World Wide Words -- 09 Aug 14

[Michael Quinion]

World Wide Words
Issue 890: Saturday 9 August 2014

This mailing also contains a formatted version of the text. 
This issue is also available online (http://wwwords.org/ixqn) .


Feedback, Notes and Comments
---------------------------------------------------------------------
DOGE. Responding to this Internet verbal fashion I wrote about last 
week, James Kahn, Pat Spaeth, Mark Hyman and John Lyon all recalled 
the same dialogue from the 1942 film Casablanca: 

    Mr. Leuchtag: Mareichtag and I are speaking nothing but 
English now.
    Mrs. Leuchtag: So we should feel at home when we get to 
America. 
    Carl: Very nice idea, mm-hmm. 
    Mr. Leuchtag: [toasting] To America! 
    Mrs. Leuchtag: To America! 
    Carl: To America! 
    Mr. Leuchtag: Liebchen — sweetness, what watch? 
    Mrs. Leuchtag: Ten watch. 
    Mr. Leuchtag: Such much? 
    Carl: Hm. You will get along beautiful in America, mm-
hmm.

Several readers asked whether "doge" is connected with "doggerel". 
There are dogs in both, though in "doggerel" it is an unfavourable 
reference, as are so many formations in which "dog" appears. 
"Doggerel" was created in the fifteenth century by adding the "-
(e)rel" suffix, which creates diminutives, often with derogatory 
force.

UPDATE. I've significantly revised the piece on "mash note" and 
included more information about the origins of "masher", a late-
nineteenth-century dandy in the US and UK.


Corybantic
---------------------------------------------------------------------
It's best not to delve too deeply into the Greek myths behind this 
word, which feature hermaphroditism, nocturnal emissions and 
castration. Merely a story of everyday life on Mounts Olympus and 
Parnassus. 

The principal figure is Cybele, goddess of fertility and mistress of 
wild nature, who had a huge and jealous love for a young man named 
Attis. The legend was created by the ancient Phrygians, but was taken 
over by the Greeks (who identified her with Rhea, mother of the gods), 
and later by the Romans. Cybele was often pictured in a chariot drawn 
by lions and was worshipped by nine armed and crested men called 
Korybantes in Greek and Corybantes in Latin. They performed noisy, 
extravagant, orgiastic dances to the sounds of drums and other 
instruments.

    Why, you have made her [Rhea] quite mad: she harnesses
    those lions of hers, and drives about all over Ida with
    the Corybantes, who are as mad as herself, shrieking
    high and low for Attis; and there they are, slashing
    their arms with swords, rushing about over the hills,
    like wild things, with dishevelled hair, blowing horns,
    beating drums, clashing cymbals; all Ida is one mad
    tumult.
    [Nigrinus, by Lucian of Samosata, 1st century AD.]

In the seventeenth century, English gained "corybantic" to describe 
any unrestrained dancing and music making. It became in time a term 
for rather more sober merrymaking. In 1890, Thomas Henry Huxley wrote 
in the "Times" about "That form of somewhat corybantic Christianity of 
which the soldiers of the Salvation Army are the militant 
missionaries."

A more recent example, from the literature of fantasy:

    She taught him the courtly manners of the elf lords,
    and also the corybantic measures they trod when they
    were out in the open, barefoot in dew and drunk with
    moonlight.
    [The Broken Sword, by Poul Anderson, 1954.]


Wordface
---------------------------------------------------------------------
ELECTRIC SPORT.  During my investigation of "blooper" a couple of 
weeks ago, I came across a curious-sounding game of the early 1920s: 
"radio golf". It took some investigation to pin it down but it turns 
out to have been a competition among early radio enthusiasts in the US 
to tune into and identify the most distant broadcasting stations 
possible. Kudos came to those who could pick up the ones furthest away 
and success was measured by adding up the distances in miles to every 
station caught, fancifully like recording the total length of one's 
golf shots. Participants had to crank up the sensitivity of their sets 
to the maximum to get good results; the early regenerative sets of the 
time meant that they often went into oscillation and generated 
bloopers in nearby receivers.

ROYAL PERMIT.  Michael Flanders, of Flanders and Swann fame, had a 
sketch about Greensleeves, which is said to have been composed by 
Henry VIII. His punchline was "And the royalties went to royalty." 
Robert Taxin in San Francisco reminded me of it when he wrote to 
wonder why the fees to artists for using their work are called 
"royalties". It seems that from the fifteenth century, one meaning of 
"royalty" was the rights and privileges belonging to the monarch. The 
crown often gave permission to subjects to do certain things, such as 
mine for minerals, in exchange for a fee. The term transferred from 
the royal perquisite to the payments themselves only in the nineteenth 
century, when it was accepted that landowners, composers, authors and 
owners of patents also had rights in their physical and intellectual 
property.

IN PASSING.  Some words I've come across during my reading in July: 
"pentapedal", used to describe the kangaroo, which uses its tail as 
well as its other limbs to move around; "hyperthymestic memory", a 
condition in which a person can remember the minutest detail of every 
day's activities; "agalmatophilia", falling in love with an inanimate 
object, such as a statue; "brogrammer", a deprecatory term invented by 
women in computing in the US for the frat-house atmosphere within the 
industry in Silicon Valley; "apophallation", the gnawing off of the 
penis of a snail by its partner after mating; "mallification", the 
conversion of public space into an area in which, as in a shopping 
mall,  many recreational activities are banned; "decamentathlete", a 
person who enters 10 classes in the Mind Sports Olympiad; "by-the-
wind-sailor", a common name for a sea-beast usually classed as a 
jellyfish, but actually a communal hydrozoan; and "pteridomania", a 
passion for collecting rare ferns.


Going spare
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. From Richard I R Winter in Ontario Canada. An article in the 
British magazine Country Life tells of villagers complaining about the 
National Trust opening a property on Sundays. The quote from one of 
the irate villagers interested me: "You can go out for a walk and find 
yourself in a traffic jam of cars. Farmers have gone spare as they 
can't get their tractors up the busy lanes." "Gone spare" is a quaint 
way of describing road rage. What is its origin?

A. You've been misled by a specific use of this characteristically 
British slang phrase. It actually means being in a state of rage or 
distress over some issue identified by the context:

    Mum will be going spare if we don't arrive in time for
    her to feed you this morning
    [Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J K Rowling,
    2007.]

Sometimes it has implications of going crazy:

    I can see constitutionally that there's an argument
    that the heir to the throne should not get involved in
    controversy. The honest truth is I didn't mind. If you
    are waiting to be the king, and you've waited a very
    long time, you genuinely have to engage with something
    or you'd go spare.
    [The Times, 30 June 2014.]

Its early history is sparse but there are enough clues for us to be 
fairly sure about how it came about. Based on the historic and current 
standard sense of "spare" — kept in reserve, not currently wanted, or 
beyond what one needs for ordinary use — at the end of the nineteenth 
century people gave it an additional meaning of a person who is forced 
to be idle and therefore useless or superfluous. 

Later appearances suggest it was taken into military slang, since "to 
be spare" is noted in 1919 as meaning off-duty and a military 
dictionary of 1926 records "to look spare" as meaning idle. This is a 
slightly earlier example of "going spare" in the same sense:

    This is not to suggest that men in camp are "going
    spare," but is simply to state that there are crews
    available for more cars.
    [Times, 14 Aug. 1924.]

Eric Partridge suggests in his "Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional 
English" that it was used for going absent without leave during the 
Second World War, though there's no known written evidence for it. 
There are some hints that after the war it came to mean men who had 
been laid off from work.

Quite how we got from this to rage or distress isn't obvious. One idea 
that has been put forward is that it arose from emotions provoked by 
enforced idleness. (We may discount the idea that it's rhyming slang: 
"spare tyre" -> "ire".) 

Some writers have suggested that "go spare" in the sense you've met 
was being used in the spoken language by the early 1950s, if not 
earlier. But this is the first recorded use in print:

    When he saw what I had done he went spare.
    [Bang to Rights, by Frank Norman, 1958.]

It's worth noting that there's another sense of "going spare", 
presumably extended from the early twentieth-century military one, for 
something that's currently unwanted and available for re-use.

    "Your parents said you could move into their hotel,"
    Rebus said. He turned to face Costello. "They've booked
    two rooms, so one's probably going spare."
    [The Falls, by Ian Rankin, 2001.]


Sic!
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Bob Kernish tells us that the Martel Electronics website implies that 
it sells a police body camera intended for mild-mannered cops: "The 
Vid-Shield is water resistant and withstand rain and humility."

On 3 August, Steve Hirsch was watching an NBC TV news report on the 
return of a patient to the US from Africa: "The American doctor with 
the Ebola virus walked into the medical center where he will be 
treated to everyone's surprise."

Tom Dooley sent a caption to a video he had found online: "Congressman 
David G Valadao discusses the history of California water and the need 
for a legislative solution to avoid future man-made droughts on the 
Floor of the House of Representatives." Debates can be rather dry.

Peter Howell, film critic of the "Toronto Star", wrote a review on 1 
August about Woody Allen's latest film, "Magic in the Moonlight". 
Lydia Hallard sent this sentence from it: "Even the most dextrose 
prose would be unable to overcome the unhappy pairing of Colin Firth 
and Emma Stone, who make a dead battery seem sparky in comparison". 
Sugary prose?

The latest edition of the e-newsletter "This Week" on WNYC, Harvey 
Wachtel tells us, has an article about Mayor DeBlasio's efforts to 
reduce traffic deaths in New York City which ends by offering a link 
labelled "Meet 10 of the people killed by cars this year." 


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

SUBSCRIPTIONS: The website provides all the tools you need to manage 
your own subscription. Please don't contact me asking for changes you 
can make yourself, though if problems occur you can e-mail me at 
wordssubs at worldwidewords.org. To change your subscribed address or 
leave the list, go to http://wwwords.org/sb . This newsletter is also 
available on RSS and via Twitter and Facebook . Back issues for the 
past year are available here.

EMAIL ADDRESSES: Comments on newsletter mailings are always welcome. 
They should be sent to me at michael.quinion at worldwidewords.org. I do 
try to respond, but pressures of time often stop me. Items for "Sic!" 
should go to sic at worldwidewords.org. Questions for the Q&A section 
should be sent to questions at worldwidewords.org, not to me directly.

SUPPORT WORLD WIDE WORDS: If you have enjoyed this newsletter and 
would like to help defray its costs and those of the linked Web site, 
please visit the support page.

COPYRIGHT: World Wide Words is copyright © Michael Quinion 1996-2014. 
All rights reserved. You may reproduce this newsletter in whole or 
part in free newsletters, newsgroups or mailing lists or as 
educational resources provided that you include the copyright notice 
above and give the web address of http://www.worldwidewords.org. 
Reproduction of items in printed publications or commercial websites 
requires permission from the author beforehand.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/worldwidewords/attachments/20140808/5205fcfe/attachment.htm>