World Wide Words -- 01 Jun 13

[Michael Quinion]

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WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 834            Saturday 1 June 2013
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Argosy.
3. Possessives with verbal nouns.
4. Barber's cat.
5. Sic!
6. Subscriptions and other information.


1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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ADOXOGRAPHY  Erik Midelfort commented, "I enjoyed your entry and 
thought I might tell you that the Renaissance had another word for 
it: the 'mock encomium', in which the writer might laud silly things 
like a flea or a bit of dust. The classic of the genre was Erasmus 
of Rotterdam's Praise of Folly (1516). You mentioned Erasmus but 
erroneously claimed that he had written something in 1556, which was 
20 years after he died. [A typing error for 1536. Apologies.] You 
get into another bit of trouble on the origins of the word because 
the Greek word ('doxa') did not mean primarily 'glory'. That was the 
common meaning in the Bible, but the root term meant something more 
like 'opinion', or 'belief', or 'what seems to be true'." Hence, as 
Allan Paris pointed out, our "orthodox" (conforming to generally 
accepted rules or beliefs), which derives from "doxa", opinion, 
preceded by "orthos", straight or right.

SHORT END OF THE STICK  "I would have surmised," Alan Weyman wrote, 
"that 'getting the short end of the stick' conflated 'getting the 
wrong end...' with 'getting the short straw'." This last idiom is 
from the ancient selection method of drawing straws randomly from a 
set, which usually committed the person choosing the shortest one to 
an onerous or undesirable task. However, the expression itself is 
relatively modern, with the first example I can find being from the 
New York Times in 1904. This suggests it could not have contributed 
to the creation of "short end of the stick".


2. Argosy
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This was the name of a magazine which my eldest brother brought home 
when I was a child. Its cover featured a line drawing of an ancient 
vessel in full sail, which linked the word and the craft for me.

The etymological link is with the modern Croatian port of Dubrovnik, 
which was called Ragusa until after the Second World War. Together 
with Venice, on the other side of the Adriatic, it was an important 
Mediterranean trading port in the sixteenth century. A ragusa came 
to mean a ship from Ragusa and this was twisted by the English into 
"argosy".

By Shakespeare's time, it had become established as the term for a 
merchant ship of the very largest size, especially those of Venice 
and Ragusa, which is why Portia is able to say to Antonio at the end 
of the Merchant of Venice, "Unseal this letter soon; / There you 
shall find three of your argosies / Are richly come to harbour 
suddenly."

Much later, "argosy" became a figurative way to speak of a rich 
supply of some material or something that had valuable contents. It 
was given as a title to a literary digest, notably to the American 
pulp magazine published by Frank Munsey in 1882, but rather earlier 
to an English journal created by Alexander Strahan, which was 
revived in 1926 and was the one that I saw about 1948.

There is no connection with the story of Jason and the Argonauts, 
who sailed on the ship Argo in search of the Golden Fleece.


3. Possessives with verbal nouns
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Q. I was wondering if you could help me out on a grammatical matter 
that has recently been vexing me. When a pronoun is immediately 
followed by a verbal noun, should it be an ordinary pronoun or a 
possessive pronoun? Take this example I found in Alice Montgomery's 
biography of Katy Perry: "Now scarcely a day went by without them 
being mentioned in the press." Shouldn't it be "their being 
mentioned"? [Matthew Brand] 

A. This is a tricky one, not easy to understand or explain.

The construction has been the subject of scholarly disputation for 
about the past three centuries. A verbal noun, also called a gerund, 
is the present participle of a verb (ending in "-ing") used as a 
noun. Examples may help to explain the ways these "-ing" forms are 
used. In "Fred is driving home" or "Fred has been driving all day", 
"driving" is a participle, part of a compound verb. In "The driving 
instructor told Fred to stop the car", it's a participle acting as 
an adjective. In "Driving is hard work" it's a verbal noun - it's 
acting like a noun, but has active implications like a verb. Take 
another example: "Hunting otters is outlawed". "Hunting" here is a 
verbal noun which has both noun force (the concept of hunting) and 
verb force (the activity of hunting).

The verbal noun was known in Latin, hence its alternative name of 
gerund, which is from "gerundum", fittingly the gerund form of the 
verb "gerere", to do. But eighteenth-century grammarians who tried 
to analyse English grammar on Latin models were baffled by this dual 
nature of the English verbal noun and the way that it was commonly 
preceded by a noun or preposition in the possessive. 

To made matters more awkward, many writers used both possessive and 
non-possessive forms, sometimes even in the same text. In a letter 
in 1867, Lewis Carroll wrote "in hopes of his being able to join us" 
(the verbal noun "being" preceded by "his", a possessive pronoun) 
and also "I suppose the music prevented any of it being heard" 
("being" again, but this time with "it", a non-possessive pronoun).

There was a notable debate about this in 1926-27 between W H Fowler, 
who had just published his Dictionary of Modern English Usage, and 
the Danish etymologist and grammarian Otto Jespersen. Fowler argued 
that the possessive pronoun should be used in every situation but 
Jesperson refuted him with copious counter-examples, commenting that 
Fowler was an "instinctive grammatical moraliser". Grammarians have 
since then exhaustively researched the verbal noun and have come to 
an understanding of it that unfortunately hasn't universally reached 
student textbooks.

What has become clear is that the distinction between an "-ing" form 
as a verb and as a verbal noun is rather artificial and that there's 
no easy test for which construction is the right one. Good writers 
follow unconscious rules in deciding whether to use the possessive 
before a verbal noun, rules they've developed from their experience 
of using the language.

Current style books (such as Robert Burchfield's third edition of 
Fowler) attempt to codify practice by providing a detailed list of 
these rules. One is to use the possessive with proper and personal 
nouns and with personal pronouns but not with impersonal ones. In 
your case that would lead to the correct version being "their being 
mentioned" and explains why Lewis Carroll used both forms, his first 
being personal and the second impersonal. Another rule often put 
forward is that personal nouns aren't possessive if they're plural 
("Girls chasing boys is nothing new" versus "Annie's chasing boys is 
nothing new", though the only way that you can tell in the first 
example that "girls" isn't in the possessive is that there's no 
apostrophe after the "s").

However, the rules are much less well observed now than they were a 
few decades ago, so that a sentence like "I have unhappy memories of 
him screaming at me" doesn't strike most of us as wrong in the way 
that it would have done for Fowler. This is part of a move towards 
informal modes of expression in which possessives are less common. 

As an illustration, the late William Safire wrote about verbal nouns 
in his On Language column in the New York Times in February 1994. He 
gave the examples "It's a matter of women being exploited by men for 
centuries", "the cliché about love being blind" and "Liberals did 
not appreciate the President lecturing them". He asserted that they 
were all incorrect. I'd argue the opposite for the first two, as 
would Dr Burchfield, on the basis that the first contains a plural 
noun ("women") and the other an impersonal one ("love"). The third 
should be possessive by the rules but both forms feels right to me, 
perhaps because "president" is an insufficiently personal noun.


4. Barber's cat
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Q. I've come across the phrase "wet and windy like the barber's 
cat". Can you tell me anything about it? Why would a barber's cat be 
so? Does it relate to a particular cat of fable or legend? Initial 
researches have yielded nothing. [Mike Lean, Australia]

A. That's a very old-fashioned expression, once known throughout the 
Anglophone countries, though not I think in the USA. It was popular 
in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but we rarely come 
across it now. Deputy Willie O'Dea alluded to it in the Dáil, the 
Irish parliament, on 26 September 2009: "There is no point coming 
into the House acting as the parliamentary version of the barber's 
cat. We know what components made up that creature."

I'll bet few readers could tell Mr O'Dea what those components were. 
Looking into its history is complicated because one part of it was 
considered to be "an expression too coarse to print", as John Camden 
Hotten commented in his Slang Dictionary in 1864. The form that he 
refused to print was "full of wind and piss, like the barber's cat". 
One meaning, surely the one Mr O'Dea had in mind, was of a uselessly 
and unnecessarily loquacious person. That sense was made explicit in 
this early appearance, though in a carefully euphemised version:

    He should be the very last man in Dundee to call any 
    one a windbag, for it is a well-known fact that, among his 
    own class as well as among those who he says are 
    "sometimes called the working classes," he is generally 
    considered the very Prince of Windbags. Indeed, it is 
    often remarked about him that he is all wind and water, 
    like the barber's cat.
    [The Dundee Courier and Argus, 8 Sep. 1877.]

Another version was "as poor as a barber's cat", which was expanded 
to refer to somebody who was half-starved, sickly or weak, though 
some later slang researchers said that it meant no more than that he 
was thin. Curiously, "all dolled up like a barber's cat" is also on 
record, as is "as conceited as a barber's cat". Give a cat a bad 
name, it seems, and you can insult him as much as you like.

It was low slang of the working classes, so its early history and 
origin are unclear. J Redding Ware argued in his Passing English of 
the Victorian Era in 1909 that it might be a corruption of the term 
"bare brisket", which he said was "also used for a thin fellow, the 
brisket being the thinnest part of beef". This is imaginative but 
too much so to be acceptable. More plausible was the hypothesis that 
a cat in a barber's shop would find little to eat and so be poor or 
ill-served, an idea expanded much later to explain your version of 
the phrase:

      As he walked back he said to Mathews: "Do you know 
    the expression - wet and windy, like the barber's cat?" 
    
      "I know it well," Mathews confessed. "Why the 
    barber's cat, I wonder?" 
      "A consequence of frugality," the poet explained. 
    "Its staple diet is hair and soapsuds." 
    [Strumpet City, by James Plunkett, 1969.]


5. Sic!
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Terry McManus found an article on The Independent's website on 26 
May about an exhibition at the British Library which mentioned 
"David Cameron and Tony Blair in calculated open-necked shorts and 
casual wear visiting the troops in the field."

A feature piece on the local DeLorean Automobile Club in the York 
Sunday News of Pennsylvania was sent in by Bill Schmeer: "The car 
was manufactured by the DeLorean Motor Company in Northern Ireland, 
which went bankrupt in 1982."

David Luther Woodward forwarded an extract from a front-page story 
in the Madison News-Record, North Carolina, for 30 May: "25 percent 
of net profits will be allocated to the superintendent of the county 
administration unit to be exasperated solely for the use of Hot 
Spring Elementary School."

Elena Cicinskaite recently visited the Yorkshire Museum of Farming. 
In the section about the work of the Women's Land Army in the Second 
World War she found an object captioned thus: "Bicycle Lamp with a 
'black out hood' to stop light being invisible to German bomber 
pilots above."


6. Useful information
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