World Wide Words -- 31 Aug 13

[Michael Quinion]

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WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 847          Saturday 31 August 2013
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Cantrev.
3. Not a happy bunny.
4. Sic!
5. Subscriptions and other information.


1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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WHIFFLERS AND WHIFFLING  Following last week's piece, readers noted 
some of the many situations in which these agreeable words appeared. 
Several pointed out that I'd not mentioned perhaps the most famous 
use of the word in literature, in Lewis Carroll's poem from Through 
the Looking Glass, in which you may recall that 

    The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
    Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
    And burbled as it came!

Lots of others mentioned the game of Whiffle Ball, likely named for 
the noise of the air passing through the holes in the ball. Others 
noted its appearance in Dorothy L Sayers's detective story Murder 
Must Advertise of 1933, in which Lord Peter Wimsey, posing as Death 
Bredon, becomes deeply involved in the advertising campaign for a 
brand of cigarettes called Whifflets, which must surely be a sly 
reference by Sayers to an old sense of "whiffler" for a smoker of 
tobacco:

    It was in that moment, and while Chief-Inspector Parker 
    was arguing over the line with the office telephonist, 
    that Mr. Death Bredon conceived that magnificent idea that 
    everybody remembers and talks about today - the scheme 
    that achieved renown as "Whiffling Round Britain" - the 
    scheme that sent up the sales of Whifflets by five hundred 
    per cent in three months and brought so much prosperity to 
    British Hotel-keepers and Road and Rail Transport. 

Also in detective fiction, Bruce Beatie and Ed Matthews tell us that 
a more directly relevant mention is in Ngaio Marsh's Off With His 
Head (Death of a Fool in the US), in which one of the characters is 
the whiffler in a traditional Morris dance, who clears a space for 
the performance:

    Through the archway came a blackamoor with a sword. He 
    had bells on his legs and wore white trousers with a kind 
    of kilt over them. His face was perfectly black and a dark 
    cap was on his head. He leapt and pranced and jingled, 
    making complete turns as he did so and "whiffling" his 
    sword so that it sang in the cold air. 

Bill Marsano was one of many who pointed out that whiffling-
waffling, as it was described in the piece, "thrives in the U.S. 
under the name of 'baton-twirling', which is almost exclusively the 
province of pretty and lightly-clad young women who typically 
perform at parades, football games, etc. In the southern US it is a 
very competitive activity, not to say sport."

Yet another American usage was reported by Jim Tang: "This explains 
that most anachronistic of baseball terms, 'he whiffed'. Bad enough 
that you missed the ball three times to strike out, but to have it 
equated with a term for a light puff of air from your swings? That 
is just piling it on. Which, of course, is the point, because the 
insult game was invented by baseball."

CRACK SHOT  This, likewise, produced many comments, especially about 
other senses of the word, such as "get cracking", to get a move on, 
and "to take a crack at", to attempt something. The latter seems, 
from evidence in the Oxford English Dictionary, to have evolved from 
musketry (being the noise of the gun) and to parallel "take a shot 
at". A "wisecrack" is from the Scots sense of talk or discussion, as 
is "crack" for a cutting or insulting remark.

John Nightingale introduced me to the odd US term "crack varnish" 
for the "very fastest and best passenger train". The second part of 
this term baffled me until I learned from the Dictionary of American 
Regional English that from the 1880s "varnished car" was a slightly 
sarcastic railwaymen's slang term for a passenger vehicle, as such 
accommodation at the time contained much highly varnished wood, in 
contrast to utilitarian freight and staff wagons. Over time this 
became abbreviated to "varnish" for the car and then for the whole 
train. A "crack varnish", of course, was the very best of its type.


2. Cantrev
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This word popped up in a book of short stories I've just finished 
reading:

    So, the land there is thickly forested to the north and 
    the forest grows even more thickly and densely to the 
    south. This southern cantrev of forest is so very dense, 
    indeed, that there is no other place in the world with 
    trees of such height or magnificence or profusion.
    [Adam Robots, by Adam Roberts, 2013.]

A cantrev - the word has been spelled in numerous ways, including 
"cantref" and "canthrif" - turns out upon enquiry to have been a 
medieval legal division of Wales (from the Welsh "cant", a hundred, 
plus "tref", a town or place). It's closely similar in sense to the 
English hundred, a division of a county or shire for administrative 
purposes. In fact, in medieval England yet another form of the word, 
"cantred", was used almost synonymously with "hundred".

The word has long had only historical interest. But it has enjoyed a 
minor revival in SF and fantasy - as in Lloyd Alexander's Prydain 
Chronicles - as an unfamiliar term with which to communicate a sense 
of otherness. The revival is most probably due to modern interest in 
the medieval Welsh epic The Mabinogion, in which "cantrev" often 
appears.


3. Not a happy bunny
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Q. Why did "not a happy bunny" come into existence?  Surely bunnies 
are largely devoid of facial expression, so determining their state 
of happiness or otherwise is not readily possible. Online searches 
seem to say nothing about the origin of the phrase. [John Gray]

A. People have been writing about this in a mildly puzzled way at 
least since John Mullan included it as his Phrase of the Week in The 
Guardian during November 2002, saying it was "now everywhere" and 
that "It started being common four or five years ago, especially as 
an understated description of a person's displeasure." 

The earliest example that I know of appeared in Punch magazine in 
November 1989 and I would have said that it had already peaked in 
popularity by 2002. However, a British newspaper archive shows that 
it has been used even more in the past two or three years. It long 
ago became a catchphrase and a cliché, mostly in Britain. It has 
also spawned its inverse, though it is still much less common to 
learn that somebody is a happy bunny than an unhappy one. 

There's a good reason for nobody online being able to say anything 
useful about its antecedents - no expert seems to have the slightest 
idea about its origin and most writers on contemporary slang have 
ignored it. Nigel Rees, presenter of the BBC radio quiz programme 
"Quote ... Unquote", has for many years included it as question 1368 
in his list of unsolved phrase origins. This shows no signs of being 
resolved any time soon.

It may be a disparaging comment drawn from children's literature, in 
which fluffy bunny rabbits are usually happily hopping about. To 
refer to a person's distress as saying he isn't a happy bunny is to 
infantilise his emotions. However, people sometimes use it about 
themselves, when it becomes self-deprecating. There may be a link to 
British television advertisements for the Duracell Bunny (matched in 
the US by ones for the Energizer Bunny). This is a pink rabbit, 
always with a fixed grin and originally endlessly beating a drum. 
The adverts have been around for some decades (they began in 1973), 
so it's not an implausible origin.

Other than that, all I've been able to do is add another mystified 
comment to the many that precede me. Add an appropriate bunny-
related punchline if you like. I'm running out of energy.


4. Sic!
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"Taking inclusive language a bit too far," commented John Martin on 
an item in The Guardian on 23 August, which quoted the TechCrunch 
website on the retirement of Microsoft's CEO, Steve Ballmer: "If his 
or her successor doesn't like the 'One Microsoft' vision, he'll have 
to do another reorganization." TechCrunch has corrected its version.

Tereza Shortall headed her contribution "Every woman's nightmare!" 
having read this advertising blurb on the Harrods website: "Tailored 
in beautiful virgin wool, these trousers from Alexander McQueen will 
instantly become the most exquisite staple in your all-rear-round 
wardrobe."

Staying with Harrods, Pat Beattie was in the famous Knightsbridge 
store and spotted that the floor directory, expensively inscribed on 
a marble wall, included the entry, "Lower Ground, Menswear, Fashion 
Accessories, Gifts and Stationary."

In the New York Daily News of 18 August, Tanya Thomas found a report 
describing the trial of Jodi Arias for killing her boyfriend, Travis 
Alexander: "Arias claimed intruders broke into the house and gave 
interviews to 'Inside Edition' and '48 Hours Mystery'." 

Tony Willett found this in a list of spa treatments in the brochure 
of The Academy at the City of Bath College: "Relax in our sauna and 
steam room, distress in our hot tub and drift away in our dry 
flotation bed."


5. Useful information
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Michael Quinion in the UK. ISSN 1470-1448. Copyediting and advice 
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