World Wide Words -- 22 Sep 12

[Michael Quinion]

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WORLD WIDE WORDS        ISSUE 802         Saturday 22 September 2012
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Weird Words: Perissology.
3. Wordface.
4. Q and A: Hootenanny.
5. Sic!
6. Useful information.


1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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HOITY-TOITY  Harry Audus asked "It seems too much of a coincidence 
if hoity-toity has nothing to do with 'haughty'. What do you think?" 
The idea behind "haughty" is the same one of superiority as that of 
the modern sense of "hoity-toity". It's more direct, as "haughty" 
derives directly, via Old French, from Latin "altus", high.

"Thank you for your definitions and depictions of 'hoity-toity'", 
wrote Kim Vares. "They've brought a smile to my face and a warmth to 
my heart. My mother, recently passed, often referred to those 
socializing with the elite as 'hob-nobbing with the hooty-snoots'.  
A descriptive judgement somewhat similar to your explanation of 
'hoity-toity' and one that we used to giggle over."

Lucie Singh wondered if "hoity-toity" was "at the heart of so many 
people thinking that 'hoi polloi' means the upper crust (often 
perceived to be haughty etc) rather than the great unwashed? This 
misapprehension is rampant in the States."

GRAND SLAM  Several readers repeated a comment widely attributed 
online, that O B Keeler of the Atlanta Journal used "grand slam" to 
describe the success of golfer Bobby Jones, who in 1930 won all four 
of the major golfing titles (British amateur, US open, British open 
and US amateur). The term was actually in wide use from about July 
that year as Jones won successive tournaments and the expectation 
increased that he would succeed in all four. This is how one 
newspaper of a great many described the culmination:

    Bobby Jones swamped Gene Homans, 8 and 7, today in the 
    finals of the U. S. amateur championship thereby 
    completing his unparalleled "grand slam" in golf for 
    1930.
    [Beatrice Daily Sun (Nebraska), 28 Sep. 1930.]

I've since found that it was also being used in other contexts for a 
team that won all its matches in a contest: it certainly appeared in 
reports about Davis Cup matches earlier the same year, so predating 
its use for the grand slam tennis singles titles.

James Swenson commented that "a grand slam in baseball - scoring 
four runs in a single time at bat - is the supreme accomplishment: 
four is maximal. In the US, later usages are strongly influenced by 
baseball: it seems to be important that one is achieving exactly 
four things (or occasionally three of some four, as a concession to 
difficulty). Examples at Wikipedia include tennis, NASCAR stock car 
racing, golf, fly-fishing, professional wrestling, men's curling, 
and ultra-running. I would find it hard to assign the name 'grand 
slam' to a new feat unless it had some basic fourness."

The article contained my Error of the Week, as many readers noted, 
including Mary Donnelly: "Australians would love to have had Donald 
Budge as their own, as you mentioned in this post; however, he was 
an American." 

LOL! Simon Cochemé wrote, "You mentioned a popular text-speak 
abbreviation - LOL. This has been used by bridge players for at 
least 40 years for 'little old lady', a weak player of either 
gender."

SIC! In response to one of my items last week, Ian Dalziel wrote, 
"Speaking as one approaching that milestone, the percentages of 
'those aged 65+ in long-term care facilities' present no conundrum. 
The responses were clearly: 21% - Male; 31% - Female; 48% - Can't 
remember right now - it'll come back to me."


2. Weird Words: Perissology
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I come to this word in the hope that the piece you are about to read 
won't be an example of it. "Perissology" means using more words than 
necessary to explain one's meaning, a pleonasm. Since "perissology" 
is three letters longer than "pleonasm" but means the same, you may 
argue it's an example of the related habit of using long words when 
shorter ones will do.

The word comes to us from the post-classical Latin of the fourth or 
fifth century AD. Romans of classical times knew it as a Greek word, 
"perissologia", which came from "perissos", beyond the usual number 
or size, redundant, superfluous. The prefix "perisso-" is known in 
two other very uncommon English words: "perissosyllabic", a line of 
verse that has more syllables than normal, and "perissodactyl", a 
grazing mammal with hooves made up of an odd number of toes, which 
sounds obscure but is a characteristic of horses as well as tapirs 
and rhinoceroses. Its opposite is "artiodactyl", having an even 
number of toes, which refers to mammals such as pigs, deer, goats 
and cattle.

"Perissology" came into English at the end of the sixteenth century 
but was never anything more than an obscure literary word. In recent 
centuries it has mainly been exploited for humorous effect.

    His inscience of avitous justicements, and of 
    lexicology, his perissology and battology, imparted to his 
    tractation of his cause, an imperspicuity  which rendered 
    it immomentous to the jurator audients.
    [Letters to Squire Pedant, by Samuel Klinefelter 
    Hoshour, 1856. This described a lawyer pleading his case. 
    It says that his knowledge of old judgements and the 
    nature of words, plus his unnecessary repetition, made his 
    case so obscure the jury decided it was unimportant. 
    "Battology" is another word for perissology; hair-
    splitting scholars find a distinction between battology, 
    perissology and pleonasm, but we may let that pass us 
    by.]


3. Wordface
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CHEEK BY JOWL  Graham Thomas asked about a word he had come across 
in correspondence of 1899 between the owner of Strachur House in 
Argyll and his builder about constructing dormer windows. It looked 
like "haffit". The Oxford English Dictionary has it as HAFFET, a 
Scots and northern English term for part of the face, variously the 
side of the head above and in front of the ear, the cheek or the 
temple. In local building terminology, it referred to the protruding 
side and top frames of the dormers. The Concise Scots Dictionary 
marks it as chiefly literary, doesn't mention the building sense, 
but says it has meant a side-lock of hair or the wooden side of a 
box-bed, two senses not too far from the one given in the OED. The 
latter's entry says it comes from Old English "healfhéafod", the 
fore part of the head or the sinciput. That last word improved my 
vocabulary: it transpired that it names the upper forward part of 
the skull, roughly from the forehead to the crown of the head; it 
comes from Latin "semi", a half, plus "caput", head. (The back of 
the head is the "occiput", from Latin "ob", towards or against.)

MEDIA MULTITASKING  The rise in smartphones, tablets and other 
mobile devices that can easily be used while watching television has 
led to SECOND SCREENER for a person who comments on social media 
such as Twitter and Facebook about their viewing experiences while 
they're watching the programme, or who searches out information to 
follow up they've heard. The process is SECOND SCREENING, though the 
term COMPANION EXPERIENCE has been used, especially by the BBC.


4. Q and A: Hootenanny
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Q. How did "hootenanny" arise? [Steven Hancock]

A. This is an example of a rule I deduced from extensive experience 
many years ago: that the shortest questions are the most trouble to 
answer. The quick reply is that we don't know for sure. But its 
history is rather curious and worth exploring.

"Hootenanny" is a successful American linguistic export. Many people 
throughout the English-speaking world are familiar with it as a term 
for what one dictionary on my shelves describes as "an informal 
gathering with folk music". So it's a pity that we have no clear 
idea of its origin. (The suggestion that it refers to the figurative 
offspring of an owl and a female goat may be disregarded, even 
though in its early days it was written at times as "hootnanny".) 

The indications are that in a directly musical sense it began to 
become known from about 1940 onwards. The first examples are from a 
short-lived newspaper in Seattle:

    The New Dealer's Midsummer Hootenanny. You Might Even 
    Be Surprised! ... Dancing, Refreshments, Door Prizes.
    [An advertisement in the Washington New Dealer, 5 Jul. 
    1940, quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary. Another 
    advert in the paper, from March 1942, lists dance music, 
    singing and bagpipes as part of the event.]

Despite this, the message from various archives is that it didn't 
really begin to catch hold until the middle 1940s. Early examples, 
like the one above, referred to entertainments with no folk music 
content. Its link to folk evolved during the 1950s, with Pete Seeger 
often being linked to the shift; it was strengthened by the US 
television programme Hootenanny in the early 1960s. It had reached 
the UK by the late 1950s:

    All over the British Isles today at ceilidhes, 
    hootennanys and similar gatherings in pubs, clubs and 
    private houses, folk music is flourishing as it has not 
    done for over a century.
    [The Times, 10 Jan. 1959.]

However ... in various spellings the word was around both earlier 
and later as one of those incoherent terms for a thing whose real 
name is unknown or momentarily forgotten. As an example, American 
newspapers ran a syndicated piece in the late 1930s about a man 
trying to teach his wife to drive. This extract gives its flavour:

    When it starts you push down on the doo-funny with your 
    left foot, and yank the uptididdy back, then let up the 
    foot dingus and put your other foot on the hickey-ma-
    doodle, don't forget to push down on the hootananny every 
    time you move the whatyoumaycallit and you'll be 
    hunkydory. Gosh, dear, what's the matter, haven't you been 
    listening to me?
    [Centralia Daily Chronicle, 10 Jul. 1937.]

In the journal Western Folklore in 1963 the American researcher 
Peter Tamony argued it should be classed as "an indefinite American 
word" that meant what you wanted it to mean. There's no shortage of 
ways it was applied. It could be a device to hold a cross-cut saw in 
place while sawing a log. The lexicographer Jonathon Green found a 
reference to it in a newspaper of February 1918 in Lincoln, 
Nebraska, as a slang term of US soldiers for cooties (body lice). A 
play by J C McMullen of 1920, Turning the Trick, includes the lines 
"'Have you any visitors at present?' 'No one. Wait a minute though. 
I forgot that bolshevik hootenanny Kathleen's brought in'"; the 
young woman so described is rebellious (one sense of "Bolshevik" at 
the time, abbreviated to the British "bolshie") as well as wild and 
unconventional and is seen as a bad influence. Another sense, of an 
ignorant or stupid person or clod, is recorded from about the same 
period in rural Ohio.

The form "hootin' nanny" appears in newspapers from 1919 onwards as 
a slang term for a motor car. I've found that it referred also to 
other varieties of noise-making machines, including a railway 
locomotive and a home-made musical instrument. Other sources claim 
"hootin' nanny" was earlier a southern US dialect term for a 
slatternly or talkative woman. In October 1929 the Evening News 
Journal of Clovis, New Mexico, mentions a visit by a sextet called 
Hooten-Anny at which "harmonious selections were sung". Was the name 
a self-deprecating play on "hootin' nanny"? It seems highly probable 
that this version of "hootananny", whatever it first meant, came 
directly from "hoot" for a discordant noise. It may even have been 
the original from which the musical sense evolved.

There are other early music references. In January 1924, an advert 
in the Evening Gazette of Xenia, Ohio, told its readers that "Marion 
McKay and his Greystone Orchestra have recorded Hootenanny and 
Little Butterfly for Gennett Records". A report in the Newark Daily 
Advocate in April 1921 noted that "the comedy sketch, 'The King of 
the Hootananny' written by Robert Abernathy and featuring several 
original songs, was the hit of the evening at every concert." 

There's clearly more going on here than the printed record tells us. 
But what exactly that is remains largely obscure.


5. Sic!
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Judith Graham submitted this from the September Partners in Health 
e-newsletter sent out by Kaiser Permanente healthcare: "Top 5 
reasons to get a flu vaccine ... Protect yourself from the flu and 
those close to you."

A report of 15 September on the BBC website about the attack on Camp 
Bastion in Afghanistan included this sentence, found by Ed Floden: 
"Earlier this year, a member of Nato forces was injured when an 
Afghan man drove a pick-up truck onto the runway, which then burst 
into flames."

In the 6 September issue of The Arbiter (the student newspaper of 
Boise State University) this headline startled Mike Lynott: "Sober 
or not, Health Services offers assistance." If he ever needs help, 
he says, he will hope it's sober that day.


6. Useful information
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