World Wide Words -- 20 Jul 13

[Michael Quinion]

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WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 841           Saturday 20 July 2013
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Taradiddle.
3. Penny dreadful.
4. Sic!
5. Subscriptions and other information.


1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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John Weiss followed up last week's story of a dictionary error by 
recounting one of his own. "I found several very literate Swedish 
friends referring to a person as a 'quiz', which I could not 
understand until they showed me a much-acclaimed English-Swedish 
dictionary, pointing to a meaning something like 'a peculiar 
person'. Some research into English-Swedish dictionaries published 
over a long period of time revealed, in their forewords, that all 
relied on what appears to have been the first modern such 
dictionary, from around the 1900s. And then I discovered that it was 
in fact an archaic English usage, and I presume the author of that 
dictionary had found it and used it with no indication that it was 
no longer current."


2. Taradiddle
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Not so much known now as it once was, this is mainly a British way 
of saying something is a minor lie. A contributor to Punch wrote in 
October 1892, "Lie, indeed! There is a middle course - say 'fib' or 
'tarradiddle'."

    These days, she lived, thought, dreamed horses, almost 
    like Verrall himself. The time came when she not only told 
    her taradiddle about having "hunted quite a lot", she even 
    came near believing it. 
    [Burmese Days, by George Orwell, 1935.]

It has also appeared as "tallydiddle" and "tarradiddle", a mark of 
people's confusion about its origins. These are shared by modern 
etymologists, some of whom point uncertainly at the verb "diddle", 
to cheat, as the source of the second element. This is recorded from 
the middle of the eighteenth century but they argue that it derives 
from the Old English "dydrian", to deceive or delude. Other writers 
have been dismissive of this ancient etymology, mainly because, if 
it were true, "diddle" had been lurking unnoticed in the linguistic 
undergrowth for about seven centuries. All the experts are silent 
about the first element of "taradiddle", which may be no more than a 
nonsense addition.

This is also true of the first element of a very similar word, of 
which musicians in particular may be reminded - "paradiddle", one of 
the basic patterns of drumming, consisting of four even strokes 
played with alternate hands. This is equally mysterious, though the 
second part might be from an old dialect verb meaning to shake or 
quiver.

In recent decades "taradiddle" has taken on a divergent sense of 
empty talk or nonsense:

    The Tarot, its origins misty until 15th-century 
    printers got on to it, is one of those allegorical 
    fortune-telling taradiddles beloved of fretful 
    teenagers.
    [The Times, 7 Sep. 2012.]


3. Penny dreadful
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Q. I was watching an Australian murder mystery on television where a 
teacher criticised her student's grotesque theory of what might have 
happened to the victim by saying that she must have read too many 
"penny dreadfuls". I presume this refers to some sort of horror 
story, perhaps which sold for a penny. Any thoughts on this? [Bob 
Taxin, San Francisco]

A. They were indeed sold for a penny, a British penny. And they were 
considered to be dreadful for reasons that will become clear.

It was common in the nineteenth century to publish works in serial 
form or in magazines - Dickens's novels, for example, first appeared 
this way. Such magazines were directed at the educated and affluent 
reading public and were usually priced at a shilling, unaffordable 
by the working man. 

To meet demand among the less well-off, some publishers brought out 
serials of inferior technical and literary quality, accompanied by 
vivid illustrations, which were sold in penny instalments. These 
featured sensationalist and lurid tales of highwaymen, pirates and 
murderers as well as exaggerated stories of real-life crimes. They 
were most popular among young men, who would sometimes club together 
to buy single copies which one person might read to others who were 
illiterate. The genre was widely regarded by the middle classes and 
by magistrates as a corrupting influence among young people and a 
cause of the rise in juvenile crime. This was contested by others 
and most famously disputed by G K Chesterton in his essay of 1901, A 
Defence of Penny Dreadfuls.

Among better-known examples of the stories were Varney the Vampyre, 
or the Feast of Blood; Black Bess or the Knight of the Road (stories 
of Dick Turpin, built on William Harrison Ainsworth's novel Rookwood 
of 1834); Ela the Outcast, or The Gipsy of Rosemary Dell; Wagner the 
Wehr-Wolf; Spring-Heeled Jack, or The Terror of London (a leaping 
madman who attacked women, a mythical character of the early part of 
the century); and The String of Pearls (despite its innocuous title 
this featured Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street). 

They started to be called penny dreadfuls around 1860, a term that 
in its melodramatic and exaggerated disdain adequately communicated 
the way reputable society thought of them. Similar publications were 
common in the US - British and American publishers often "borrowed" 
each others' material - and came to be called "dime novels", a less 
sensational term that likewise started to appear around 1860. Later, 
terms such as "penny blood" and "penny awful" were used for them in 
Britain. 

In the 1880s, the alliterative "shilling shocker" - also called a 
"shilling dreadful" - began to appear for a type of more substantial 
short sensational novel, often by writers of some ability (Robert 
Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was put in this category 
when it first came out). An early instance was The Dark House, by G 
Manville Fenn, described in The Pall Mall Gazette on 22 June 1885 as 
"a 'shilling dreadful' of the most hair-stiffening and sanguinary 
description."

These didn't achieve the same depths of condemnation as the earlier 
penny dreadfuls. They were often bought for reading during a railway 
journey, the precursors of today's airport novels, whodunits and 
other entertaining genres. They suffered merely from being described 
in slightly disparaging terms by literary critics as examples of 
popular culture.


4. Sic!
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Harry Campbell emailed from Glasgow with the cooking instructions 
that came with his purchase of sliced haggis: "Defrost thoroughly 
before cooking in a refrigerator".

"Is this how new words are formed?" asked Bron Forman. "My sister 
found this in June's edition of The Rip, a local rag circulated in 
Queenscliff and Point Lonsdale at the treacherous entrance (called 
'The Rip') to Melbourne's harbour, Port Phillip Bay: 'It's that time 
of year when ... Sea Pilots perform seemingly deftifying feats in 
huge swells...'."

Anne O'Brien reports from British Columbia that a TV advertisement 
for Raid, an insecticide spray, claims that it "kills ants for two 
weeks."  She wonders what happens then - a resurrection on the 
fifteenth day, perhaps?

A headline in the Daily Telegraph on 12 July quoted the Liberal 
Democrat MP Mark Williams: "Parents 'should be prosecuted for not 
loving or ignoring their children'".


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 
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