World Wide Words -- 13 Oct 12
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Oct 12 16:41:16 UTC 2012
--------------------------------------------------------------------
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 805 Saturday 13 October 2012
--------------------------------------------------------------------
This mailing also contains an HTML-formatted version.
A formatted version is also available online at
http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/ninp.htm
Contents
--------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Weird Words: Gander month.
3. Miscellany.
4. Q and A: Kidding on the square.
5. Sic!
6. Useful information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
--------------------------------------------------------------------
FROSTS MY GROMMET A large number of readers (too many to respond to
individually) put me right on this idiom. They explained, often in
careful euphemism, that this is a variation on a ruder phrase that
appears in many forms. Lisa McIntyre wrote, "There is a much older,
much ruder expression in American English, 'That really frosts my
ass', for things that annoy. There are more polite variations, such
as 'frosts my cookies/cornflakes/cake'. I'm guessing substituting
'grommet' for 'ass' is another effort to be more polite, with the
grommet alluding to the anus. Plus, grommet is a satisfying word to
say, especially if one is irritated!"
Steve Kenney confirmed, "I've heard the same basic phrase beginning
with 'frosts my' followed by any body part or pretty much anything
that could be frosted. A similar expression is 'chaps my ass' and is
also used to express extreme disappointment." John C Britton noted,
"It was a bit of an eye-opener when I heard a woman say 'Well, that
frosts my balls!'" Ellen Sheffer wrote, "When I was younger (in the
year dot), the mother of a friend always said 'Well, if that don't
just frost my gizzard!' This was in Vermont, where gizzards and
other things are very liable to be frosted come the winter!" Kelly
Erickson reports having come across "frosts my pumpkin" and "frosts
my buns" from time to time.
And finally, Jonathan Phillips responded, "Am I alone in finding
certain words comic, quite irrespective of their meaning? Do we not
all tend to giggle inwardly at the same words? 'Flange, Grommet,
Gusset and Throb, Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths'?". Some
words are indeed intrinsically humorous - it isn't an accident that
the lead characters in the Aardman Animations films are called
Wallace and Gromit.
CHISSICKING Peter Hartog commented, "Chissicking would be an
appropriate description of one of the characteristic noises made by
magpie robins, a common sight - and sound - in suburban gardens of
Bangkok. They are most active when hunting insects just before dawn
and around dusk. At these times they emit harsh sounds I have
previously described as rasping and have also compared to throat-
clearing coughs." Gill Dunn wrote from the UK: "Like many birders,
if I heard chissicking I would immediately look for a pied wagtail.
Hearing one pass overhead has often been called a Chiswick Flyover."
(The Chiswick Flyover is an elevated motorway in west London; we
Brits pronounce Chiswick as "chissick".) Also from the UK, Neil
Paknadel found the noun as a description of the sound made by the
house sparrow; it was in The Birds of Britain and Europe by Heinzel,
Fitter & Parslow (1972): "Vocabulary of chirps and cheeps, with a
double 'chissick', sometimes strung together as a rudimentary song."
YEAR DOT Peter Weinrich e-mailed: "You write of the year dot that
you are not convinced users have thought it referred back as far as
the mythical year between 1BCE and 1CE. I can only say that all my
life, certainly in our family, that imaginary year is exactly what
it did refer to and my grandparents used it in that sense. Had I
been asked, that is the definition I would have given. Hardly proof
enough to contradict you though!"
"Regarding the year dot," Ewan Croal recalled, "a common way to
describe a long time since (syne) when I was growing up in Scotland
was the phrase 'in eighteen oatcake'. It just means that something
has been done this way for a very long time, usually longer than
living memory! I assume it is just one of those nonsense phrases,
where both halves reinforce each other: "How long have craftsmen
been making sporrans this way?" "Oh, since at least eighteen
oatcake!"
2. Weird Words: Gander month
--------------------------------------------------------------------
At one time, a woman was conventionally confined not only to give
birth but for a month afterwards, her lying-in period, during which
she slowly recovered her strength. The end of this period was marked
by her churching, her first public appearance, in which she received
a blessing on her safe delivery. She was naturally the household's
centre of attention during this period, with her husband excluded,
neglected and at rather a loss.
It was considered unsurprising, at least in some circles, that he
should take himself elsewhere and find what consolation he could.
Descriptions of his activities in reference works vary in their
explicitness. One nineteenth-century writer noted it was the time
when "the male of the household must make shift for himself", while
another delicately explained that at that time "a certain license in
behaviour is excusable in the male". The 1811 edition of Grose's
Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was only a little less ambiguous -
it was the period in which "husbands plead a sort of indulgence in
matters of gallantry". Put simply, it was a time when the husband
was permitted to sleep around.
Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, a roving male at
this time was known as a gander-mooner and the period as the gander
month. The former term appears first in a play by Thomas Middleton
and William Rowley of 1617, A Fair Quarrel. The latter is found a
little later:
I'll keep her at the least this Gander month,
While my fair wife lies in.
[The English Moor, by Richard Brome, 1652.]
The Oxford English Dictionary surmises it was an "allusion to the
gander's aimless wandering while the goose is sitting". It has been
suggested that this behaviour is similarly the origin of the nursery
rhyme, "Goosey goosey gander, whither shall I wander", but there's
no evidence either way. The usage may also include a hint of an old
slang sense of "gander" for a silly or stupid person. But "gander"
was also a general slang term for a male and a "gander party" was
what we would now call a stag party.
3. Miscellany
--------------------------------------------------------------------
GOING DOWN Rob Hodge was asked by a friend who had learned to speak
English as a second language why we say "underneath", instead of the
simpler "under". His friend pointed out we don't say "overneath" or
"besideneath". True. However, we do say "beneath". The confusion
here is with the meaning of "neath". "Underneath" is not quite a
tautology, as "neath" means below. It's from the Germanic "nithan"
or "neothan", related to "nether", lower in position. It survives in
literary English as a word in its own right, though almost always
prefixed by an apostrophe to show it's a conscious contraction of
"beneath" ("Sitting 'neath the quiet evening skies," for example,
from a poem by Robert Service).
WISDOM OF THE COMMONS Some years ago, the Oxford English Dictionary
benefitted from a British television series, Balderdash and Piffle,
in which viewers were encouraged to send in examples of words and
phrases that predated those the OED's own researchers had been able
to find. This was successful enough that the OED has announced what
it calls a "major online initiative" under the name of OED Appeals.
This seeks to involve the public, through what is now fashionably
called crowdsourcing, in tracing the history of words of uncertain
origin. John Simpson, the Chief Editor of the OED, explained, "The
very first recorded usage of many words can be difficult to track
down. We can trace certain words and phrases back only so far with
conventional tools. An old takeaway menu, a family letter or album,
or an obscure journal might hold the key to solving one of those
mysteries."
These are among the first terms, with the OED's editors' comments in
parentheses: "blue-arsed fly" ("Was this known before the Duke of
Edinburgh was quoted saying it in 1970? The r-less 'blue-assed fly',
however, is attested from at least 1932. Why such a discrepancy?");
"come in from the cold" ("Did John le Carré coin the phrase? Was it
ever used by actual intelligence officers?"); "disco" ("Was a disco
a type of short, sleeveless dress before it was a nightclub? That's
the surprising implication of evidence we've recently uncovered in a
source dated July 1964"); "FAQ" ("Do you have proof of the earliest
FAQ? The term is currently attributed to Eugene N Miya, a researcher
at NASA, who is said to have coined it c1983 in documents circulated
on Usenet. Our earliest verifiable evidence is from 1989 but we'd
like to go back further to prove its coinage"); and "cooties" ("In
North America an imaginary germ with which a socially undesirable
person, or one of the opposite sex, is said to be infected. Our
first evidence for this common playground taunt is from 1967, in a
children's novel by Beverly Cleary. The word goes back earlier as
slang, originally in military contexts, for a body louse, but we're
looking for earlier evidence of the germ sense.")
To contribute (please don't write to me!) or to learn more, you can
visit the Appeals site at http://public.oed.com/appeals/.
4. Q and A: Kidding on the square
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. I heard "kidding on the square" for the first time about twenty
years ago from an older gentleman whose origin was the US mid-west.
Maybe he was pulling my leg. Where did it originate? [Janet Hughes]
A. Somebody kidding on the square makes a joke but means it, too.
This is a recent example from an author who uses it a lot:
Priepke was smoking a pipe apparently charged with
stinkweed. "Everything under control?" he asked.
"Everything except that." Walther pointed at the pipe. "I
thought they outlawed poison gas a long time ago." ...
He'd been kidding on the square; the pipe really was vile.
[In the Presence of Mine Enemies, by Harry Turtledove,
2003]
It's a native US idiom, hardly known outside the country. It's often
attributed to the comedian, political commentator and senator Al
Franken because of this:
I think he was "kidding on the square," a phrase I hope
will catch on. It means kidding, but also really meaning
it. People do it all the time. "Kidding on the square." If
this book does two things, I want it to get "kidding on
the square" into the lexicon, and I want it to get Bush
out of the White House.
[Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, by Al Franken,
2003.]
Readers unfamiliar with it naturally thought it was new and that Al
Franken had invented it. It wasn't and he hadn't. The idiom is known
from the early twentieth century - it turns up in February 1907 in
McClure's Magazine and is often recorded in the years that follow.
It's not possible to work out what part of the US it comes from.
"Kidding" was by then a long-established term of somewhat obscure
origin. It was originally low slang of the criminal classes for
getting something of value by false pretences; it may be from the
slang sense of kid for a child, suggesting that to fool the person
was as easy as stealing candy from a baby or that the kiddee was as
naive as a child. To kid is to joke, but in particular to fool a
person into believing something or deceive them in a playful way.
If you are "on the square", you're honest or sincere, an idea that
turns up in other expressions, such as "square deal". It may come
from a square being an uncompromisingly straightforward shape, but a
link with Freemasonry has been suggested. For masons, a square was a
key instrument for accurately measuring a 90º angle, those of the
corners of a square (also called right angles because they were the
correct or true ones), so that a structure "on the square" had been
properly constructed. Similarly, anything "off square" had something
wrong with it.
Putting them together produces the idiom that Al Franken used.
5. Sic!
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Marilyn King came across this sentence on the Kitchen Daily website:
"Quick tip: When buying a whole cooked lobster, make sure that the
tail is curled, which is a sign that it was alive when killed -
meaning it's very fresh."
The October 4th issue of the Kentucky Kernel (the University of
Kentucky student newspaper) featured the headline "Campus garden,
home to over 300 plant species, fears removal." Sentient plants,
what next?
On 8 October Fred McArdle came across a report on the Cairns Post of
Queensland about the sighting of a crocodile near the beach: "Ellis
Beach Bar and Cafe staff member Jon Parkin said onlookers watched on
as the creature glided past, filming and taking photos."
Mike Poliakoff asks "Did he send them out for repair?". He had read
a headline in ESPN's SportsCenter news feed on 7 October about the
Baltimore Ravens' linebacker Terrell Suggs; "Suggs eyes return this
month".
"Hyphen needed" was the subject line of Hugh Knight's e-mail from
Cape Town on 9 October, reporting a sign on a bargain table at a
local supermarket: "Deranged goods". [Even as "de-ranged", this
hardly counts as an easily understood term; it presumably refers to
a range of items that the store is no longer stocking and is selling
off to clear its shelves.]
6. Useful information
--------------------------------------------------------------------
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
website is http://www.worldwidewords.org.
SUBSCRIPTIONS: The website provides all the tools you need to manage
your own subscription. Please don't contact me asking for changes
you can make yourself, though if problems occur you can e-mail me at
wordssubs at worldwidewords.org. To change your subscribed address,
leave the list or re-subscribe, go to http://wwwords.org?SUBS. This
e-magazine is also available on RSS (http://wwwords.org?RSSFD) and
Twitter (http://wwwords.org?TWTTR). Back issues are available via
http://wwwords.org?BKISS.
E-MAIL CONTACT ADDRESSES: Comments on e-magazine mailings are always
welcome. They should be sent to wordseditor at worldwidewords.org. I do
try to respond, but pressures of time often prevent me from doing
so. Items for the Sic! section should go to sic at worldwidewords.org.
Questions intended to be answered in the Q and A section should be
sent to wordsquestions at worldwidewords.org, not to me directly.
SUPPORT WORLD WIDE WORDS: If you have enjoyed this e-magazine and
would like to help defray its costs and those of the linked Web
site, please visit the support page via http://wwwords.org?SPPRT .
COPYRIGHT: World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2012. All
rights reserved. You may reproduce this e-magazine in whole or part
in free newsletters, newsgroups or mailing lists or as educational
resources provided that you include the copyright notice above and
give the web address of http://www.worldwidewords.org. Reproduction
of items in printed publications or commercial websites requires
permission from the author beforehand.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/worldwidewords/attachments/20121012/92016424/attachment.htm>
More information about the WorldWideWords
mailing list