World Wide Words -- 26 May 12
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri May 25 16:21:45 UTC 2012
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WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 786 Saturday 26 May 2012
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Weird Words: Derring-do.
3. Q and A: Aeriated.
4. Sic!
5. Useful information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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NO ROOM TO SWING A CAT The last issue two weeks ago discussed this
idiom. Tony Chabot commented, "I had heard that it was originally
'not enough room to swing a cot' a ship-board bed". The suggestion
isn't new - it appeared in the Calcutta Review in 1889: "Few cabins
were spacious enough to allow of a cot swinging freely lengthwise
(query, is not this the origin of the phrase 'room to swing a cat
in'?)". Another suggested origin was mentioned by Derek Silk, that a
cat was a type of small boat and "if a harbour was too congested for
a ship to enter it was said that there was no room to swing a cat."
However, I can find no evidence for either origin and the early
examples don't support them.
MORE ON THE VERGE Following our discussions about the many names
Americans and others have for the strip of green that separates
pedestrians from drivers, Pauline Bryant wrote from Australia. In
the late 1980s and early 1990s she mapped the dialect regions of
Australian English for her PhD thesis. "In Australia, it depends
whereabouts you live. In Western Australia it is verge. In the
south-east of Australia, it is indeed nature strip [as others have
previously mentioned]. But in the rest of South Australia and NSW
and in Queensland it's footpath. It doesn't matter whether it has a
concrete strip along it or not, it is still the footpath. To the
confusion of the rest of Australia, in most of NSW and in
Queensland, you can have a footpath with a footpath on it, or a
footpath without a footpath on it."
LSOFT CHOICE AWARDS It looks as though we shall come top in the May
contest as well as the April one. We can't, of course, be finalists
twice, so it would seem to be time to relax our voting efforts to
let others achieve top ranking during the remaining months. Thanks
to everyone for your efforts. We must wait until late in the year to
learn which of the six monthly finalists gains prizes.
2. Weird Words: Derring-do
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Jeffery Deaver, the American thriller writer who continued the James
Bond franchise by writing Carte Blanche in 2011, said in a recent
newspaper interview about the original Bond novels, "I began reading
them when I was nine or 10, enthralled by their sense of adventure
and derring-do."
Deaver moved Bond to the 2000s, making his superhero a veteran of
Afghanistan. Though "derring-do", meaning heroic acts, is still
around, his vocabulary here evokes the nineteenth century rather
than the twenty-first. It was currently unfashionable authors such
as Sir Walter Scott and Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton who brought the
ancient word down from the musty attic of the English language as a
mock-archaism to spice up their historical novels. As with so many
old words, it was Scott who led the resurrection:
"O no! I will put my faith in the good knight whose axe
hath rent heart-of-oak and bars of iron. - Singular," he
again muttered to himself, "if there be two who can do a
deed of such derring-do!"
[Ivanhoe, by Sir Walter Scott, 1819.]
Scott added a footnote to explain that "derring-do" meant desperate
courage. What he didn't realise was that the word was a linguistic
misconstruction.
The story begins with Geoffrey Chaucer. In Troilus and Criseyde of
1371 he described his hero as "in no degre secounde in dorrying don
that longeth to a knyght", meaning that Troilus was second to none
in daring to do what befitted a knight. The following century the
poet John Lydgate misunderstood "dorrying don" as a noun phrase that
meant some masculine quality. In reprinting Lydgate's works after
his death, a printer changed the phrase to "derryinge do" (the role
of printers in amending the language has been underestimated). The
mischief was completed by the poet Edmund Spenser, who respelled it
as "derring-doe" in The Shepheardes Calender of 1579 and explained
it as manhood and chivalry. It then fell into disuse until Scott
resuscitated it with a different sense.
3. Q and A: Aeriated
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Q. I am not sure how to spell the word I am asking about, as I have
only ever heard it said. It could be "aereated", "aireated" or even
"airiated". In my family it has always been used to mean "worked up,
irritated, annoyed" as in "don't get so aeriated about it". Is our
meaning "real" or just another of those odd family words. Hope you
can help! [Gillian Christie, New Zealand]
A. It's most certainly more than just a family word. It was once a
fairly widely known colloquial term, though of limited circulation
these days. It's usually spelled "aeriated", but also as "airyated".
Your question takes me back more than half a century. I remember my
mother, a Londoner, using the word, just as you have spelled it and
with exactly that sense. It's still very occasionally to be found in
print:
The fans getting so aeriated at Mr Glazer's takeover
are all idiots.
[Evening Standard, 16 May 2005.]
David Crystal, in The English Language, argues that it's Liverpool
dialect. It certainly remains more often used there than in other
parts of the UK and - for example - appears frequently in the works
of the romantic novelist Lyn Andrews, who was born in Liverpool:
"There's no need to get all airyated with me, Betty! I
was only telling you what me mam said," he replied
huffily.
[To Love and to Cherish, by Lyn Andrews, 2010.]
But your experience and mine shows that it has been distributed more
widely (the Oxford English Dictionary marks it merely as "British
regional). In your case, it seems certain that it was taken to New
Zealand by British migrants. Many examples of both spellings appear
in unedited texts online from several English-speaking countries,
showing that the usage is still alive.
There's no doubt that it's based on "aerated", with an extra vowel
stuffed into the middle, something that can happen in casual speech.
Other examples are "athlete" said as "athelete", or the England
football supporters' chant of "Engerland". The technical term for it
is epenthesis, more strictly in this case anaptyxis since the extra
sound is a vowel.
The error, if we can describe it as that, is very far from new. The
Oxford English Dictionary has examples of "aeriated" in the place of
"aerated" from as far back as 1794: "If a small heat be applied to
the aeriated water, it parts with its fixed air" ("fixed air" was
then the usual name for carbon dioxide), which is no more than seven
years after the first known appearance of "aerated". The OED records
the colloquial term - defined as overexcited, angry or irate but
spelled "aerated" - from 1912, though we may reasonably assume it
could be decades older. However, its first citation for "aeriated"
in our sense is as recent as 1974. Jonathon Green, in Green's
Dictionary of Slang, takes that back to a novel about the London
underworld published four decades before:
I've never known a girl like you for getting
airyated.
[The Gilt Kid, by James Curtis, 1936.]
What makes the derivation certain is that the anaptyxis is still
around - we can find "aerated" in its standard English sense spelled
with the extra vowel:
The course will be closed to golfers that day because
the greens are being aeriated.
[Rocky Mountain News (Denver), 10 May 2001.]
The technical term "aerated", for introducing a gas into a liquid,
started to become known to the general public at the end of the
eighteenth century through the invention by the Swiss watch maker
Johann Schweppe of an effervescent drink made by bubbling carbon
dioxide into water under pressure. Schweppe moved to London in 1793;
by the turn of the century others were promoting a similar drink
under names such as alkaline aerated water, though the term "soda
water" soon replaced it because soda (sodium carbonate or washing
soda) was added to imitate natural mineral waters. Later, the same
process made a variety of flavoured fizzy drinks. "Aerated" became
common in advertisements in Britain from the 1840s onwards.
I suspect that a once-famous London bakery called the Aerated Bread
Company might also have had something to do with the genesis of the
slang term. The ABC, as it was universally known in my youth through
the tea shops that it ran, was founded in 1862. Its bread was made
to rise without yeast through a patented process involving forcing
carbon dioxide through the dough (its inventor considered it to be
more hygienic because supposedly noxious fermentation by-products
were avoided and the dough didn't have to be kneaded by workers who
may have had dirty hands).
The idea of somebody becoming inflated from anger, just like the
bread, must have appealed, as must that of becoming emotionally
effervescent like the spurting water from the soda siphon or the
fizz from an opened bottle of pop.
4. Sic!
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An addition to the it-could-have-been-better-worded department.
Steven Brainerd was attending a drivers' education course in Pima
County, Arizona. The course documents informed him that "50% of
people wearing seat belts survive fatal accidents."
A subheading from The Age of Melbourne on 17 May caught the eye of
Sarah McConville and Kate Archdeacon: "Moving self-portrait painted
after death wins People's Choice". It turned out that the artist
painted herself after her husband's death.
A headline on the website of the West Australian for 13 May read
"Stolen Car Racquet is Busted". No more motorised tennis for them.
Andrew Haynes found this fine sentence in London's Metro freesheet
on 14 May: "Despite not being a conventional beauty, author Will
Self has called this post-war concrete structure the capital's most
important building."
5. Useful information
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