World Wide Words -- 24 May 14
Michael Quinion
michael.quinion at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Thu May 22 22:02:00 UTC 2014
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WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 884 Saturday 24 May 2014
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A formatted version is also available online at
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Contents
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1. Feedback, Notes and Comments.
2. Nuciform.
3. Wordface.
4. Red rag to a bull.
5. Sic!
6. Useful information.
1. Feedback, Notes and Comments
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COLPORTEUR Roderick Webb wrote "The best book about a colporter is
the wonderful The Bible In Spain by George Borrow dated 1843. This
eccentric English traveller financed a long walking tour of Spain by
agreeing to distribute Bibles for the Tract Society. The result was
surely one of the best travel books ever written."
Tom Knight noted "I knew that, among Jehovah's Witnesses, the term
'colporter' was used of their full-time evangelists until 1931. I
was unaware that Seventh-day Adventists continued to call their
evangelists 'colporters' as late as 1980, until I saw a reference on
Wikipedia." Kenneth Michie added "I was brought up in a Church of
Scotland manse in the 1940s and 1950s. I clearly remember my father
having visits from a representative of the Scottish Colportage
Society. I have just found a link to its existence in the 1960s."
Several readers pointed out that in German relatives of the word
have taken on negative meanings, "Kolportage" means something cheap
and sensational; a "Kolportageroman" is a trashy novel. The verb
"kolportieren" means to peddle rumours or false information. "It's
also still current in Dutch," Richard Bos noted. "The only meaning
now is the door-to-door vending of printed materials you mention,
and especially of subscriptions to magazines and encyclopaedias.
It's also gained the meaning of an itinerant pedlar of cheap
rubbish. It's not a good thing to be called, as it implies
undesirable wares, a certain lack of honesty, and unpleasant
persistence.
2. Nuciform
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John Fisher reminded me, following my discussion of "marthambles",
(http://wwwords.org/mtbls), that George Bernard Shaw satirised
doctors and surgeons of his day for espousing remedies that were no
less fictitious than Dr Tufts' diseases of marthambles, hockogrocle
and moon-pall. In Shaw's The Doctor's Dilemma of 1906, the famous
surgeon Sir Cutler Walpole advocated the removal of the "nuciform
sac", a bodily organ unknown to medical science. Shaw was satirising
the then widespread practice of removing the appendix in the belief
that it would cure various chronic diseases, including mental
conditions.
A couple of decades later, the writer and silent-film actor Louis
Sherwin was quoted on leaving Hollywood as describing the place as
"that paradise of the nuciform brain". (He also said "I am glad to
say farewell to a city where the inhabitants know only one word of
two syllables, 'fil-lum'.")
"Nuciform" is a sensible and useful English word, albeit one that
few of us need unless we're botanists (or disgruntled film actors
who know their Shaw). It simply means nut-like or nut-shaped. The
earliest use that I've found is in the Transactions of the American
Philosophical Society in 1843, in an article by a man named, would
you believe, Nuttall.
Its origin is the classical Latin prefix "nuci-", which derives from
"nux", a nut. The earliest English word that employed the prefix is
the highly obscure "nuciprune" (from Latin prūnum, a plum), a fruit
halfway between a nut and a plum. The botanist Nehemiah Grew created
it in 1682 for the walnut, whose plum-like character is elusive. If
you would like to be even more obscure, when next cracking a walnut
you could refer to the "nucifragous" implement that you're wielding,
in plain English a nutcracker.
3. Wordface
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TURN O' PHRASE The Mike Leigh film about the painter J M W Turner,
premiered at Cannes last weekend, has had rave reviews. The Observer
commented, "The film also features some succulent period language,
such as the imprecation: 'Brook your ire, sir!' The film is so well
liked here that someone could do a roaring trade in T-shirts: MR
TURNER SAYS: BROOK YOUR IRE." It may be succulent but common it
never was - I can find no equivalent examples anywhere. The verb
"brook" means to tolerate or allow something, typically dissent or
opposition (it comes from an Old English verb meaning to enjoy and
later to digest or stomach). It's much more common in the
negative, as in "He would brook no dissent". The phrasing may have
been an error by the Observer's man in Cannes, since Chris Knight,
writing in Canada's National Post, renders it as "I beseech you
brook your ire", seemingly an attempt to placate an angry fellow
artist. It looks as though the scriptwriter meant Turner to
request the other person to curb or control his anger but used the
wrong word. I await the public release of the film so that under
the pretence of enjoying myself I can do a bit of linguistic
analysis.
ARSE VERSUS ELBOW At the end of April Sarah Wendell, who edits the
romance blog Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, raised a small storm of
media attention. The process by which printed books are scanned into
digital text can suffer problems with recognising characters. OCR
(optical character recognition) software is rarely 100% accurate and
can fail really badly with older books whose printing isn't up to
modern standards. She discovered that in one horrifyingly hilarious
error, "arms" often turns into "anus". This is one out of many that
she dug up, in a digitised story by Thomas Lansing Masson from Life
magazine in 1900: "Mrs. Tipton went over to him and put her anus
around his neck." Another Twitter user wrote "People think OCR is a
cheap way to get old books into ebook format. But to do it right
means thorough proof reading is needed."
I was reminded of this when Francesca Davis emailed me, having found
a puzzling word while reading Louisa May Alcott's 1873 novel Work: A
Story of Experience on her Kindle: "You are only a woman, and in
tilings of this sort we are so blind and silly." She couldn't find
any reference to "tiling" other than in connection with roofing or
related matters and wondered if it were some old-fashioned term. It
isn't rare in digitised books archives: "They may do all the right
tilings, but they can't sense the feelings of others", "There are
many tilings which will retard the elevation of woman in Greece" and
"She gets so bored, she does all kinds of silly tilings." My hunt
online found a facsimile of the book. It should have read "You are
only a woman, and in things of this sort we are so blind and silly."
4. Red rag to a bull
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Q. Why do people talk about waving a "red rag at a bull" when they
mean somebody is deliberately angering another? Why a red rag, and
why a bull? [Bill Fairweather, Detroit]
A. The idiom "red rag to a bull" has been known in the English-
speaking world since the nineteenth century. It can mean either an
incitement or provocation or something that causes great annoyance
or anger. The alternative "red flag to a bull" was recorded in its
early days and is still in use.
Red rags have had a long history. The first meaning, known from
about 1600 and which has lasted almost down to the present day, was
of the tongue. "To wag the red rag" was to talk incessantly. This is
a later example:
Shut your potatoe trap, and give your red rag a
holiday.
[A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, by
Francis Grose, 1785. It's a little late to reassure former
vice-president Dan Quayle that "potato" was indeed at one
time often spelled "potatoe", which explains why "potato"
has the non-standard plural "potatoes".]
Literal red rags have many times been suggested as provocations for
wild animals. A writer in 1720 stated that turkeys and pheasants
would fly in anger at one. Others have mentioned snakes: in March
1809 The Times opined that "Truth to a lawyer was like a red rag to
a viper - it extracted his venom." In a similar vein, Sir Richard
Burton noted in The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night in 1885
that snake-jugglers removed the poison fangs of snakes by provoking
them to strike at a red rag. A book on wildfowling a decade later
mentioned a small stand with a mirror and a red rag fastened to it
for ensnaring larks. An Australian newspaper many decades ago said
that even sheep are enraged by a red rag. An after-dinner toast of
the nineteenth century mentions one further animal and adds another
sense, the red coats of soldiers: "May our fair [ladies] never so
nearly resemble our geese as to be attracted by a red rag."
The usual explanation of the origin of "red rag to a bull" connects
it with bullfighting. The muleta, the small cape Spanish matadors
flourish in the final stages of the bout, has been coloured red ever
since Francisco Romero from Andalusia introduced it around 1726. We
now know that bulls are colour blind and that it's the movement of
the cape that attracts their attention. Other animals also have poor
colour vision and this disposes of the story that the colour reminds
them of blood, which discomforts them so much they charge at it.
People were making a direct connection between red rags and bulls
from early in the nineteenth century:
The Bulls of Bashan are all roaring against him, and
will toss and tear him to pieces like a red rag.
[Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Sep. 1822. The
reference to Bashan is Biblical, to Psalm 22.]
By the middle of the century, we find the expression taking on its
modern form:
You say you don't see much in it all - nothing but a
struggling mass of boys, and a leather ball which seems to
excite them all to great fury, as a red rag does a
bull.
[Tom Brown's Schooldays, by Thomas Hughes, 1857.]
It's no more than coincidence that the earliest known usages of "red
rag" in connection with hunting animals appear shortly before the
muleta arrived in Spanish bullfighting. It's most likely that red,
traditionally the colour of fury, was the obvious choice for a thing
designed to madden an animal and that the muleta's colour was chosen
for that reason. English speakers created the idiom "red rag to a
bull" as an evocative extension of the idea once bullfighting had
become well enough known.
5. Sic!
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Don Begleyu saw an ambiguous headline in Slate Magazine on 14 May
over a story about the results of a survey by Amnesty International:
"American Citizens Fear Being Tortured By Their Own Government More
Than Chinese Citizens".
Another appeared on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer website on 17
May, where Barton Bresnik saw it: "UK tower accused of melting car
to get sunshade".
An announcement on the website of Powys-Dyfed Police in Wales, about
the promotion of an officer, surprised Celia Villa-Landa: "He had
responsibility for leading some of the most serious crimes across
the force area."
On 17 May, Lisa Robinton read a story on Gawker about an invasion of
bees in London: "The beekeepers had to smoke the bees into a box and
were carried away."
Niall McLaren found this in the Hindustan Times of 16 May: "The
official was not authorised to give his name to the press without
authorisation, which he didn't have."
6. Useful information
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