World Wide Words -- 21 Sep 13

[Michael Quinion]

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WORLD WIDE WORDS        ISSUE 850         Saturday 21 September 2013
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       This mailing also contains an HTML-formatted version.
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Umbrage.
3. Snippets.
4. Rhino.
5. Sic!
6. Subscriptions and other information.


1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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GLASS SLIPPER  Roger Depledge doubted my French translation. "Balzac 
indeed wrote 'sans doute de menu vair' about Cinderella's shoes, but 
do not make him more categorical than he was, even for a Frenchman. 
'Sans doute' is a common semantic false friend; it means 'probably' 
or 'presumably'. 'Without (a) doubt' is 'sans aucun doute'."

ASPARAGUS  Pat Gadsby commented, "Grass is a common name for this 
vegetable in East Anglia and its use has caused a great deal of 
concern among my visitors from the USA when I tell them I am going 
to buy some." Anne Osborne added, "A pub near Evesham, at Badsey, is 
called The Round of Grass. Evesham is still great asparagus-growing 
country and I believe bundles of asparagus are even now sold as 
'rounds of grass'."

"Sparrowgrass put me in mind of sparrow iron," Don Donovan wrote. 
"Many buildings in New Zealand use corrugated iron, mainly for 
roofs. While doing illustrations for my books about NZ architectural 
subjects I came across sparrow iron, a material that seems to have 
been used in early years but which does not appear to be available 
now. It has much finer corrugations than usual and is more 
attractive. Why it was called sparrow iron defeats me." I have found 
references to it in British sources, one of which asserts it was 
given that name because the sparrow is such a small bird. It's as 
good an answer as any in the absence of authoritative research, but 
don't quote me!


2. Umbrage
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"Umbrage" is offence or annoyance. These days we almost always "take 
umbrage", the two words having been conjoined into a fixed phrase. 
It is less common to hear of people "giving umbrage", though someone 
who takes umbrage presumably has had it inflicted on him by another. 
Or does this imbalance imply that the perceived offence is almost 
always in the mind of the receiver?

"Umbrage" derives from Latin "umbra", shadow, and that was its first 
meaning in English. A tree might cast umbrage and in later centuries 
its foliage came to be its umbrage. Shelley wrote "The tall ash and 
oak, in mingled umbrage, sighed far above their heads." In the time 
of Shakespeare, an umbrage was a shadowy outline (Hamlet uses it for 
the shadow of a man), which led to its suggesting somebody lurking 
out of plain view. From this grew ideas of being under the shadow of 
suspicion and being in disfavour and indirectly to our modern senses 
of annoyance, offence or resentment.

"Umbrage" has almost entirely severed its associations with shadows, 
but its adjective "umbrageous" usually refers to shade, most often 
that cast by trees. We have lost its relative "umbratile", which 
once referred to a reclusive person, one who kept in the shade by 
staying indoors. However, we retain another relative, "umbrella", 
originally a sunshade, which came into English via Italian.


3. Snippets
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The word of the week must surely be "parbuckle", which has been 
widely used in the media in connection with the salvaging of the 
cruise ship Costa Concordia. Though unknown to most of us, it's a 
term of art among marine salvage specialists. The technique - though 
more rarely the word - is known to others who have to move heavy 
objects about. When I used to see draymen rolling casks of beer down 
a ramp into the cellar of my local pub using a pair of rope slings 
to control their movement, I didn't then know that was parbuckling. 
Foresters use the same technique to roll heavy logs along the 
ground. The term is appropriate for the Costa Concordia because 
ropes and other equipment were used to rotate the ship away from the 
rocks on which it was stuck. The word's history is obscure; it 
appeared in the seventeenth century as "parbunkel", with the first 
part possibly being a variant of "pair". The second part was later 
modified by folk etymology, most probably on the assumption that it 
was related to "buckler" for a small shield or for the moveable head 
of a cask used to compress its contents.

Before I went on holiday, Richard Winter asked me about a word he 
had encountered in a football report by Simon Barnes in The Times on 
26 August about a match that had to be abandoned because the pitch 
was waterlogged: "Wimps. Waterlogged pitch indeed. Lookshurry!" I 
found other examples of this slightly weird exclamation, mostly in 
sports contexts, which seem to suggest that something is excessive 
or over the top. I have been quite unable to trace its origin or 
find out anything more about it.

In my youth, so long ago, when we bought something that wasn't new, 
we called it second-hand or used. More recently, we in Britain have 
learned the American "pre-owned" and "pre-loved" but we have never 
taken them to our hearts. We're beginning to see another American 
import, "luxecycled". Such items have been creatively recycled for 
new owners - restyled and decorated beyond their original state of 
newness, at least to the eyes of their embellishers. The more common 
US term for the process is "upcycling", but to luxecycle something 
would seem to be taking the process to extremes.


4. Rhino
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Q. I searched your site (perhaps not thoroughly enough?) looking for 
the word "rhino", meaning money, which you mentioned in your piece 
some time ago about "pony up". It also appears in the short story by 
Washington Irving entitled The Devil and Tom Walker. Where does this 
come from? [Chuck O'Brien]

A. "Rhino" is one of the more ancient, curious and perplexing slang 
terms for money in the English language. It originated in Britain 
and was taken to other English-speaking countries by emigrants. It 
has had a long life - though it begins to appear in the written 
record in the 1620s, it continued to pop up well into the twentieth 
century. Its heyday was the nineteenth:

    "But there's one thing needful - and that is the 
    needful." "Money?" suggested Alaric. "Yes, money - cash - 
    rhino - tin - ready - or by what other name the goddess 
    would be pleased to have herself worshipped; money, sir; 
    there's the difficulty, now as ever."
    [The Three Clerks, by Anthony Trollope, 1857.] 

The obvious assumption is that it's the same word as the abbreviated 
form of "rhinoceros", whose name is from Greek words that literally 
mean "nose-horn" (Greek "rhinos", nose). Much speculation has been 
built upon this supposed connection, some of it attempting to link 
"rhino" with "paying through the nose", another seventeenth-century 
idiom that has acquired fanciful etymologies of its own. It has been 
argued that monetary "rhino" came about as a reference to the high 
value of rhinoceros horn, a supposed aphrodisiac.

The big problem with such attempts is dating. At the time the slang 
term was first recorded, only two rhinoceroses had been brought to 
Europe, in 1515 and 1577, both gifts to Portuguese royalty through 
Portugal's maritime contacts with India and the East Indies. The 
first to be seen in England arrived only in October 1684, by which 
time "rhino" had long been established in its monetary sense. (This 
rhinoceros had been imported from India by a ship's captain named 
Henry Udall, who unsuccessfully hoped to sell it at a good profit, 
though after the failure of an auction it ended up being exhibited 
at the Bell Savage Inn on Ludgate Hill in London.) When another 
rhinoceros came to England in 1739, it was still exotic enough to be 
described in the London Daily Advertiser as a "strange and wonderful 
creature". It would be surprising for an animal so little known in 
Britain to have generated a slangy abbreviation. Jonathon Green, the 
slang lexicographer, has remarked that the efforts to forge a link 
show "a certain lexicographical desperation". 

We have to presume that the true origin lies elsewhere, though we 
haven't the slightest idea where that might be. However, it may be 
that the arrival of the first rhinoceros in England created a link 
between it and the existing slang term. A little while after its 
arrival this appeared:

    My lusty rustic, learn and be instructed. Cole is in 
    the language of the witty, money. The ready, the rhino; 
    thou shalt be rhinocerical, my lad, thou shalt.
    [The Squire of Alsatia, by Thomas Shadwell, 1688. 
    "Cole" is now spelled "coal", a valuable mineral.]

This hinted at a link with the animal through "rhinocerical", which 
Shadwell invented and which became a fanciful adjective in the next 
century for being rich. Might he have had in mind the animal that 
was languishing in the courtyard of a London pub and generated a pun 
on its name and the existing "rhino"? If so, it's his fault that 
later generations of word sleuths got the wrong end of the stick.

Incidentally, Thomas Shadwell's text shows that "ready" (later "the 
readies") was already in use. It's short for "ready money", cash or 
funds immediately available for use, which dates from the 1420s. The 
composite "ready rhino" appeared in 1697. Like "rhino", it continued 
in use for a couple of centuries and it was punned upon in the first 
known use of "rhino" for the animal, thus turning the term full 
circle:

    The Black Rhinoceros of Equatorial Africa ... The 
    promptness with which it makes its tremendous charges has 
    earned for it, among European hunters, the soubriquet of 
    the "Ready Rhino".
    [Punchinello, 9 Jul. 1870.]


5. Sic!
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Bruce McKenzie shared this from the first chapter of Utopian Man, by 
Lisa Lang, of 2010: "Button-sized and made of copper, he has planned 
the medals as a gift for his customers."

Grant Agnew's electricity company, EnergyAustralia, is inviting its 
customers to register for a new email newsletter. Grant reports that 
it has issued the following instruction: "Your password must be at 
least eight characters long. 'Password' is too short."

Wracked wrecking. Julane Marx spotted this about Miley Cyrus on the 
MSN Wonderwall: "Her video for Wrecking Ball, in which she appears 
in the nude while swinging on a large demolition ball, broke the 
record for most online views in the first 24 hours following a 
premiere; the video wracked up a whopping 19.3 million views in its 
first day."

Steve Marston encountered this description of the 3M General Purpose 
Adhesive Cleaner on Amazon: "Specially blended solvent for removal 
of light paint overspray, adhesive residue, wax, grease, dirt and 
bugs in aerosol form."


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 
Europe. Any residual errors are the fault of the author. The linked 
website is http://www.worldwidewords.org.

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