World Wide Words -- 20 Apr 13
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Apr 19 17:12:38 UTC 2013
--------------------------------------------------------------------
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 828 Saturday 20 April 2013
--------------------------------------------------------------------
This mailing also contains an HTML-formatted version.
A formatted version is also available online at
http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/zbdm.htm
Contents
--------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Ignoramus.
3. Profician.
4. Cooking one's goose.
5. Sic!
6. Subscriptions and other information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
--------------------------------------------------------------------
THATCHER'S LINGUISTIC LEGACY When Michael Grosvenor Myer's e-mail
arrived soon after the last issue was published, pointing out an
error, I thought I was going to get a lot of messages, though only
four other readers actually wrote in. The Iron Duke was, of course,
Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington, not the Duke of
Marlborough. I knew that (even more so now), but I had what's often
called a senior moment, or more crudely a brain fart.
SCRUMPTIOUS "I took a train trip in 1976 across the northern US,"
Phil Glatz remembers. "Out in the wilds of Montana, I asked the
conductor, an African-American in his sixties, if there was still
time to get breakfast in the dining car. He looked at his watch,
shook his head, and said, 'you better hurry, or all that will be
left is the scrumpts.' I've always remembered that term, but have
not heard it since, but figure it might be related to 'scrumptious',
maybe from southern US slang." The Dictionary of American Regional
English doesn't include "scrumpt", but it does have "scrumption", a
variant form of "scrimption" recorded mainly in the US South from
1834 onwards. It says it means a bit or scrap and is from an
unspecified English dialect term, perhaps one of those listed in the
piece. It's easy to imagine that "scrumption" became "scrumptious"
and this might be the missing link between English dialect and the
US "scrumptious". If so, we're still left with no information how
the term took on its modern meaning.
Lots of readers asked whether the term for the childhood activity of
scrumping, stealing apples from an orchard or garden, was connected.
It isn't. That comes from a dialect word meaning a withered apple,
perhaps connected with "scrimp", to be thrifty or economise, as in
"scrimp and save". More on scrumping: http://wwwords.org?SCRMP .
FIB I wrote last time that "fib" first appeared in Randle
Cotgrave's Dictionary of the French and English Tongues in 1611 as a
translation of "bourde", which I said meant a blunder. Marc Picard
commented, "That meaning is relatively recent, from the eighteenth
century. The first meaning of the word was 'mensonge' (a lie or fib)
and is still given in some French dictionaries."
"As a child,", Ross Marouchoc e-mailed, "I was told that the origin
of 'fib' came from the anatomical fact that the smaller lower leg
bone, the fibula, 'lies' next to the much larger tibia. I always
suspected that this was apocryphal, but I thought that you might
enjoy this example of the type of fib told to children by adults."
2. Ignoramus
--------------------------------------------------------------------
It's a satisfying way to tell somebody that he's stupid or ignorant,
its Latinate form projecting an aura of dusty academic superiority.
It also has a long and interesting history.
The ancient legal institution of the grand jury now continues only
in the USA, but it was once the standard way of deciding whether a
person should be charged with a crime. It was called a grand jury
because it was made up of 24 men, twice the size of one in a trial,
which was a petit jury or petty jury. Grand juries were originally
called from among local men who were expected to act on personal
knowledge. If they felt the evidence was too weak their foreman
wrote the Latin word "ignoramus" on the back of the indictment. This
literally meant "we do not know", from the Latin verb "ignorare", to
be ignorant. In practice it meant "we take no notice of this". It
was the opposite of declaring the indictment a true bill, which
meant the accusation went to trial.
How this abstruse foreign form from the specialised language of the
law became an English word is due to George Ruggle. He wrote a play
called Ignoramus, mostly in Latin, which was performed on 8 March
1615 at Trinity College, Cambridge, before an audience of some 2,000
which included King James I of England and the future Charles I. It
featured a rascally and ignorant lawyer, the Ignoramus of the title,
who used barbarous law Latin of a kind deplored by the university's
academics. The king loved the play but his judges and law officers
hated it. It caused a huge controversy that led to the name of the
play's chief character entering the language.
Since there is no lack of ignorance and stupidity in our world, we
have to decide how to create its plural. A slight knowledge of Latin
noun plurals suggests it should be "ignorami", to match "nucleus",
"fungus", "terminus", "cactus", and "stimulus". But "ignoramus"
never was a Latin noun, so the sensible course is to stick to the
rules of English, making "ignoramuses". That's a mouthful, but it
will stop you from sounding like an ignoramus.
3. Profician
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Much effort has been expended in the UK recently on reporting the
results of the Great British Class Survey, devised by the BBC and
researched by social scientists from three British universities. It
divides the economically active population into seven groups, rather
different in composition to the six grades of the NRS social grade
system (A, B, C1, C2, D, E) and the eight of the National Statistics
Socio-economic Classification.
One consequence has been a rare appearance in the public media of
the specialist term "profician". This is strongly associated with
Professor Guy Standing of the School of Oriental and African Studies
at the University of London, who has been using it since the early
1990s and seems to have coined it. In his book of 2009, Work After
Globalization, he discusses it alongside his other socio-economic
classifications: the global elite ("a tiny minority of absurdly rich
and high-earning people"), the salariat ("high-income earners in
stable, full-time employment", a term borrowed from French and known
in English for about a century but which is still specialist), the
traditional working class (the proletariat), the precariat (an ill-
defined group of insecure casual workers) and an underclass that
Marxist theory calls the lumpenproletariat.
As the name suggests, proficians are experts in a field and include
skilled technicians and professionals. They may be lawyers, sports
stars, architects or IT specialists. Their key quality is that they
are project-oriented freelance workers (Standing has described them
as "self-selling entrepreneurs, living opportunistically on their
wits and contacts") and tend to suffer problems such as stress and
burn-out.
Standing could have created "proficiat" instead of "profician", to
match the "-iat" ending of the other terms that have been coined on
the model of "proletariat". It might now be better known.
Great British Class Survey calculator: http://wwwords.org?GBCS.
World Wide Words on "precariat": http://wwwords.org?PRCRT.
4. Cooking one's goose
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. The expression "goose is cooked" appears in the stage and film
versions of Les Misérables. Might its origin be of interest to
subscribers? [Colin Hague]
A. I hope so, but the historical record is unhelpful about details,
as so often with slangy idioms. The gap has been filled with many
folk etymological tales.
The known facts first. Various forms - "do his goose for him" and
"cook his goose" as well as "goose is cooked" - start to appear in
British writings in the 1830s, as in this report of a court case:
The complainant said that on Saturday morning he was at
the plying place at the Tower stairs, when Crouch began to
abuse him, and swore he would "cook his goose," by which
he meant he would ruin him, or put an end to his mortal
existence.
[True Sun (London), 26 Oct. 1837. A "plying place" is
one where a porter, cabman or boatman waited to be hired;
it's from an old sense of "ply" meaning to solicit
patronage. British taxis, for example, still officially
"ply for hire".]
This is another appearance from a decade later:
"I rather think, friend Sandy," said Smith, looking
cheerfully back at the bedroom as he turned the corner, "I
rather think, to use a figurative expression, your goose
is cooked!"
[Paddiana; or, Scraps and Sketches of Irish life, by
William Henry Gregory, 1847. Later Sir William Gregory,
the author was Governor of Ceylon in the 1870s.]
The idiom is so common and yet so mysterious that numerous stories
have appeared to try to explain it. One suggestion online is that it
derives from a wry joke about the fate of the Bohemian reformer Jan
Hus - whose name is similar to "husa", his native Czech word for a
goose - who was burned at the stake in Constance by the Catholic
Church in 1415. The gap of four centuries before the idiom appears,
in another country, renders this implausible. Myron Korach argued in
Common Phrases in 2008 that it refers to a battle fought by Eric, a
king of Sweden, who was known to love eating goose. His enemies set
one up for their archers to shoot at but Eric won a great victory
and with relish cooked and ate their goose. We may disregard this
tale for similar reasons. We may also take no notice of the vague
story that a besieged town once displayed a goose to show that it
had enough food, provoking the attackers to set the bird on fire. A
connection has also been made with the goose who laid the golden
eggs; the farmer that owned it killed it to find the secret, only to
be left with no gold but merely a goose to cook.
We may not know the details of its origin, but we can get a good
idea of what was in its creators' minds from other food-related
idioms of this period and later. People might express the same idea
through "giving him his gruel" or "settling his hash". A person in
deep trouble might be "in a stew" or run the risk that somebody will
"make mincemeat of him". (However, "had his chips" isn't in the set,
as that comes from gambling.)
Why we're so fond of figuratively relating the consumption of food
to murder, spoiling someone's plans or causing their downfall is, I
suspect, a matter more for psychologists than lexicographers.
5. Sic!
--------------------------------------------------------------------
A sentence in an obituary published on 13 April in the Detroit News
was sent in by Roger Chard, "In 1960, Musser became president of the
hotel and later purchased it along with his wife Amelia in 1979."
"I couldn't help but giggle," emailed Melinda Heritage. She had seen
a headline in the Toronto Sun on 14 April: "There's no email in
heaven, so Google lets you shut down accounts after death."
Isn't medical science wonderful? Douglas Downey spotted this in the
Police Reports section of his local paper The Northbrook Tower on 10
April: "She was found unconscious in the vehicle and transported to
Glenbrook Hospital for alcohol intoxication."
Singing praises: Malcolm Ross-Macdonald found this on the Mozy Home
site: "One of the crowing jewels that makes Mozy an incredible place
to work is definitely the people that work here."
6. Useful information
--------------------------------------------------------------------
ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER: 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 by Robert Waterhouse in
Europe. 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
on 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 2013. 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/20130419/16060f64/attachment.htm>
More information about the WorldWideWords
mailing list