World Wide Words -- 06 Apr 13
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Apr 5 15:07:07 UTC 2013
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WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 826 Saturday 6 April 2013
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This mailing also contains an HTML-formatted version.
A formatted version is also available online at
http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/ohfq.htm
Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
3. Vulcan.
4. Pull devil, pull baker.
5. Sic!
6. Subscriptions and other information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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FENDER Ken Thornton commented, "Fender's non-inclusion in slang
dictionaries raises yet again the question of when does a comparison
become widespread enough to attain the usage threshold required for
lexicographers? I can imagine many once-popular terms have slipped
through the word gratings of doom."
Jonathon Green, of Green's Dictionary of Slang, commented. "I would
suggest that slang lexicographers missed it because one very rarely
looks far beyond the gutter in one's researches. The middle classes
largely fail on slang creation, as do their social superiors, though
J Redding Ware, in Passing English of the Victorian Era (1909), who
does offer examples labelled 'society', might have been expected to
have picked it up."
The term is not as obsolete as I had presumed. Dennis Glanzman told
me James Sherwood used it in his blog The London Cut Diary about the
US presidential visit to London in May 2011: "I also thought the
Duchess of Cornwall looked terribly grand in her diamond fender."
"Just a brief note," added Erik Kowal, "to applaud your exemplary
exegesis of this term in this week's newsletter. It's the kind of
detective work that demonstrates that, while not glamorous in the
conventional sense, in its own way etymology can be an exciting and
even thrilling enterprise. Anyway, thanks for the ringside seat!"
2. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater
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Q. I'm actually rather surprised you don't already have an entry for
this but what, in your expert etymological opinion, is the origin of
the phrase "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water"? The oft-
quoted origin, that babies in medieval times were bathed last, when
the water was pitch-black and dirty enough that an infant could be
lost in it, is complete pig-swill. Why wash a vulnerable child in
dirty water? [Sarah Balfour]
A. Is that ancient bit of online folklore still doing the rounds? I
thought it had been laughed out of existence at least a decade ago.
The only truth in it is that the phrase is indeed ancient, though
not originally English.
Like all proverbs, it contains good advice: in your haste to discard
something unpleasant or undesirable, don't throw away something
worth keeping.
But Jenkins can't play too fast and loose with the
investment bank. It contributes more than half Barclays'
profits; profits it dearly needs to build up the capital
reserves demanded by regulators. Shareholders want to know
he won't throw out the baby with the bath water.
[Sunday Times, 10 Feb. 2013.]
It began life in the German language, and is still popular in the
form "das Kind mit dem Bade ausschütten". A comprehensive study of
its origins by Wolfgang Mieder was published in 1992. He showed that
the first known example is in a satire of 1512 by Thomas Murner with
the title Narrenbeschwörung (Appeal to Fools). The religious writer
Sebastian Franck published a book of proverbs in 1541, Spruchwörter;
he illustrated the principle by the example of sending an old horse
to the knacker's yard but omitting to take its valuable saddle and
bridle off first.
Despite these early examples and its wide popularity in German down
the following centuries, it appeared in English for the first time
as recently as 1849. The Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle was very
well informed about Germany and included a translation of it in an
article in Fraser's Magazine in December that year about the slave
trade, which was published as a pamphlet four years later:
The Germans say, "you must empty-out the bathing-tub,
but not the baby along with it." Fling-out your dirty
water with all zeal, and set it careering down the
kennels; but try if you can keep the little child! How to
abolish the abuses of slavery, and save the precious thing
in it: alas, I do not pretend this is easy.
[Thomas Carlyle, Occasional Discourse on the Nigger
Question, 1853.]
This was a clumsy translation, lacking the force of our usual form.
It doesn't seem to have had any impact on the language - at least my
necessarily imperfect searches haven't turned up another example
before the twentieth century. Its popularity is almost certainly due
to George Bernard Shaw, who used it many times. The first was in the
introduction to his play Getting Married in 1911, though his form
then was "empty the baby out with the bath".
3. Vulcan
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If you ask a dozen people at random about this word, it's a safe bet
that most replies will feature a pointy-eared alien. Spock's native
planet is newsworthy this week, not because of the forthcoming
second movie outing of the revitalised Star Trek series but because
the Oxford English Dictionary has added that sense of Vulcan to its
online site.
Why Gene Roddenberry should have chosen this name seems to have been
lost in the fug of the writing room. Would he really have borrowed
the name of the Roman deity of fire and metalworking? Like most
gods, Vulcan was capricious - he did use fire for human good but he
was also known for chucking it about irresponsibly and for making
mountains spout lava.
It's more likely that Roddenberry knew about the French astronomer
Urbain Le Verrier who, in 1860, came up with an ingenious solution
to a baffling celestial problem. The planet Mercury didn't move in
its orbit exactly according to the rules of Newtonian mechanics -
the difference was very slight but enough to need explaining. Le
Verrier postulated a planet between Mercury and the sun, in part
because it was thought one had been observed the year before. He
called it Vulcan, because being forever close to the sun it must be
as hot as the god's forge. His idea failed to be accepted, mainly
because nobody was able afterwards to find the planet; Einstein
finally disposed of it in 1916 by calculating that his theory of
relativity accounted for Mercury's anomalous orbit. But it may be
that Roddenberry borrowed its name, since Spock's Vulcan is hotter
than Earth, though not as hot as Le Verrier's would have been.
"Vulcan" has had other meanings. It has been employed as an obvious
figurative reference for a blacksmith. A person who was lame might
also have been given his name because Vulcan's mother, Juno, hated
his ugly red face when he was born and threw him out of Olympus,
breaking his leg. A cuckold, in particular one who was a blacksmith,
might once have been metaphorically Vulcanic, because legend says
that Vulcan's wife, Venus, had an affair with Mars. His enduring
legacy, however, is "volcano" for a burning mountain, which came
through French, Spanish and Italian writing of the sixteenth century
about Mount Etna, underneath which Vulcan was supposed to have had
his forge.
We shouldn't criticise the OED for being a mite slow in recognising
the SF sense of Vulcan. It's actually been rather responsive to the
vocabulary of the Star Trek universe - it already has entries for
"Klingon", "mind meld", "phaser", "prime directive", "beam me up,
Scotty", "Trekkie" and "warp factor" as well as including "Vulcan
nerve pinch" in its new entry. It's good to see the grand old lady
of lexicography showing her populist side.
4. Pull devil, pull baker
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Q. I recently read a 1934 book on speedway called Thrilling the
Million. In it is the phrase "pull devil, pull baker" that I'd never
encountered before. It seems to imply a contest in which the leader
is constantly changing. Have you come across it before, and if so
can you tell me why the unlikely combination of devil and baker?
[Steve Moore]
A. Like you, I've no memory of having heard it before. My references
show its heyday was the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and
that it has now almost totally fallen out of use. It usually refers
to a closely fought see-sawing contest between two individuals or
groups that almost resembles a tug-of-war:
The result is a succession of duels of competitive
greed between the nationalized industries and public
service, "pull devil, pull baker" industrial disputes,
from which their trade-union-organized employees
invariably emerge with ever higher nominal wages.
[Illustrated London News, 30 Apr. 1983.]
The source is an old fable, a moral tale warning against the perils
of greed, featuring a crooked baker and his struggle with the devil.
From the middle of the eighteenth century it was commonly retold as
a magic lantern show in fairs. A contributor to Notes and Queries
in March 1857 remembered it like this:
The first scene is the baker's oven; the second, the
baker detected in making short weight; in the third the
devil comes and carries off the baker's bread and bag of
ill-gotten wealth; then comes the fourth, in which the
baker, in pursuit of his treasure, overtakes the devil,
and grasping him tightly by the tail, it is "pull Devil,
pull Baker," backwards and forwards, till the baker is
pulled off the scene, and, in the next, appears packed in
his own basket and strapped on the devil's back, carried
rapidly forwards to the fearful end of his career.
The earliest reference is this one:
He dances punch inimitably, spreads out a feather, and
flashes his magic lightning, or knocks down a poor dog, to
the great diversion of all present; or opens his magic
lanthorn and gives you pull baker, pull devil, in their
gaudiest colours.
[The Experimentalist, or Modern Philosopher, from the
Universal Museum, reprinted in The Beauties of all the
Magazines Selected for the year 1764, by George Alexander
Stevens, 1764.]
There are several versions of the catchphrase, some mentioning a
parson, a tailor or Punch instead of a baker. It's also recorded as
"pull dog, pull devil". The references suggest that its moral has
been interpreted in different ways. Brewer's Phrase and Fable in
1894 defined it as meaning "Lie, cheat, and wrangle away, for one is
as bad as the other." In Slang and Its Analogues in 1891 Farmer and
Henley preferred "To contend with varying fortunes." The Oxford
English Dictionary records that it was a catchphrase "formerly used
to incite two persons or parties to greater efforts in a contest for
the possession of something."
5. Sic!
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"The local bus company can be accused of quite a number of things,
high fares being a prime example," John Gray e-mailed on 30 March,
"but the This is Gloucestershire website is possibly exaggerating
somewhat with the imperative headline 'Fight against cancer brought
by bus'!"
Tom Mannoia submitted a sentence from a news report on the Florida
Today website about a white supremacist group: "Several people with
ties to Brevard County were arrested in the case, which tallied a
total 14 arrests on charges of paramilitary training and shooting
into a building using an undercover FBI informant."
Stan Firth was left thoroughly confused by a headline on the Daily
Mail's website on 2 April: "How wife's diaries helped convict the
husband who murdered her from beyond the grave."
Michael Tremberth was startled by the all-encompassing denial of a
basic human ability implied by a notice at the motorway services on
the M5 near Exeter: "Please note that alcohol cannot be consumed
anywhere inside or outside these premises."
6. Useful information
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