World Wide Words -- 08 Mar 14

[Michael Quinion]

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WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 872           Saturday 8 March 2014
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Grimoire.
3. Wordface.
4. Ham.
5. Sic!
6. Useful information.


1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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BLIND FREDDIE  Several subscribers commented on the piece in much 
the same terms as Naomi Rankin: "The information about Frederick 
Solomons is interesting, but doesn't seem to fit the idiom. To 
underline the obviousness of something we would say that even an 
unperceptive person could see it, not one who was renowned for his 
remarkable acuteness of perception despite his blindness."

The idiom was surely a development of the much older slur "even a 
blind man could see ..." (as in the Newcastle Morning Herald of New 
South Wales in 1881: "even a blind man could see this is a clear 
case of suicide"). Speakers used Blind Freddie as a well-known case 
of a blind man to personify and localise the saying while ignoring 
his special qualities.

HYPNAGOGIC  Dr John Brydon emailed from Australia: "The sudden jerk 
that we may make when falling asleep, commonly in the belief we are 
tumbling out of bed, gives rise to the most delightful name for a 
medical syndrome that I know: the 'hypnagogic startle'."

CLUBBING  Ted MacKinney found the following headline, which appeared 
in the Utah People's Post on 22 February: "Google clubs hands with 
WRI to check deforestation". He and I find this an unusual sense of 
the verb "club" and I wonder if it's an unconscious blend of "club 
together" and "join hands with". But do readers know differently?


2. Grimoire
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A grimoire is a book of magic that may contain spells, conjurations, 
instructions for divination and the construction of amulets, and 
other secret knowledge of a supernatural kind. The examples include 
such famous works as the Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, The Book 
of St Cyprian, The Key of Solomon and The Sacred Magic of Abramelin 
the Mage.

The word is French, in the same sense. It began to appear in French-
English dictionaries early in the nineteenth century but became more 
widely known in the 1850s. In French, it was a medieval modification 
of "grammaire", a book of grammar, by which was meant Latin grammar, 
since at the time there was no other kind. It derives from the Latin 
"grammatica", the study of literature in general, which by the 
Middle Ages had come to mean knowledge of Latin. 

The shift from book of grammar to book of magic isn't as weird as it 
might seem. Few among the ordinary people in those times could read 
or write. For superstitious minds books were troubling objects. Who 
knew what awful information was locked up in them? For many people 
grammar meant the same thing as learning, and everybody knew that 
learning included astrology and other occult arts.

In medieval English, "grammarye" was likewise the study of Latin 
grammar and this, too, took on undertones of occult learning, magic 
and necromancy. It fell out of use but was revived by Sir Walter 
Scott in his Lay of the Last Minstrel in 1805. 

Another of Scott's popularisations was the Scots "glamour". This was 
also from "grammar", with a small shift in pronunciation, and shared 
the idea that grammar was linked with witchcraft and sorcery. To us 
today glamour is physical allure but for the Scots of earlier times, 
and for Scott, it was enchantment, magic or a spell cast upon a 
person.


3. Wordface
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FIDDLE, TWIDDLE AND TWEAK  A review by Steven Poole in the Guardian 
last Saturday of Geek Sublime by Vikram Chandra noted the author's 
use of the computer jargon verb FROBNICATE, frequently shortened to 
"frob". Eric S Raymond defined it in The New Hackers' Dictionary in 
1993 as "to manipulate or adjust, to tweak". Mr Raymond traced it to 
"frobnitz", an ad hoc invention within the Tech Model Railway Club 
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology around 1960. Its users 
abbreviated it to "frob" and others later extended it again. Steven 
Poole says he knows enough computer code to be able to "hack around 
in [the computer language] PHP a bit until my websites work the way 
I want", which is a good definition of a FROBNICATOR in action.

DIFFICULT EXTRACTION  Jerry Krempel recently came across the British 
expression WINKLE IT OUT and asked whether it has anything to do 
with shellfish. It does indeed. Boiled winkles were once a favourite 
seaside fast food in Britain, though consumption has fallen hugely 
since the Second World War. Winkles were sold in paper bags together 
with a pin, essential to extract the meat from the shell, though 
even with its aid it often wasn't easy. To figuratively winkle out, 
therefore, is to obtain something with difficulty. ("I'm very good 
at counselling my friends and coming up with solutions to their 
problems. Even if they don't want to talk, I'll winkle it out of 
them!" -- Julian Clary in the Sun, Aug. 2013.) The verb was 
originally military slang of the Second World War; even earlier a 
winkle-pin was a bayonet.


4. Ham
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A ham or ham actor is one who struts his piece upon the stage to 
little effect, a fifth-rate artiste of the sort that P G Wodehouse 
said "couldn't play the pin in Pinafore". He may fail because he is 
an unskilled amateur, though the word is more often applied to a 
thespian who overacts in a theatrical or ranting way to compensate 
for his poor grasp of technique or to upstage his fellow actors.

The term is American and dates from the nineteenth century. Where it 
comes from has been the subject of more inventive etymology than you 
can shake a stick at. It's said to be from Hamlet's advice to the 
actors ("O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-
pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the 
ears of the groundlings"), though why it had to wait 300 years to 
appear is not explained. A related idea is that the word comes from 
the title of the play, which is one that amateurs frequently perform 
badly. Others argue it's from a Cockney pronunciation of amateur, 
"hamateur", but that would put the origin on the wrong continent. 

In the 1860s, "ham" began to be used in America for somebody who was 
stupid, clumsy or worthless, especially an untalented prize fighter. 
This is most likely to have been borrowed from "ham-handed" or "ham-
fisted", meaning a person with large hands that fancifully resembled 
the prepared ham of a pig, hence clumsy. 

In a separate development in the 1870s, "ham" began to be applied to 
variety performers, who were looked down on by "legitimate" actors. 
It was also used for incompetents within the profession generally:

    Ham - is the most derisive word in the professional 
    vocabulary, and if you wish to lose the friendship of 
    anyone in the business call him a "ham," and that settles 
    it. A person who can do nothing at all, can not speak his 
    lines properly or is any way bad in his calling, is 
    denominated a "ham".
    [Cincinnati Enquirer, 7 Sep. 1879.]

In this sense, it's almost certainly an abbreviation of the slightly 
older "hamfatter":

    "When Dellaven proposed this concert business, I told 
    him I was no ham-fatter, and --" "Ham-fatter?" "Yes. Ham-
    fatter. That's the name we give a man in our profession 
    who is a poor performer."
    [Nashville Union and American, 6 Nov. 1874.]

The consensus is that the source lies with low-paid performers in 
minstrel troupes, who had to make do with ham fat for cleaning off 
make-up after a performance rather than a more expensive cream. It 
seems likely that a mental association grew up with the existing 
sense of "ham" for a clumsy or useless person. Another link may have 
been "hambone", slang for a third-rate minstrel performer; this is 
said - not entirely convincingly - to come from trombonists in such 
troupes using ham fat to grease the slides of their instruments, 
slangily known as "bones".

"Ham" later became a term for an amateur radio enthusiast. There has 
been much controversy about where the term comes from, but it seems 
certain that it's connected to "ham" in the sense of "clumsy". With 
that meaning it was used in the 1890s by US railway telegraphers to 
describe ill-trained, slow and inaccurate Morse-code operators. It 
seems to have been adopted early in the next century as an inverted 
badge of honour by early radio experimenters, who also communicated 
using Morse code.


5. Sic!
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Roy Sinton tells us that on 1 March The Press of Christchurch, New 
Zealand, reported on the restoration of a historic building that had 
served as a monastery and as an alcoholics' rehabilitation centre: 
"He was puzzled by the number of liquor bottles he found around the 
place. Could they have been smuggled in by the alcoholics or did the 
brothers sneak them in hidden down their cossacks?"

The Independent newspaper had an item on 2 March about Ukip, the UK 
Independence Party (which wants the UK to leave the European Union). 
Mark Daley read that its leader, Nigel Farage, was worried about a 
threat from immigrant gamblers: "Mr Farage said it was 'nonsense' to 
try and impose a cap on migration as a member of the EU, and said 
that if he was a Romanian worker he would move to Britain for the 
higher wagers being offered."


6. 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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