World Wide Words -- 24 Aug 13

[Michael Quinion]

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WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 846          Saturday 24 August 2013
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Whiffler.
3. Crack shot.
4. Sic!
5. Subscriptions and other information.


1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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PARCEL  "If you are in the habit of reading antiques catalogues," 
Anthea Fleming wrote, "you may come across the term 'parcel-gilt' in 
descriptions of silver items. It means partly gilded, as in a silver 
figure wearing gilded drapery, or a silver cup gilded inside. I 
don't know why this expression is used." I can help there: it comes 
from an ancient adverbial sense of "parcel", in the sense of "part, 
partly, partially; to some degree, to some extent". It's recorded 
from the fifteenth century, "parcel-gilt" itself from 1453.

LEMNISCATE  Several subscribers, either in puzzlement or devilry, 
queried my instructions about cutting the doughnut. For example, 
Gareth Williams: "If you lay a doughnut on the board, put the knife 
vertical against the inside edge of the hole and cut downward .. 
nothing happens because the point of the blade is now stuck in the 
chopping board." It would have been better if I had written, "Take a 
sharp knife and hold the blade so that its edge is exactly above the 
inside edge of the doughnut. Cut vertically downwards ..." I am 
reminded of my university physics professor, a Shakespeare scholar 
who always prefaced his notes on practical sessions with "Bloody 
instructions, which being taught return to plague the inventor." 
Kathleen Dillon registered a complaint: "You are responsible for my 
having to buy a new bathing suit. I tried to follow your 
instructions about cutting a doughnut and ruined half a dozen of 
them, which I had to eat before they became stale."

AGOG AGAIN  From Peter Armstrong: "I sometimes wish that we English 
speakers and writers had the use of an accent or other diacritical 
mark. This morning I was reading your update on 'agog' and wondered 
why your correspondent was saying 'it's happening by way of agape'. 
How in the world does agog's meaning get influenced by the word used 
to express theological love? Ah, my kingdom for an accent." The two 
are indeed among the more remarkable homographs in the language: one 
from Old Norse, the other from classical Greek.

NOT CRICKET?  Several readers essayed a translation of the cricket 
item in the Sic! section two weeks ago, which I mentioned here last 
week. You may recall that the original read, "On three occasions, 
thick inside edges avoided the stumps and raced to the fence, while 
a brace of airy heaves into the leg side somehow dissected the 
outfielders." This is from Bruce Laidlaw: "The batsman mishit the 
ball three times (the ball in each case clipping the edge of the 
bat) yet still scored four runs each time as the ball went behind 
him all the way to the boundary; the batsman twice hit the ball hard 
upwards and to the left, the ball falling between fielders so none 
could catch or stop it. The implication is that the batsman was 
lucky, scoring twenty runs by hitting the ball five times to the 
boundary from bad shots." Cricket-savvy readers have suggested that 
"dissect" has taken on a specific meaning; Ricki Barnes explained, 
"It refers to a ball being hit into the air such that it ends up 
between a number of fielding positions. Strictly it should refer to 
more than two fielders. With two, you may instead hear the phrase 
'bisecting the field'." "Dissect" presumably came about as an error 
for "bisect" but has become accepted as what H W Fowler called a 
sturdy indefensible, since to literally dissect outfielders 
certainly wouldn't be cricket! We may now consider this subject 
closed.


2. Whiffler
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Students of Shakespeare will know of whifflers from Henry V: 

    The deep-mouth'd Sea,
    Which like a mighty Whiffler 'fore the King,
    Seems to prepare his way.

Whifflers went in front of a procession to clear spectators from its 
path. In early times, they would have been men-at-arms, wielding 
their customary weapons such as javelins or swords to keep back the 
mob. By the time of Shakespeare, they had taken on a formalised role 
and by the next century had degenerated into being merely part of 
the ritual of events such as civic parades. They survived until the 
middle of the nineteenth century in the procession of the London 
craft guilds to the Guildhall banquet on Lord Mayor's Day, in which 
young freemen called bachelor whifflers carried flags to lead each 
guild. They lived on to about the same date in Norwich:

    In that of the Corporation of Norwich from the Guild-
    hall to the Cathedral Church, on the Guild-day, the 
    whifflers are two active men very lightly equipped ... 
    bearing swords of lath or latten, which they keep in 
    perpetual motion, "whiffing" the air on either side, and 
    now and then giving an unlucky boy a slap on the shoulders 
    or posteriors with the flat side of their weapons. 
    [The Vocabulary of East Anglia, by Robert Forby, 
    1830.]

In an entry written a century ago, the Oxford English Dictionary 
finds the word's origin in the Old English "wifle" for a spear or 
battleaxe. But as "whiffle" also referred to the wind when it blew 
in puffs or slight gusts, or veered or shifted about (it became a 
figurative way to describe a shifty or evasive person), it would be 
as reasonable to assume that it referred to the continual waving of 
their weapons to encourage hangers-on to stand back. Whifflers in 
action would certainly have raised a constant whiffle of wind, as 
Robert Forby implied with his use of "whiff", to blow lightly (this 
last word is also the source of the word in the sense of a brief or 
faint smell, as in "a whiff of perfume").

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Thomas Ratcliffe, a 
contributor to Notes and Queries, recalled this variation:

    The art of the whiffler-waffler is still known, though 
    I have not seen the practice for a number of years. 
    Whiffling-waffling was common when I was a boy, and many 
    boys could give very creditable exhibitions of the art. 
    ... Some men were great experts, making the stick twirl in 
    the hands round and about all parts of the body round the 
    head, behind the back, under the thigh, the whiffling-
    waffling being done as easily with the left as with the 
    right hand. When the exhibition was put of doors the stick 
    was sent whirling high, the performer dancing round a 
    considerable circle before catching it at the right moment 
    of its descent.

We are irresistibly reminded of a drum-major with his mace leading a 
band in a parade. There certainly seemed to be a skill to whiffling, 
to judge from George Borrow, who lamented in The Romany Rye in 1857, 
"The last of the whifflers hanged himself about a fortnight ago ... 
from pure grief that there was no further demand for the exhibition 
of his art, there being no demand for whiffling since the 
discontinuance of Guildhall banquets." The modern drum-major may not 
have his genesis in the ancient passage-clearing art of the 
whiffler, but parallels persist.


3. Crack shot
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Q. Where did the term "crack shot" originate? [Mark Brown, US]

A. The short answer to your question is England, but I suspect that 
may leave you feeling a bit short-changed. Fortunately I can supply 
some more on the whys, hows and whens of the term as well as the 
wheres.

The obvious first guess is that it's an imitative word for the noise 
made by a pistol or rifle. Unlike most first guesses in etymology 
that's not entirely wrong, but it's not the whole story.

Around 1500, "crack" is recorded as a Scots term for loud boasts or 
brags, which in the following century became much more widely known 
in England. After it spread south it started to mean the subject of 
a person's boast, something that was claimed to be first-class or 
excellent. This might be a preeminent flock of sheep, the best room 
in a hotel or a person who was a superbly accurate shot. This last 
sense appeared at the very beginning of the nineteenth century in a 
long-forgotten comic playlet that featured a duel:

    That's my friend - you subpoenaed him to attend. I'm 
    dashing Bob, his second, - a crack shot and a crack whip. 
    Take your ground, Colonel.
    [Modern Sharpers, by an unknown author, in Flowers of 
    Literature For 1804, London, 1805.]

However, the term is presumably older in speech. It was taken to the 
New World by colonists and is first recorded there in the 1820s.

What makes the word particularly relevant to pistols at dawn is that 
the boasting sense of "crack" derives from Old English "cracian", to 
make a sudden sharp noise. It is indeed the same word as the one for 
the noise a gun might make. It's also where we get "cracking" from, 
in the sense of something very impressive or effective ("it was a 
cracking good film").

Incidentally, you may see similarities between the boasting sense of 
"crack" and the Irish term for enjoyable conversation, news, gossip 
and general fun. You would be right, as they're the same word. But 
"crack" first took on this sense in the eighteenth century in Scots. 
It appeared in Ireland only in the 1950s, having been taken from 
Scotland into Ulster. The Irish Gaelicised it into "craic", said the 
same way. This was reborrowed into English in the 1970s, latterly 
for commercial reasons linked to the growth of Irish pubs and bars.


4. Sic!
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Seen by John Peck in the Marks and Spencer store in Haverfordwest, 
Pembrokeshire, a set of four "serial bowls". He suggests the great 
advantage is that one only has to do the washing up every fourth 
day.

Neil Hesketh urged, "Don't mess with US Navy women." He had spotted 
a report on NBC News about NASA and the Navy practicing retrieval of 
splashed-down spacecraft: "Unlike in past recovery efforts, the Navy 
doesn't plan to use helicopters to retrieve Orion. Instead, a wench 
will pull the spacecraft into the Arlington's well deck."

On 5 August, Pattie Tancred tells us, the Economist reported on the 
burger made from laboratory-grown meat: "After sizzling in a pan for 
a few minutes under the watchful eye of a British chef, two pre-
selected tasters, a nutritional scientist and a food writer, dug 
in."


5. Useful information
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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 
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