World Wide Words -- 04 Jan 14
Michael Quinion
wordseditor at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Sat Jan 4 01:44:55 UTC 2014
--------------------------------------------------------------------
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 863 Saturday 4 January 2014
--------------------------------------------------------------------
This mailing also contains an HTML-formatted version.
A formatted version is also available online at
http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/rwcg.htm
Contents
--------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Conformator.
3. Wordface.
4. Squared away.
5. Sic!
5. Useful information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
--------------------------------------------------------------------
BLATTEROON Mildred Gutkin wrote, "About 'pisk': in the Yiddish-
speaking world of my childhood, a pisk was an animal's mouth, as
distinguished from 'moil', the proper word for the human body part.
The cat has a pisk; a person has a moil. To speak of a person's
pisk, therefore, is derogatory, intimating loose lips or some such,
and that person is, with great contempt, a 'piscatch'. Blatteroon
indeed, the meaning then readily extended to dismiss the entire
individual, body and soul, as a scoundrel."
Howard Wolff added, "During my childhood in the 1930s and 1940s in
Brooklyn, 'fermach deine pisk' meant 'Shut your mouth' or 'Shut up'.
But I must admit that I haven't heard the word used in that or any
other way in many years."
Miriam Miller contributed further Yiddish terms: "The common phrase
'frosk in pisk' means a slap on the mouth. 'Pisk' has come to mean a
loudmouth, not garrulous but dominating conversation. One way to say
garrulous is 'hock meir ein chinick', to knock or bang like a tea
kettle, to yammer on until one wishes he would shut up. Your bubbie
(grandma) might hock you a chinick, but she wouldn't be a pisk."
SITE CHANGES Part of the reason for taking a break at this time of
year is it gives me some time to do essential site maintenance and
improvements. I've extensively recoded the site to begin to make it
support the screen widths of mobile devices, but much remains to be
done (and I have more to learn about what's called responsive web
design). The main change is that pages print much better: the side
columns are removed so the text fills the width of the page within
the margins.
2. Conformator
--------------------------------------------------------------------
This contraption came to my attention, as so many things do, whilst
I was looking for something else, in this case in a book with the
title A History of the City of Lawrence in Massachusetts by Jonathan
F C Hayes, dated 1868. This is a peculiarly formatted book, with its
text only on right-hand pages, faced by adverts for everything from
cough drops to cotton-cleaning machines. One promoted the clothing
emporium of C B French, who announced:
The finest qualities and latest styles of silk hats
manufactured to order, and fitted to the head by the
French conformator.
An illustration showed the conformator to be a sort of circular cage
that fitted over the head. Dozens of bars around the rim were pushed
in by a spring to record the lumps and bumps on the head of the man
or woman being measured. The machine punched a paper pattern for the
hatter, who used it to set the outline of a former on which the brim
of the hat was reshaped. The pattern was often kept so the customer
could order new hats without having to visit the store or go through
the process again.
The conformator was indeed French, though it had been imported from
France rather than being a creation of the firm advertising it (I
fear the ambiguity was deliberate.) The word appeared first in the
French language, as "conformateur", a thing made to conform to the
shape of something else (devices of the same name recorded the shape
of the bust in dressmaking). The invention of the conformateur for
hats is variously credited to a man named Maillard in 1843, to the
firm of Allié Aine the following year and then to that of Allié-
Maillard in 1852, all based in Paris. Though conformators have long
since ceased to be manufactured, they continue to be used by bespoke
hatters such as Lock of London; the rare examples that come on the
market are highly prized and expensive.
I was delighted to find more terminology in Scientific Hat Finishing
and Renovating by Henry L Ermatinger of 1919. He explained that "The
conformator consists of two separate parts, the conformator proper
and the formillion, or shaping block." The formillion is the former
that I mentioned above. He added that "The retailer, or renovator,
should provide himself with a brim board and an iron foot-tolliker
for smoothing the brim." A search found that foot-tollikers, usually
now just called tollikers ("foot" referred to the base of the hat,
not that the tool was foot-operated), are hand tools to set the
angle of the crown to the brim, but I can't trace the origin of the
term.
3. Wordface
--------------------------------------------------------------------
WORDS OF 2013 The American Dialect Society continued its tradition
of voting for its Word of the Year at its annual conference, held
this year in Minneapolis. The winner was a curious choice: "because
X", where "X" is a noun or noun phrase without the intermediate "of"
that would be expected in standard English: "because homework",
"because internet". In such phrases, most often encountered online,
"because" has changed from a conjunction to a preposition. It may
suggest that the logic behind the reasoning is too poor to survive
exposure or that the reason is so obvious the speaker doesn't need
to elaborate. The version found most often is "because reasons", a
hand-waving way of saying that the speaker doesn't want or need to
explain. "Because X" had also been chosen as Most Useful Word of the
Year, beating "struggle bus", a difficult situation, as in "I'm
riding the struggle bus". It is likely that journalists will have a
struggle bus telling their readers why "because X" won (try "because
language", guys).
OTHER YEARLY WORDS ... Collins Dictionaries announced their word of
the year on 17 December: "geek". It's a mark of the word's changing
fortunes. Originally in English dialect a foolish or offensive man,
it has travelled via American carny slang to be a term of abuse for
an unattractive and boring social misfit, frequently one immersed in
the abstruse technicalities of computing. Recently it has become a
positive term, foreshadowed by the slogan "the geek shall inherit
the earth" that has echoed around theatre, film and book since the
1990s and bolstered by the success of technology entrepreneurs such
as Bill Gates, Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg. Collins has already
reflected this change by amending its definition of "geek" to "a
person who is very knowledgeable and enthusiastic about a specific
subject". For Collins, Ian Brookes commented, "The idea of future
generations inheriting a more positive definition of the word is
something that Collins believes is worth celebrating."
WINTER FALLS Alan Harrison asked about "give the cat a penny", a
dialect expression of the English Black Country and adjacent areas
of South Staffordshire, meaning to take a tumble on ice. He wrote,
"In a pub conversation, someone suggested it was derived from a
German phrase meaning fall on your arse, used by prisoners of war
incarcerated in camps on Cannock Chase. This seems improbable. My
mother, born in 1924, believes that she has known the term all her
life." I've looked into this but can't find much about it, though I
can confirm once again that it's undesirable to take seriously the
etymological assertions of people in pubs. Mr Harrison's mum is
correct to say that it's old: in February 1873 an equally puzzled
correspondent to Notes and Queries recalled that a clergyman in
Northamptonshire had written to a local paper about it thirty years
previously. As to how it could have come about, I am at a loss!
4. Squared away
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Q. Your questioner about "crackerjack" (http://wwwords.org/crkjk)
some time ago used "squared away". Now we need an article on its
figurative meaning, though I believe its origin is nautical. [Neil
Paknadel; a related question came from Carol Nichols.]
A. It is indeed a term from the days of sailing ships, though it
has come ashore in its current figurative sense of being tidy or in
proper order. It's common in the armed forces, more so in the US
than the UK.
Perhaps his first inspiration to serve was when his
uncle, looking sharp and squared away in his military
uniform, returned home from the Korean War and introduced
himself to Lloyd when he was a little boy.
[The Buffalo News (Buffalo, NY); 25 Nov. 2013.]
We have numerous idioms employing "square" which imply related ideas
of something that's proper, correct, fair, honest, straightforward,
precise or exact, all of which take us back to well-built structures
whose corners are true right angles. Many are recorded for the first
time in the sixteenth century and it was in that century, too, that
we start to see examples of seafarers using "square" in various
expressions, including "square the yards".
It meant that the yards, the spars that carried the sails, were to
be set at right angles to the keel line from bow to stern, a state
that was known as "square by the braces", or "square by the lifts
and braces" if the spars were also set horizontal. (The lifts and
braces were part of the running rigging; the lifts raised and
lowered the yards and the braces turned them.) At sea, squaring the
yards meant that the ship sailed directly downwind. After anchoring,
"square the yards" was an instruction to clear the decks and make
the ship tidy and ready for sailing again.
Near the end of the eighteenth century, sailors began to extend the
verb by adding "away". The combination took on a sense of getting
moving or travelling directly to some destination without delay or
deviation. This is the earliest I can find:
We have not anchored and shall not, as we shall square
away for Canton in the evening.
[From the entry of 30 August 1798 in the diary of
Ebenezer Townsend, owner and supercargo of the Neptune.
Reprinted by the Hawaiian Historical Society in 1888.]
In the 1860s we begin to see "square away" being used by non-sailors
in a way that approximates to our current sense and which developed
from the sailing one - to make everything ship-shape or to get ready
for some action. An early appearance:
I didn't waste any time in sociabilities with Clarence,
but squared away for business, straight-off.
[A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, by Mark
Twain, 1889.]
Incidentally, from about 1820 in Britain, "square away" took on a
distinct sense of putting oneself in a posture of defence ready for
a fist fight, presumably by adopting the conventional pugilistic
position with fists clenched and raised. (The American "square off"
appeared about the same time; more recently, "square up" has been
usual in Britain.) This usage of "square away" lies to one side of
our modern meaning but presumably derives from the same source.
5. Sic!
--------------------------------------------------------------------
On 28 December, Stella McDowall found something fishy in the Daily
Mail (it also appeared in the Mirror): "A sturgeon who performed the
UK's first hand transplant has revealed an NHS row over funding is
delaying further operations."
Department of inappropriate simile: a report on the Sydney-Hobart
yacht race in the Sydney Morning Herald on 27 December, noticed by
Norman King, quoted competitor Tom Addis as saying "Bass Strait will
be a landmine."
It could have been better expressed 1: Ian Whiting read this online
in the journal Bedfordshire on Sunday dated 12 December: "After two
years of increased begging, anti-social behaviour and drinking on
the streets of Bedford, a dedicated police officer is to once again
patrol the centre of the town."
It could have been better expressed 2: A Reuters report in the
Chicago Tribune on 27 December told DeeDee Wilson: "A Louisiana man
is suspected of killing his wife, ex-mother-in-law and a former
employer before turning a shotgun on himself and committing suicide
at four locations outside of New Orleans, police said on Friday."
Jim Frederick read this in the Telegraph online on 2 January: "As we
now know, the ship was diverted from her original path to assist the
Spirit of Mawson expedition. Although trapped in the ice, the
helicopters of the Snow Dragon completed the airlift in four hours."
6. 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.
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,
leave the list or re-subscribe, go to http://wwwords.org/sb. This
newsletter is also available on RSS (http://wwwords.org/rs) and on
Twitter (http://wwwords.org/tw). Back issues are available via
http://wwwords.org/bk.
E-MAIL CONTACT ADDRESSES: Comments on newsletter mailings are always
welcome. They should be sent to michael.quinion at worldwidewords.org.
I do try to respond, but pressures of time often stop me from doing
so. Items for Sic! should go to sic at worldwidewords.org. Questions
intended to be answered in the Q and 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 via http://wwwords.org/st.
COPYRIGHT: World Wide Words is copyright © Michael Quinion 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/20140103/c74fe43a/attachment.htm>
More information about the WorldWideWords
mailing list