World Wide Words -- 14 Sep 13
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Thu Sep 12 22:02:00 UTC 2013
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WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 849 Saturday 14 September 2013
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A formatted version is also available online at
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Poltroon.
3. Glass slipper.
4. Sic!
5. Subscriptions and other information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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HOLIDAYS I am away. 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 once again updated versions of ones from my bestselling
book Port Out, Starboard Home, published in 2004. Normal service
will be resumed next week.
2. Poltroon /pQl'tru:n/
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"Poltroon" was one of the nineteenth century's favourite insults,
meaning an utter coward, often preceded by adjectives such as "base"
or "wretched". Stories of the more sensational kind preferred
stronger words:
"If you are not, after all," resumed the duke, "the veriest
coward and most lily-livered poltroon in all his majesty's
dominions, follow me into that carriage, Prince."
[Sylvester's Eve, By William Henry Farn, published in
Blackwood's Lady's Magazine in 1843. "Lily-livered poltroon"
became a cliché, later to be mocked by P G Wodehouse.]
In the eighteenth century its origin was widely believed to be that
suggested by an eminent French classical scholar of the previous
century, Claudius Salmasius. He theorised that the word derived from
medieval longbowmen. One who wished not to risk his skin in combat
had only to make himself incapable of drawing a longbow by cutting
off his right thumb. In Latin, "pollice truncus" meant maimed in the
thumb; Salmasius asserted that this had become corrupted into the
French "poltron".
In the nineteenth century this wildly inventive view was no longer
believed. Scholars noted instead that in French - and also in the
obviously related Italian "poltrone" - the word didn't just mean a
coward but also someone who wallowed in sloth and idleness. This led
them to believe that it originated in Italian "poltro", a couch, an
etymology respectable enough to be cited in the first edition of the
Oxford English Dictionary.
Today's Oxford etymologists are sure both stories are wrong. They
point instead to the classical Latin "pullus" for the young of any
animal, particularly a young domestic fowl or chicken. It's the
source also of "pullet" and is related to "poultry" and - more
distantly - to "foal". The link is an ancient reference to the
notoriously timorous and craven behaviour of farmyard fowl.
So a poltroon is chicken. How appropriate.
3. Glass slipper
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The classic Cinderella story remains so widely known that the phrase
"glass slipper" still achieves instant recognition. It is sometimes
used as an emblem of appropriateness:
It is also back in its original frame, which was found
at Houghton with another picture inside it, but fits the
Poussin as perfectly as a glass slipper fits a princess's
foot.
[The Times, 10 May 2013.]
Readers of the story have often been puzzled by the glass slippers,
the ones that Cinders's fairy godmother gave her to wear at the
ball. Such fragile and potentially dangerous wear, unknown in
everyday life, surely could not have been what was intended?
Succour for such doubters has been provided in the past century by
writers who claimed that "glass slipper" was a mistranslation of the
French story on which our modern versions are based. They say that
the slippers were really made of "vair", a type of fur that's called
miniver in English, not of "verre", glass. Explanations along these
lines have appeared at various times in standard works such as the
Encyclopaedia Britannia, Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable and
the Oxford English Dictionary. All were relying on what seemed to be
an impeccable authority, that of Honoré de Balzac, who wrote in 1836
that the slippers were "without doubt of miniver".
Alas, this attempt to prove the story to be a popular etymology is
itself a popular etymology. All modern authorities are certain that
the slippers were indeed made of glass, though this hasn't prevented
the false story continuing in circulation.
The Cinderella story is one of eight in Charles Perrault's little
book, whose title is "Histoires ou contes du temps passé" ("stories
or tales of times past"). It was translated into English in 1729 by
Robert Samber. The French and English versions both proved immensely
popular. As well as the Cinderella story, it included those of Babes
in the Wood, Bluebeard, Puss in Boots, Tom Thumb, Little Red Riding
Hood and Sleeping Beauty. Because the frontispiece shows an old
woman sitting spinning and telling stories, with the caption "Contes
de ma mère l'Oye" ("Tales of Mother Goose"), such children's fairy
tales are often called Mother Goose stories.
As with the others in his collection, Charles Perrault was recording
an oral folktale current in France at the time, in this case an
eternally resonant tale of unjust oppression followed by joyful
reward that folklore experts have traced back through hundreds of
versions as far as China in the ninth century. Perrault actually
wrote of the fairy godmother that "elle lui donna ensuite une paire
de pantoufles de verre, les plus jolies du monde" ("she then gave
her a pair of glass slippers, the prettiest in the world"), so
Samber's translation is correct. Perrault was following the
tradition of giving Cinderella costly and impractical footwear. In
1812, the Brothers Grimm wrote a German version, Aschenputtel ("ash
fool"), closer in spirit to the darker and much more violent
traditional rendering; in theirs the slippers on successive evenings
were of white silk, silver and gold.
As well as introducing the fairy godmother, Perrault seems to have
invented the idea of making the slippers of glass. In doing so he
had to leave out an important aspect of the traditional story, in
which one ugly sister cut off her toes and the other her heel to try
to fit their foot into the dainty slipper; they succeeded but were
discovered and eventually blinded as a punishment. Their stratagems
were found out when blood was seen to stain their stockings. As
Perrault's slipper was made of glass, their ghastly subterfuges
would have been obvious at once. The Grimm brothers' version is
still known, though here muddled with Perrault's:
The Office for Budget Responsibility's forecasts do not
fit the economic weather Salmond needs to make
independence attractive and so, like the ugly sisters
hacking off their toes to fit the glass slipper, the
Scottish government publishes its own oil-price forecasts
that meet the SNP's economic vision.
[Sunday Times, 24 Mar. 2013.]
One difficulty with giving Cinderella fur slippers is that they
sound much too grandmotherly and everyday. A princess could not
possibly wear anything so homely. Gold slippers certainly fit the
bill, but the glass ones illustrate Cinderella's delicate nature
especially well. She would have had to be physically light and
dainty to be able to wear them without shattering them.
And, after all, this is a fairy story.
4. Sic!
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Richard Beal, Colin Houlden and Meg Kingston all noted this sentence
in a BBC report of 4 September about a new super-prison: "Last year
around 19,140 inmates on average were made to share a cell designed
for one person."
Anne Hickley found this in her local paper, the Watton and Swaffham
Times, on 11 September: "Friends and family joined together this
weekend to remember a Watton teenager who died suddenly as a hockey
club stand was opened in her honour." [She actually died three years
ago.]
A headline on the Globe and Mail website of 1 September was sent in
by Tom Kavanagh: "Canadian Pacific navy fleet severely hampered
without damaged ships". [Replace "without" by "as a result of".]
"An impressive feat, even when conscious," remarked Rus Stolling
about an item on the Fox News site on 7 September: "A wild bull elk
gored a shepherd in the mountains in eastern Utah, puncturing one of
the man's lungs, knocking him unconscious and forcing him to walk
several miles for help."
Richard R Losch sent this report from The India Times of 29 August:
"60-year-old Arun Kumar, a senior professor in the Electrical
Computer Science Department of the Institution was found lying in a
pool of blood at his flat with his throat slit by his maid servant
yesterday, Haridwar SSP Rajiv Swaroop said. Though the cause of his
death is being probed, the possibility of a suicide or murder cannot
be ruled out, he said."
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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