World Wide Words -- 17 Nov 12

[Michael Quinion]

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WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 810         Saturday 17 November 2012
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Weird Words: Understrapper.
3. Miscellany.
4. Q and A: Gigantic.
5. Sic!
6. Useful information.


1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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RUTHLESS RHYMES  Many readers responded to my comments in the last 
issue about the difficulties poets have with rhyming words such as 
"orange" and "month". George Steinberg commented, "Don't forget 
songwriter Stephen Sondheim's advice: 'To rhyme a word like silver, 
/ or any "rhymeless" rhyme, / requires only will, ver- / bosity and 
time.'" Other readers, including William Logan, pointed to this:

    As long as he can grind em out, a dozen-or-so a month,
    We'll praise him to the nth degree, and to the n-plus-1th.
    [On Reading John Hollander's Poem "Breadth. Circle. 
    Desert. Monarch. Month. Wisdom. (for which there are no 
    rhymes)", by George Starbuck, 2003.]

MULCT  Pat Jakobi was among several readers who suggested another 
source: "My grandfather (born 1878 in Wisconsin) always complained 
about his boss milking the staff by working them hard and paying 
them little. The idea of someone taking fluids from a cow without 
permission and potentially with force certainly fits." It does, but 
the Oxford English Dictionary's recently revised entry for "milk" 
says otherwise, recording examples in the senses of deprive, defraud 
or exploit from the sixteenth century, three centuries before these 
senses were attached to "mulct". The obvious connections with 
extracting milk from a cow, which has also led to phrases such as 
"cash cow", were enough to suggest the idea in people's minds.

Jonathan McColl e-mailed from Dingwall in Rossshire: "The Dingwall 
Burgh Council meeting minutes from 1708 record a landowner beating 
up the 'multurer' at the main mill. I feel he was probably incensed 
at the fellow taking more than the normal bit off the top of any 
grain he was grinding in his mill, his 'multure'. I assume this 
comes from the same root, and might dare say that's one reason 'to 
mulct' has rather a pejorative feel nowadays." Yes, I'm sure the 
taking of excessive tolls or fees is part of the cause of the shift 
of "mulct" to its modern meaning of extortion. ("Multure" is a Scots 
word, based on the older spelling of "mulct", which can be traced 
back to the early thirteenth century for a charge or toll made by a 
miller for grinding corn.)


2. Weird Words: Understrapper
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The British author and newspaper columnist Simon Hoggart is fond of 
this word, applying it particularly to a governmental minion sent to 
make a statement before the House of Commons, thereby taking abuse 
that should have been directed at his boss. Few people now would 
grasp the full import of the word, though its first element gives 
enough of a clue that it's an alternative to underling.

It was a popular term of the eighteenth century, its first user on 
record being Thomas Brown, a satirist now only remembered, if at 
all, for a verse translation of a Latin epigram he composed when 
under threat of being sent down by his Oxford tutor, Dr John Fell: 
"I do not love thee, Dr Fell, / The reason why I cannot tell; / But 
this I know, and know full well, / I do not love thee, Dr Fell." In 
1702, he wrote a book of mock letters from the recently deceased, 
including three supposedly from the late comic actor and satirical 
writer Joseph Haines to his friends at Will's Coffee House:

    I intend to build me a Stage in one of the largest 
    Piazza's of this city, take me a fine House, and set up my 
    old Trade of Fortune-telling; and as I shall have upon 
    occasion now and then for some Understrapper to draw teeth 
    for me, or to be my Toad-eater upon the stage, if you will 
    accept of so mean an Employment, beside my old Cloaths, 
    which will be something, Ill give you Meat, Drink, 
    Washing, and Lodging, and Four Marks per annum.
    [Letters from the Dead to the Living, by Thomas Brown, 
    1702. The wayward apostrophes are as printed.]

It was still common during the nineteenth century:

    "Dear me - very awkward!" said Stephen, rather en 
    l'air, and confused with the kind of confusion that 
    assails an understrapper when he has been enlarged by 
    accident to the dimensions of a superior, and is somewhat 
    rudely pared down to his original size.
    [A Pair of Blue Eyes, by Thomas Hardy, 1873.]

My Collins Dictionary explains the second part as being from one 
sense of the verb "strap", to work hard, which is also the source of 
the adjective "strapping" for someone big and strong (originally 
applied only to young women, by the way). A strapper could be a 
labourer or a man who groomed horses, hence a menial employee. His 
subordinate would be the ultimate underling.

If you would like an archaic alternative, try "under-spur-leather", 
which is from the same area of life. A spur-leather was the strap 
that secured a spur to the rider's foot, so somebody under the spur 
leather is figuratively beneath the heel of the rider.

    There is a notorious Idiot, one hight Whachum, who from 
    an under-spur-leather to the Law, is become an 
    understrapper to the Play house, who has lately burlesqu'd 
    the Metamorphoses of Ovid by a vile translation.
    [Remarks upon Mr Pope's Translation of Homer, by John 
    Dennis, 1717. "Hight": named.]

I offer it to Mr Hoggart for his consideration.


3. Miscellany
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THERE'S MONEY IN THEM THERE WOODS  A buzzword of conservationists 
suddenly appeared in British newspapers this month: "treeconomics". 
It's a blend of "tree" and "economics" and refers to the growing 
practice of establishing a monetary value for natural resources. The 
immediate reason for the word's appearance was a report that the 
Torbay district council in Devon employed a software application to 
value its 818,000 trees, based on variables such as carbon lockdown, 
energy conservation, storm-water control, air-quality improvement 
and increase in property values. The figure it came up with was £360 
(US$570) a tree. I got the wrong end of the stick when I first saw 
the word, reading it as "treaconomics", but then realised, silly me, 
that there are no treacle mines in Torbay. (If baffled, please see 
http://wwwords.org?TRMN.)

END OF THE YEAR SHOW  No sooner had the smoke and din of Guy Fawkes 
Day subsided than Oxford Dictionaries announced its Word of the Year 
2012. I swear such annual publicity exercises are, like Christmas 
advertising, shifting earlier in the calendar. Oxford's choice is  
"omnishambles" (a word previously featured here; if you missed it, 
get the details via http://wwwords.org?OMNSM). It is defined as "a 
situation that has been comprehensively mismanaged, characterized by 
a string of blunders and miscalculations". One reason for the choice 
is its linguistic productivity: not only have we had the adjective 
"omnishambolic" but also derived forms, including "Romneyshambles" 
for the tactless comments on London's ability to host a successful 
Olympic Games by the US presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Another 
is "Scomnishambles", a Scottish omnishambles, coined in October when 
the Scottish government had to admit it hadn't sought legal advice 
on whether an independent Scotland could join the European Union. As 
Oxford Dictionaries points out, the word may prove to be temporary 
and never join other coinages in dictionaries.


4. Q and A: Gigantic
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Q. Is there any connection between the two adjectives, "giant" and 
"gigantic"? It seems to me there must be, and if so, where did the 
extra "g" in the latter come from? [Jim True]

A. A connection does exist: they both derive from the same word of 
the classical Greek period. The difference in spelling came about 
because their journeys into English took separate paths.

The Greek word was "gigas", in compounds as "gigant-". (The modern 
number prefix "giga-" for a thousand million was based on the Greek 
root.) The Romans borrowed both to make the Latin noun "gigas" and 
its adjective "gigantem". Old English took its word for giant from 
the Latin adjective, making "gigant". This survived in the language 
for several centuries, though it is long since defunct.

That's because of the Norman Conquest, following which English was 
influenced heavily by Norman French. By the 1290s, English people 
had taken over the Old French word for a giant. This did similarly 
derive from Latin, but had been greatly modified along the way and 
was said and spelled differently, as "géant", "jéant" or "gaiant". 
English adopted the "geant" version.

Around 1600, writers created two new adjectives, "gigantean" and 
"gigantic". The source is uncertain (Robert Barnhart commented 
rather sadly in the "gigantic" entry in his Dictionary of Etymology 
that "a long literary history of reference ... makes determination 
of the word's immediate source difficult to establish"). It could 
have been from the Latin adjective "gigantem", or perhaps from the 
Greek "gigant-", or even possibly with a nod to the Old English 
"gigant", which was still around, though overshadowed by the "geant" 
version.

However it happened, the adjective settled down to be "gigantic". In 
turn, its influence shifted "geant" to "giant".


5. Sic!
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A curious statement was found by Michel Norrish in a brochure from 
New Zealand Post which advertised a forthcoming issue of stamps for 
the Ross Dependency: "Unless stocks are exhausted earlier, these 
stamps will remain on sale until further notice."

Nothing changes. An article in Time magazine dated 9 November about 
the causes of the decline of the Mayan civilisation contained this 
sentence, sent in by Deane Rothenmaier and Beate Czogalla: "There 
was also a lot of warfare in that period, which makes sense for a 
culture fighting over swindling resources."
 
Jeremy Bangs e-mails from Leiden in the Netherlands to tell us that 
a local restaurant "offers customers an English-language menu as an 
alternative to the ordinary menu in Dutch. Attempting to avoid being 
rude through using the word 'breast', the chef allows customers to 
order 'roast duck udders'. Kind patrons have refrained from telling 
the management that their English sucks."

Another restaurant, the Rubicon in Griffith, Australia, posts menus 
for its lunchtime and evening "banquets" on its website. Therese 
Osborne spotted that the restaurant insists that "Banquettes must be 
pre booked - minimum 8 parsons." And if you bring your own wine, the 
restaurant wants "cakeage".


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 
are provided by Julane Marx in the US and Robert Waterhouse in the 
UK. Any residual errors are the fault of the author. The linked 
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