World Wide Words -- 03 Dec 16

[Michael Quinion via WorldWideWords]

World Wide Words Newsletter 930

World Wide Words

Issue 930: Saturday 3 December 2016

This issue is also available online <http://www.wwwords.org/momn>

Feedback, Notes and Comments

Several medical experts commented that the definitions I quoted from 
dictionaries for the word /chalazion/ last time were incorrect. I’ve 
modified the piece, which you will find on the website 
<http://wwwords.org/chlzn>.

The piece on /Boxing Day/ below is a revision of one I wrote in December 
2002.

Because of the Christmas break and other matters I cannot say when the 
next issue will appear.

Not my pigeon

Q /From Helen Mosback/: I have just read a serialised version of John 
Rowland’s /Calamity in Kent/. It includes this: “In fact, it’s your 
pigeon, as they say in the civil service.” I was wondering if you could 
shed any light on the expression /it’s your pigeon/? I have to admit to 
being quite taken by the Polish expression /not my circus, not my 
monkeys/ to indicate that something is not one’s problem, and would be 
very happy should I have found an equally enchanting English expression!

A Readers may not be familiar with John Rowland, a little-known and 
neglected British detective-story writer who published /Calamity in 
Kent/ in 1950. The British Library has republished it this year in its 
Crime Classics series.

The date of his book is significant, since at that time the expression 
was more familiar to people in the countries of what is now the 
Commonwealth than it is now. It had come into the language around the 
end of the nineteenth century.

The idiom suggests something is the speaker’s interest, concern, area of 
expertise or responsibility. This is a recent British example:

If posh people aren’t your pigeon, the correspondence on display in this 
book will be a massive bore and irritation.
/The Times/, 8 Oct. 2016.

It also turns up in the negative in phrases such as “that’s not my 
pigeon”, denying involvement or responsibility in some matter.

Despite your analogy with the Polish expression, the pigeon here isn’t 
the animal. It’s a variant form of /pidgin/. The name is said to derive 
from a Chinese attempt to say the word /business/; the original pidgin, 
Pidgin English, was a trade jargon that arose from the seventeenth 
century onwards between British and Chinese merchants in ports such as 
Canton. The word /pidgin/ is recorded from the 1840s and has become the 
usual linguistic term for any simplified contact language that allows 
groups that don’t have a language in common to communicate.

This is an early example of /pidgin/ being used in the figurative sense:

We agreed that if anything went wrong with the pony after, it was not to 
be my “pidgin.”
/The North-China Herald/ (Shanghai), 1 Aug. 1890.

Most early examples in English writing were spelled that way, though by 
the 1920s the /pigeon/ form was being used by people who didn’t make the 
connection with the trade language.

Subnivean

Classical scholars will spot the wintry associations of this word; it 
derives from Latin /nix/ for snow, which becomes /niv-/ in compounds 
such as /nivālis/, snowy or snow-covered. Etymologists point out that 
the English /snow/ and the Latin /nix/ both ultimately derive from the 
same ancient Indo-European root. But then humans in Europe have long had 
plenty of experience of the white stuff.

About four centuries ago, English scholars borrowed /nivālis/ to make 
the adjective /nival/ to add to our /snowy/ (though French got there 
first, at least a century earlier). We also have the more recent 
technical term /nivation/, not — as you might guess — meaning snowfall 
but the erosion of ground around and beneath a snow bank that is 
seasonally melting.

/Subnivean/ is another member of the group, nearly two centuries old. 
This refers to something that happens underneath snow such as the 
activities of animals that survive winter beneath it.

Very recently that word has been joined by the linked noun /subnivium/ 
for the area between soil surface and snowpack. It was coined by a group 
led by Jonathan Pauli of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They wrote 
in a paper in /Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment/ in June 2013: 
“For many terrestrial organisms in the Northern Hemisphere, winter is a 
period of resource scarcity and energy deficits, survivable only because 
a seasonal refugium — the ‘subnivium’ — exists beneath the snow.”

Black as Newgate knocker

Q /From Jim Mitchell/: As a child in South London, when I came in from 
playing and was a bit grubby my mother would say I looked /as black as 
nookers nocker/. My mother was born in 1917. I wonder if she might have 
heard this expression from her mother?

A It’s very probable. But not perhaps in that form. Your mother’s 
version is a mishearing of a Londoners’ expression that dates back in 
written records to 1881: /black as Newgate knocker/. It has also turned 
up in the forms /black as Newker’s knocker/, /black as Nook’s knocker/ 
and /black as Nugent’s knocker/.

Curiously, though it has been in existence for more than a century and 
is currently not widely known, in writing it is now more often found 
than it has ever been, perhaps because it’s such an evocative item of 
historical Cockney slang. These days it almost always has an added 
apostrophe-s:

Her eyes really are black as Newgate’s knocker.
/Sunday Times/, 19 Jun. 1994.

Newgate here refers to the notorious prison, originally created in 
medieval times in one of the turrets of Newgate, a main entrance through 
the walls into the City of London. Down the centuries the prison was 
rebuilt five times; it closed in 1902 and was demolished in 1904. The 
Central Criminal Court, better known as the Old Bailey, now stands on 
the site.

Newgate was a place of fear and loathing to many Londoners, not only 
criminals but also debtors, who were imprisoned there until they found a 
way to repay what they owed. After 1783, it was also the place where 
executions took place, initially on a public platform in front of the 
building, later inside. For most of its existence it was a noisome, 
dank, dark and unhealthy place to be incarcerated.

It’s not surprising that it should have been commemorated in 
expressions. But why not just /black as Newgate/? Why should its door 
knocker be selected as the source of the simile?

The phrase /Newgate knocker/ itself is older. It was applied to a 
hairstyle fashionable among lower-class male Londoners such as 
costermongers. Though it became widely known from the 1840s, I’ve found 
a reference to it in the /Kentish Gazette/ in 1781. It referred to a 
lock of hair twisted from the temple on each side of the head back 
towards the ear in the shape of a figure 6.

In 1851, Henry Mayhew wrote in his /London Labour and the London Poor/ 
that a lad of about fourteen had told him that to be “flash” (stylish) 
hair “ought to be long in front, and done in ‘figure-six’ curls, or 
twisted back to the ear ‘Newgate knocker style’.” Eight years later, 
John Camden Hotten explained in his /Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, 
and Vulgar Words/ that “The shape is supposed to resemble the knocker on 
the prisoners’ door at Newgate — a resemblance that carries a rather 
unpleasant suggestion to the wearer.” Another description came a couple 
of years later from another investigative social journalist, James 
Greenwood:

All, or nearly all, [were] bull-necked, heavy-jawed, and with the hair 
dressed after a fashion known among its patrons as the “Newgate knocker” 
style — that is, parted in masses on each side of the head and turned 
under unnaturally.
/Illustrated Times/ (London), 16 Feb. 1861.

There’s no obvious connection with the colour black. We may guess, 
however, that Londoners would have imagined the prison’s knocker to be 
large and made of black iron as well as figuratively black because of 
its evil associations. We may also guess from the dates at which the two 
expressions were first current that Londoners took over the hairstyle 
phrase as a new way to describe the colour, as people have done for 
centuries with similes such as /black as your hat/, /black as death/, 
/black as the ace of spades/, /black as thunder/, and /black as the Earl 
of Hell’s waistcoat/.

As a postscript, I also found this, in a story from 60-odd years ago 
about the search by a journalist named Bernard O’Donnell for the 
original Newgate knocker:

His spasmodic search came to an end recently when he was in the office 
of the Keeper of the Old Bailey, Mr A W Burt. “Where is Newgate’s 
knocker?” he asked Mr Burt. Promptly it was shown to him. It was on the 
keeper’s desk. After years spent as a symbol which came to inspire dread 
among the poor of London, it had found a more useful rôle. It now makes 
an ideal paper weight.
/The Scotsman/, 24 April 1950.

Make of that what you will. I wonder if it still exists?

In the news

Oxford Dictionaries announced its Word of the Year 2016 on 16 November: 
/post-truth/. Its editors defined this as “relating to or denoting 
circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping 
public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” One example 
came in a report in /The Times/ on 31 October of comments by the 
president of the European Council on the signing of a trade deal with 
Canada: “Mr Tusk also denounced the ‘post-truth politics ... on both 
sides of the Atlantic’ which nearly scuppered the deal because ‘facts 
and figures won’t stand up for themselves’ against an emotional 
opposition campaign.” Though it has been very much a word of this year, 
connected both with the Brexit referendum in the UK and the US 
presidential election, Oxford Dictionaries noted that “/post-truth/ 
seems to have been first used in this meaning in a 1992 essay by the 
late Serbian-American playwright Steve Tesich in /The Nation/ magazine.”

Last time I mentioned the Danish word /hygge/, a quality of cosiness and 
comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or 
well-being. This has become widely popular in Britain this year, and was 
one of Oxford Dictionaries’ runners-up as Word of the Year. For the 
background and the story of its rise in British English, I can’t do 
better than point you to an article by Charlotte Higgins in /The 
Guardian <http://wwwords.org/hygge>/ on 22 November.

The newest British buzzword is /jam/. Not as in the “jam tomorrow and 
jam yesterday, but never jam today” meaning of the Red Queen in /Through 
the Looking-Glass/ — though the quip has been made several times by 
pundits — but as an acronym for “Just About Managing”. This refers to 
the estimated six million working-age British households on low to 
middle incomes who are struggling to stave off poverty from day to day. 
The term derives from a speech given by the new prime minister, Theresa 
May, just after she was chosen by MPs in July. She said of the members 
of this group, “You have a job but you don’t always have job security. 
You have your own home, but you worry about paying a mortgage. You can 
just about manage but you worry about the cost of living and getting 
your kids into a good school.” Her words became a catchphrase among 
commentators which has now been shortened.

Boxing Day

Q /From Burt Rubin; a related question came from Keith Denham/: As an 
American, I’ve always wondered about the origin of the term /Boxing Day/.

A Boxing Day is a public holiday in Britain and most Commonwealth 
countries. There’s some minor confusion these days, in Britain at least, 
over which day it actually is. The reference books a century ago were 
adamant that it was the first working day after Christmas Day. However, 
the name is now frequently attached specifically to 26 December, even if 
it falls at the weekend, which makes it equivalent to the Christian 
saint’s day of St Stephen.

We have to go back to the early seventeenth century to find the basis 
for the name. The term /Christmas box/ appeared about then for an 
earthenware box, something like a piggy bank, which apprentices and 
other workers took around immediately after Christmas to collect money. 
When the round was complete, the box was broken and the money 
distributed among the company. The first known example:

/Tirelire/, a Christmas box; a box having a cleft on the lid, or in the 
side, for money to enter it; used in France by begging Fryers, and here 
by Butlers, and Prentices, etc.
/A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues/, by Randle Cotgrave, 1611.

By the eighteenth century, /Christmas box/ had become a figurative term 
for any seasonal gratuity. By the nineteenth century their collection 
seems to have become a scourge in our big cities. When James Murray 
compiled an entry for /Christmas box/ in the first edition of the 
/Oxford English Dictionary/ in 1889, his splendidly acerbic description 
suggests that the practice had become a personal bugbear:

A present or gratuity given at Christmas: in Great Britain, usually 
confined to gratuities given to those who are supposed to have a vague 
claim upon the donor for services rendered to him as one of the general 
public by whom they are employed and paid, or as a customer of their 
legal employer; the undefined theory being that as they have done 
offices for this person, for which he has not directly paid them, some 
direct acknowledgement is becoming at Christmas.

Though the term /Boxing Day/ for the day on which such Christmas boxes 
were requested didn’t become widespread until early in the nineteenth 
century, a few examples are recorded from the previous century. The 
earliest I know of is this:

Tuesday in Christmas Week, about Eight in the Evening, I was coming over 
this broad Place, and saw a Man come up to this lame Man, and knock him 
down — It was the Day after Boxing Day.
/Transcript of a trial at the Old Bailey/ (London), 14 Jan. 1743.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the term seems to have become 
as closely associated with importuning individuals as Christmas Box itself:

“Boxing Day,” — the day consecrated to baksheesh, when nobody, it would 
almost seem, is too proud to beg, and when everybody who does not beg is 
expected to play the almoner. “Tie up the knocker — say you’re sick, you 
are dead,” is the best advice perhaps that could be given in such cases 
to any man who has a street-door and a knocker upon it.
/Curiosities of London Life/, by Charles Manby Smith, 1853.

The custom has died out, seasonal visitors to Britain may be assured, 
though small gifts are still sometimes given to tradesmen and suppliers 
of services. The favourite occupation of the day is attending football 
matches or rushing to the post-Christmas sales.

Useful information

*About this newsletter.* /World Wide Words/ is written, edited and 
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