World Wide Words -- 26 Oct 13

[Michael Quinion]

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WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 855         Saturday 26 October 2013
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Help wanted.
3. Manicule.
4. Snippets.
5. Old besom.
6. Sic!
7. Subscriptions and other information.


1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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BROWN AS A BERRY  A few readers creatively suggested that if grapes 
were called berries then dried grapes such as raisins would be brown 
enough to fit the description. Drying grapes to preserve them would 
seem to be as ancient as growing vines but drying them in our damp 
English climate would have been a chancy business. The evidence I've 
found is that in post-Conquest England raisins were imported as a 
luxury good. By 1300, they already had that name, so Chaucer would 
have been unlikely to call them berries.

Michael Keating wrote "The term may find its origin in the Anglo-
Saxon for a bear. The colour brown was associated with bears in 
ancient French." That's an interesting suggestion, but bears were 
almost certainly extinct in Britain by the Anglo-Saxon period and 
"brown as a bear" isn't on record.

Bo Bergman emailed from Sweden: "It might be of interest that the 
related Swedish word 'brun' has or has had the meanings 'black, 
dark; dark red; reddish-brown'. Swedish 'brunbär' (literally 'brown 
berry') means 'morello cherry'. In Old French 'brun' could mean 'a 
dark color between red and black, especially of the complexion'."

"I have heard the term, 'brown as a berry', but infrequently," wrote 
Terry Long. "My older relatives, many of whom were from the southern 
USA, would say 'brown as a nut'. Parts of the southern USA used to 
have forests of nut trees, such as pecans and walnuts, so I would 
imagine such variation would come naturally."


2. Help wanted
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I'm looking for additional volunteer help to look over issues in 
draft. My British reviewer is finding it hard to comment regularly 
because of his commitments and I'm looking for somebody from the UK 
to supplement him. It involves carefully reading draft issues for 
sense and style and needs a person with editorial or journalistic 
experience. I usually email drafts the Sunday before the issue date 
and need comments back within 24-48 hours. If you're interested, 
email me at volunteer at worldwidewords.org .


3. Manicule
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Not to be confused with manacle or manicure, this is a much rarer 
word that also derives from Latin "manus" for a hand, in this case 
from the diminutive "manicula", a little hand, which Romans also 
used for a plough-handle.

It has popped up through a discussion about it in a book on 
typography by Keith Houston, Shady Characters: The Secret Life of 
Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks (worth buying if 
you're at all interested in the history of typography). A manicule 
is a hand with its first finger pointing, once used in the margins 
of manuscripts and books to draw the reader's attention to passages 
of particular importance. We often encounter it as a direction 
pointer in old-fashioned public signs, though these days we notice 
it most often as the vertical-pointing shape your computer's cursor 
changes to when you pass it over a web link. Printers have given it 
a number of names, including "fist" and "index". This last one is 
the official name, echoing the Latin word for a sign or pointer, as 
in index finger.

The history of "manicule" in English is a bit of a mystery. It isn't 
recorded in the recent review of the letter M in the Oxford English 
Dictionary, nor is it in any other dictionary that I've been able to 
consult. And I've found no example in print before 1996. However, 
William Sherman wrote in a detailed study of the sign in 2005 that 
he had been told it had become the standard term among scholars who 
study ancient manuscripts. I wonder if his informant actually had 
"manicula" in mind, either the Latin word or the identical Italian 
one; this has certainly been used in English-language descriptions 
of manuscripts. Alteration of the final letter to turn it into an 
English equivalent seems to have happened very recently.


4. Snippets
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STAG DAY  The ninth annual World Bolving Competition was held last 
Sunday on the hills above Dulverton on Exmoor. "Bolving" is unique 
to Exmoor for what is known elsewhere as the belling or roaring of 
red deer stags at rutting time. Adrian Tierney-Jones described it in 
the Daily Telegraph in 2007 as "a mix of roaring lion, bellowing 
cow, chainsaw and someone severely constipated". Stags produce a 
series of deep guttural sounds as a threat and challenge to other 
stags. The call has been imitated by hunters as a way to attract 
deer, although they have to be wary, as the unexpected arrival of 
several hundred kilograms of angry animal with big antlers intent on 
seeing off a rival is likely to ruin their day. The competition is 
just a fun event that was dreamed up in the local pub as a way to 
raise money for charity.

SEEING DOUBLE  The astronomical term "circumbinary", which has been 
in the news recently, may not enthuse most readers. It becomes more 
engaging if the Star Wars planet Tatooine is mentioned, which orbits 
a double star and so is lit by two different suns. The concept has 
been dismissed by astronomical theorists as not being achievable 
even a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, because such systems 
would be too unstable to survive. But several such planets have been 
found in recent years, so that cosmology's vocabulary has had to be 
enriched by two new words: "circumbinary" for the Tatooine type of 
planet and "circumstellar" for boring planets like Earth which only 
orbit the one sun.


5. Old besom
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Q. When I muttered "old besom", when watching a local politician on 
the TV recently, was I unintentionally calling her a witch? Or was I 
merely taking a word beginning with "b" as a euphemism for female 
dog? Perhaps nobody else ever muttered "old besom"? It came up from 
the depths unexpectedly, I think a mild insult from my Lancashire 
childhood, a besom being a twig broom, very like a witch's. I just 
wondered whether you might have any thoughts on the matter. [Jane 
Tomlinson, Montreal]

A. I can assure you that "old besom" is a well-recorded insult that 
goes back many years, commonly with added expletives:

    I'm a freeholder, with money in the bank; and now I 
    won't trust women no more! Silly old besom!
    [Rewards and Fairies, by Rudyard Kipling, 1910.]

It isn't yet obsolete but it's definitely out of fashion, its fall 
in popularity partly due to the rarity of besoms in everyday urban 
life and perhaps also to the odd modern opprobrium attached to 
calling somebody old. It is still to be found in fiction:

    It was unlikely that Rhea would have seen Susan's face 
    through the dense overgrowth of pig ivy even if 
    the old besom had been looking in that direction, and 
    she wasn't.
    [Wizard and Glass, by Stephen King, 2003.]

As you say, in standard English a besom is a broom made from twigs 
tied round a stick, a useful implement for sweeping up leaves and 
other loose stuff. If we are to go by the etymology of "broom" - 
always a most dangerous proceeding - anything called a broom really 
ought to be of the besom type, because its name derives from the use 
of the plant called broom to make besoms. "Broom" and "besom" have 
separated in sense in modern standard English, with only the latter 
now meaning implements made of twigs.

"Besom" as a term of mild contempt for a woman, especially one who 
is awkward or surly, began to appear in Scots near the end of the 
eighteenth century and is also known in several dialects of northern 
England, including Lancashire. It's metonymy, a woman doing 
household chores by wielding a besom becoming known by its name. It 
may also be that an influence was the association of witches with 
broomsticks, always pictured as besoms. By the way, the Scottish 
National Dictionary says that in Scots "broom" refers only to the 
plant, while "besom" means any sort of sweeping instrument.

An early user was Sir Walter Scott:

    "Ill'fa'ard, crazy, crack-brained gowk, that she is!" 
    exclaimed the housekeeper, as she saw them depart, 'to set 
    up to be sae muckle better than ither folk, the ould 
    besom, and to bring sae muckle distress on a douce quiet 
    family!" If it hadna been that I am mair than half a 
    gentlewoman by my station, I wad hae tried my ten nails in 
    the wizen'd hide o' her!" 
    [Old Mortality, by Sir Walter Scott, 1816. "Ill'fa'ard" 
    is "ill-favoured"; "gowk" is an awkward or foolish person, 
    (though often as here a general term of abuse); a "muckle" 
    (a variant of "mickle") is a large amount; "douce" means 
    sober or sedate.]

One curiosity is that the two senses are pronounced differently. The 
broom is /biːzəm/ (BEE-zum) while the disrespectful figurative 
version is more often /bɪzəm/ (biz-zum).


6. Sic!
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"Hyphen needed!" was the subject line of Greg Grove's email about an 
online advert that appeared next to a crossword puzzle that he was 
solving: "Join Dell, Microsoft and a guest expert for an in depth 
look at how OS migration can enhance security and end user 
productivity." 

Gerhard Burger submitted a sentence from a Lifestyle column in the 
Johannesburg Sunday Times about a cycling event: "Roads, restaurants 
and bars were awash with tight Lycra-clad bottoms that spoke German 
or Spanish or surprised you with an English or Antipodean twang."

Such precision! A caption to a photograph of a Turkish coffee pot on 
the ABC website was spotted by Terry Karney: "Inexpensive models are 
listed for around $7 on Amazon, but more elaborate products with 
brass or copper can cost upwards of more."

Howard Sinberg sent in what he described as the non sequitur of the 
week, which he found in an article in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel 
about a ramen restaurant: "Despite opening in 2008, the restaurant 
still has customers who prefer to eat the soup but not the noodles." 
He added, "And despite having been born in 1947, I am a retired 
electronics engineer."


7. Useful information
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ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER: World Wide Words is written and published by 
Michael Quinion in the UK. ISSN 1470-1448. Copyediting and advice 
are provided by Julane Marx in the US and by Robert Waterhouse in 
Europe. Any residual errors are the fault of the author. The linked 
website is http://www.worldwidewords.org.

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