World Wide Words -- 27 Jul 13
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jul 26 18:25:08 UTC 2013
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WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 842 Saturday 27 July 2013
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Slangwhanger.
3. Smelling of the lamp.
4. Sic!
5. Useful information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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PENNY DREADFULS "Oh dear!" commented Richard Feaver, "Inflation
strikes. By the time I graduated from Radio Fun and similar comics
in 1937 your penny dreadfuls were already 'tuppenny bloods'." This
name came about because a set of weekly boys' magazines published
between the two World Wars by D C Thomson of Dundee had a cover
price of twopence ("tuppenny" being a common contraction for "two
penny"). They included Rover, Wizard, and Hotspur and I can remember
them from my childhood in the early 1950s.
TARADIDDLE Lyn Lloyd-Smith provided a variant: "While I have never
heard of 'taradiddle', 'faradiddle' is a word I know well. Not quite
a fib but more of a fanciful silly story, I might consider using it
in certain contexts." It's not so common as "taradiddle", but this
is one example:
He smiled, obviously about to spin her some faradiddle,
and Sarah's frayed patience snapped.
[The Shadow of Albion, by Andre Norton and Rosemary
Edghill, 1999.]
Among my many unaccomplishments is that of drumming. I picked up an
incorrect definition for "paradiddle". It does consist of four drum
strokes, but either left-right-left-left or right-left-right-right
(LRLL or RLRR). I have since learned that the vocabulary of drumming
is full of such exotic terms. There's the flamdiddle, for example, a
paradiddle with added flam (a flam being a quick double stroke, one
heavier than the other) and the paradiddlediddle, which is LRLLRR or
RLRRLL.
2. Slangwhanger
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When this went out of fashion, the English language lost one of its
more flamboyant words. Its early days, in the first decades of the
nineteenth century, are marked by association with two distinguished
American men of letters, Washington Irving and John Pickering.
Irving started a satirical magazine in New York in 1807 with the
whimsical title of Salmagundi; or The Whim-whams and Opinions of
Launcelot Langstaff, Esq. & Others. Salmagundi was a popular salad
of the time whose many constituents led to its name being borrowed
for a miscellaneous collection (see http://wwwords.org?SLMGD).
A slangwhanger was what we would now call a newspaper columnist, a
writer who was free to express his personal opinions, which he often
did with great energy and notorious political partisanship. Irving
wrote with heavy irony of them in one issue:
In this country every man adopts some particular slang-
whanger as the standard of his judgment, and reads
everything he writes, if he reads nothing else; which is
doubtless the reason why the people of this logocracy are
so marvellously enlightened.
John Pickering was a lawyer, philologist and scholar, an authority
on North American Indian languages and compiler of one of the
earliest lexicons of classical Greek. In 1816, he compiled the first
collection of Americanisms, under the ponderous title, typical of
the age: Vocabulary, or a Collection of Words and Phrases Which Have
Been Supposed to be Peculiar to the United States of America. He
wrote of "slangwhanger":
This word, which is of very recent origin in America,
does not denote merely a "writer;" It means also a noisy
talker, who makes use of that sort of political or other
cant, which amuses the rabble, and is called by the vulgar
name of slang. It is hardly necessary to add, that this
term (as well as slang-whanging) is never admitted into
the higher kinds of writing; but, like other cant words,
is confined to that familiar style, which is allowed only
in works of humour.
Pickering wasn't a fan of slang or the evolving American dialect but
sought to preserve the purity of the English language in America. He
wrote Vocabulary to warn his countrymen against using the words he
listed in it because they would be thought provincial barbarians by
British scholars. He would have been saddened to learn that
"slangwhanger" maintained a place in the language throughout the
century, though he might have been comforted by this:
A "slang-whanger" is a noisy, turbulent fellow, whose
language is not of the best, and slang itself is generally
considered disreputable.
[Bucks County Gazette (Pennsylvania) 24 Sep. 1891.]
By then, the word could mean a political orator, bar-room pundit,
hell-fire preacher or bullying court lawyer. It could at times also
mean something written by a newspaper slangwhanger or a violent
political harangue.
3. Smelling of the lamp
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Q. Anthony Cave Brown writes in his Bodyguard of Lies of a deception
plan being considered by the Allies at the beginning of the Second
World War: "Marshall's and Eisenhower's plan was not only thought to
smell of the lamp ..." I wonder if you might tell me what he meant
by that strange phrase, and what its origin might be. [Ed Shaw]
A. The smell of the lamp is what remains when you have burnt the
midnight oil.
You have - say - toiled over a work with immense effort, working
late into the night to revise and polish and perfect your creation.
The end of all your efforts is likely to be a work with the vitality
and freshness of a three-day-dead rat. Your overwrought effort has
lost the spontaneity and ease of good writing. James Thurber once
described a much-reworked piece in the New Yorker as exhibiting the
"strains of rewrite", another way of expressing the same idea. In
the book that you mention, it's probably suggesting that the plan is
over-designed - too complex and theoretical to be useful.
The expression is first recorded in English in 1579, in Sir Thomas
North's translation of a work of two millennia ago by the Greek
biographer and philosopher Plutarch. Its figurative force remained
obvious until gas and electric lighting allowed writers to slave
into the night without the aid of oil lamps.
The editor of a short-lived theatrical review in Dublin two
centuries ago put it like this in his inaugural issue:
Such a man may produce a good paper, but then it will
smell of the lamp. ... The strife and struggle of his
style will render his sentiments cramp and pedantic.
[The Stage, 9 Apr. 1821. "Cramp" is in an old sense of
being difficult to make out or comprehend; a cramp-word
was difficult to say or understand.]
The phrase has often had a flavour of academic hackwork. It had a
brief flurry of popularity in the early 1800s but has otherwise
never been common. This is a rare modern appearance:
Rose [Wilder Lane] wrote adult novels of pioneering
life, stealing her mother's material but substituting the
sourness of maturity for the warm-heartedness of Wilder's
children's fiction. They smell of the lamp.
[The Guardian, 29 Dec. 2012.]
4. Sic!
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The vocabulary of TV and radio weather forecasters everywhere seems
to be full of extraordinary phrases. Gareth Wynn-Williams heard one
on BBC Radio on 20 July speak of "a sea-change in the landscape", a
remarkable geographic occurrence.
Dr Frankenstein lives, at least according to this BBC news item of
17 July found by Jago Tremain: "A team led by Dr Jeanne Lawrence
inserted a gene called XIST into the stem cells of a person with
Down's syndrome grown in the lab."
Brian Barratt found this on the website of an Australian wholesaler
of microwave meals: "By ooming straight to you we can afford to give
your customers a better price point and intern increase your GP."
"That's a relief!" emailed Gary Puckering about a flash report on
the BBC's website on 23 July: "The Duchess of Cambridge has given
birth to a child, Buckingham Palace announces." Coincidentally, Dr
Ray Brindle made exactly the same comment about a headline on the
Guardian's site: "Royal baby: Duchess of Cambridge leaves hospital
with new prince - live."
5. Useful information
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