World Wide Words -- 12 Oct 13
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Oct 11 15:17:11 UTC 2013
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WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 853 Saturday 12 October 2013
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Preantepenultimate.
3. Snippets.
4. Softly, softly, catchee monkey.
5. Sic!
6. Subscriptions and other information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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DWARVES Several readers responded to my mildly facetious comment,
"if 'dwarves' was good enough for J R R Tolkien". Jason Brown noted
a letter from Tolkien to his publisher, Stanley Unwin, in 1937,
following the publication of The Hobbit:
Although all [reviewers] have carefully used the
correct "dwarfs" themselves, [none] has commented on the
fact ... that I use throughout the "incorrect" plural
"dwarves". I am afraid it is just a piece of private bad
grammar, rather shocking in a philologist; but I shall
have to go on with it. Perhaps my "dwarf" - since he and
the Gnome are only translations into approximate
equivalents of creatures with different names and rather
different functions in their own world - may be allowed a
peculiar plural. The real "historical" plural of "dwarf"
(like "teeth" of "tooth") is "dwarrows", anyway: rather a
nice word, but a bit too archaic. Still I rather wish I
had used the word "dwarrow".
Notwithstanding Tolkien's comments, "dwarves" has a significant
history as an English plural. The Oxford English Dictionary's first
example is dated 1818 and many others appear in British newspapers
and books in the nineteenth century, no doubt creating them on the
model of words such as "scarf" and "wharf", which can have their
plurals in "-ves". But Tolkien certainly widened its popularity and
rendered it acceptable, to the extent that it is common today.
VAPER Amy Livingston emailed, "The introduction of 'vapers' for
smokers of electronic cigarettes brought to mind 'viper', used in
Harlem during the 1920s to refer to a marijuana smoker. It's fallen
out of general use now, but it survives in the song "You'se A Viper"
by Stuff Smith, most famously recorded as "If You're A Viper" by
Fats Waller. The alliance among vapers fighting a proposed ban on e-
cigarettes seems to reflect the spirit in which Waller recorded the
song as a nose-thumb to the drug czar of his day. Maybe it's time
for a new anthem:
Dreamed about a cig without the smoke
Hit of juice won't make you choke
No-smoking sign, but you're still fine
If you'se a vaper."
OLD-FASHIONED Josie Frei wrote, "I remember mother (in the north-
east of England) using this expression but entirely in the meaning
which Angela Carter describes: 'ironic, sly, a smidgen of disdain in
it.' I could never understand what was so old-fashioned about it."
2. Preantepenultimate
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This train of prefixes surely needs uncoupling. Something that is
ultimate is the last in a series (from Latin "ultimare", come to an
end); the penultimate is next to last ("pen-", a prefix formed from
Latin "paene", almost); the antepenultimate is the one before that
("ante-", previous, from Latin "ante"). Preantepenultimate (Latin
"prae-", before) is one step further back still, making it the
fourth from the end of the series, the last but three.
It was invented in all seriousness by a famous lexicographer, John
Walker, in his Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the
English Language, dated 1791 ("These words have the antepenultimate
and preantepenultimate accent, which has generally a shortening
power, as in privilege, primitive, prevalency, &c.") Linguists have
continued to be almost its sole users, though other specialists, for
some reason mainly zoologists, have borrowed it from time to time.
Outside these areas, it is almost invisible, but not quite:
While it was gratifying to see the return of the John
H. Rice column to the pages of the Eagle, it was
disappointing to have a typographical error mangle the
sense of his pre-antepenultimate paragraph.
[Berkshire Eagle (Pittsfield, Massachusetts), 24 Feb.
1977.]
Does the sequence stop with preantepenultimate? There must be so
little need for a word meaning fifth from last that we can hardly
imagine anybody has taken the trouble to invent it. But it does
exist: suprapreantepenultimate (Latin "supra", above, beyond). The
only place I've so far found it, however, is in a humorous column in
the web-based journal The Beechwood Reporter of Chicago dated
January this year, in which the writer asked if there's a word for
the item that comes before it in the sequence. That's taking matters
much too far. Even "suprapreantepenultimate" is too monstrous a
term: it's far easier just to say "fifth from last".
3. Snippets
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SUPER? OR NOT? While we're on the subject of prefixes, "super-" was
in the news in London this week following publication of a study by
the Cripplegate Foundation (named after an ancient gate of the City
of London; its name may be from Anglo-Saxon "crepel", a covered way
or underground passage). Many parts of the capital have been changed
by gentrification, improvements that made them attractive to middle-
class professionals such as doctors, lecturers and civil servants
but have pushed out poorer residents. Some areas, such as Islington,
the report asserts, are now suffering "supergentrification", which
isn't just more of the same, but a shift towards colonisation by the
super-rich, who are often very mobile and have scant interest in the
local community. "Supergentrification" was applied first in 2000 by
the British geographer Professor Loretta Lees to a similar shift in
the Brooklyn Heights area of New York City.
TURKEY TOV! A curious calendrical coincidence means that this year
Thanksgiving on 28 November coincides with the second candle night
of Hanukkah (or Chanukkah if you prefer), which one of my Oxford
dictionaries describes rather loftily as "a lesser Jewish festival".
It's the first time since 1888 that this has happened, which has led
to much mildly facetious cross-cultural commentary. An Associated
Press article on Wednesday noted that one linguistically inventive
commercial enterprise has trademarked the term Thanksgivukkah for
it, which Julane Marx tells me has been used casually amongst Jewish
friends and family for a few weeks. A nine-year-old from Manhattan
has invented, trademarked and marketed the Menurkey, a menorah in
the shape of a turkey. If you really want to give somebody a once-
in-a-lifetime gift, this surely must be it - competing calculations
suggest that the next coincidental holiday will be either in about
77,000 years from now or never. Though the young man's opportunity
for getting rich is regrettably short-lived, it does mean - let us
give thanks - that we shall never encounter "Thanksgivukkah" again.
OUT OF THE BLENDER Talking of combining things, you may have heard
of the cronut, this summer's artery-hardening comestible, a cross
between a croissant and a doughnut, which was invented by the
French-born New York chef Dominique Ansel. A second such blend was
created a couple of years ago in her London tearooms by an American,
Bea Vo. This is a doughnut-muffin hybrid called the duffin, which
was in the news this week because the name has allegedly been
trademarked by Starbucks without consulting Ms Vo. The Guardian
covered this story and went on to celebrate other cross-bred
delicacies that it rather neatly called "portmanteau patisseries".
The story mentioned the fauxnut, a fake doughnut which is low-fat
and baked rather than fried, and the crookie, a commingling of
croissant and cookie. I suspect most of these will survive about as
long as the Menurkey.
4. Softly, softly, catchee monkey
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Q. According to an online search, Lord Baden-Powell imported the
saying "softly, softly, catchee monkey" from the Ashanti in Ghana.
The saying has a Kiplingesque ring. Can you shed any further light?
[John Lewis]
A. Quite a bit, as it happens. The expression is indeed frequently
attributed to Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts, largely
because he uses it three times in his diary about his activities in
what is now Ghana in 1895-6:
If it were not for the depressing heat and the urgency
of the work, one could sit down and laugh to tears at the
absurdity of the thing, but under the circumstances it is
a little "wearing." But our motto is the old West Coast
proverb, "Softly, softly, catchee monkey"; in other words,
"Don't flurry; patience gains the day."
[The Downfall of Prempeh, by Major R S S Baden-Powell,
1896. Prempeh was then King of Ashanti.]
Though the book never achieved wide popularity, it's curious that
this instance doesn't appear in the entry for the idiom in the
Oxford English Dictionary; its first citation is of a listing in
Cassell's Book of Quotations in 1907, which is also the first in the
Oxford Book of Proverbs. Even more oddly, it's easy to take it back
many years.
It appears in a book of 1832, Scottish Proverbs, Collected and
Arranged by Andrew Henderson, in the form "safly, safly, catch
monkey". Henderson quotes it as an example of proverb creation in
"rude and infant communities" and says it is "common among the
negroes in the colony of Demerara". Even earlier, the idiom is in
the rambling autobiography of a well-known English actress, Mary
Wells (later Mrs Mary Sumbel), active in the late eighteenth century
and the early nineteenth. She records that she went one day, it
would seem from context in London, to hear an itinerant black
preacher:
Though there was no long-sounding chapter or high-
numbered verse from which it was taken, I was convinced
notwithstanding, by the arguments of the sooty Ethiopian,
that patience and perseverance will overcome many
obstacles. The words were as follow:- "Softly, softly,
brethren, and you'll catch a monkey!"
[Memoirs of the Life of Mrs Sumbel, Vol. 3, 1811. Her
"Ethiopian" isn't to be taken literally; it was then a
common term for any black person.]
This is another example:
"Prudens qui patiens" was, if we mistake not, the motto
of the great Lord Coke. A sort of paraphrase of it is
current among the sable objects of Exeter Hall sympathy -
"Softly, softly, catch monkey."
[The Morning Post, 23 Apr. 1846. At the time, Exeter
Hall in the Strand was the headquarters of the anti-
slavery movement in London, so "sable object" is an
oblique reference to black Africans.]
These examples give the lie to another suggestion made online, and
in an 1989 book with the title Scottish Proverbs, that it's a
traditional saying of Scotland. This assertion seems to be due to
searchers finding Andrew Henderson's book but failing to read his
introductory comments.
The rest of the few nineteenth-century examples that I've found
likewise imply or state that it originated in a native West African
expression that was brought back in translation to Britain (we may
reasonably conclude that its appearance in Demerara, in present-day
Guyana, was the result of West African slaves being taken to South
America to work the sugar plantations). However, the evidence shows
that it wasn't widely known in the nineteenth century but that it
suddenly starts to appear quite frequently in British newspapers
from January 1900 in reports of the Boer War.
What is intriguing about these reports is that they all use the
"catchee" form instead of "catch" (which has led a few writers into
falsely attributing a Chinese origin to the proverb). This form
isn't on record before Baden-Powell's book of 1896. He was garrison
commander during the siege of Mafeking, which was lifted on 16 May
1900. During the siege reporters from four London newspapers were in
the town, and it's hardly a stretch of the evidence to argue that
they obtained that version directly from him. So he certainly wasn't
the inventor, but he popularised the version we now know.
As an aside, the phrase was much later adopted as the motto of the
Lancashire Constabulary's Training School. It was advice to aspiring
police officers that a bull-headed approach wasn't the best way to
nab criminals. This inspired the title of the British television
police series, Softly Softly, from 1966 onwards.
5. Sic!
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"In this part of Canada, we like to keep our wildlife happy," John
Holland emailed from the Okanagan Valley in British Columbia. He was
writing in reference to a headline over a story dated 4 October on
the website castanet.net: "Man attacked by bear in good spirits".
Peter Geldart emailed from Hong Kong, having seen an article in the
Financial Times of 4 October ("Help to get a good night's sleep" by
Emma Jacobs): "Louise Moxon set up Cocoon, an agency in London that
provides parents desperate for their infants to sleep through the
night with consultants."
Dennis Kiernan sent this from a report on Fox News dated 4 October:
"Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Homeland Security
Committee, told Fox News that investigators believed [Miriam] Carey
suffered 'serious' mental issues and that President Obama was trying
to communicate with her through radio waves."
"Impressive!" Gila Blits commented, having seen a headline on the
Mail website on 6 October: "Wife praises surgeon husband who treated
children in Afghanistan after he collapsed and died during D-Day
run."
Harold Pinkley emailed, "In The New York Times of 7 October, the
chaplain of the United States Senate was described as 'a Seventh-day
Adventist, former Navy rear admiral and collector of brightly
colored bow ties named Barry C. Black.' I never thought to name my
own ties."
6. Useful information
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