World Wide Words -- 13 Apr 13
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Apr 12 15:57:40 UTC 2013
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WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 827 Saturday 13 April 2013
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Scrumptious.
3. Thatcher's linguistic legacy.
4. Fib.
5. Sic!
6. Subscriptions and other information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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VULCAN "An interesting piece," Benjamin Lukoff wrote, "and you may
be right - but given that there was a planet Romulus (and a minor
one in the same system named Remus) - could Roddenberry not have
been thinking about ancient Rome after all?" It seems very probable.
How could I have forgotten the Romulans?
Charles Norman suggested yet a third possibility: "The Outer Limits,
a short-lived SF series on American television, featured an episode
Cold Hands, Warm Heart, which starred William Shatner as an American
astronaut participating in a Project Vulcan. Gene Roddenberry was
often on the set, and hired several staffers from the earlier series
when he began the Star Trek project."
Terry Walsh felt my description of the Roman god as irresponsible
was off the mark: "Vulcan, as the blacksmith god, was particularly
careful and diligent. As you say, his famous limp (which marks him
off, of course, as a 'below-stairs' god) was not of his own making,
but most (human) blacksmiths in the ancient world would have picked
up injuries from the nature of their work, so that Vulcan is a fair
representation of the type. A blacksmith, in other words, cannot
afford to be careless or irresponsible."
Several readers queried a connection with "vulcanise", the process
of treating rubber with sulphur and heat to harden it. I doubt that
Gene Roddenberry had this in mind. The term was introduced by Thomas
Hancock in his patent for the process in 1846. It was suggested to
him by his friend William Brockedon, a painter and inventor, who
clearly had in mind the great heat associated with Vulcan's forge.
BABIES AND BATHWATER Debby Swayne pointed out that there is a more
recent US version of the saying: "Don't throw the baby out with the
dishes". She found this in a little red book of blunders attributed
to President Johnson; a writer in the Chicago Sun-Times in 1986 gave
the credit instead to Ronald Reagan. Enough instances appear online
to show that this version, though nonsensical, is believed by many
to be acceptable. I can't trace examples before LBJ's time, but I
suspect it was around in the spoken language earlier.
2. Scrumptious
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We commonly use this to refer to some especially appetising item of
food or a very attractive person. Roald Dahl, who wrote the script
for the film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, felt it was appropriate for
the character Truly Scrumptious, which must be in contention with
Pussy Galore for the worst-ever invented female movie name.
Critics have not been kind to "scrumptious". In 1921, H L Mencken
described it as an "artificial word", lumping it with sockdolager,
hunky-dory, spondulix, slumgullion and similar creations of American
linguistic ingenuity. In his Dictionary of Modern English Usage in
1926, H W Fowler classed it as a "facetious formation".
Many dictionaries just say "origin unknown" or "origin uncertain",
not wanting to engage in complicated but ultimately unsatisfying
discussions about etymology. This writer has no such qualms.
It's certainly American in origin, dating from about the 1830s, at a
time when so many other splendiferous terms were emerging from the
melting pot of cultural assimilation. But it first appeared it had a
different meaning:
I won't trouble you to ride far to find me; - and then
it may be broad sword, or pistol, rifle or bagnet - I'm
not over-scrumptious which.
[Horse Shoe Robinson, by John Pendleton Kennedy, 1835.
"Bagnet" is an old term for a bayonet.]
Here it clearly means scrupulous. In another early example, from
Thomas Chandler Haliburton's The Clockmaker of 1836, it's a vague
term of praise: "A little tidy scrumptious looking slay" (we would
now write the last word as "sleigh"). In 1846, Sylvester Judd puts
it in his novel Margaret to mean fastidious ("I don't mean to be
scrumptious about it, Judge; but I do want to be a man, if I am a
Breakneck, and haven't so much eddecation as the rest"). It could
also have about it the idea of a stylish or handsome person. Our
current sense evolved around the middle of the century.
Some current dictionaries start from the modern meaning to argue
that it's from "sumptuous", which doesn't fit the earlier senses.
Various English dialects have had words of the same spelling, though
there's no way of knowing whether any of them contributed to the US
senses. The English Dialect Dictionary records it as Suffolk dialect
for a miserly, stingy or close-fisted person; the Century Dictionary
of 1889 and the Oxford English Dictionary suggest that derives from
dialect "scrimptious", based on "scrimp", be thrifty, as in the
exhortation to "scrimp and save". How this evolved into any of the
recorded senses is unclear. A writer to Notes and Queries in 1870
said it was Essex dialect meaning charming or delightful, quoting a
fond lover to his lass: "Oh you scrumptious little duck!" That
neatly matches one modern meaning but not the early ones.
Perhaps "origin unknown" isn't such a bad summary after all.
3. Thatcher's linguistic legacy
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The death this week of the former British prime minister Margaret
Thatcher has led to a vast outpouring of discussion on her legacy.
When she entered Downing Street in 1979, she quoted St Francis of
Assisi: "Where there is discord, may we bring harmony". Obituaries,
no matter how reverent, have had to admit that she was on the
contrary a hugely disharmonious leader and remains as divisive in
death as in life. The language used by and about her illustrates
that.
It began before she became PM. The chant "Thatcher, Thatcher: milk
snatcher" dates from 1972 when, as education minister, she stopped
free school milk for the over-sevens. It is remembered - in 2012 the
health minister Anne Milton cut a subsidy to childcare centres for
free milk to the under-fives and The Mirror headed its report "the
return of the milk snatcher". In January 1976, a year after she
became leader of the Conservative Party, the Soviet army magazine
Red Star accused her of trying to revive the Cold War, calling her
the Iron Lady. The writer probably had in mind the nineteenth-
century German Iron Chancellor Otto von Bismarck rather than the
British Iron Duke, the first Duke of Marlborough. But she swooped
gratefully on the title and is still known by it (a graffito in West
Belfast the day after her death read "Iron Lady, Rust in Peace").
The obvious shorthand "Thatcherite" for a supporter of her policies
dates from April 1976, less than a year after she became party
leader, "Thatcherism" from just a year later. The journalist Philip
Howard predicted in his A Word in Time in 1990 that "Thatcherite"
would be meaningless to the next generation, but the policies of the
current Conservative-led coalition, presided over by a prime
minister who admires her, mean that the term is as alive as ever.
But then most of the politicians currently in power are "Thatcher's
children", of an age that Margaret Thatcher's policies and outlook
were formative influences. That term was coined in 1986 but remains
sufficiently evocative that it was used in a headline over a story
in The Independent on 9 April about her enduring influence. The
related "Thatcher's Britain" is older, from the beginning of her
premiership; it had a renewed burst of popularity when the coalition
was elected in 2010 (the Daily Telegraph headlined a report in
December that year "Thatcher's Britain returns 20 years after she
fell", and Jonathan Freedland commented in the Guardian the day
after she died that "the country we live in remains Thatcher's
Britain"). "Thatcher's girls", from northern England, briefly
appeared around 1985 to mean prostitutes, applied - so it was
asserted - because her policies had driven many women to the only
way left open to them to earn money.
Few leaders have been graced with so many epithets. She was often
referred to as "Maggie" or "leaderene", sometimes with a tinge of
misogyny by opponents but with affection by supporters. (The pound
coin was briefly nicknamed a Maggie after she accidently used the
royal we in her announcement of 1989 that "We have become a
grandmother", which led to wits saying that the coin was "blond,
brassy and thinks it's a sovereign".) "Maggie" is still around and
was used by The Sun in a headline on Wednesday about her funeral.
Other terms were definitely deprecating: Attila the Hen, for
example, and the Grocer's Daughter (she was one, though that
snobbish putdown hardly suited an Oxford University science
graduate; in part it echoed the nickname of her Conservative
predecessor, Edward Heath, who was The Grocer). Her famous handbag
also became a topic of drollery. The Economist wrote in 1982, "One
of her less reverent backbenchers said of Mrs Thatcher recently that
'she can't look at a British institution without hitting it with her
handbag'."
Those most likely to be handbagged she described as wets. She used
it in a way that had been around since the early twentieth century
for a person who in British slang was soppy or a drip - ineffectual,
inept or effete - but she implied that her targets wanted to take
the easy option or lacked intellectual or political fortitude. She
used it for the members of her cabinet who had liberal or middle-of-
the-road views on controversial issues such as monetary policy,
though The Times wrote in 1980 that a wet "seems to be anybody who
crosses the Prime Minister in fashioning a particular policy". It
became a badge of honour for her opponents, meaning left-leaning,
liberal or anti-ideological. In return, one prominent wet, Norman St
John Stevas, whom she sacked in 1981, renamed her Tina, from a
phrase she often repeated to force home her policies, "there is no
alternative" The opposite of "wet" was sometimes "dry", in the press
especially, but her preferred term was "sound", meaning both loyal
to her and having a similar view of policy, in another of her
phrases "one of us".
Her main linguistic failing was her inability to appreciate or even
understand jokes and wordplay. In a reference to Moses at the 1977
Conservative Party conference she wanted to change a catchphrase of
the 1970s Morecambe and Wise TV show, "keep taking the tablets" to
"keep taking the pills". It was hard to persuade her to include her
famous line at the 1980 conference, "To those waiting with bated
breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the 'U-turn', I have
only one thing to say: 'You turn if you want, the lady's not for
turning'." Even after her scriptwriter, the playwright Sir Ronald
Millar, patiently explained it was a pun on the title of Christopher
Fry's play The Lady's Not for Burning, she still didn't get it. At a
farewell dinner in 1991 for her staunchest supporter and wisest
guide, William Whitelaw, she raised titters in the company with her
innocent and unintended pun on a British slang term for the penis
when she said of him, "Every Prime Minister needs a Willie."
[My thanks to Anthony Massey for his assistance.]
4. Fib
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Q. I recently told my grandchild not to tell fibs. The word "fibs"
stuck in my head as something heard commonly in my long-ago youth,
but not these days. The dictionary and Google did not offer much.
What can you tell us about fibs? [Dean Riley]
A. Surprisingly little, to tell the truth. It's one of those elusive
little words that have slipped into the language without anybody
much noticing.
A fib is the childish cousin to the grown-up untruth, falsehood or
lie, a naive attempt at bending reality that's fit only for nursery
school. A child may fib from not knowing the consequences but an
adult called a fibber is condemned by it as an incompetent deceiver,
a purveyor of porkies well past their sell-by date.
It seems always to have been a unkind or trivial lie, though in its
earliest days it was a word for adults and only slowly took on its
associations with minor childhood misdemeanours. The Oxford English
Dictionary says it was first printed in Randle Cotgrave's Dictionary
of the French and English Tongues in 1611. He used it to translate
French "bourde", though that's a blunder, not a falsification. The
evidence suggests his was an error of translation, not that "fib"
had a different meaning then.
Reference works sometimes point to "fible-fable" as a possible
origin. This looks like a reduplication of "fable", and seems to
have been a way of describing nonsense such as a tall story or a
flight of fancy rather than a deliberate attempt to mislead. Experts
treat this origin with caution, because there is only one recorded
example, in a 1581 translation by James Bell of a Latin polemic by
Walter Haddon and John Foxe.
The guess is that the first half of "fible-fable", a nonsense word,
broke away to form a new word and was shortened. "Fible-fable" might
never have been noticed were it not for a nineteenth-century
philologist named James Orchard Halliwell, who included it in his
Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words.
Other than that, the origin of "fib" remains obscure.
5. Sic!
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It may have been a joke of the headline writer, but like Robert Wake
and Beate Czogalla, who encountered it on the CNN website, I found
it funny: "Ex-porn star charged with battery".
On the other hand, as Derek Stevens suggested, the report in a BBC
News story online last Monday about the injured jockey Ryan Mania
was unconsciously humorous. When he arrived at the Royal Victoria
Infirmary in Newcastle, he was said to be in a "stable condition".
Barry Prince found a headline on the BBC Sport site on 11 April
about one of the opening matches of the British cricket season:
"Sussex paceman Jordan runs through Yorkshire." Translated, this
means Sussex bowler Chris Jordan took six Yorkshire wickets.
6. Useful information
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