World Wide Words -- 07 Jul 12
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jul 6 16:17:07 UTC 2012
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WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 792 Saturday 7 July 2012
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Weird Words: Aliment.
3. Wordface.
4. Q and A: Going Dutch.
5. Sic!
6. Useful information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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HOPPING THE WAG Following last week's piece, readers supplied more
slang terms for playing truant. Gerard M-F Hill: "I went to school
in Cardiff, where it was called 'mitching', and then in the West
Riding of Yorkshire, where it was 'laiking', which also means
'playing'." Tony Morris likewise mentioned "mitching", which his
wife uses, who comes from County Tipperary. Tom Kavanagh added
another: "When I was growing up in Newfoundland (longer ago than I
care to remember) the word used for playing hookey was 'slinge'. I
believe it's of Irish origin."
Michael Grosvenor Myer mentioned, "In Northampton, where I lived for
a couple of years during the Second World War, the form for truancy
was always 'playing waggy', rather than simply 'wag'." Australians
and New Zealanders say that "wag" is common in their counties, but
never "wag off" or other compounds. Val Hope e-mailed, "If you're
looking to extend the list of terms, in my Blackburn schooldays in
the 1970s we always used the phrase 'to nick off school'. Not that I
ever did it." Carolyn Barnes confessed that "during the 1960s my
classmates and I 'skipped out' of our Canadian high school classes."
Other writers discussed "skiving", I think familiar to Americans
from the Harry Potter stories. This is a well-known British and
Commonwealth slang term in the general sense of avoiding duties of
any kind, not just truanting, usually by ensuring one is somewhere
else at the time. Its origin is uncertain, but it may be from French
"esquiver", to slink away. As "skive" is first recorded in 1919 in
an army context, it may be yet another term adopted by soldiers in
France during the First World War.
GRANDSTANDING At the beginning of the piece on "gamp" last week, I
was groping for a link between "g" and "thousand". My ageing memory
failed to throw up "grand" for a thousand dollars, an omission
thoroughly corrected by readers, who were curious about its origins.
None of my references even hazard a guess. The alternatives of "big
ones" or "large ones" (also in expressions such as "You owe me ten
large") suggest it may have at first have been "grand one" or
something similar. Against this is that the earliest examples on
record, around 1900, used it in the plural, as in "A hundred and
fifty grands". A connection with French "grand", large, seems
improbable from this period.
A NAME, A NAME Last week I omitted to correct the name of one of my
favourite authors, Jerome K Jerome (the middle initial is short for
Klapka, by the way, although he was christened Clapp, which was his
father's original surname; both father and son found good reasons to
change it). The error provides an excuse to reproduce a little verse
Harry Campbell sent me - Mutual Problem, composed by William Cole:
Said Jerome K Jerome to Ford Madox Ford,
"There's something, old boy, that I've always
abhorred:
When people address me and call me 'Jerome',
Are they being standoffish, or too much at home?"
All this reminds me that scientific names in which the same word is
used for genus and species are called tautonyms. For example, the
red fox is Vulpes vulpes and the black rat is Rattus rattus, while
the tiny bird called the wren that I sometimes notice in my garden
rejoices in the mighty cognomen Troglodytes troglodytes.
2. Weird Words: Aliment
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If you first read this as "ailment", you momentarily confused the
word with one that's almost its opposite. Ailment, a minor illness,
derives from Old English "eglan", to trouble or afflict. This became
the verb "ail", which we hardly know except in set phrases that are
most often uttered for humorous effect, such as "what ails you?".
Contrariwise, an aliment is food or nourishment. In that sense it
has likewise disappeared from our language except as a deliberate
archaism (the late Ivor Brown called it "crossword-clue English").
It derives from Latin "alere", to nourish, and close relatives of
"aliment" are known in all the Latin-derived European languages.
Mrs Beeton recorded in her invaluable Book of Household Management
that "there exists in the salt ocean, and fresh-water rivers, an
abundance of aliment". She was rather fond of "aliment" and also
mentioned the alimentary canal, which the medical profession now
prefers to call the digestive tract. She employed "aliment" many
times, notably in this moralistic passage:
From the grossness of his feeding, the large amount of
aliment he consumes, his gluttonous way of eating it, from
his slothful habits, laziness, and indulgence in sleep,
the pig is particularly liable to disease, and especially
indigestion, heartburn, and affections of the skin.
[The Book of Household Management, by Isabella Beeton,
1861. We wouldn't now use "affection" in that way, , but
would prefer "infection"; she meant the skin was being
affected by some outside agency, in this case a
disease.]
"Aliment" is still alive in Scots law, where it's the standard term
for what in other jurisdictions may be called spousal maintenance,
spousal support or alimony. "Aliment" and "alimony" are etymological
twins, though "alimony" is a late-comer in English, first being
recorded as a legal term in the 1650s in the sense of a supply to a
cast-off wife of the essentials of living.
3. Wordface
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WEATHER WORD The devastating storms in the eastern United States
last weekend had a linguistic consequence. Reports on them brought
to public notice a term long known to professional meteorologists:
DERECHO (usually pronounced /deI'reItSoQ/ or "day-ray-cho"). It's a
loanword from Spanish, in which it means "straight". It refers to a
fast-moving storm with a straight or slightly bowed wavefront that
travels long distances across country, the linear equivalent of a
rotating tornado. The term was first used in 1888 by Professor
Gustavus Hinrichs of the University of Ohio in a paper entitled
Tornados and Derechos.
JOINED IN SCIENCE Few of us have failed to be made aware this week
of the subatomic particle called the HIGGS BOSON or that it was
named after Peter Higgs, a physicist at Edinburgh University who was
among a group who argued in a series of papers in 1964 that it ought
to exist. Fewer will know that the second part of the name also
commemorates a scientist, the Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose,
who made a key discovery about quantum statistics in 1924 that
proved a class of subatomic particles with particular properties
must exist. These were given his name, modified by the conventional
"-on" ending for such particles. The other class of particles,
FERMIONS, were named after the Italian-born American physicist,
Enrico Fermi.
4. Q and A: Going Dutch
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Q. I've been told that "going Dutch", used when two or more people
share an activity but agree to each pay their own way, may have its
cultural origin in a slur. It was common for the Dutch to pay for
themselves separately when dining out, unless a gentleman took a
lady out. The English, especially during the Anglo-Dutch Wars of the
17th century, came to paint the Dutch as stingy, and so created the
phrase as a negative stereotype. True? [Ellen Smithee]
A. Some pejorative expressions using "Dutch" were certainly created
through cultural enmity between the English and the Dutch during
their fight for naval supremacy in the seventeenth century. I wrote
about this many years ago (http://wwwords.org?DUTCH) and won't go
over the same ground again, only to record that "Dutch reckoning" (a
bill presented without any details and which gets bigger if you
argue), "Dutch widow" (a prostitute) and "Dutch feast" (an alcohol-
fuelled event in which the host gets drunk ahead of his guests) do
seem to be contemporary with the conflicts, while others, including
"Dutch courage" and "Dutch uncle", came along later as imitations.
"Going Dutch" - to which we can add "Dutch lunch", "Dutch treat",
"Dutch party" and "Dutch supper", all with closely similar meanings
- are American creations from the nineteenth century. The oldest of
these in the record is "Dutch treat":
If our temperance friends could institute what is
called the "Dutch treat" into our saloons, each man paying
his reckoning, it would be a long step towards reforming
in drinking to excess.
[Daily Democrat (Sedalia, Missouri), 27 Jun. 1873. A
"no treating" rule of this kind was in fact introduced
into British pubs by law during the First World War for
exactly this purpose.]
Confusingly for the etymological researcher, before "Dutch lunch"
and "Dutch supper" took on their idiomatic meanings they were used
in the literal sense of a meal reflecting a particular culture. The
evidence shows they were more correctly German (a common error of
the time, as in Pennsylvania Dutch), since a newspaper report in
1894 mentions that for a Dutch supper to be successful everything
must be "consistently expressive of [the] vaterland" and mentions
rye bread, cabbage salad, Wienerwursts and beer as being on offer.
This is the first idiomatic example of "Dutch lunch" I can find:
Perhaps you have a fatter pocketbook than some of the
other fellows. I, for instance, can't afford to buy two
tickets every time I go. So some of the boys and I go on
the "Dutch lunch" plan: everybody for himself.
[Fort Wayne Morning Journal, 24 Oct. 1897.]
The evidence makes clear that "going Dutch" and its synonyms are too
recent and from the wrong continent to be linked with the ancient
enmity between the English and the Dutch.
There is a hint in James Fenimore Cooper's Satanstoe of 1845 that
paying for oneself was a known custom of Dutch people in New York.
The action takes place in and around New York in the years 1757 and
1758. The main characters, including Cornelius Littlepage, Anneke
Mordaunt and Dirck Follock, are of Dutch descent and good social
position. At one point, Cornelius Littlepage pays the entry fee to a
fair sideshow for himself, Anneke Mordaunt and her black maid; she
carefully repays him the cost for herself and her maid, which he
understands very well is the custom in the city, particularly among
unmarried women. Cooper doesn't use the term "Dutch treat" - either
it wasn't in his vocabulary or he knew it would be anachronistic in
1757 - but its idea is clearly expressed in the dialogue.
We mustn't make too much of this sliver of evidence, but it provides
a plausible origin for the idioms. It may be that Americans invented
them based on their observations of the habits of Dutch immigrants.
The evidence shows that early users applied them as straightforward
descriptions and not as derogatory terms. So the origin you've been
given may be correct, albeit applied to the wrong time and place.
5. Sic!
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Di Platts wrote from Shropshire concerning a letter sent from her
grandson's school: "Children now know what they need to wear for the
play and so can start to be brought to school in a bag."
Greg Dowle pointed out a report of 1 July on stuff.co.nz about New
Zealand businesses failing to exploit the halal market: "The Koran
says Muslims cannot consume pork or pork by-products, animals that
were dead prior to slaughtering, animals not slaughtered properly or
not slaughtered in the name of Allah."
An unintended consequence of our recent horrible weather was this
report which Marcus Patton saw in the Belfast Newsletter on 29 June:
"On Wednesday evening, aerial routes in Belfast became impassable
and homes were destroyed because of flood water."
Peter Norton e-mailed from Homer, Alaska, to tell us that his local
paper, The Homer News, reported on 28 June about a man who eluded
police in a car chase: "Police described Volz as 6-feet tall, 190
pounds, with blue eyes, sandy brown and balding hair with glasses."
On 29 June the Daily Telegraph told of a drunken night out before a
friend's impending marriage that ended in a prosecution for animal
cruelty. Ian McIver was intrigued by this sentence: "Mr Hammond
later studied the hotel's CCTV and found footage of the Barnett
brothers taking the hens up to the stag's room after they claimed
they had been egged on by others."
6. Useful information
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Michael Quinion in the UK. ISSN 1470-1448. Copyediting and advice
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