World Wide Words -- 26 Jan 13

Fri Jan 25 16:28:17 UTC 2013

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WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 816         Saturday 26 January 2013
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Pardon my French!
3. Brexit.
4. Pavonine.
5. Sic!
6. Subscriptions and other information.

1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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Jan van den Berg followed up my item on "according to Cocker": "in 
Dutch we have a similar expression: 'volgens Bartjens' ('according 
to Bartjens'). Willem Bartjens was a schoolmaster who wrote a book 
on arithmetic in 1604. Its last edition appeared in 1839." 

Many subscribers commented on the quotation I attached to the piece 
on prestidigitator last time, which included the phrase "cavort and 
gamble with words". Should "gamble" not have been "gambol"? As Joel 
Karasik put it, "I would assume he wants to play with words, rather 
than put them at risk." I copied the text from an online database, 
NewsBank. It probably was a misprint, but I've been unable to check 
the Sunday Times's original as its site is behind a paywall. 

Thanks to everybody who voted in the Love English Awards 2012 from 
Macmillan Dictionary. World Wide Words finished well down the ranks, 
with the winner being the Hungarian English-language teaching site 
5Perc Angol.

2. Pardon my French!
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Q. Where does the phrase "pardon my French" or "excuse my French" 
come from? Some people use it to apologise for using a swearword. 
[Jan Rudge]

A. Yes, that's its present-day meaning, usually accompanying some 
blunt or offensive language. The speaker tries to divert criticism 
from the objectionable term by pretending that it's innocuous 
French.

    Well, look who is laughing now. And if you'll excuse my 
    French, Thierry, go stick your va va voom where it 
    hurts.
    [Charleston Daily Mail, 27 Aug. 2012.]

    Gov'mint's run by a buncha goddamn morons. Pardon my 
    French.
    [The Good Neighbour, by William Kowalski, 2004.]

However, in recent times we have become so inured to hearing rough 
language that the annotation is now often applied humorously or 
coyly to terms that would need euphemising only for the supremely 
squeamish:

    The bar menu at Muse helps - their cocktails aren't for 
    sissies (pardon my French) - they might look feminine to a 
    hard core beer drinker, but I really love the way they've 
    kept the sweetness. 
    [Daily News & Analysis, 22 Apr. 2012.]

The phrase began to appear around the first third of the nineteenth 
century, the "excuse" version then being more common. This is a 
typical early example:

    Dreadful good brandy o' yourn. Ha! ha! ha! My respects. 
    Excuse my French.
    [Marian Rooke, by Henry Sedley, 1865. We must presume 
    that "dreadful" was stronger language then.]

The background is the centuries-old adversarial relationship between 
the British and the French, which had culminated in the Napoleonic 
Wars at the beginning of the century. "French" had long appeared as 
one element in deprecatory formations, often with the implication of 
sexual adventurousness or explicitness - "French pox" (syphilis), 
"French letter" (condom), and "French novel" and "French print" 
(pornographic material) - together with "French leave" (going 
somewhere without asking permission). There is a parallel with the 
Dutch, who had been maritime competitors of the English during the 
seventeenth century and whose name appears in such formations as 
"Dutch uncle" and "Dutch comfort" (see http://wwwords.org?DTCH). 

The compliment has been returned: in France, French leave is "filer 
à l'anglaise", to flee in an English way, a French letter is a 
"capote anglaise", an English cap, and the French pox has been 
called "la maladie anglaise". Then there's "le malaise anglais" and 
"le vice anglais", which seem to have been used for everything the 
French have from time to time found distasteful about the English: 
rickets, economic incompetence, football hooliganism, depression, 
food, flagellation and homosexuality.

The earliest examples, however, are attached to actual French words 
and phrases. Most seem to have been genuine apologies for using a 
French term that the listener might not have understood:

    Bless me, how fat you are grown! - absolutely as round 
    as a ball: - you will soon be as embonpoint (excuse my 
    French) as your poor dear father, the major.
    [The Twelve Nights, by Baron Karl von Miltie, 1831.]

    Teddy and Lord Radstock's son, Waldegrave, boarded the 
    French commodore, and carried him l'épée à la main; - 
    excuse my French.
    [Memoirs and Letters of Captain Sir William Hoste, 
    1833.]

3. Brexit
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On Wednesday, the Daily Mail described David Cameron's much-delayed 
speech on Europe that day as an "historic ultimatum". He proposed 
that Britain's European Union membership should be renegotiated, to 
be followed by what he called an "in-out referendum" on whether the 
country should stay or leave. Wits immediately dubbed it the "hokey-
cokey referendum" (Americans will prefer "hokey-pokey"), with one 
headline reading "In-out, that's not what it's all about".

His speech has pushed the neologism "Brexit", short for "British 
exit", into the foreground. Strictly, of course, it's the United 
Kingdom that would be leaving, but "Ukexit" is too clunky to be 
acceptable. 

"Brexit" began to appear in the British press at the start of 2012:

    The PM indulges loose talk of a renegotiated 
    relationship with a jittery, distracted Europe which could 
    spiral into a risky in/out referendum. No wonder Ukip's 
    Nigel Farage hopes for a breakthrough or that Brussels has 
    a new word: "Brexit".
    [The Guardian, 1 Jan. 2012. "UKIP", said as "u-kip", is 
    the UK Independence Party, meaning independence from the 
    EU.]

It appeared often enough during 2012 to be noticed in passing in a 
couple of Words of the Year compilations. But it was overshadowed by 
the term on which it was modelled, "Grexit", the possibility that 
Greece would leave the euro currency zone. Its visibility has grown 
hugely following Mr Cameron's speech, not only in Britain and other 
English-speaking countries, but also throughout Europe, including 
France, Italy, Germany, Poland, Sweden and the Netherlands. An 
Austrian news site commented sadly on the day of the PM's speech: 
"Und jetzt droht eine lange Brexit-Debatte" (Now a long Brexit 
debate threatens) and a Czech one the day after wrote, "Odchod 
Británie z Evropské unie neboli brexit by byl katastrofou" (Britain 
leaving the European Union, or Brexit, would be a disaster.) Such 
widespread popularity in Europe suggests that The Guardian was right 
to attribute its invention to EU bureaucrats in Brussels.

It's a bit early in the year to be making predictions, but I suspect 
that "Brexit" will be a strong candidate for the British Word of the 
Year 2013.

4. Pavonine
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This word has too little intrinsic character to convey the meanings 
that authors have attached to it that evoke the gaudily patterned, 
the iridescent or the ostentatious. All these senses are linked to 
its literal meaning: "like a peacock". 

But perhaps I'm being too hard on this import from Latin "pavo", a 
peacock. The native English equivalent is "peacocky", surely an 
equally poor word with which to communicate the flamboyant vanity 
for which it is most commonly employed.

Authors have described pavonine seas and deep-hued pavonine dusks, 
both reminiscent of the blue of the peacock's tail. Others have 
conjured up a pavonine strut like a peacock in full display.

    This isn't to say that [Freddie] Mercury's presence 
    wasn't absorbing. He was an enthralling performer. Here he 
    was again in all his pavonine glory, a camped-up, balletic 
    "macho man", singing "I Want to Break Free", wearing fake 
    breasts.
    [The Independent, 17 Oct. 2012.] 

"Pavonine" turns up most frequently, which is to say not that often, 
in the common names of some birds with peacockish plumage, including 
the pavonine cuckoo, the pavonine quetzal and the pavonine toucan. 
One rare linguistic relative is "pavonise", to comport oneself like 
a peacock, to strut and display one's imaginary plumage. Another of 
equal uncommonness is "pavonious", to have eyespots like those on 
the tail of the peacock. 

5. Sic!
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Gareth Williams found a photo caption in the Guardian online site on 
22 January: "The Security Council votes on a resolution condemning 
North Korea's rocket launch in December that sent a satellite into 
orbit at United Nations headquarters in Ney [sic] York."

A widely reproduced Associated Press report of 25 January into a 
murder was spotted by RG Schmidt of Florida: "Nothing was stolen 
from the home of the victim, whose body was bound with rope at her 
wrists and ankles and wrapped around her neck, police said."

6. Useful information
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