World Wide Words -- 14 Dec 13

[Michael Quinion]

--------------------------------------------------------------------
WORLD WIDE WORDS         ISSUE 862         Saturday 14 December 2013
--------------------------------------------------------------------
       This mailing also contains an HTML-formatted version.
          A formatted version is also available online at
             http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/zgyr.htm


Contents
--------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Blatteroon.
3. Snippets.
4. Case the joint.
5. Sic!
5. Useful information.


1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
--------------------------------------------------------------------
SIX WAYS FROM SUNDAY  Douglas Wilson suggested what must surely be 
the true origin for the first version of the expression that I was 
able to find, "nine ways from Sunday". Like others, he noted that in 
his work of 1828 James Kirke Paulding was describing a person with a 
strabismus, in which the eyes appear to be looking in different 
directions. He pointed me to an entry in Captain Francis Grose's 
Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue of 1785 which lists several slang 
terms for the condition: 

    Said to be born in the middle of the week, and looking 
    both ways for Sunday; or born in a hackney coach, and 
    looking out of both windows; fit for a cook, one eye in 
    the pot, and the other up the chimney; looking nine ways 
    at once.

Douglas Wilson has found examples of "two ways for Sunday" from 1770 
and "looking nine ways", apparently in the same sense, from 1622:

    "Oh those fair star-like eyes of thine!" one says,
    When to my thinking, she hath look'd nine ways;
    "And that sweet breath," when I think (out upon't!)
    'Twould blast a flower if she breathed on't.
    [A Satire, Of the Passion of Love, by George Wither, 
    1622.]
    
It would seem that Paulding employed an amalgamation of the first 
and last of Grose's expressions, one that he might have invented but 
more probably heard from others. The writer to Notes and Queries in 
1861 whom I quoted had come across "looking two ways for Sunday", a 
version of the first expression. It is easy to see how "looking nine 
ways at once" could have been generalised to "in every direction" 
and evolved into the abstract idea of being thorough.

STARVING  While discussing a possible shift in the usage of "drown" 
last time, I mentioned the weakening that has taken place in the 
meaning of "starve". Many readers pointed out that it has quite a 
different sense in some English dialects. 

Alison Melville was one: "As I'm sure others will tell you, in some 
regional versions of English, one can starve of cold. My mother told 
me how she went to South Shields to meet her prospective mother-in-
law. After a generous tea, my grandmother, to my mother's surprise, 
told her to come closer to the fire as she 'must be starving'." 

Eileen Gomme remembered: "Your mention of the word took me back 70 
years or so, soon after we moved from Lancashire to Essex. Coming 
home from school one freezing day, I found my mother looking 
bemused. She explained that in chatting to our next-door neighbour 
she said she was starving: the neighbour promptly disappeared, and 
came back a few minutes later with a plate of steaming stew. My 
mother then had to explain that the only meaning she knew for 
starving was cold - not hungry! It wasn't the only 'southern' word 
we northerners had to learn to make ourselves intelligible."

John Orford added, "When I was growing up in Leicester during the 
forties and fifties, if you were starving you were cold. 'Pining' 
was the word for being hungry." Graham Moss recalls being told in 
Manchester in the early 1970s that it was "starving this morning", 
meaning it was very cold.

ANTELUCAN  Latin scholars, among whose company you will be very much 
aware I do not belong, corrected my statement that "The word derives 
from Latin 'lux', light, which becomes 'luc-' in compounds." Marc 
Picard wrote: "Not really. The root is 'luc-' and 'lux' is nothing 
more than 'luc' + 's', so 'lux' itself doesn't become 'luc-' in any 
sense of the word." 

CORRECTION  I misspelled the name of the Chinese technology company 
last week. It should be Huawei.

LINKS  You may have seen short links to web pages using my home-
brewed system which begin with http://wwwords.org. I experimented 
recently with using a well-known public alternative. The result was 
that many hundreds of email subscribers had mailings rejected; it 
turned out that a major spam detection service tags as unwanted any 
message that includes such links. I have gone back to my own system, 
in the process recoding and improving it somewhat, and the number of 
email rejections has fallen to its usual level. Apologies to anyone 
who missed issues.

HOLIDAY BREAK  As usual at this time of year, I propose to take a 
break from World Wide Words for two weeks. The next issue will be 
that of 4 January 2014. Happy holidays!

ALL MY OWN WORK  Several recent communications have assumed that 
World Wide Words is produced by a staff of writers. I've encouraged 
this view inadvertently in the past by calling myself editor, for 
want of a better title. In truth, everything in World Wide Words is 
written by me, though improved by corrections and comments from a 
group of volunteer readers. My grateful thanks go to Julane Marx, 
Robert Waterhouse, John Bagnall and Peter Morris. They're getting 
two weeks off for the holidays, too.


2. Blatteroon
--------------------------------------------------------------------
When in 1887 James Murray was compiling entries beginning with the 
letter B for what was then called the New English Dictionary on 
Historical Principles, now the Oxford English Dictionary, he was 
able to find only two examples of "blatteroon", both of them from 
the seventeenth century. It had been taken from the Latin "blatero", 
a babbler, to generate an insult which Thomas Blount defined in his 
Glossographia of 1656 as "a babbler, an idle-headed fellow".

So might the word have ended its life, but a small number of other 
examples are known, used without any elaboration for a person who 
won't shut up. Dr Murray could not have known of them, as they are 
later than the publication of his dictionary entry. It seems that 
his inclusion of the word sparked a minor revival in its fortunes, 
and not solely in those works of a superficial and fleetingly 
entertaining nature designed merely to display the oddities of 
English.

This is one modern appearance, in a humorously verbose encomium 
studded with Yiddishisms that was published to mark the retirement 
of an eminent US legal expert:

    Yale Kamisar's acute logorrhea ... is well known to 
    all. The only uncertainty, it seems, concerns the 
    magnitude of the problem; some but certainly not all would 
    go so far as to label him a blatteroon, a verbomaniac, or 
    even a pisk or a plyoot.
    [Wayne R LaFave, in the Michigan Law Review, Aug 2004. 
    "Pisk" is Yiddish for a garrulous speaker, from the Polish 
    word for a shriek or squeal; a "plyoot" is a 
    loudmouth.]

The other curiosity is the appearance of the word in a variety of 
commercial code books. These weren't designed to hide the sense of 
messages - the books were published for all to read who could beg, 
buy, borrow or steal a copy - but to provide one-word equivalents 
for common phrases to reduce the cost of cablegrams. Lieber's code 
of 1896 said "blatteroon" meant "did you reserve?"; the New General 
and Mining Telegraph Code of 1903 translated it as "almost certain 
to float"; while the Western Union Telegraphic Code of 1901 left its 
meaning blank for sender and recipient to select their own. 

Would "blatteroon" have appeared in any of these works without its 
having first been recorded in the NED? It's very unlikely.


3. Wordface
--------------------------------------------------------------------
WORDS OF THE YEAR  The track record for words of the year has not 
always been impressive (does anybody still speak of "information 
superhighway" or "Bushlips"?). This may be why Merriam-Webster took 
the editorial eye out of the equation and resorted to statistics in 
choosing its word for 2013. Its online dictionary gets about 100 
million accesses every month, so there's no shortage of data. It 
checked the words that have been looked up most often and selected 
those that show the greatest increase this year compared with last. 
This led to a disappointingly mundane result: the word that came out 
on top with an increase of 176% and so became word of the year is 
"science". Peter Sokolowski, Editor-at-Large at Merriam-Webster, 
noted, "A wide variety of discussions centered on science this year, 
from climate change to educational policy. We saw heated debates 
about 'phony' science, or whether science held all the answers." The 
rest of the top five are equally unexciting: "cognitive", "rapport", 
"communication" and "niche".

The Australian National Dictionary Centre announced its word of the 
year on Friday. It looks for one that has come to prominence in the 
Australian social and cultural landscape over the year. Its choice 
is the digital crypto-currency "bitcoin", which is attracting great 
attention because it's an anonymous way to transfer money without 
the need for a central bank. Runners-up included the golfing term 
"captain's pick", which moved into Australian politics this year 
when former PM Julia Gillard used it for decisions she made without 
consulting her party. Australia's general election led to another 
shortlisted term: "microparty", a small political party, often one 
based around a single issue. Another unsuccessful candidate was the 
notorious "twerk"; the Centre defines it as "dancing in a sexually 
provocative manner involving thrusting hip movements and a low, 
squatting stance" (see Miley Cyrus, passim). This also has political 
associations in Australia following a television demonstration of it 
during the election by the portly 59-year-old mining magnate Clive 
Palmer, candidate for a Queensland seat (he won, narrowly).

LIVING WITH THE RELATIVES  An article on the study of personal names 
in my newspaper introduced me to "uxorilocality", supposedly as an 
example of the exotic vocabulary of genealogy. It's actually a rare 
term in social anthropology for a practice in some societies by 
which a married couple goes to live with or near the family of the 
wife (it's from Latin "uxor", wife.) The equivalent when it's the 
husband's family is "virilocality" (from Latin "vir", man). Older - 
and more common - terms for the customs are "matrilocality" and 
"patrilocality" (from Latin words for "mother" and "father"). 
Leonhard Adam proposed "uxorilocality" and its counterpart in an 
article in American Anthropologist in 1947, because he felt the 
older pair presupposed the presence of children.


4. Case the joint
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. Do you know the origin of the phrase "Case the joint", as in "He 
had to case the joint before the robbery"? [Jane Cawthorne]

A. To get to the bottom of this one, we have to split the expression 
into two. "Joint" here is the well-known American term for a place, 
especially a bar or club. It comes from "joint" in the slang sense 
of an illicit association or partnership, a joint endeavour, and 
then of a place where criminals gathered. Its first American sense, 
in the 1880s, was of an opium den but it soon spread to refer to an 
illegal saloon, a brothel, gambling den, or even a poor restaurant. 
Later it became a term for prison. Even in today's looser sense of 
some unspecified place or undertaking, "joint" retains a raffish or 
disreputable undercurrent. (Its sense of a marijuana cigarette is 
said to have been an independent creation, but one has to wonder in 
view of its early application to an opium pipe.)

"Case" is a more difficult term to pin down because noun and verb 
have so many senses. The experts point to the gambling game called 
faro, hugely popular in North America in the nineteenth century, to 
the extent that for a while it almost became a national game. Its 
name is a simplified form of "pharaon" (English "pharaoh"), a French 
game of the century before. Various writers have argued that it gave 
American English numerous idioms, some now defunct, which include 
"calling the turn", "coppering the bet", "from soda to hock", and 
"play both ends against the middle". Faro was also called "bucking 
the tiger", for unknown reasons, a term also applied to roulette and 
to heavy gambling of any sort.

Faro was easy to learn and offered good odds because the percentage 
of bets taken by the operator was especially low, between two and 
three percent. Honest operators of faro games found it hard to make 
a living and cheating became rife:

    There is no game which gives freer rein to the passion 
    of gambling than faro. There is no game in which money is 
    won or lost more readily. Above all, there is no game in 
    which the opportunities of cheating are more numerous or 
    more varied.
    [Sharps and Flats, by John Maskelyne, 1894.]

However, the following advertisement suggests that game operators 
didn't inevitably prosper:

    One Faro lay-out, with rosewood case-keeper; first-
    class, with painted cards on both lay-out and case-keeper. 
    Cost $100, for $25.
    [Daily Globe (St Paul, Minnesota), 22 Jan. 1880.]

This mentions two of the key pieces of equipment required for Faro, 
the third being a "dealing box" from which cards from a single pack 
were dealt one at a time. The layout was a sheet or board set with 
the images of the thirteen cards from one suit, on which the players 
placed their bets. A "case-keeper" was a device rather like an 
abacus, which kept a record of the play, in part so players could 
avoid betting on cards that had already been played, but also to try 
to ensure fair play. At various times it was known instead as the 
"cue box", "cue keeper" or "case keep", which was kept up to date by 
an assistant who was usually, if confusingly, also called the "case-
keeper".

Its records became increasingly important as the game progressed and 
the number of cards remaining in the dealing box fell. Experienced 
players kept a close watch on it to maximise their chance of winning 
and to minimise the risk that a crooked dealer and case keeper were 
working in cahoots (in slang, operating a "brace game", as it needed 
a pair of rogues). This is said to have given rise in the 1880s to 
the idiom "to keep cases", to watch something closely. The players 
often kept their own records of play on cue cards and this was also 
called "keeping cases".

An early example appeared in a tale about a frontier funeral that 
made humorous use of contemporary gambling terminology:

    Jack Richards was keeping cases, and he proposed three 
    cheers for the stiff; and you double your gamble he got 
    'em.
    [Omaha Daily Bee, 15 Jun. 1881.]

Sometime later this sense of "case" as a noun evolved into the verb 
"to case", to watch or inspect. The earliest example we know of is 
in a slang dictionary of 1914, but by then it had probably been in 
use in the criminal community for many years. The special form "case 
the joint" is first recorded in a book about Los Angeles:

    Case the joint. For it is time now. 
    [Angel's Flight, by Don Ryan, 1927.]

However, it became widely known only from the late 1930s, in books 
and films about American gangsters and tough detectives.


5. Sic!
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Robert Rosenberg, Peter Dawson and Ann Jones forwarded this from the 
Telegraph's website: "The missing shipment of radioactive cobalt-60 
was found Wednesday near where the stolen truck transporting the 
material was abandoned in central Mexico. The atomic energy agency 
said it has an activity of 3,000 curries, or Category 1."

Sticky clothing. A news item in the Sydney Morning Herald on 6 
December about the model Cara Cameron was submitted by Monica 
Vardabasso: "A nervous-looking Cameron, dressed in a pink sleeveless 
shirt, black pants and chewing gum, appeared before Judge Leslie 
Brown in an LA court on Thursday."

Terry McManus visited the Independent's website on 9 December and 
was surprised to read about number eight in its top ten Christmas 
hampers: "It's no surprise Godiva are chocolatiers to the Belgian 
Royal family. The small hamper contains salted caramel slabs, milk 
chocolate pearls, dark chocolate almonds, coffee-flavoured coffee 
and a whole lot of Christmas nibbles."

A headline on the Big Hospitality site over a story dated 6 December 
puzzled Espen Hauglid: "Cluck chicken concept eyes roll out." A 
quick read of the story reveals - much less intriguingly than the 
headline - that Cluck is a "new fast-casual dining concept" which 
plans to expand.

Henry Peacock found this on the Coventry Telegraph site on 11 
December, "Former Sky Blues youth chief Gregor Rioch gets Wigan job 
... 8-year-old left Coventry City a fortnight ago after six-and-a-
half highly successful years." Youth chief indeed.

In an item on the BBC News website on 12 December about Kenya 
reaching 50, Annamaria Trusso found a report of local people who 
"took to the streets and shouted down their members of parliament 
who were attempting to raid public coiffures and award themselves 
lucrative pay hikes."


6. Useful information
--------------------------------------------------------------------
ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER: World Wide Words is researched, written and 
published by Michael Quinion in the UK. ISSN 1470-1448. Copyediting 
and advice are provided by Julane Marx, Robert Waterhouse, John 
Bagnall and Peter Morris. 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/sb. This 
newsletter is also available on RSS (http://wwwords.org/rs) and on 
Twitter (http://wwwords.org/tw). Back issues are available via 
http://wwwords.org/bk.

E-MAIL CONTACT ADDRESSES: Comments on newsletter mailings are always 
welcome. They should be sent to michael.quinion at worldwidewords.org. 
I do try to respond, but pressures of time often stop me from doing 
so. Items for Sic! 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 newsletter and 
would like to help defray its costs and those of the linked Web 
site, please visit the support page via http://wwwords.org/st.

COPYRIGHT: World Wide Words is copyright © Michael Quinion 2013. All 
rights reserved. You may reproduce this newsletter 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/20131213/d71f2e50/attachment.htm>