World Wide Words -- 08 Jun 13
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jun 7 16:50:55 UTC 2013
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WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 835 Saturday 8 June 2013
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Crosspatch.
3. Cli-fi.
4. Handicap.
5. Sic!
6. Subscriptions and other information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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BARBER'S CAT Several readers commented that the barber's cat might
be a humorous antithesis to and a play on the phrase "as fit as the
butcher's dog". I hadn't previously made the acquaintance of this
animal. The OED says it was a breed of dog but neglects to include
the expression, probably because it only came into being after the
entry was written in 1888 - more recent works suggest that it's a
twentieth-century expression, originally from Lancashire. It can't
be the source of the much older "barber's cat" but is probably a
blend of it with the ancient "fit as a fiddle". The idea is that a
butcher's dog must be healthy because it's well fed on meat, though
that might equally imply it was fat and lazy (Australians have had
the variant "full as a butcher's dog", to have enjoyed a substantial
meal). In Francis Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue
of 1788, however, "butcher's dog" is defined as one that can "lie by
the beef without touching it, a simile often applicable to married
men".
POSSESSIVES WITH VERBAL NOUNS Graham Cobb was one of a large number
of readers who thoughtfully suggested there was more to the decision
whether to employ a possessive form: "I feel the choice changes the
meaning slightly and that both are equally valid depending on the
meaning you wish to convey. This is easiest to illustrate with 'I
have unhappy memories of him screaming at me'. In this form, it
means that my memory is of him, and what he is doing is screaming.
'I have unhappy memories of his screaming at me' means my memory is
of screaming, his screaming. Both forms are equally correct but
subtly different in emphasis." Hilary Powers noted that some writers
on grammar and style agree: "In The Copyeditor's Handbook, Amy
Einsohn supports Strunk & White in arguing that the noun or pronoun
should reflect the meaning: 'Do you mind me asking a question?'
refers to the behaviour of a specific person (differentiated from
that of others in the group), while 'Do you mind my asking a
question?' refers to the acceptability of questions in general."
2. Crosspatch
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A recent article about Mark Haddon, who wrote The Curious Incident
of the Dog in the Night-Time, reminded me of this pejorative term:
Haddon is sometimes described as a crosspatch. "Our
defining connection was that we were both grumpy men in
our 40s with children. We'd sit down over lunch, grumbling
about how indie music wasn't as good as when we were
teens,"
[The Guardian, 4 May 2013.]
A grumpy grumbler - that's a crosspatch to a T.
It's from the seventeenth century, now remembered much more in the
UK than in other English-speaking countries, though even here it has
lost its one-time colloquial force to become rather literary. We
don't need to spend time on its first element, an obvious synonym
for bad-tempered, but the second may mislead us. This patch isn't a
piece of cloth for mending or some small area of ground. It's a
fool, simpleton or clown.
The story is that the original Patch was a real clown or fool named
Sexten, who was employed by Cardinal Wolsey. When Wolsey fell out of
favour with Henry VIII, he gave him Sexten along with Hampton Court
in an attempt to restore himself to the king's good books (it didn't
work). We know very little about Sexten, not even his first name,
but a letter from Thomas Bedyll to Thomas Cromwell in 1535 mentioned
that Sexten, then working for the king, was "an old fool" and it was
time to search out a replacement. People have tried to fit the cloth
sense of patch to Sexten's nickname by saying that he wore patched
clothes, a form of motley. It's much more likely that his name came
from the Italian "pazzo", a fool or madman. A little later, "patch"
become a generic term for a clownish individual, used by Shakespeare
in A Midsummer Night's Dream: "A crew of patches, rude Mechanicals".
"Crosspatch", as an elaboration of "patch", turns up first in a work
of 1699, A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the
Canting Crew, that is, the slang or jargon of beggars, thieves and
other ne'er-do-wells. It's another of our odd gender-bending terms -
unlike "patch" it was then and for a century after applied mainly to
women. It was Sir Walter Scott who began to use it of men.
3. Cli-fi
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This suddenly fashionable term, a shortening of "climate fiction",
is obviously based on "sci-fi", an abbreviation for science fiction
used mainly by those who are unfamiliar with it (fans and writers
hate it and insist on "SF", so perhaps we should be writing about
"CF" instead).
Climate fiction is fundamentally dystopian. Its focus is the effect
of climate change on human life, perhaps including its continuing
existence. Most commentators have listed J G Ballard's The Drowned
World of 1962 as an early example, a prophetic tale in which melting
ice-caps and rising sea levels led to the destruction of
civilisation, though the cause was solar flares, not human-derived
changes to the climate. In the past decade it has become a frequent
theme in SF. Examples are Kim Stanley Robinson's Science in the
Capitol trilogy that began with Forty Signs of Rain in 2004, and The
Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi in 2009.
The term "cli-fi" appeared in 2012. Dan Bloom wrote an article on
TeleRead on 9 March that year, using the term, though he has since
stated that he actually invented it in 2007. Another early user was
Margaret Atwood, which helped to bring it, and the genre, to much
wider public attention (to the extent that an article in the Irish
Times in December 2012 said she had invented it).
One interesting consequence of heightened awareness of the possible
consequences of human influence on the planet is that the genre has
begun to move from SF towards the literary mainstream - for example,
Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood in 2009; Ian McEwan's Solar
of 2010; and Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behaviour, which was on the
shortlist for the 2013 Women's Prize for Fiction. An article in the
Christian Science Monitor on 26 April was headlined, "Don't call it
'science fiction'. Cli-fi is literary fiction."
Most of the mainstream works are set in the present day or the near
future rather than looking speculatively at longer-term implications
as SF novels tend to do.
4. Handicap
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Q. What I'd like to know is how or where "handicap" was formed? What
is a handicap? Does it have anything to do with having your cap in
your hand? In other words, why "handicap"? [Randy Forror]
A. Some people with disabilities dislike "handicapped" because they
believe it refers to a person having to beg for alms or go "cap in
hand" for assistance.
In fact, it has nothing to do with having your cap in your hand but
a great deal with having your hand in a cap. The first forms of the
word were "hand i' cap", or "hand in the cap". The original handicap
was a gambling game or lottery indulged in by sporting gentlemen,
especially those associated with horse racing.
It involved three people. Let's call them Alan, Brian and Charlie
and suppose that Alan has a nice gold watch and Brian an excellent
thoroughbred horse. Alan decides he would like to have Brian's horse
and challenges him to exchange it for his watch. Brian accepts the
challenge and the pair of them agree on Charlie as their umpire.
Charlie produces a hat or cap, into which all three of them put an
agreed stake. Alan and Brian put their hands into the cap, out of
sight. Charlie extols the relative virtues of both watch and horse
and names a difference in value between them, to be paid by the
owner of the less valuable item to make it a fair exchange. Alan and
Brian then open their hands. If both contain something, usually
small change, they indicate Charlie's price is acceptable and the
deal is agreed; if either or both show empty hands, the deal is off.
If the deal is accepted, Charlie gets the stakes. If neither is
satisfied - Alan's and Brian's hands are both empty - Charlie also
gets the stakes. If one accepts but the other doesn't, the one who
has accepted gets the stakes. This sounds complicated and dry but in
practice it was anything but. It was common for side bets to be made
by those present on whether Alan and Brian would accept or reject
Charlie's valuation.
The term starts to appear in print in the middle seventeenth century
(Samuel Pepys is an early user, who wrote in September 1660, "Some
of us fell to Handycapp, a sport that I never knew before, which was
very good"), though the idea was first recorded in the medieval poem
Piers Plowman around the middle of the fourteenth century. Most of
the challenges, of course, were for items of much smaller value and
indeed the fun was in the contest, not in acquiring something one of
the contestants lusted after. The cap or hat was later dispensed
with and the contestants just put their hands in their pockets until
it was time to show them.
A similar idea was applied to horse racing around the time of Pepys.
In a two-horse race, an umpire proposed a weight which the better
horse and rider should carry to make the contest equitable; the same
rules were followed to decide if the race should be run on those
terms. Later, in the eighteenth century, handicapping was extended
to races with more than two horses; this was more difficult to work
out and the decision about the weights to be carried was made by an
umpire without a game taking place.
Some evidence exists that it had early on been used in golf, though
the term wasn't used until the eighteenth century. By the 1840s,
handicapping had been extended to shooting, billiards, foot races
and other contests. Shortly afterwards the term begin to be used
figuratively for a person who had been placed at a disadvantage for
some reason. It was in the early twentieth century that it was
applied to a person with a physical or mental disability, a usage
that is now deprecated (see http://wwwords.org?HNDCP).
The game continued until at least the end of the nineteenth century.
A famous description exists of the latter stages of one. Jack is the
umpire and Mr Pacey and Mr Sponge are the contestants. Jack has set
a handicapping value and both contestants have taken their hands out
of their pockets to indicate that they have made a decision but
haven't yet opened them to show what that is ("sport" here means to
display or show):
"Hold hard, then, gen'lemen!" roared Jack, getting
excited, and beginning to foam. "Hold hard, gen'lemen!"
repeated he, just as he was in the habit of roaring at the
troublesome customers in Lord Scamperdale's field; "Mr.
Pacey and Mr. Sponge both sport their hands."
"I'll lay a guinea Pacey doesn't hold money,"
exclaimed Guano.
"Done!" exclaimed Parson Blossomnose.
"I'll bet it does," observed Charley Slapp.
"I'll take you," replied Mr. Miller.
Then the hubbub of betting commenced, and raged with
fury for a short time; some betting sovereigns, some half-
sovereigns, other half-crowns and shillings, as to whether
the hands of one or both held money.
Givers and takers being at length accommodated,
perfect silence at length reigned, and all eyes turned
upon the double fists of the respective champions.
Jack having adjusted his great tortoiseshell-rimmed
spectacles, and put on a most consequential air, inquired,
like a gambling-house keeper, if they were "All done" -
had all "made their game?" And "Yes! yes! yes!" resounded
from all quarters.
"Then, gen'lemen," said Jack, addressing Pacey and
Sponge, who still kept their closed hands on the table,
"show!"
At the word, their hands opened, and each held
money.
"A deal! a deal! a deal!" resounded through the room,
accompanied with clapping of hands, thumping of the table,
and dancing of glasses.
[Mr Sponge's Sporting Tour, by R S Surtees, 1852.]
5. Sic!
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Chris Sunderland found this on the BBC site on 31 May: "Mr Sullivan
filmed The Magical Timperley Tour, a documentary where Sidebottom
toured the area of Greater Manchester where he lived with 100 fans
on an open top bus."
Barry Prince e-mailed from New Zealand to point out a caption on the
Mail's online sports page on 2 June: "Retired footballer Michael
Owen has revealed he wants to become a jockey. ... [N]ow Owen wants
to take his passion a step further by riding in a horse in a
fundraising race." Presumably a Trojan horse.
"Am I right to be confused?" Alan Weyman asked rhetorically, having
heard the presenter of BBC Television's Countryfile say on 2 June:
"We're heading deeper into Yorkshire now, where there's been
something of a sea-change at grass-roots level."
An item from the Associated Press appeared in newspapers on 2 June
and was sent in by Steve Colby and Enith Vardaman: "Seven-time All-
Star Grant Hill retired from the NBA on Saturday after 19 seasons,
ending a career interrupted by injuries that included an Olympic
gold medal."
On 4 June the Israel Today website had an article about apartheid,
which Rod Theobald says included this sentence: "They were subjected
to segregation everywhere from pubic restrooms to schools to
hospitals."
A BBC news website report dated 3 June about crocodile infestation
in Australia was spotted by Joan Butler: "When the rivers rise, the
crocs are able to go wherever they like. Quite often they'll walk up
into people's backyards looking for their dogs."
6. Useful information
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