World Wide Words -- 29 Jun 13
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jun 28 17:01:28 UTC 2013
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WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 838 Saturday 29 June 2013
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A formatted version is also available online at
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Able-whackets.
3. Vection.
4. Jitney.
5. Sic!
6. Subscriptions and other information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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BLIZZARD OF HORSERADISH Michael Grosvenor Myer responded to last
week's piece: "The Marx Bros film was called Horse Feathers, not
Horsefeathers. It was one of a sequence of four made for Paramount
early in their careers, before they signed with Irving Thalberg at
MGM, who insisted on more narrative coherence in contrast to the
freewheeling nonsense of their Paramount days. The four Paramount
films were Animal Crackers, Monkey Business, Horse Feathers and Duck
Soup, all having two-word titles idiomatically redolent of nonsense
and confusion."
HIDING TO NOTHING/NOWHERE "I never heard this in the Lancashire of
my youth," Anne O'Brien wrote, "but we had an expression that served
the same purpose and which I still use: 'can't win for losing'."
That's known in the US, though it remains more common in Britain, as
does another expression that she remembers, "can't do right for
doing wrong."
Margaret Gibbs commented, "I wonder if the 'nowhere' version is not
a confusion with 'on a siding to nowhere', referring to a train
sitting idly on a siding? My husband and I had maternal grandfathers
who were civil engineers with the Canadian Pacific Railroad, and 'on
a siding to nowhere' was commonly used in both our families." That
makes it much older than the earliest example I can find in print,
which is in a short story by William S Burroughs in Esquire dated
1958. It often appears online as an allusion in comments by railway
enthusiasts worldwide, not only in North America. It rarely appears
in newspapers, though The Scotsman wrote in 2004: "Under London
direction, rail in Scotland was on a siding to nowhere." The most
likely origin - I am guessing - is a play on "journey to nowhere", a
set phrase for a useless endeavour that's at least as old as the
railway era, though I can't trace its antecedents.
FRENCH FRIES Proving once again that it is always worth expanding
the scope of an etymological search, Thomas Thornton told me about
German fried potatoes, a term that has been widely used in the USA
from about the 1890s, though it went out of favour for the obvious
reason during the two world wars. Recipes vary widely but are based
on Bratkartoffeln, parboiled potatoes sliced thick and pan-fried
with seasoning.
SIC! SICCED! A number of readers criticised "accidently", which a
submitter used in a comment in a Sic! item last week. It's marked as
non-standard by current dictionaries and style guides but that is
surely too harsh a description of a common and inoffensive variant
of "accidentally". Large numbers of recent examples are on record
from everywhere that English is spoken and it has been in regular
use from the fifteenth century by authors who include Jane Austen
and Charles Dickens.
UPDATE With valuable research help from Gary Kiecker, a former
marketing director for Scotch tapes at 3M, I've been able to update
the story of "duct tape", disposing of a widespread story about its
origins and antedating the term. See http://wwwords.org?DCTTP.
2. Able-whackets
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It would be best to begin with a definition:
ABLE-WHACKETS. A popular sea-game with cards, wherein
the loser is beaten over the palms of the hands with a
handkerchief tightly twisted like a rope. Very popular
with horny-fisted salts.
[The Sailor's Word-Book, by William Henry Smyth,
1867.]
There were many such rough and spirited games to while away time on
board ship, including High Cockalorum, Sling the Monkey and Baste
the Bear, of the last of which one observer commented that it was "a
recreation of which nobody tired except the unfortunate actor who
was cast for the bear."
This is a more detailed contemporary description:
And here I may relate our game of Able Whackets. The
cards called "good books"; the hand, "flipper"; a
handkerchief tightly braided up, "good money." At the loss
of the game he that was the winner would say, "I demand
the good money," and to the loser, "Hold out your flipper:
this is for the loss of the good game called Able
Whackets, and a precious hard thump"; another would say,
"This is for the same," and so on all round.
[Recollections of My Sea Life from 1808 to 1830, by
Captain John Harvey Boteler, published by The Navy Records
Society in 1942.]
It was a particularly suitable game with which to tease a gullible
greenhorn, such as a young midshipman. One ploy was to insist that
the correct names were used for everything associated with the game.
As well as those Captain Boteler listed, the "board of green cloth"
was the card table and to "stand able" meant you claimed a winning
hand. A miscall of one of these terms resulted in every other player
around the board of green cloth beating the offender's flipper with
the good money.
None of the many descriptions explain the card game itself. Though
it was clearly of secondary importance in the gulling of the unwary,
it must have had some rules, but we're never told what they were.
This tells of the end of another game:
The victim was called to receive punishment. Murray
having demanded the "good money," desired him to hold out
his flipper, and he began, "This is for the loss of the
good game called Able Whackets, this is for the same, and
this is for my standing Able and your losing the game;"
and at each time fell a stroke which nearly cut his hand
off. At the expiration of this, Weazel withdrew his hand
to offer it to the next. "Avaust there!" said Murray;
"hold out your flipper again!" and he received three more
most powerful cuts for Weazel's having stood Able and
having lost the game.
[The Arethusa: A Naval Story, by Frederick Chamier,
1837.]
We may presume that "standing able" provided the first part of the
name, perhaps with a nod to the rank of able seaman in the Royal
Navy. The second part must surely be from "whack" or "thwack".
3. Vection
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An everyday example of vection is sitting in a stationary train at a
platform and seeing another train alongside start to move; this may
give the impression that you're moving in the opposite direction: a
visual stimulus has fooled you. Vection can have unfortunate side-
effects, because a conflict between what your eyes are seeing and
what the motion sensors in your ears are telling your brain is a
classic cause of motion sickness.
Designers of video games want to enhance players' feeling of being
part of the action by making it seem that they are moving within the
scene. But the small size of most displays and the risk of motion
sickness have constrained them. A combination of new types of wrap-
around visual displays and motion sensors such as treadmills is now
changing that because they can couple the movements of players with
what they are seeing. As a result, "vection" has become common as a
term of art within the field.
"Vection" derives from the Latin verb "vehere", to carry or convey,
which also appears in compound verbs such as "convection" as well as
in "vector", the mathematical term for a quantity with direction as
well as size. An old sense of "vection", which comes directly from
Latin, is the action of carrying, in particular the transference of
a disease from one person to another ("vector" has also taken on the
sense of an organism responsible for such transfers).
4. Jitney
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Q. At breakfast today my mother-in-law referred (semi-jokingly) to
her vehicle as a "jitney". She explained that her late father always
used it. I had never heard it before despite having been raised in
the southern or southwestern region of the US, from where it is said
to originate. Do you know the history of this word and how it
evolved? [Haleigh Morgan]
A. The story begins near the end of the nineteenth century. "Jitney"
(or "gitney") was then a slang term for five cents (or perhaps for a
nickel coin, it's hard to tell). The earliest example researchers
have so far found is in an exchange between a pair of tramps:
"Can't spare de change. Me granmaw died in Sout'
Afriky an' I need dis to float me over ter de fun'ral."
"Quit yer kiddin' an' let me have a jitney."
[The Morning Herald (Lexington, Kentucky), 16 Dec.
1899.]
Around 1914 a transport sense began to appear, at first in forms
such as "jitney bus" and "jitney car", soon abbreviated to "jitney"
for the vehicle. In the early days it was a private car, running a
service that was a cross between a bus and a taxi. It often took the
same route as a bus or streetcar but was flexible about where you
could get on and off. Similar systems exist today in South American,
African and Asian countries under many names. The cars were called
jitneys because the fare for any length of journey was five cents.
The system immediately became hugely popular:
Have you ridden in a "jitney bus"? You get a $2.50 taxi
journey for 5 cents. ... The idea, so far as anybody can
discover, originated in Los Angeles. Somebody with a Ford
went broke. He began competing with the street cars. Now
there are 600 "jitney buses" in Los Angeles, doing an
estimated business of $1,250,000 a year. ... San Diego and
San Francisco liked the "jitney bus" notion. It swept up
the Coast. Portland has them. So has Tacoma. Little
Everett has gone "jitney bus" mad. It has 60 or more, and
nobody rides on the street cars any more.
[Seattle Star, 1 Jan. 1915 1/6.]
Jitneys were common for a decade or more but increasing regulation
and battles with streetcar and bus companies meant that they slowly
died out; by the 1930s they were rare. The term "jitney" largely
went with them, although it never completely vanished from the
language and jitney buses still ply in a few communities in the US.
One place it survived was in the name of Jitney Jungle supermarkets,
founded in 1919, whose founders borrowed it in part as a reference
to the "nickel on a quarter" that the customer would save from
patronising their new-fangled self-service stores.
Where "jitney" comes from is a puzzle and dictionaries today are
still likely to cautiously say "origin unknown". Speculation about
its origin was widespread almost from the moment that jitneys hit
the street. It was argued that it was a Russian word for a small
coin that had been brought to America by Jewish immigrants, that it
came from Yiddish slang or that it derived from an English village
of that name south of London.
There are strong hints in early sources, including the first known
example, that the word appeared first in the south-eastern United
States among Creole-speaking African Americans. If so, the most
likely source that specialists have put forward is a Louisiana
French term "jetnée", which is said to derive from French "jeton", a
token.
This remains a supposition, albeit a plausible one. The experts
remain understandably cautious.
5. Sic!
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Reuters sent out a story on 21 June, Dann Albright reports, with the
headline, "Six all-female jurors selected in Trayvon Martin case."
It was later amended to "All-female jury selected ...".
Ray Brindle read this sentence in the Australian Ethical Investments
e-newsletter: "Our new video explains how ethical investment can
give good returns in under 2 minutes."
Stephen Lucek emailed from Dublin with a headline from last Sunday's
edition of the Boston Globe: "Deputy police chief aims for reduced
costs, efficiency."
Another easy-to-misunderstand headline appeared over an AP story in
the Washington Post on 24 June: "Man shoots pictures of wolf chasing
him on motorcycle in Canada". Thanks go to Justin Beam and Karen
McVicker for that.
6. Useful information
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