World Wide Words -- 30 Jun 12

[Michael Quinion]

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WORLD WIDE WORDS            ISSUE 790          Saturday 23 June 2012
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Weird Words: Gamp.
3. Wordface.
4. Q and A: Wag.
5. Sic!
6. Useful information.


1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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WRONG AND WRONGLY  Carolyn Dane commented, "I agree entirely with 
your use of 'wrong'. Another instance of the same issue is people 
who feel 'badly' about something. As Isaac Asimov said, 'The only 
people who feel badly are inept dirty old men.'" 

Marc Picard introduced me to a new grammatical term. "Adverbs like 
'wrong', 'sure', 'fast', 'slow', etc. actually have a name, as I 
discovered recently when one of my students did a paper on this 
phenomenon in a course I was giving on the history of English. 
They're called 'flat adverbs', presumably on the basis of phrases 
like 'to fall flat' or 'to turn down flat'." The Oxford English 
Dictionary includes "flat adverb" as first being used by the 
philologist John Earle in his work The Philology of the English 
Tongue of 1871, though it doesn't explain why he chose it.

A perspective on all such intricacies of English was supplied by 
Vivien Allen: "As a teacher of English as a foreign language before 
I retired I always read your weekly magazine with great interest. 
Today I was reminded of a class at a language school in Cambridge 
where I taught at one time. I had been taking my students through 
the various pronunciations of '-ough' and had put a list of words 
such as 'bough', 'tough' and 'through' on the blackboard. At the end 
a German boy sighed deeply and said, 'Mrs Allen, You don't know how 
lucky you are being born speaking English'! On another occasion I 
congratulated a Dutch student on his excellent English and commented 
that the Dutch students always arrived well grounded in the 
language. He replied, 'If you are born speaking a language that 
sounds like swearing in hiccups you have to be good at English'!"

ON THE EDGE  Several readers provided a further illustration of the 
worrisome difficulties of English. They noted that in this section 
last time I wrote, "Two comments suggest that I sounded the death 
knell on 'Great Wen' too precipitately". They firmly told me that 
the word should have been "precipitously". Having written one long 
piece last week to justify my choice of adverb, I'm disinclined to 
impose another on long-suffering subscribers: the complicated story 
of the ways in which the two words have interacted in meaning and 
usage would need a substantial and probably boring article. However, 
I'm surprised at the comments, since all the dictionaries that I've 
consulted give as their first sense of "precipitate" phrases such as 
"sudden, hasty, rash" or "done without careful consideration", They 
also give one sense of "precipitous" as "hasty or precipitate". Jeff 
Kabacinski lightened his gentle criticism by ending his message, 
"though it does bring to mind that old chemistry joke, 'If you're 
not a part of the solution, you're a part of the precipitate'."


2. Weird Words: Gamp
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A new subscriber from Australia told me he had come across the site 
through trying to solve a crossword clue in The Age, "1000-ampere 
rain shedders". He didn't get any help from the site, because I'd 
never written about "gamps", but he solved the clue anyway. (Was the 
compiler thinking of a thousand US dollars, a g-note? I'd normally 
take the prefix "g" to mean "giga-", a thousand million.)

A gamp is indeed a rain shedder, more prosaically an umbrella, one 
particularly suited to this apology for a summer we're currently 
having in Britain. But we Brits are inured to rain. As The Times 
commented in April 2011, "When the clouds open we will bring out 
brollies, beach parasols, golf umbrellas, gamps, sou'westers, oil-
skins, gaberdines and rain-ponchos."

"Brolly" is, all the best authorities assure us, a clipped and 
altered form of "umbrella", supposedly beginning its life as 
university slang at Oxford and Cambridge in the 1870s (it's also 
sometimes known as a brelly, which makes a little more sense). But 
"gamp" had preceded it into the printed record for what a writer 
described in 1864 as "a large, bulgy, loosely tied cotton umbrella".

We are once again indebted to the fertile mind of Charles Dickens. 
Mrs Sarah (Sairey) Gamp appeared in his novel Martin Chuzzlewit in 
1846. She had a large umbrella, "in colour like a faded leaf, except 
where a circular patch of a lively blue had been dexterously let in 
at the top", which entered into so many adventures during the course 
of the story that it almost become a character in its own right.

Mrs Gamp, a disreputable drink-sodden widow, first appears when she 
is engaged as a night watcher to sit up with the body of Anthony 
Chuzzlewit during the week before his funeral; she claimed also to 
be a midwife, though she was really what was then called a monthly 
nurse, one who stayed with and looked after women for that period 
after childbirth. (The modern equivalent is sometimes called a 
doula, from the classical Greek word meaning a female slave.)

"Gamp" is not now much used, even in the country of its birth, but 
it's still in the dictionaries and it's well enough remembered that 
a crossword setter in Australia could base a clue on it and expect 
it to be solved.


3. Wordface
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NOT LOST BUT REFASHIONED  Tony Chabot wrote that he came across this 
sentence in a seventeenth-century letter from Sir Isaac Newton to 
Robert Hooke: "I have long grutched the time spent ...". He feels 
that GRUTCHED has a wonderful sound to it and that it should be more 
commonly used. In Newton's time it was still employed in the sense 
of being reluctant to give or allow something, to begrudge, but it 
seems to have gone out of mainstream English currency around 1700. 
It lasted long enough in a few local dialects for it to be included 
in the English Dialect Dictionary at the very end of the nineteenth 
century and to be resurrected, temporarily, by Rudyard Kipling in 
his Barrack-Room Ballads ("I paid my price for findin' out, / Nor 
never grutched the price I paid"). Its origin is the Old French word 
"groucier", to murmur or grumble. Our modern "grudge" is an altered 
form of it.

BEWARE OF THE INVITATION  One form of online confidence trick is 
aimed at scientists and technologists, always eager because of the 
pressure to publish to take up invitations to present a paper at a 
prestigious conference. E-mail messages and websites advertise a 
conference in their field with a personal invitation to take part, 
subject only to the usual conference registration fee. A gullible 
booker finds too late that the conference doesn't exist - it's a 
SCAMFERENCE. The term dates back to the middle of the last decade. 

DEUS EX MONETA  For the first time ever, journalists were allowed 
into the Vatican Bank this week. They found an ATM in the banking 
hall that displayed its messages in Latin. "Deductio ex pecunia" 
means "cash withdrawal". But what's the Latin for "international 
requirements on financial transparency"?


4. Q and A: Wag
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Q. I often hear "to wag off" here in Australia - meaning to cut 
classes - and thought it was an Australianism. However it seems to 
have been in use in England at the end of the nineteenth century, as 
James K Jerome uses it in Three Men on the Bummel. Any ideas on its 
derivation? [Malcolm Sealy]

A. It's rather older than Jerome. It certainly is British, having 
been first recorded here:

    "My misfortunes all began in wagging, Sir; but what 
    could I do, exceptin' wag?" "Excepting what?" said Mr 
    Carker. "Wag, Sir. Wagging from school." "Do you mean 
    pretending to go there, and not going?" said Mr Carker. 
    "Yes, Sir, that's wagging, Sir."
    [Dombey and Son, by Charles Dickens, 1848]

My wife remembers taking a day off when she was a student teacher at 
a London school in the 1960s and being asked the following day by a 
child, "Was you hoppin' the wag, Miss?" That's recorded a century 
earlier, from the 1860s. Other formulations have been documented:

    The most general term for truancy seems to be "to play 
    hookey" (an Americanism which became naturalized around 
    1900), although very often, particularly in the north, 
    young ne'er-do-wells use the older phrases "playing wag", 
    "playing the wag", "hopping the wag", "wagging school", or 
    "wagging it", speaking with the same tongue boys used in 
    the time of Dickens.
    [The Lore and Language of School-children, by Iona and 
    Peter Opie, 1967.]

My impression is that "wag" in its various forms is still known in 
the UK, though it's local. Around here in Gloucestershire, "skiving" 
and "bunking off" are usual. I remember Sir Paul McCartney a couple 
of years ago referring to "sagging off" school during his Liverpool 
childhood. "Nobbing", "dodging", "plunking" and "twagging" are also 
known in various parts of the UK. The last one is fairly recent and 
some writers have suggested that it derives from "wag".

Otherwise, we use the verb "wag" these days almost exclusively to 
mean moving something rapidly from side to side (or up and down): a 
dog wags its tail, a person may wag his finger as a warning or a 
reprimand, or gossips may wag their tongues. This is ancient: it 
appears in the fourteenth-century poem Piers Plowman by William 
Langland, though he meant by it a boat rocking from side to side 
(it's from Old English "waggian", to shake). 

Earlier still it could mean to move one's limbs with difficulty, to 
totter, stagger, or walk unsteadily. The mental picture of side-to-
side movement may have emerged from this. The Dictionary of American 
Regional Usage records "wag" from some parts of the US in the sense 
of staggering along, especially under a heavy load, and so to carry 
something heavy. A person who was swinging from a rope after being 
hanged was at one time said to be wagging, which led to "waghalter" 
for a man who was going to be hanged, or deserved to be. Though the 
evidence is indecisive, it may have been abbreviated back to "wag" 
and softened to mean a mischievous prankster or youth - hence "wag" 
for a facetious person or practical joker. (Recent "wag" for a wife 
or girlfriend is an acronym.)

The unsteady walking sense evolved into wandering about from place 
to place or moving away from some place, especially with difficulty 
or under pressure to remain. The idea of truancy evolved from this, 
though uncertainty about the source of the mischievous youth sense 
of "wag" leaves the experts uncertain whether it might be from 
"waghalter" instead.


5. Sic!
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This appeared in the New York Times magazine on 17 June, Sarabell 
Stoll tells us. "When Pablo Escobar was Chapo's age, he had been 
dead for more than a decade."

An article in the Guardian on 23 June described a possible reaction 
of a hospital patient seeing a clergyman approaching his bed. "Is he 
here to give me the last rights?" Unfortunately, the writer was 
Giles Fraser, formerly Canon Chancellor of St Paul's Cathedral.

On 19 June the Australian Government released a report, catchily 
entitled Post Implementation Review of the VET FEE-HELP Assistance 
Scheme. Gavin Moodie found this sentence in it: "Consideration also 
needs to be given to the role played by other relevant bodies to 
ensure, where possible, ongoing alignment in policy and minimisation 
of regulatory duplicity." 

A report on ABC News online on 27 June interested Brian Barratt. 
Below the headline, "Cops scour Darwin bush for beheading suspect", 
one line read "Police cars are patrolling the area, and a chopper is 
circling above." Add your own punchline.

Raymond Noë wrote from The Netherlands concerning a headline he had 
seen in the New York Daily News of 26 June: "Reading books will help 
shorten Brazilian prisoners' sentences". But as he says, improved 
literacy may equally result in their sentences getting longer.


6. Useful information
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Michael Quinion in the UK. ISSN 1470-1448. Copyediting and advice 
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