World Wide Words -- 01 Feb 14

[Michael Quinion]

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WORLD WIDE WORDS          ISSUE 866         Saturday 1 February 2014
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Apotropaic.
3. Wordface.
4. Give the mitten.
5. Sic!
6. Useful information.


1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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SNAKE OIL  John Bakke found an earlier reference to the medicinal 
use of snake oil than I included in the piece last week. It was in 
the Royal Gazette of New York dated 21 February 1778: "Wanted: By a 
certain Gentleman, some Rattle Snake Oil. Any person having this 
article, and is willing to dispose of a small quantity, will by 
applying to Mr. Rivington be paid their demand for the same, it 
being wanted for a particular occasion." We are both intrigued as to 
the nature of the particular occasion.

Hugo van Kemenade found an even earlier one in a letter the Rev John 
Clayton wrote in 1687 (Clayton later became Dean of Kildare in 
Ireland and was the first person to extract an inflammable gas from 
coal): "There are three Sorts of Oils in that Country [Virginia], 
whose Virtues, if fully proved, might not perhaps be found 
despicable. The Oil of Drums, the Oil of Rattle Snakes, and the Oil 
of Turkey Bustards." An excellent find which, as so often, raises a 
further question: what is "oil of drums"? Many Americans will know 
what I had to be told: that it's oil from one of several fish called 
more fully drum-fish that have the power of making a drumming noise. 
Presumably in this case it's the salt-water drum of the Atlantic 
coast.

"Believe it or not," Henk Rietveld emailed, "a modern, non-medicinal 
snake oil is on the market. It bears no resemblance to the product 
flogged in the 19th century, but in fact is a cleaner/lubricant for 
sewer snakes - those sinuous cables used to clear clogged drains. I 
work in a large hardware retail store that rents these things, and 
upon return, they are power-washed and coated with snake oil. This 
prevents rusting, and promotes somewhat easier insertion into the 
next clogged drain. I must confess that I laughed when I was first 
faced with the product, but believe me, it's real."


2. Apotropaic   /ˌapətrəˈpeɪɪk/
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Tomorrow, 2 February, is a Christian festival day that has a number 
of names, one of them Candlemas. It got that name because on that 
day in medieval times people brought candles to church to have them 
blessed by the priest. This was thought to give the candles the 
power to ward off evil spirits - in the language of religion and 
folklore, they became apotropaic.

The word is classical Greek, "apotrepein", to turn away or avert. 
Like other civilisations, Greeks and Romans had many rituals that 
were designed to ward off evil. Grotesque masks and faces, such as 
the Medusa head of the ancient Greeks or the gargoyles on medieval 
churches, frightened witches and demons away; incantations and 
gestures kept the devil at a distance; amulets preserved their 
wearers from malignant spirits; holly and rowan were effective 
against evil; symbols such as the all-seeing eye were put on 
wineglasses, houses, boats or tombs. All were apotropaic.

    Although the house is humble, with no fancy 
    architectural details, he noticed a few things that dated 
    it to the late 17th or early 18th century. These included 
    an "apotropaic symbol", carved on the inglenook and 
    intended to keep witches from coming down the chimney.
    [Sunday Times, 13 Mar. 2011.]


3. Wordface
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THANKFULLY, WE'RE DIGITAL  Howard Sinberg emailed from Florida to 
ask about "chloephobia", which seems to be the newest member of a 
vast class of names for irrational fears. It's not a morbid dislike 
of girls named Chloe but a fear of newspapers. It appeared in the 
Daily Mail in Britain on 27 January and the story has since been 
widely reproduced. It claimed one sufferer's phobia began 25 years 
ago "when she saw her mother jokily hit her father over the head 
with a newspaper." The earliest example that I've so far found was 
in the Western Daily Press of Bristol in May 2013 but the source and 
etymology of the word are obscure. Greek "chloe" can refer to green 
things, especially grass and the first green shoots of spring (it's 
a relative of "chlōros", pale green, hence our "chlorophyll" and 
"chlorine"), but neither fits the context. This researcher retires, 
baffled.

UNPOETIC  From Vancouver, Ken Tough queried the use of "verse" among 
young people to mean "be in competition with" as in "what team are 
we versing tomorrow?" This has become widespread worldwide in the 
past decade or so. In origin it's a typical childhood error: the 
preposition "versus" is heard as "verses" and then reasonably but 
incorrectly analysed as the third-person present tense of the verb 
"verse". It's far from new: the New York Times noticed it in 1984 as 
"high school slang meaning to compete against another school's team" 
- but it only started to be commented on as a trend a decade or so 
ago. The evidence suggests that it was popularised through online 
gamers' forums in the 1990s. It's not clear how often it survives 
childhood to be used by adults, though there is evidence of this in 
Australia. The Macquarie Dictionary includes it and it can sometimes 
be found in print:

    To get a game, even here in Australia, would be 
    unbelievable. To be versing the likes of Sachin Tendulkar, 
    Rahul Dravid - it's going to be a massive challenge.
    [Sydney Morning Herald, 25 Nov 2011.]

DEATH OF A MILLION CUTS  The rather morbid "micromort" is a unit of 
risk equivalent to a one-in-a-million chance of death. It was in the 
news recently through reports that a smartphone app is likely to 
come out later this year which will let you look up the risk level 
of an activity measured in micromorts. A British report in 2009 
calculated that an average person experiences a micromort by driving 
230 miles in a car, riding six miles on a motorbike, travelling 
6,000 miles in a train or by taking three flights. The first use I 
can find is in a book of 1980, Societal Risk Assessment.


4. Give the mitten
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Q. I was recently working an acrostic puzzle and came upon the clue, 
"to break up with a loved one". The answer, which I had never run 
across, was "give the mitten". Could you explain the history of this 
phrase, please? [Michael Thomas]

A. It's new to me, too, Mr Thomas, as it probably is to readers, 
since it is now extremely rare. The meaning has often been the one 
you give (in the American Civil War, a soldier who received a Dear 
John letter (http://wwwords.org/drjn) was said to have been given 
the mitten) but it could also often mean that a woman had rejected a 
unwelcome admirer out of hand. It occasionally meant that a student 
had been expelled from college or a workman had got the sack.

It's known to be at least 170 years old. It has sometimes been taken 
to be North American, as the examples that were written down first - 
in the 1840s - are from works by Thomas Chandler Haliburton of Nova 
Scotia, who had a keen ear for the vocabulary of his times. However, 
as it is also recorded in Britain and Canada during much of the 
nineteenth century, it is probably an older British idiom that 
emigrants had carried abroad. In support of this, at the end of the 
century, the English Dialect Dictionary noted it as a British 
regional or dialect expression in the form "to send one a mitten", 
to reject somebody or to cast them off.  

"Mitten", for a glove with two sections, one for the thumb and the 
other for all four fingers, comes from the French "mitaine". One 
French authority has argued this was transferred from the Old French 
and surviving regional term "mite", a pet name for a cat. It's 
assumed that the link is to the cat's warm fur. (In modern French a 
mitaine is a fingerless glove, with "moufle" having taken over the 
mitten sense.)

The origin is alas, as so often, quite obscure. 

Might it somehow be an inverted version of the old tradition that a 
man who rejected a proposal of marriage from a lady in a leap year 
had to give her a present of a pair of white gloves? Probably not.

Some speculate its origin lies in the Latin "mitto", to dismiss, via 
"mittimus" ("we send"), which was a legal order that committed a 
person to prison. If we extend and blur the sense of "mittimus" to 
mean merely sending somebody away, it's possible that it might have 
got wrapped up with "mitten". But it's a bit of a stretch.

The other explanation is about equally believable, by which I mean 
only possibly. It is said that there was a tradition in France by 
which a young lady who wished to decline a marriage proposal sent 
her suitor a pair of mittens. Could this have been a consolation 
prize for not getting her hand? Or might it have begun with some 
young man who was being sent away wailing the French equivalent of 
"Baby, it's cold outside!" being dismissively supplied with mittens? 
It's as good a story as any ...


5. Sic!
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Stella McDowall spotted an understandable homophone in a headline in 
the Daily Mirror. It was over a story dated 20 January about what it 
called the "gentle succession" in the British monarchy: "Queen hands 
over the reigns to Prince Charles".

"This is wrong for so many reasons!" Kerry Walsh emailed about the 
description of a "Men's Stainless Steel Cross Railroad Bracelet" he 
read on Amazon: "Although it has a similar appearance to metal, 
Stainless Steel is much thicker and will not tarnish."

David Becker submitted a headline from the issue of USA Today for 26 
January: "Boar killed after wild beach run to feed poor". Not the 
sad end to a mercy dash by a selfless animal, but the donation of 
the carcass of a wild pig that caused panic on a Florida beach to 
feed people in a homeless shelter.

AOL News online on 28 January startled Steve Hirsch and Dan Welch 
with a brief item about execution by lethal injection: "Despite 
complaints from executed inmates, Oklahoma will not review its 
protocol." It was quickly changed.


6. Useful information
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