World Wide Words -- 05 Jul 14

[Michael Quinion]

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WORLD WIDE WORDS            ISSUE 885           Saturday 5 July 2014
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Bat an eyelid.
3. Sic!
4. Useful information.


1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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RETURN OF WRITER  I am revitalised by my holiday. Thank you all for 
your forbearance during my month away.

CLOSETS AND CUPBOARDS  My discussion of "skeleton in the cupboard / 
closet" last time led, as I expected, to numerous messages about the 
scope and meaning of these words in American and British English. 

British English doesn't much use "closet" as a noun, though the verb 
has currency. "Water closet" for toilet, lavatory or loo is archaic 
(though John Neave recalled that "My grandmother was a Londoner born 
and bred. To her, a cupboard was a cupboard, but The Closet was the 
lavatory"). Our closets are figurative. We've borrowed the American 
phrase "to come out of the closet", though we couldn't imagine being 
in one to start with ("coming out of the cupboard" doesn't have the 
same portentous connotations.) We also have "closet racists" and 
other closeted types with skeletons in their cupboards.

My understanding is that American cupboards always hang on walls, as 
British ones can also do. As Richard Bos argued, "cupboard implies 
shelves, and therefore not much room for a skeleton, while a closet 
implies standing, or at least hanging room". Paul Witheridge noted 
in similar vein, "To fit in a North American cupboard, the skeleton 
would have to be the remains of a small animal". We Brits prefer 
"cabinet" for these, as in "kitchen cabinet" or "bathroom cabinet" 
(though the former is less used than it once was, perhaps because it 
reminds older Brits of the punning "kitchen cabinet" for the private 
and informal group of advisors around the British PM Harold Wilson, 
though that's originally American of the early nineteenth century). 
British cupboards are often also tall floor-standing storage spaces. 
Sometimes they're built in, but they're still cupboards.

Bill Wallace wrote pithily, "You keep your clothes in a cupboard?" 
To which I replied equally briefly, "No. Mine are in a wardrobe", a 
large free-standing cupboard with specialist fittings, a feature and 
a word that's less common in the US, I believe. But that led me to 
think about the room off our bedroom, just large enough to insert 
one's body into, which the architect no doubt intended for clothes 
but which we use for miscellaneous storage because we already have 
two wardrobes. Though uncommon in Britain such little rooms are, I'm 
told, standard in American bedrooms and are always called closets. 
We call ours a cupboard. Even if we used it for clothes, I still 
wouldn't call it a closet, because that word isn't in my idiolect. 
How would I describe it in that case? I'm not sure. The architect 
probably labelled it "built-in wardrobe" though that would surely be 
a pretentious title for a space of its paltry dimensions.

Gordon Rich emailed: "I am reminded of the comment from the Irish 
lady who was confronted with a skeleton in her cupboard; she said 
'There he is; all-Ireland hide-and-seek champion.'" Marty Ryerson, a 
reader from the US, commented: "When I was a young lad, my mother 
explained that a cupboard was for cups, a closet was for clothes, a 
pantry was for pans, and a larder was for lard. We had a closet 
where we kept canned goods. So, being the youngest in a family of 
smart-alecks, I asked if this was known as a cantry. This term ever 
afterward became the family's name for that storage space."

JABBERWOCKY  Readers pointed out the many translations of Carroll's 
famous poem into other languages. My favourite is the German version 
that I came across in Martin Gardner's The Annotated Alice. It's by 
Robert Scott (one half of Liddell and Scott, authors of the famous 
Greek-English Lexicon, Henry Liddell being the father of the famous 
Alice; his surname, by the way, is pronounced "liddle", as is shown 
by a rhyme of the time: "I am the Dean and this is Mrs Liddell, / 
She plays the first, and I the second fiddle"). The German version 
was published in 1872 in an article in Macmillan's Magazine whose 
title was The Jabberwock Traced to Its True Source. It claimed to 
demonstrate that the poem was actually an English translation of an 
old German ballad. Scott published it under the pseudonym Thomas 
Chatterton, a nod to the knowledgeable because Chatterton had been 
the famous forger of mock-medieval ballads the previous century. It 
begins:

    Es brillig war. Die schlichte Toven 
    Wirrten und wimmelten in Waben; 
    Und aller-mümsige Burggoven 
    Die mohmen Räth' ausgraben.

Though it sounds wonderfully Teutonic read aloud, it is, of course, 
thoroughly bad German and quite unintelligible to native speakers.

GYRE  Steve Price was one of several readers who reminded me of a 
famous example of "gyre" in its sense of a spiral: "Yeats's The 
Second Coming begins 'Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The 
falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the centre 
cannot hold.' And 'gyronny' is the term for a heraldic device of 
eight 'gyrons' that looks as though it's turning like a gyrfalcon in 
the sky."

Scott Underwood pointed out that I was mistaken to imply that "gyre" 
in the poem was pronounced as in standard English, with a soft "g". 
Lewis Carroll wrote in an introduction to Through the Looking-Glass 
dated Christmas 1896: "The new words, in the poem Jabberwocky, have 
given rise to some differences of opinion as to their pronunciation: 
so it may be well to give instructions on that point also. Pronounce 
'slithy' as if it were the two words 'sly, the': make the 'g' hard 
in 'gyre' and 'gimble': and pronounce 'rath' to rhyme with 'bath'."


2. Bat an eyelid
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Q. How did "batting an eyelid" arise? "Fluttering" makes sense, but 
in my view bats flap. [Brian Fleming]

A. The bat in the expression turns out to have nothing do to with 
nocturnal flying mammals. And likewise it's unconnected with table-
tennis, cricket, baseball or any other game in which a bat is an 
essential requirement.

Three idioms are associated with batting eyes or eyelids, by which 
we mean a pronounced rapid blink or series of blinks.

One - very old-fashioned - is "I didn't bat an eyelid all night", 
equivalent to "I didn't sleep a wink". If a woman bats her eyelids 
(more commonly her eyelashes) she's fluttering them flirtatiously:

    It was amusing to watch the woman - who must have been 
    at least sixty - dissolve into girlish simpering in the 
    wave of my brother's considerable charm. When she began 
    coyly batting her eyelashes at him, I'd had about all I 
    could stand of this stomach-turning display. 
    [The Cliff House Strangler, by Shirley Tallman, 
    2007.]

The third, "not to bat an eye" (or eyelid) is to avoid blinking or 
showing any other emotion when something awkward occurs, a mark of 
self-control and equanimity. 

For the answer, we must look to the long defunct verb, "bate", which 
is connected to our "abate", "debate" and "bated breath". It came 
into English from French "battre", to beat, and meant, among other 
things, the beating or fluttering of a falcon's wings. Over time, 
"bate" became shortened to "bat" in some English dialects and came 
to mean "blink" or "wink". Dialect researchers in the nineteenth 
century noted this sense of "bat" in a swathe of England from south 
Yorkshire down to Nottinghamshire and across to Shropshire.

The sense of flirtatiousness is originally American. It starts to 
appear in the record around 1880.

    You hol' your head high; don't you bat your eyes to 
    please none of 'em.
    [At Teague Poteet's, by Joel Chandler Harris, in the 
    Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, May 1883. This story 
    of Georgia backwoodsmen and moonshiners was published the 
    following year in Mingo and Other Sketches in Black and 
    White.]


3. Sic!
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Knowing teaser line or accident? Alex Baumans spotted on 5 June that 
the Huffington Post promoted an article with "Only Chrissy Teigen 
Could Pull Off Underwear On The Red Carpet."

Betsy Adams sent a copy of an article from a newsletter that the 
College of Arts and Sciences at the University of South Carolina 
circulated to potential donors. She was disquieted by its headline: 
"Student embraces one-on-one with top-level researcher".

Someone noted Graham Thomas's interest in ornithology and suggested 
he download an app that included 268 bird guides, an A to Z list of 
birds and many other features. The last of these really caught his 
imagination: "Ability to Tweet from the app".

A Daily Mail website photo caption on 16 June noted the unhappiness 
of some older fans of Southampton FC to the appointment of a new 
football manager and added, "But it doesn't mean they are casting 
dispersions". Barry Prince said he always thought it was nasturtiums 
that one cast ... or an equivalent malapropism such as "cast 
asparagus".


4. Useful information
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ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER: World Wide Words is researched, written and 
published by Michael Quinion in the UK. ISSN 1470-1448. Copyediting 
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