World Wide Words -- 02 Jun 12

[Michael Quinion]

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WORLD WIDE WORDS            ISSUE 787           Saturday 2 June 2012
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Weird Words: Godwottery.
3. Wordface.
4. Q and A: Redd.
5. Sic!
6. Useful information.


1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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NO ROOM TO SWING A CAT  Victoria Solt Dennis e-mailed: "Swinging 
real live cats was once commonplace in England, and it wasn't
a 'child's cruel game' but an adult sport. Brewer's Phrase & Fable
of 1898 remarks: "Swinging cats as a mark for sportsmen was at one 
time a favourite amusement. There were several varieties of this 
diversion. Sometimes two cats were swung by their tails over a rope. 
Sometimes a cat was swung to the bough of a tree in a bag or sack. 
Sometimes it was enclosed in a leather bottle." Shakespeare alluded 
to this last method in Much Ado About Nothing, Act 1 Scene 1: "If I 
do, hang me in a bottle like a cat and shoot at me"' but I wonder 
about the other supposed games. Was this an instance of Ebenezer 
Cobham being as unreliable a reporter as he so often was? I suspect 
so.

I've also now discovered that the expression occurs in exactly its 
modern form in Medela Pestilentiae (To Cure the Plague) by Richard 
Kephale, dated 1665: "One house I know more especially by Cursitors-
Alley, where the Man, his Wife and Childe liv'd in a Room that 
look'd more like, for bigness, a big Chest than any thing else: They 
had not space enough (according to the vulgar saying) to swing a Cat 
in; so hot by reason of the closeness, and so nastily kept besides, 
that it took away a mans breath to put his head but within the 
doors."

I've updated the discussion at http://wwwords.org?NRTSAC .


2. Weird Words: Godwottery
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On Christmas Eve 1940, The Times presented readers with its usual 
seasonal set of general knowledge questions. One question asked for 
a definition and derivation of the word "godwottery". This was a bit 
cheeky on the part of the compilers, as the word had appeared in 
print for the first time only in 1936 and must have been unknown to 
most readers.

Three days later it offered the definition "Contemptuous term for a 
type of sentimental writing." As Evelyn Waugh's foreign editor in 
Scoop would have said, "Up to a point, Lord Copper". One sense of 
the word does indeed refer to language, but to the employment of 
deliberately archaic vocabulary. That sense was used - possibly for 
the first time - by the successful British author Norah Lofts in her 
book Out of This Nettle of 1938 (published in the US under the title 
Colin Lowrie). In an author's note she said, "I have written this 
so-called historical novel in so-called modern language", hoping 
that her readers "will appreciate this lack of 'God-wottery'."

However, the two earliest examples that I know of are connected not 
with literature but with gardening. This is one:

    There is no need to descend to Godwottery, or even to 
    know the difference between an aquilegia and an 
    antirrhinum, in order to be enthralled by the ingenious 
    and lovely shape, colour and texture - to say nothing of 
    scent - which surround you.
    [Try Anything Twice, by Jan Struther, 1938.]

Godwottery for gardeners means an exaggeratedly elaborate creation 
that jumbles together incompatible styles and materials with kitsch 
decorations. In August 1969, the Guardian described such a garden: 
"Cotswold stone retaining walls; vaguely Spanish wrought iron gates; 
'crazy' paving, nowadays often coloured yellow, green, and pink; 
plainly irregular ponds, now usually of pale blue fibreglass, fed by 
streams of impossible source; gnomes, fairies, and animals, usually 
plastic."

This meaning comes by linguistic legerdemain from a short poem, My 
Garden, written by the Manxman Thomas Brown in 1876 while he was a 
schoolmaster at Clifton College in Bristol. We remember now, if at 
all, only its first line, "A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot." 
Thereby Brown was himself perpetrating godwottery by making use of 
an archaic verb.

The verb is "wit", to know, one of the more irregular verbs in the 
language: "wot" is the present tense and "wist" the past. So "God 
wot" means "God knows". The only survival of the verb is the formal 
"to wit", meaning "that is to say", introducing an explanation of 
something that has gone before.

Both senses of "godwottery" survive, both with and without a hyphen, 
though it was never much used and has largely fallen out of favour. 
Its constituency divides neatly in two, with writers on gardening 
using one of the related senses and literary critics the other.


3. Wordface
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CRIMPING CRIMINALS' STYLE  Crimbo came into being in the UK in the 
1980s as a humorous, deliberately childish term for Christmas, a 
version of the slightly older Crimble. It's now well established, 
though slightly cringe-making for many of us Brits who encounter it 
unprepared. Crimbo was seized upon by journalists when the British 
Home Secretary, Teresa May, published a government criminal justice 
white paper on 22 May. This proposes replacing ASBOs, Antisocial 
Behaviour Orders, with CBOs, Criminal Behaviour Orders. CBOs were at 
once dubbed CRIMBOS; the term is certain to catch on and may cause 
some confusion around December. Having learned all that, you're 
equipped to puzzle out the tortuous headline that appeared in the 
tabloid Daily Star on 27 May, which makes one wonder whether the 
crossword compiler was standing a shift as a subeditor: MOTHER 
CRIMBO MAY AN ASBEEN.

THIS WAY TO THE EGRESS  The turmoil in the Eurozone over the fragile 
state of the Greek economy and the increasing likelihood that the 
country will be forced to abandon the Euro has generated a jargon 
term: GREXIT, short for "Greek exit". It is still mainly found in 
British newspapers but has spread to the US in the Washington Post, 
NPR and other media. Among its earliest appearances, in February, 
the Irish Times and the Guardian both said that it had been coined 
by the Citi chief economist Willem Buiter, presumably in reference 
to his use of it in Citi's Global Economics View of 6 February.

BANG, BANG, GONE  Michael Hocken asked me about BANGING OUT, which 
he read in a report in The Times on Thursday. Richard Wallace and 
Tina Weaver, the editors of the Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror, had 
been dismissed the day before with immediate effect. On leaving the 
office for the last time Mr Wallace was ritually BANGED OUT by his 
colleagues, who thumped their desks with suitably heavy objects. 
When the staff of the News of the World filed out following its 
final edition in July 2011, the editor, Colin Myler, observed the 
same tradition by striking a desk with a ruler as each passed him. 
Robert Waterhouse, a journalist of long experience, tells me that it 
was originally a print-workers' custom from the time when newspaper 
pages were set using metal type. "In those days of hot metal, the 
compositors - the only people allowed to touch anything in the 
composing room - traditionally and ritually banged any metal surface 
with lead or other metal to mark events such as people leaving; the 
practice later spread to journalists." He recalls, "I was the stone 
sub [who made the final corrections and cuts after the pages were 
composed] of the final foreign pages at the Guardian's Manchester 
office in August 1976, when live production stopped there. The pages 
were dutifully banged out."


4. Q and A: Redd
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Q. My mother descended in part from Pennsylvania Dutch immigrants. 
One expression that she used throughout my childhood was "read the 
table" ("read" being pronounced "red"), meaning clear the table 
after a meal. She also used "reading" ("redding"), as in "Your 
brother is reading the table". Growing up I assumed that "to read" 
meaning "to clear" was related somehow to the archaic English verb 
"to ready", ie, to make ready or to prepare. What do you think? 
[Rand Lee]

A. I think it's one of the more interesting terms in the American 
language with a history that's complicated and often misunderstood.

It's known mainly in Pennsylvania but the Dictionary of American 
Regional English records it widely but sporadically across much of 
the north-central US and elsewhere, often as the result of out-
migration from that state. As you note, it's said commonly as "red" 
but also as "rid" and sometimes "ret". It's usually spelled "redd" - 
not least in Redd-Up, an annual springtime city-wide clean-up in 
Pittsburgh.

Because of its focus, it has often been assumed to derive from the 
speech of its German settlers (as you mentioned, called Pennsylvania 
Dutch, where "Dutch" is a mishearing of "Deutsch"). That's in part 
because of the Middle Low German "redden", to make ready, put in 
order, tidy, organize, pay or settle and the old Dutch verb "redden" 
to put right, settle, tidy up or put in order.

However, your suggestion of its origin is much nearer the truth. 
"Redd" is an ancient English verb with much the same sense. It is 
Scottish, northern Irish (presumably as a result of the plantation 
of Scots in Ulster in the seventeenth century) and also northern 
English. I've written about it here: http://wwwords.org?RDDP.

Its history is complicated and confusing, since another verb, "rid" 
(specifically in the sense of freeing an area from rubbish or 
obstacles), and also "rede" - also a Scots term, now rare, with 
similar senses to "redd" - have become deeply intertwined with it to 
the point at which it's almost impossible to tell their stories 
apart. It may indeed be that "ready" is also part of the mix.

The Oxford English Dictionary remarks, at the end of a long note 
about the etymology of "redd" in a recently revised entry, "In U.S. 
use perhaps partly reinforced by Pennsylvania German, although it is 
possible that use in Pennsylvania may simply result from Scots input 
in the English of this area." This is supported by some of the DARE 
research results from elsewhere in the US, in which the respondents 
were of Scots or Ulster descent without German connections.

Whatever its origin, it continues to puzzle out-of-state visitors to 
Pennsylvania who unwittingly come across it:

    Recently, an obvious non-native was volunteering her 
    services to a charitable organization when the chief 
    volunteer suggested that she "redd up" the kitchen. 
    "What?" the volunteer replied, looking perplexed. ... They 
    eventually got around the conversational roadblock, and 
    the volunteer did, indeed, help redd up the kitchen. I 
    don't think she realized she was redding, however.
    [Altoona Mirror (Pennsylvania), 14 Feb. 1993.]


5. Sic!
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"I thought you might like this remarkably apt spelling mistake I saw 
recently," Martin Gregory e-mailed. "It comes from a comment added 
to an article in the Melbourne Age of 18 May 2012. 'Everything that 
increases teachers management time away from the classroom, lessons 
their ability to be productive teachers.'"

One for the department of improbable anatomy: "When his vision 
returns, he is prone on his back and four perfect porcelain faces 
loom in a circle above him." (Quantum Thief, by Hannu Rajaniem, 
2010.) 

Mike Nease and Gustavo G spotted an interestingly ambiguous headline 
in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on 25 May (it also appeared in 
other media outlets): "Hostile crowd on Capitol Hill keeps medics 
from stabbing victim." 

Gloria Bryant found an intriguing headline in the Seattle Times on 
30 May: "After aging 8 years, sommelier wins wine world's top 
honor." I'll bet he has a wonderful bouquet.


6. Useful information
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ABOUT THIS E-MAGAZINE: World Wide Words is written and published by 
Michael Quinion in the UK. ISSN 1470-1448. Copyediting and advice 
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