are: Estonian Sock Patterns All
Around The World, A Century Of Sand Dredging In The Bristol Channel
(Volume Two), A Taxonomy of Office Chairs (which is described as "an
exhaustive overview"), and The Mushroom In Christian Art. The winner
will be chosen through a public vote at websites of The Bookseller
(thebookseller.com) and its sister consumer site welovethisbook.com
and will be announced on Friday 30 March. By the way, the "poo" in
the first book's title is actually the Thai word for crab. We may
suspect a pun on the title of the famous book Cooking With Pooh.
4. Q and A: Playing gooseberry
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Q. Like many Americans, I learn a lot about the common language that
divides us from British programs - er, programmes - that cross the
pond and appear on American public television. Just now I saw a 1998
episode of As Time Goes By in which one character, invited for a
weekend in the country with four other characters, expresses concern
about "playing gooseberry". It was clear from the context that she
meant an interloper who gets in the way of activities better suited
for smaller groups; "being a fifth wheel" is the familiar term I'd
use. A bit of Web searching confirmed the interpretation, but I
remain baffled about the connection between fruit and intrusiveness.
[Marc S Glasser]
A. You're not alone. This odd phrase puzzles everybody who has come
across it. Not the least odd thing about it is that in its fairly
short history it has flipped sense. As you have learned, today it
means intruding on a couple, usually lovers, who wish to be alone.
As you might also say, "two's company, three's a crowd". But when it
first appeared, in the nineteenth century, matters were very
different.
A delightful story by a man who wrote under the pseudonym of "an old
bachelor" appeared in Notes and Queries in 1860. He told how he was
accompanying his nineteen-year-old niece on a walk when a young man
joined them. He went on:
I observed nothing particular on the road, except that
my niece and our casual companion seemed very much taken
up with one another, and left me to my own meditations.
But when we reached my brother's house, and the young
gentleman had wished us good morning, my niece, to my
great surprise, not only informed me that I was the
kindest of uncles, but added that she could not express
how much she felt obliged to me for _doing gooseberry_.
[Notes and Queries, 20 Oct. 1860.]
He asked about the expression after dinner that evening and to his
chagrin "all the gentlemen present began laughing". He wrote to the
journal for elucidation. The editor added a note:
Though it may not be thought quite the _thing_, if a
young lady and her sweetheart are seen rambling through
bypaths and shady lanes _alone_, yet if they take the same
walk accompanied by the young lady's aunt, married sister,
grandmamma, or uncle, there is no "violation of the
strictest propriety." The party thus sanctioning is said
to _do gooseberry_. We confess that, had our correspondent
asked for the origin of the phrase, we should have felt at
a loss; though very possibly some other correspondent may
yet come to our assistance."
Others did, pointing out that the expression was a shortened form of
"gooseberry-picker", meaning a chaperone who, innocently or on
purpose, allowed himself or herself to be distracted by something of
interest - notionally picking fruit - so allowing the young couple
to be alone together.
The first description of the gooseberry-picker that I can find
suggests a slightly different association:
[H]is duty is to hover about, to watch his patroness's
wants and wishes; escort her, if she require it, to the
supper room, make way for her and secure a place for her,
stay by her, until somebody comes up with whom she wishes
to flirt, and then withdraw and give his place to that
person.
[The Parson's Daughter, by Theodore Edward Hook,
1833.]
This leaves us no nearer to understanding why the gooseberry should
have been chosen as the fruit, nor why picking it was the activity
involved. In Popular Sayings Dissected in 1894, a Mr A Wallace
(nobody seems to know his first name), argued that the chaperone,
"has to undergo all the pains and penalties attached to gathering a
prickly fruit, while the others have the pleasure of eating it." We
may disregard this description of the self-abrogating chaperone as
the romantic fantasy that it surely was. There must have been very
few opportunities for actually picking gooseberries on walks (or was
this perhaps the point?); it would have been more appropriate to
select the wild blackberry, frequently harvested in season. One
writer to Notes and Queries wondered if it derived from some work of
fiction now lost to memory, but nobody's managed to unearth it. The
activity was also known as daisy-picking, which made a little more
sense, particularly as children were often used as chaperones in
this situation.
There were earlier gooseberries in slang. A gooseberry could be a
fool or simpleton, borrowed from the ancient dish gooseberry fool.
"Old Gooseberry" was the devil - an exact parallel to Old Harry -
perhaps using the word in the sense of a being who could with care
be outwitted. To play old gooseberry meant to make mischief or to
defeat, destroy or ruin, or to seriously mismanage some matter:
You go and play old gooseberry with your constitution,
you know, pitch your liver to Old Harry, and make ducks
and drakes of your nervous system; - why, _bless_ my soul,
you know, you'll be dead in two-two's.
[The Colonial Monthly (Australia), Mar. 1869.]
Might play gooseberry or do gooseberry have originally derived from
playing old gooseberry, notionally (if not actually) to get between
a lover and his lass and spoil their fun?
What we can understand is why the expression flipped from being a
person who allowed a young couple to be romantically engaged to
somebody who got in the way of amorousness. Once the bonds of
propriety weakened and chaperones were no longer required, a third
person ceased to be a fig leaf of respectability and became a mere
nuisance.
5. Sic!
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John Eliot Spofford tells us that the Boston Globe reported on 18
February: "A woman in her early 50s who was struck and killed by a
tow truck while crossing a street in Brighton Thursday night has
died, Boston police said."
>From an obituary in the Wiltshire Times of 17 February, submitted by
Alan Jones: "Mr [B] grew up in the East End of London but when his
mother died at the age of five he was sent to a Dr Barnado's [sic]
home".
Freddie Cheah reports that on 18 February, the website of the Sydney
Morning Herald had the headline "Honeymoon murder trial: Drowned
woman's heart problem cured."
On 20 February, Gerry Zanzalari encountered a Fox News story about
the Swedish man who survived for two months in his car in sub-zero
temperatures without food: "When rescuers arrived at the scene,
Skyllberg was emancipated and barely speaking." Even stranger was
the version Jeremy Shaw read on Zeenews of India the same day: "A
45-year-old Swedish man has survived being frozen to death in his
snow-covered car for two months."
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