World Wide Words -- 11 Oct 14

[Michael Quinion]

World Wide Words
Issue 899: Saturday 11 October 2014

This mailing also contains a formatted version of the text. 
This issue is also available online (http://wwwords.org/nohz) .


Feedback, Notes and Comments
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HABILIMENTS. "Your article on habiliments," emailed John Walmsley, 
"brought to mind a word used by my great-uncle (and others of his 
generation) in the 1970s in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland.  It 
may still be in use there. My great-uncle referred to one's underwear 
as 'your decibels'. (The spelling is as I heard it at age 10.) Once I 
started to learn French at school, I assumed that this was derived 
from "déshabillé". I just checked my Chambers Dictionary, which is 
always strong on the words of my Ulster youth. There I find 
'dishabilles' and my schoolboy etymology is confirmed."

Graham Thomas added, "Habiliments reminded me of a book I read in my 
youth: My Father in His Dizzerbell by Douglas Hayes. "Dizzerbell" was 
the eponymous father's rendition of the French "déshabillé" and 
usually meant his dressing gown, which he wore before donning his 
clothes for the day."

FOCUS! Marni Hancock spotted a typo in my review of Steven Pinker's 
new book last time. I wrote "mental effect" when I meant "mental 
effort". My typing fingers have a will of their own sometimes. 
However, readers who suggested kindly that in using "focussed" in the 
piece I had suffered a keyboard malfunction were off-track, as 
doubling the "s" is standard in British English.

BETA TESTING. Many thanks to everybody who made useful comments on the 
draft page. With your help the redesign is now in good shape to be 
rolled out to the whole site. I hope this will happen next weekend.


Immensikoff
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I was leafing, if that's the right word, through a digital copy of an 
issue of the Strand Magazine, most famous as the publisher of Arthur 
Conan Doyle's stories about Sherlock Holmes, when this word almost 
jumped off the page. It was in a story about a child pickpocket who 
might have come from the pages of Oliver Twist:

    He felt himself much drawn toward a man in an
    "immensikoff"-a fur-lined overcoat -which was quite the
    most magnificent garment in the crowd. The large
    side-pocket of the "immensikoff" gaped invitingly, and,
    though outside overcoat-pockets were barren vessels as
    a rule, this was so very easy that nothing could be
    lost by trial. 
    [A Lucifo Match, by Arthur Morrison; Strand Magazine, 6
    Jan. 1909. The title is a play on lucifer, a common
    term for a match; Lucifo was actually a Spanish
    conjuror, who was wearing the overcoat. He got the
    better of the pickpocket (match here is in the contest
    sense).]

This grandiloquent word for a rather fine garment was the accidental 
invention of one of the most famous music-hall artists of Victorian 
times, Arthur Lloyd, a Scottish-born comedian and singer who made his 
name in London with a vast output of self-penned musical numbers. This 
is the first reference to the song that I know about, in an article 
about the Winchester Music Hall in London:

    Mr. Arthur Lloyd appeared in appropriate costumes, and
    sang and discoursed in his easy, telling manner as "The
    Pedagogue," and "Immenseikoff, or the Shoreditch
    Toff."
    [The Era, 5 Apr. 1868.]

When singing Immenseikoff, Mr Lloyd portrayed himself as a "swell" 
(slang of the time for a fashionable or stylish person of wealth or 
high social position). His song had this chorus:

    Immenseikoff, Immenseikoff
    Behold in me a Shoreditch Toff
    A toff, a toff, a toff, a Shoreditch Toff
    And I think myself Immenseikoff.
    [Immenseikoff, or the Shoreditch Toff, a polka with
    words and music by Arthur Lloyd, published 1860. ]

"Toff" is a slang term for a rich or upper-class person. The joke lay 
in the incongruity of a man from Shoreditch being able to emulate the 
style and clothing of a well-off person, as Shoreditch was one of the 
poorest parts of the East End of London. "Immenseikoff" was presumably 
a play on the language of Russian Jews who were beginning to settle in 
the area.

His song became popular (an American visiting London in 1870 remarked 
that everyone was humming it). His word likewise became well known. In 
1869 it appeared in a story in an American newspaper as the name of a 
Russian giantess in a circus. The same year Charles Marriott, a 
popular light-music composer of the period, turned Lloyd's song into a 
quadrille with the same title. 

The word soon lost its second "e" and came to mean an overcoat. 
Several decades later it was claimed that this came about because 
Lloyd wore one when performing the song. However, no contemporary 
reference exists that I can find and his song doesn't mention an 
overcoat. On the cover of the sheet music he's wearing the "flash" 
fashion of the time. As the covers of his other songs show him in the 
costumes he wore to perform them, I suspect that he never wore a 
overcoat while singing "Immenseikoff" and that the supposed link was 
added much later in a misguided effort to explain its meaning. The 
reason for its adopting this meaning is lost to us.

"Immensikoff" survived for several decades. Arthur Morrison's use in 
1909 was almost its swansong, though Arnold Bennett employed it in his 
novel Hilda Lessways two years later.


Poach
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Q. From Ozer Bergman: If I had a "poached" egg for breakfast, did I 
have contraband?

A. You might guess that we have yet another case of English words of 
the same spelling and pronunciation that have arrived in the language 
from different sources. But that may not be true in this case. Bear 
with me, it's complicated.

The word meaning to cook an egg without its shell in boiling water is 
the easier to explain. It can be traced back through the Middle French 
verb "pochier", with the same meaning, to the noun "poche", a bag or 
pouch. The idea seems to have been that the white of the egg was a 
container for the yolk. That makes the egg sense of "poach" a close 
relative of "pouch", of the bag sense of "poke" (as in not buying a 
pig in one), and "pocket", which is etymologically a little poke. By 
the end of the seventeenth century this sense of "poach" had been 
extended to simmering fish, fruit and other foodstuffs in water.

The other "poach", to illegally hunt fish or game, began life in 
English to mean prod, shove, or roughly push together, to push or 
stir. This probably came from the Old French "pocher", to prod, and is 
a relative of another sense of "poke". This sense of prodding is 
obsolete in mainstream English but survives to some extent in regional 
English dialects and in Scots. Later, "poach" developed into 
unlawfully encroaching on someone else's preserve, to trespass. It has 
a third sense of breaking up ground into muddy patches through animals 
trampling it.

These three senses puzzle the experts, because they don't seem to 
derive from a single word. But there are no other obvious candidates. 
The mud sense is probably connected with hooves prodding the ground. 
The illegal hunting sense has been said to be from the idea of 
figuratively pushing into somebody else's territory, which by the 
early 1700s had become linked to taking game illegally as an extension 
of the idea of trespass.

But it's also argued that the illegal hunting sense might be from 
thrusting something into a bag (as in "poacher's pocket", 
etymologically an intriguing phrase), which would make it a 
development of the other word. This is supported by Randle Cotgrave's 
note in his Dictionary of the French and English Tongues of 1611 that 
it refers to encroaching on another man's trade or employment, as the 
English equivalent of a French expression which speaks of pocketing 
another man's labour.

Whatever the source, Mr Bergman, you may safely eat your poached egg 
without fear of the law.


Sic!
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Alan Clayton writes in numerical wonderment, "I just searched Google 
for a walking route around Reims and one hit was 'Find over 0 of the 
best walking routes in Reims ...'. Unfortunately there were only just 
over -1 of them."

The Herald Sun of Australia surprised Barbara McGilvray with news of 
the supernatural powers of a revered AFL footballer: 'Robbie Flower 
will be remembered as one of the finest players to ever pull on the 
boots after passing away'.

On 1 October the Weekly Press of Philadelphia had a restaurant review 
in which Beverly Collins found this: "Nearby, twelve Penn students ate 
and toasted each other."

Bill Clarke found this in the printed instructions from a doctor: "put 
one drop in the eye four times per day while awake."


Useful information
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