World Wide Words -- 18 May 13

[Michael Quinion]

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WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 832            Saturday 18 May 2013
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Palpebrous.
3. Rotate versus revolve.
4. Spill the beans.
5. Sic!
6. Subscriptions and other information.


1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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BANAUSIC  Numerous readers pointed out that this word is much better 
known in German in the form "Banause". Heidi Beck commented that it 
is "regularly used by German speakers to describe someone who is 
uncultured, a philistine."

EARL GREY TEA  To judge from correspondence, some confusion exists 
about "bergamot". There are two species of that name. The Earl Grey 
one is a citrus tree, the Bergamot orange (Citrus bergamia), which 
produces fruit the size of oranges but coloured like a lemon. The 
other is an unconnected North American plant of the mint family, the 
wild bergamot or bee balm. 

I was watching a marvellous programme on BBC television last Friday 
that recreated the dances and food of the famous Netherfield ball in 
Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. The narrator mentioned bergamot 
as a flavouring but said it as though it were French. The final "t" 
is actually sounded, as it didn't come to us from that language but 
was taken from Italian "bergamotta" (modern Italian "bergamotto"); 
some dictionaries say that this refers to the city of Bergamo while 
others argue it's from Turkish "bey armudu", the prince's pear.


2. Palpebrous  /'palpIbr at s/
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My secret is out. I admit it. I am palpebrous.

However, my confession will mean nothing unless I explain the word, 
because it won't be understood even by that minuscule proportion of 
the population who know the Latin from which it was taken.

It's so rare I have been able to find only one modern example:

    Don's deep voice, his palpebrous, leonine features, his 
    evident learning, his almost BBC-like diction, his entire 
    bearing, might seem so grand as to be intimidating to a 
    young student.
    [Geographical Review, July 2009.]

A member of the medical profession will assume it has something to 
do with my eyes, since a palpebra is an eyelid, a term taken from 
classical Latin and so having "palpebrae" as its plural. Zoologists 
may recognise it as a relative of the second half of the scientific 
name Paleosuchus palpebrosus for Cuvier's dwarf caiman (it means to 
have prominent eyelids). It also appears in Zosterops palpebrosus, 
the formal term for the oriental white-eye, a little bird so named 
because it has a prominent white ring around its eye. A scientific 
relative, now wholly defunct, is "palpebrate", having eyelids.

We're in the right area, but "palpebrous" came about through a 
misapprehension by Benjamin Smart, a nineteenth-century elocutionist 
and grammarian. In the second edition of A New Critical Pronouncing 
Dictionary of the English Language, he defined "palpebrous" to mean 
a person with prominent eyebrows.

So now you know.


3. Rotate versus revolve
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Q. A loosely organised group of eccentric friends and wine lovers 
meets each week. The question arose, does a lazy Susan revolve or 
rotate? What about the plates on it? [Brian Miller, Australia]

A. That's an interesting question, which lacks a simple answer. If 
anybody's not sure about a lazy Susan, by the way, it's a device on 
a table which turns to give easy access to plates and condiments 
(see http://wwwords.org?LZSN for my comments on the term).

Most people's response to this would probably be on the lines of 
"who cares?" The two words are used so interchangeably in the sense 
of spinning round that for most purposes they're synonyms and 
they're treated as such in thesauruses. To take an example, does a 
wheel rotate or revolve? Most people would say it can do either.

If you're arguing from etymology (always risky), it can only rotate, 
since that term comes from the Latin verb "rotare", to turn in a 
circle, whose root is "rota", a wheel. But you might argue that it 
revolves, because that verb is from the Latin "volvere", to roll (in 
this case, the "re-" prefix implies repetition of the action) and a 
wheeled vehicle certainly does roll along.

Strictly speaking, there is a difference, which is most noticeable 
in the terminology of astronomers. For them, the earth rotates every 
24 hours but takes a year to revolve around the sun. The rule about 
which verb to use is based on the position of the axis of rotation. 
If the body turns on an axis within itself it rotates but if the 
axis is outside it revolves. Following this definition, a wheel can 
only rotate (hooray for etymology).

The strict answer to the question, therefore, is that the lazy Susan 
rotates. However, because the plates on it orbit or circle around an 
axis outside themselves, they revolve. Do not insist on this careful 
distinction during the later stages of a dinner party or the lazy 
Susan may become a spinning projectile aimed at you.

As I say, the rule is rarely observed outside science and the two 
words have been hopelessly muddled for centuries. A revolving door 
actually rotates; a rotating shaft makes revolutions. You might 
argue that a revolver ought to be a rotator but it depends whether 
you are thinking of the cartridges or the cylinder that holds them.


4. Spill the beans
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Q. An Indonesian friend fluent in English asked me what "spill the 
beans" means and how it originated. It's fairly easy to understand 
"spill" as revealing a secret, but why "beans"?  [Martin Schell]

A. The key word is indeed "spill", which has always had a negative 
aura about it. In Old English it meant to kill and in the twelfth 
century to shed blood (which is why we still have the fixed phrase 
"to spill blood"). By the fourteenth century it had softened to mean 
causing damage or waste, from which evolved the specific idea of 
letting a liquid accidentally escape from a container. Much later it 
took on a figurative sense of being thrown out of a moving vehicle.

"Spill the beans" starts to appear in the US early in the twentieth 
century. In its first decade it varied in its meaning and settled on 
our current one only in the 1920s. 

Early examples are in reports of horse racing. This is the first 
example that I've so far come across:

    KINGSTELLE SPILLED THE BEANS
    Everyone fancied that the fifth race was a two-horse 
    one between Nearest and Audiphone, who were held at 4 to 5 
    and 8 to 5 respectively. Kingstelle, a 10-to-1 shot, broke 
    it up. She laid away from the pace and came along in the 
    stretch, and won, handily, a real nice race.
    [St Louis Republic (St Louis, Missouri), 6 May 
    1903.]

Since the horse did better than expected, this might seem to 
challenge the idea of a spill being a bad thing but the headline 
writer is saying that expectations have been upset, a figurative 
extension of "spill". In the following years the idiom spread beyond 
racetracks, by 1908 being used of boxing and by 1910 of baseball. In 
that game it came to mean a blunder that leads to defeat:

    In the eighth it looked like Vernon surely would 
    overcome the Seals' lead and win the game, but some 
    boneheaded base running and poor judgment on the coaching 
    lines spilled the beans.
    [Los Angeles Herald, 3 Jun. 1910.]

An article in the Tacoma Times in March 1913 defines it like this: 
"If we descend to the vulgar language of the street ... 'Spilling 
the beans' has much the same meaning as 'upsetting the apple cart.'" 
Being considered slang may explain why it took some time to become 
mainstream. Most appearances were confined to the sports pages, 
which had a licence to adopt language that was considered unsuitable 
for other parts of the paper.

Our modern sense starts to appear around 1910 as an extension of the 
sports sense into upsetting a situation by speaking out. An early 
case on record concerns a ticket scalping scandal at a New York 
baseball club:

    The entire affair is again bottled up just at a time 
    when the American League president said he would spill the 
    beans and expose the rascality of the whole business.
    [Bisbee Daily Review (Bisbee, Arizona), 24 Dec. 
    1911.]

Politics being a rough old game, it's in news reports of events in 
that domain that we start to see a broader public use of the idiom. 
It was widely publicised in a comment from a witness during a famous 
court case of January 1914 about corruption and this seems to have 
broken the implicit ban on its use outside sport. 

To answer the original question - if you can still remember what it 
was - there doesn't seem to be anything special about "beans" and no 
good reason why it should have been adopted. That is, apart from the 
obvious consideration that spilling useful beans is a bad move. The 
idiom has appeared in various other forms since, including "spill 
the dirt", "spill the dice", "spill the dope" and "spill the works". 
There's also "spill it" by itself, with the sense "tell me your 
sensational gossip immediately". These confirm that the key word is 
"spill" and that the other noun is a mere embellishment. We may 
guess that some bean-spilling accident led to stable boys using it, 
but, as with most idioms, history is silent on what that might have 
been.


5. Sic!
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Many readers sent a link to a photo that has appeared widely online 
of the RSPCA shop in Bury, Lancashire. The slogan on the fascia is 
"Helping Bury Animals". Surely not a joking matter?

Tony McCoy O'Grady says he feels deficient in the leg department. He 
had read this in the Irish Times on 13 May: "Pricewatch conducted an 
unscientific Twitter poll, asking if people would shell out an extra 
50 cents on a pair of five socks, if they knew they were ethically 
produced."


6. Useful information
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Michael Quinion in the UK. ISSN 1470-1448. Copyediting and advice 
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