World Wide Words -- 27 Sep 2014
Michael Quinion
michael.quinion at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Thu Sep 25 22:02:00 UTC 2014
World Wide Words
Issue 897: Saturday 27 September 2014
This mailing also contains a formatted version of the text.
This issue is also available online (http://wwwords.org/upnz) .
Feedback, Notes and Comments
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LINE IN THE SAND. Rosemary Thomas wrote, "Every Texan knows the story
of Colonel William Barret Travis at the Alamo and the little band of
defenders besieged by overwhelming forces, of how Travis spelled out
the grim choices left them and, drawing a line in the sand with his
sword, challenged them to step across the line and stay with him and
face certain death. Even though that speech may be apocryphal, it's
cherished."
"I have to admit to liking an expression such as 'a line in the
sand'," Mark Alcamo commented, "because we not only all know what it
means cliché-wise, but because it has such an intrinsically ironic
sense - a line in the sand is probably only surpassed by a line in
water for its naturally transient nature."
Fiona MacArthur wrote, "A relatively recent variation is the addition
of 'red'. I've heard 'drew/crossed the red line' often on Euronews in
the recent past. The colour red seems to me inconsistent with the sand
image of the earlier idiom. So I wonder where the colour idea might
have come from?" I suspect it derives from the red line on a meter
that shows the maximum safe level of operation. To "red line"
something is to push an engine to its limits, to go as fast as
possible, which is from aviation and motoring jargon of the 1950s. It
has become conflated and muddled with the existing "draw a line".
PEELY-WALLY. Chris Quinn and many others pointed out that a "wally
dug" is a pottery dog, not a vase. "They are for some reason extremely
popular in Scotland. They're usually found in pairs in front of the
fireplace or on the mantel." Jill Williams added that "a 'wally close'
is a close (an entrance hallway to a block of tenement flats) with
tiled walls, a sign of a superior property to one which had merely
painted walls. 'Wallies' was a familiar term for false teeth,
presumably because they used to be made of porcelain."
"On the subject of 'peely-wally'," Colin Melville wrote, "my
Glaswegian father occasionally took me along with him to play golf
when his usual partner couldn't make it. Since I seldom played, he
tried to help me improve my rather weak game. He told me that the fact
that the ball went anywhere but where I wanted it to go was due to my
peely-wally grip on the club, by which he meant weak."
Agister
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Having just spent some time in the New Forest in southern England, I
have been reminded of this ancient word for an officer of the Forest.
It might sound like one of those ceremonial positions Britain is so
fond of but the role of the agister in the New Forest is practical and
essential.
In medieval times, the New Forest was a royal hunting park. As with
the many other royal parks in England, people who didn't have grazing
rights on the common land could pasture their animals for a fee. The
agister's job was to collect the fees and oversee the pasturing.
"Agister" is from an Anglo-Norman word meaning to pasture livestock on
land belonging to somebody else. It's from Old French "giste",
lodging, which in its modern spelling has become "gîte", a French
holiday home. It and the noun "agistment" and verb "agist" continue in
use in related senses to various degrees in Australia, New Zealand and
North America. In the New Forest the process is called "depasturage,"
from Latin "depascere", to eat down or consume.
Today's New Forest agisters work for the verderers, who run the Forest
(their name is also from Anglo-Norman French, based on Latin
"viridis", green). The agisters patrol the forest on horseback to
supervise livestock, including the famous ponies, and to deal with
emergencies.
The Word at War
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We are hearing so much about the centenary of the outbreak of the
First World War that another sad date has largely passed us by, the
75th anniversary of the start of the Second World War on 3 September
1939. Philip Gooden and Peter Lewis have marked it by producing The
Word at War, in which they discuss 100 words and phrases associated
with the conflict- German, French, Italian and Japanese ones among
them.
Many were created for concepts not previously known: "Morrison
shelter", "victory garden", "V-1", "Baedeker raid", "kamikaze, Woolton
pie, Home Guard, Molotov cocktail". Others became associated with the
war but had been coined earlier: "concentration camp", "fifth column".
The Second World War was also the age of the acronym, not just the
official ones - ASDIC, RADAR, PLUTO, LDV, SHAEF - but also the
unofficial ones such as FUBAR and SNAFU and those in servicemen's
letters home: BURMA, NORWICH, SWALK, HOLLAND.
Among phrases intimately linked to the conflict are "V for Victory",
"a day that will live in infamy" and "Kilroy was here". The authors
include the story behind a recently resurrected one, "Keep Calm and
Carry On", from a poster that was never distributed, despite two and a
half million copies having been printed, because officials came to
realise the British public would disdain it as patronising. Much of
the value in this little book lies in the similarly extensive
background details that Gooden and Lewis supply throughout.
[The Word at War, by Philip Gooden & Peter Lewis; published on 25
September in the UK (November in North America); hardback and ebook
from Bloomsbury; ISBN 9781472904898. Help support World Wide Words by
buying from Amazon: UK (http://wwwords.org/awaruk), USA
(http://wwwords.org/awarus) , Canada (http://wwwords.org/awarca),
Germany (http://wwwords.org/awarde).]
Not so green as you're cabbage-looking
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Q. From Laurence Horn, USA: On one of the Inspector Lewis episodes in
the BBC/PBS Masterpiece Mystery series, Lewis tells Det. Sgt. Hathaway
(who has just acknowledged copying a key notebook before returning
it), "You're not so green as you're cabbage looking". A new one on me
(I had to rewind to make sure that's what he said), but upon
consulting Google I've learned that it's "an old Yorkshire saying"
that seems not to have made it across the pond. I'm sure you can trace
its genealogy for us.
A. This is a delightful folk saying. Like so many it's sufficiently
opaque to make the casual reader or viewer stop and blink. "Green"
here means naive and it's usually a way for a person to declare he
isn't as easily fooled as another person might think. Lewis is saying
that Hathaway has surprised him by his initiative, that he might seem
to be untrained or unworldly but that he has actually been rather
clever. It's more complimentary than it sounds.
A splendid example is in a report of a case at Southwark County Court
in London more than a century ago, recorded in authentic voices by the
court shorthand reporter. It concerned a greengrocer who was being
sued for lost wages by a man he had sacked for wanting to take an
evening off:
"Defendant": He said "Tip me five and a kick I've
earned and we'll cry quits. I can't stop ter-night, as
I've got to meet the donah." (Roars of laughter.) "His
Honour": Is that true? "Plaintiff": No. When I'm agoin'
he says, "You can't go now. You must clear the spuds
orf ther front board." "His Honour": And what did you
say? "Plaintiff": I said I knew 'ow many beans made 5 -
(laughter) - and if I wor cabbage-looking I woren't
green. (Roars of laughter).
[Westminster Gazette, 3 Nov. 1898. A donah was a wife
or girlfriend, via Polari from Italian donna, a woman;
a kick was sixpence, an imperfect rhyme between kick
and six; the front board was probably the display area
in front of the shop. The man won his case and got his
wages.]
This is the first example in the recently revised entry for the phrase
in the Oxford English Dictionary. The word play and the laughter show
that the speaker's audience knew the expression well. How long it had
been in the spoken language is impossible to say. But there are hints,
especially this earlier example from Australia:
The moral which the splitter extracted from the
experience was to the effect that a man is not
necessarily green because he is cabbage looking.
[Southern Argus (Goulburn, NSW), 30 Sep. 1882. A
splitter was a man who sawed and split logs.]
A phrase so curious could hardly have been invented twice, so we must
presume it was taken to Australia by emigrants at some earlier date
still.
The phrase is still popular in Yorkshire and it's often assumed it
began there because it fits the pattern of other allusive local
sayings like "well, I'll go to the bottom of our stairs" (meaning the
speaker is astonished) or "he's all mouth and trousers" (a put-down to
a pushy man). There's no firm evidence for this, though.
It's unknown in the US now but it appeared in a Pennsylvania newspaper
in 1907 and a Texas one in 1910. We may guess that it was transplanted
from its native soil by immigrants but failed to thrive. It is known
from Canada from as early as 1919 and from Ireland in 1922 - James
Joyce used it in Ulysses. It has long been popular in Ireland, so much
so that it's been suggested that it might be an English version of a
Gaelic saying.
Today, it's a deliberately old-fashioned usage that evokes aged
relatives:
You can see why householders are right to feel browned
off about the Green Deal. We need to save more - not
borrow more - and it is foolish to pretend otherwise.
Or, as my Aberdonian grandmothers used to say when
confronted with any childish attempt at deception: "We
are not as green as we are cabbage-looking."
[Daily Telegraph, 26 Jan. 2013.]
Sic!
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On 19 September, Adam Sampson read an Independent report on a rally of
the Scottish independence campaign in Glasgow. "The two sides were
initially separated by a human cordon of police officers, shouting
insults at each other and waving flags." It's good to hear the
constabulary got into the spirit of things.
Useful information
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