World Wide Words -- 07 Sep 13
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Tue Sep 3 22:02:00 UTC 2013
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WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 848 Saturday 7 September 2013
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Asparagus.
3. Curry favour.
4. Sic!
5. Subscriptions and other information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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HOLIDAYS By the time you read this, I hope that my wife and I will
be cruising down the River Rhône in France. If you wish to, by all
means respond to this issue as described in Section 5 below, but it
is unlikely that I shall be able to respond personally. You may spot
that this week's items are updated versions of ones first published
in my bestselling book Port Out, Starboard Home of 2004.
NOT A HAPPY BUNNY A moment of inattentive editing led me to remove
a note in the draft of this piece mentioning the near equivalent US
idiom "not a happy camper", a term almost certainly deriving from
the summer camps to which large numbers of young people are annually
despatched, not always willingly. Robert Hart wrote, "The picture
that comes to mind is of youths exposed to what they consider the
rigors of outdoor life for the first time." (We don't have such
camps in Britain and so when I first heard the Allan Sherman song
about Camp Granada many years ago it took a moment to puzzle out the
context.) The excision led to several dozen readers writing to tell
me about the US idiom. Thanks; your reward was an automated message
because I didn't have the time to respond personally. The edit also
made it less clear that "not a happy bunny" is mostly British and
Australian.
Readers from Britain, Ireland and New Zealand mentioned "not a happy
chappie", another version in which the last word is a familiar form
of "chap", a rather dated Britishism for a man (also in the one-time
common form of address among familiars of "old chap"). "Chap" was
originally a slangy term for a customer or buyer, an abbreviation of
"chapman", a merchant or itinerant dealer. Yet another version that
was mentioned, which I think is mainly from the US, is "not a happy
puppy".
CRACK VARNISH Following up the note about this last week, Michael
Neustadt wrote, "Your explanation of crack varnish as the finest of
passenger train cars parallels the common expression, at least among
rail fans and rail car owners, for a privately owned rail car as a
'private varnish'."
2. Asparagus
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The name of this delightful vegetable has swung from classical Latin
to rustic reinvention and back during its history in English.
It first appears in English around 1000. Its name was taken from the
medieval Latin "sparagus" but by the sixteenth century it had come
"sperach" or "sperage". It might well have stayed like that had it
not been for herbalists, who knew the classical Latin name was
"asparagus", itself borrowed from the Greek. Their influence meant
that that name became quite widely known during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries alongside the older names. Nicholas Culpeper,
for example, headed an entry in his herbal of 1653 as "Asparagus,
Sparagus, or Sperage", thus covering all bases.
Non-scholars had trouble with "asparagus" and did what the medieval
Latin writers had done - leave off the unstressed initial vowel, so
making it "sparagus" again. But they went one step further,
converting it by folk etymology into forms that seemed to make more
sense, either "sparagrass" or "sparrowgrass". The latter form became
common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries:
So home, and having brought home with me from Fenchurch
Street a hundred of sparrowgrass, cost 18d.
[Diary, by Samuel Pepys, 20 April 1667.]
In the eighteenth century sparrowgrass was so much the standard and
polite term that John Walker commented in his Critical Pronouncing
Dictionary in 1791: "'Sparrow-grass' is so general that 'asparagus'
has an air of stiffness and pedantry". In the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries it was also called "Battersea grass",
from the name of the London suburb alongside the Thames in whose
market gardens it was grown.
During the nineteenth century the wheel turned yet again, in part
because of pedagogical opposition to a form considered to be no more
than an ignorant mistake, bringing "asparagus" to the fore and
relegating "sparrowgrass" to what the New English Dictionary rather
loftily described in 1885 as "dialect or vulgar" status. This is
supported by examples in fiction which attempt to render the voices
of lower-class characters:
I remember my lars' customer, the very lars' customer
that ever I 'ad. He was a Mr. Moses Gluckstein, a city
gent and very pleasant and fond of sparrowgrass and
chokes.
[The War in the Air, by H G Wells, 1908. "Chokes" are
artichokes.]
Slavey came in while I was eating it, and caught me
picking it up with my fingers. Next morning she says to my
missis, so missis told me, "'Ow does master eat 'is
sparrowgrass when 'e's out with company, mum?" says
she.
[Lord Raingo, by Arnold Bennett, 1926. A slavey was a
hard-worked live-in maidservant.]
"Sparrowgrass" is still around, though in print only as a historical
reference, and the vegetable is still sometimes called "grass" in
the greengrocery trade.
3. Curry favour
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Q. As I gave the cat its supper, I said to my wife that I was doing
it to "curry favour" with the cat. Out of curiosity I looked "curry"
up in the two-volume Oxford dictionary to see where this expression
comes from. The explanation involved a chestnut horse. This seems a
bit far-fetched. Is there a better explanation? [Patrick Martin]
A. Believe it or not, the explanation is correct. But then, it's an
odd phrase - why should "curry" have anything to do with winning the
favour of somebody or ingratiating oneself with him?
Its origin lies in a French medieval allegorical poem called the
Roman de Fauvel, written by Gervais de Bus and Chaillou de Pesstain
in the early 1300s. Fauvel was a horse, a conniving stallion, and
the poem is a satire on the corruption of social life. He decided he
didn't like his stable and moved into his master's house, becoming
the master and being visited by church leaders and politicians who
sought his favour.
There are several layers of meaning in his name: "fauve" is French
for a colour variously translated as chestnut, reddish-yellow, tawny
or fawn. A close English equivalent is the rather rare "fallow", as
in "fallow deer", an animal with a brownish coat (it may be that
uncultivated ground is also said to be fallow because it looks that
colour). "Fauve" is also a collective name, originally "les bêtes
fauves", for a class of wild animals whose coats are tawny, such as
lions and tigers, and hence ferocious wild animals (the fauverie in
a French zoo houses the big cats). In the poem, the name Fauvel can
moreover be glossed as "fau-vel", a veiled lie, but it is actually a
partial acronym of the initial letters of the French words for six
sins: "flatterie", "avarice", "vilenie", "variété", "envie", and
"lâcheté" (flattery, avarice, depravity, fickleness, envy and
cowardice). His colour also evokes the old medieval proverbial
belief that a fallow horse was a symbol of dishonesty.
The poem was well known among educated people in Britain, who began
to refer to "Fauvel", variously spelled, as a symbol of cunning and
depravity. That soon became "curry Favel". This "curry" has nothing
to do with Indian food (a word that came into English only at the
end of the sixteenth century via Portuguese from Tamil "kari", a
sauce or relish) but is another ancient word from a French source,
still common in English, which means to rub down or comb a horse.
The idea behind "currying Favel" is that the horse was highly
susceptible to flattery, figuratively a kind of stroking.
For people who didn't know the poem - then, as now, that was almost
everybody - "Fauvel" or "Favel" meant nothing. "Favour" seemed much
more sensible a word and by the early part of the sixteenth century
popular etymology had changed it and so it has remained ever since.
4. Sic!
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Stewart Kramer and Jonathan Domash of California independently sent
in a sentence from a flyer for the 99ONE Healing Crusade: "99ONE
bringing the love and power of God to hurting people."
"Those clumsy California kids," commented Jack Shakely, having seen
a headline in the Los Angeles Times on 30 August: "Scores Fall at
Schools in the State."
Department of inanimate expansion. Anne Umphrey submitted this line
from the police log in the Concord Journal for 29 August: "A caller
reported the buses near the intersection of Route 117 and Plainfield
Road have overgrown." (It turns out the caller said "bushes".)
Richard Atkinson sent a picture of an item from a leaflet that the
Australian Labor Party sent to voters. Alongside a big green tick
mark it promised "Better Schools so every child no matter where they
go to school or where they has access to a quality education."
The Yellow Duckmarine tour bus company is defunct, as Jenny Drayden
learned from the Liverpool Daily Post of 23 August: "All the staff
and the vehicles have been repossessed."
Sandra Barley found a science item on the website of the Charlotte
Observer, dated 2 September, which said that alkalinity "exacerbates
the Stalinization of fresh water". The what? The story came from the
Cary Institute site, which has "salinization". Aha! Automatic spell
checking at work.
5. 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
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