World Wide Words -- 18 Jan 14

[Michael Quinion]

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WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 865         Saturday 18 January 2014
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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. Rhine.
3. Wordface.
4. Whet one's appetite.
5. Sic!
6. Useful information.


1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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ALL SIZZLE AND NO STEAK  From Australia, Terence Hogan commented, 
"In this part of the world I'm more familiar with the version 'all 
sizzle and no sausage'." Several other Australians mentioned a 
classic putdown by the sharp-tongued former PM Paul Keating, who 
once referred to the then Treasurer Peter Costello as "all tip and 
no iceberg".

David Gallagher remembered, "The equivalent in Liverpool in my 
childhood was 'big head and no bread in the house'." Steve Price 
noted, "We as teenagers referred to this as 'NATO', 'No Action, Talk 
Only'." "Growing up in Tennessee," David Powell wrote, "the phrase 
I've always heard for someone that doesn't live up to their own hype 
is 'all bark and no bite'." Michael Templeton found another in The 
Sky Fisherman by Craig Leslie: "all tackle and no fish"; he also 
pointed out "all buzz and no bees".

Many people mentioned the northern English and Scottish "all fur 
coat and no knickers" as a comparable form. I didn't include it 
because its implications are of pretentious elegance that overlies 
vulgarity rather than incompetence. In the sense of keeping up with 
the Joneses it's close to the London "kippers and curtains" (see 
http://wwwords.org/kpctn). There's also "all mouth and trousers" 
(http://wwwords.org/amat), another northern English put-down with 
rather different implications.

FROST QUAKE  Morgiana Halley commented, "While I have heard the term 
'frost quake' very rarely, I had no idea of what it meant, though I 
live in the State of Maine, which often gets extreme winter weather. 
I had always heard the phenomenon referred to, both in speech and on 
road hazard signs, as 'frost heave'. Usually, though, if any warning 
is given for the navigational problems resulting from this, it's a 
small sign that reads 'bump'." Ed Pixley added, "Having grown up in 
Northern Minnesota in the 1940s and 1950s, I don't remember hearing 
the term I do vividly remember 'frost boils', which usually began to 
appear in late March and April as frozen ground thawed and refroze, 
creating havoc with all macadam and gravel roads in the area."


2. Rhine  /riːn/
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A little stream that runs close to my house soon drops to what used 
to be the flood plain of the River Severn before it was enclosed and 
drained. It flows into a drainage ditch called the Pickedmoor Rhine. 
It can't be compared with its vastly greater cousin, the continental 
European Rhine, but if you trace its history back far enough you 
will find it shares an etymology.

"Rhine" is an old dialect word known in several spellings around the 
estuary of the Severn. On the Somerset Levels to the south, it is 
"rhyne". On the other side of the estuary, around Newport in South 
Wales, it's "reen". No matter the spelling, all are pronounced 
"reen", suggesting a common origin. The Somerset spelling has been 
in the news recently because of serious flooding on the Levels.

The Oxford English Dictionary lists a group of words closely similar 
in sense: "rean", "rain", "rone" and "rune", of which "rain" has a 
separate origin from the one meaning water from the sky and "rune" 
is likewise a different word from the one for a letter in an ancient 
alphabet. A "rean" is a deep furrow in a ploughed field; "rain" 
could have the same sense as "rean", but could also be a strip of 
uncultivated land marking a boundary; "rone" is likewise a boundary 
strip; and "rune" is a watercourse. The group appears to be 
Scandinavian or Germanic variations on an ancient Indo-European word 
meaning to flow or move, linked to "run". The name of the European 
river Rhine is from the same source, as is that of the Rhône and 
some other rivers.

My local "rhine" rarely appears in literature; one mention is in a 
story about pirates told by a 12-year-old born in Gloucestershire, 
though here he's talking about south Devon:

    The sea had once come right up that valley to just 
    below my uncle's house; but that was many years before - 
    long before anybody could remember. Just after I went to 
    live there, one of the farmers dug a drain, or "rhine," in 
    the valley, to clear a boggy patch. 
    [Jim Davis, by John Masefield, 1911.]


3. Wordface
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IDLE LANGUAGE  It started with an item on local dialect on the BBC 
Radio Wiltshire morning show last November. Mervin Grist of the 
Wiltshire & Swindon History Centre mentioned "ganderflanking", a 
one-time local word for aimlessly messing about. Sim Courtie, the 
show's presenter, loved it and started a campaign to get it into the 
Oxford English Dictionary (a nice thought, Sim, but you haven't a 
hope, because it's very rare and long since obsolete). The South 
Swindon MP, Robert Buckland, helped the campaign by using it in the 
House of Commons last week. The English Dialect Dictionary of 1898-
1905 records it in the sense of frolicking, larking or gadding 
about, though a publication of the English Dialect Society in 1893 
preferred to define it as "To go off larking or wondermenting". This 
last word was another Wiltshire term, meaning to play the fool or 
waste time over unprofitable work. The EDD includes two related 
words in the same sense as "gandermooning": "gander-mooning" from 
Gloucestershire and the more widely recorded "gander-legging".

CAFFEINE HIGH  Workers whose essential equipment is no more than a 
laptop and a wi-fi connection find coffee shops to be good places to 
hang out. Constant access to beverages, a background buzz and no 
colleagues to distract them are just the ticket for getting work 
done. "Coffee-shop office" has been compressed into "coffice". 
Though it's been around for several years, it has received a boost 
this month through a mention by Nicola Millard, futurologist at the 
British telecoms firm BT (although she prefers to call herself a 
"soonologist", as she looks no more than five years ahead). She 
extends the idea of the coffice to airport lounges and hotel 
lobbies. If I were forced to work in places like that, I'd have to 
restrain myself from continually shushing people, but each to their 
own.

A WORD WITH LEGS  The extraordinary rise in popularity of "selfie" 
for a self-photograph was noted here last November when it became 
Oxford Dictionaries' Word of the Year. A signal of its widespread 
acceptance was the creation of related terms such as "welfie" (a 
workout selfie) or "drelfie" (one taken while drunk). The newest is 
"felfie", a self-portrait taken by a farmer, either holding an 
animal or with animals in the background. It began through a "Selfie 
on the Farm" contest in the Irish Farmers Journal late last year, 
which was won by a farmer from County Tipperary, and has spread 
widely since. When middle-aged farmers are taking selfies, you know 
it's gone way beyond a teen craze.


4. Wheeling and dealing
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Q. Following up your item last week about "all sizzle and no steak", 
(http://wwwords.org/asans) could the Wheeler who prompted the saying 
have also inspired "wheeling and dealing"? [Meg Morley]

A. "Wheeling and dealing" is American, like the famous depression-
era salesman Elmer Wheeler you mention, but some research shows that 
it has nothing to do with anybody called Wheeler. However, it does 
come into being in his time.

Its origins are hinted at in early twentieth-century references to 
gamblers who could run either a roulette wheel or a card game, that 
is, could wheel or deal. This has been seriously suggested as the 
origin but can only have been a slight influence at best because the 
idea never became formalised into a set expression. Another sense of 
"wheel" that was in the air and may have contributed was the 1930s 
slang term for a gangster, more generally (and often as "big wheel") 
any prominent and important person.

However, the record shows the direct origin was the motor trade, 
largely because it made an apposite rhyming catchphrase. Advertisers 
in the 1930s offered "wheel deals", good prices on cars, and later 
expanded the expression into a verb, as this early example shows:

    C. & M. OIL CO. See 'COXIE' - He Will "Wheel 'n Deal" 
    the Bargains
    [The Sikeston Herald (Missouri), 17 Jun. 1940.]

"Wheel and deal" became more common in the motor business after the 
Second World War and later broadened its appeal beyond the trade to 
shrewd bargaining of any kind. The form "wheeling and dealing" 
naturally followed.

A further stage of development was to turn the phrase into a noun 
for a person, a "wheeler-dealer". This starts to become widely known 
in the late 1950s and was defined in Wentworth and Flexner's 
Dictionary of American slang in 1960 as "an adroit, quick-witted, 
scheming person". But its story goes back at least a decade, at 
first meaning a car salesman:

    George Butler, the wheeler-dealer at the Jackson Goldie 
    Chrysler-Plymouth place, is back from an Oregon trip.
    [Daily Review (Hayward, California), 13 Jul. 1951.]

Within a few years it had evolved into the meaning we now know:

    Texas' fabulous multi-millionaires - particularly ex 
    San Antonian Clinton Williams Muchison, "the biggest 
    wheeler-dealer of 'em all' - are glorified and joshed in 
    [this] week's Time magazine cover story.
    [San Antonio Express (Texas) 24 May 1954.]


5. Sic!
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The Daily Mail's lead sentence on a report of 24 December was passed 
to us by Christopher Joubert: "Comedian Russell Brand revealed he 
did have sex with model Sophie Coady during a High Court hearing on 
Monday."

Jenny O'Brien reported: "I've just received a message that began: 
"Get O, The Oprah Magazine for your iPad to enjoy", which listed 
several attributes of the electronic edition. It's nice that Oprah 
wants my iPad to enjoy her magazine. I really enjoy receiving your 
newsletter, and I'm sure my iPad does too!"

In an article about biting beach flies that Lee Schlesinger found on 
the website of WWSB, the ABC news affiliate in Sarasota, Florida, we 
find an interesting method of insect reproduction. "McCord says the 
bite of both types of flies can leave whelps on the skin and be very 
painful."

One for the "I Know What You Mean" department. Janet Walker sent 
this from the Guardian on 16 January about the death of a British 
actor: "[Roger] Lloyd-Pack lived in Kentish Town, north London, with 
his second wife Jehane Markham, the daughter of the stage and film 
actor David Markham, with whom he had three sons."


6. Useful information
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ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER: World Wide Words is researched, written and 
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