World Wide Words -- 02 Jul 16

[Michael Quinion via WorldWideWords]

World Wide Words

Saturday 2 July 2016.

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Feedback, Notes and Comments

*Change in format.* Following my move from Pegasus Mail to the 
Thunderbird email client earlier this year, a few readers have reported 
problems viewing the HTML version of this newsletter. I have traced 
these to errors introduced when pasting the text from Microsoft Word 
into Thunderbird. This issue has been sent using a different method, 
which I hope resolves the problems.

*By hook or by crook.* Following the piece last time on this idiom, 
several readers updated me on the geography of the tale about the 
invasion of Ireland through Waterford. They pointed out that a village 
called Crook does exist, on the west bank of the estuary of the River 
Barrow, while Hook is on the east side.

Hilary Maidstone, among others, suggested that /hook/ and /crook/ aren’t 
so closely connected in meaning as I had implied. “One thing I thought 
of as is that a /hook/ in East Anglia — and possibly elsewhere for all I 
know — is a sharp tool, either for grass (a curved blade similar to a 
sickle on a short handle) or for hedging (a billhook or /billock/ in 
Norfolk dialect), a hooked blade on a short handle.” A tool very similar 
in shape to the modern billhook appears several times in medieval 
illustrations of pruning grapevines and fruit trees.

Yarely

Pronounced /ˈjɛːli/

Alfred Tennyson, poet laureate during much of Queen Victoria’s reign, 
preferred words of native English origin over those from French and 
Latin. He’s credited with bringing many old words back into the 
language. However, his son Hallam wrote a memoir in which he recalled 
his father regretting that he had never employed /yarely/.

If he had, his readers would have been as baffled by it as they were 
with some of his other reintroductions, because by the nineteenth 
century /yarely/ had fallen out of the standard language, though 
surviving in some dialects. A rare notable earlier usage that century 
was in a work by another resurrector of antique words:

“Yarely! yarely! pull away, my hearts,” said the latter, and the boat 
bearing the unlucky young man soon carried him on board the frigate.
/Waverley/, by Sir Walter Scott, 1814.

>From this, we may guess, correctly, that it means briskly, promptly or 
quickly. Its source is the Old English /gearolíce/, related to /gearu/, 
ready or prepared.

The Scottish poet, journalist, author, anthologist and songwriter 
Charles Mackay (best known for his three-volume work of 1841, /Memoirs 
of Extraordinary Popular Delusions, and the Madness of Crowds/) included 
/yarely/ in his /Lost Beauties of the English Language/, quoting 
examples from three Shakespeare plays, including this one:

Speak to the mariners: fall to’t, yarely, or we run
ourselves aground: bestir, bestir.
/The Tempest/, by William Shakespeare, 1611.

Despite the nautical nature of these two examples, it wasn’t 
specifically a sailors’ word. However, the Old English /gearu/ became 
/yare/, which is still in the seafaring language of North America, 
meaning a ship that is quick to the helm and is easily handled or 
manoeuvred.

Upset the apple cart

Q /From John Hathaway/: I know that somebody who says the apple cart has 
been upset means that somebody’s plans have been ruined, but why an 
apple cart rather than anything else?

A A figurative sense of /apple cart/ has been around since the 
eighteenth century. For an unknown but probably trivial reason it’s 
actually slightly older than the literal use of the phrase.

In the earlier part of its life, the most common sense of /apple cart/ 
in Britain was the human body. Francis Grose recorded /down with his 
apple-cart/ in his /Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue/ as meaning to knock 
a man down; that was in 1788, although the same idea is on record from 
about 1750. It later became known in Australia:

He slapped her face, she seized a broomstick, and he capsized her “apple 
cart,” and broke two pannels [/sic/] of the door.
/The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser/, 16 Apr. 1833.

The etymologist Walter Skeat wrote in 1879, “I think the expression is 
purely jocular, as in the case of ‘bread-basket,’ similarly used to 
express the body.”

The form you’re referring to also appears early on. There’s an isolated 
example on record from Massachusetts in 1788 but it only starts to 
appear on both sides of the Atlantic in any significant way in the late 
1830s:

They won’t encourage trade, or commerce, or manufacturing — because they 
know that trade, and commerce, and manufacturing would create a power 
right off that would upset their apple-cart.
/Logansport Canal Telegraph/ (Indiana), 23 Sep. 1837.

The Whigs, Gentlemen, cannot object to the soundness of our old 
authorities in law, because, you know, they themselves are very fond of 
referring to the same source, when it suits their purposes; and to deny 
those authorities, therefore, would be at once to upset their own apple 
cart.
/The Champion and Weekly Herald/ (London), 16 Apr. 1837.

We may assume it was around in the spoken language in Britain, lurking 
out of sight, for longer than the written record shows. It continued in 
parallel with the human-body sense for most of the 1800s but took until 
the early twentieth century to become widely popular and to shift from 
slang to colloquial usage. An early stimulus may have been the widely 
reported comment by Cecil Rhodes, then prime minister of the Cape 
colony, that the Jameson Raid of 1895 had “upset the apple cart”. The 
evidence suggests a peak in the 1930s, possibly helped along by George 
Bernard Shaw’s play /The Apple Cart/, first produced in 1929.

The shift in sense from a slang term for the body to ruining a person’s 
plans seems to have been via an intermediate sense of suffering a 
personal accident, either involving some external object or simply 
falling over:

The bed groaned for a moment under the load, and the next moment the 
strings snapt like tow, and down came the bed, bedding, Dutchman and 
all, plump into the middle of the cabin floor. ... “You've upset your 
apple-cart now,” says I as soon as I’de [/sic/] done laughing.
/Huron Reflector/ (Ohio), 3 Apr. 1832.

If a child falls down you first inquire if he is much hurt. If he is 
merely a little frightened you say, “Well, never mind, then; you’ve only 
upset your apple-cart and spilt all the gooseberries.” The child perhaps 
laughs at the very venerable joke, and all is well again.
/Notes and Queries/, 13 Dec. 1879.

We’re quite unable to say why some unknown person 250 years ago selected 
an apple cart as a metaphor for the body because there’s no written 
evidence on which we can base any reasoned explanation. But we can 
understand why the idea remains popular in the sense of ruining some 
undertaking: the visual image of a cart laden with apples overturning — 
with all its implications for mess, inconvenience and financial loss — 
is too striking to lose.

It might be worth ending by mentioning an arcane suggestion for the 
origin of one sense. About 200 BCE, the comic playwright Plautus wrote a 
line in his play /Epidicus/ that implied Romans had a proverb, /perii, 
plaustrum perculi/, which may be loosely translated as “I’m done for! 
I’ve upset my wagon!” Could this have been the stimulus for the English 
idiom, with some jesting Latin scholar turning the Roman wagon into a 
very English apple cart? It’s a nice story, but I suspect that native 
English wit was capable of creating the image without resorting to 
second-hand humour.

Snooter

Q /From Ali Nobari/: Wodehouse uses the word /snooter/, presumably 
schoolboy slang, but what does it mean?

A It’s possible to get an impression of the meaning of this very unusual 
word from the contexts in which P G Wodehouse uses it. A couple of examples:

Those who know Bertram Wooster best are aware that in his journey 
through life he is impeded and generally snootered by about as scaly a 
platoon of aunts as was ever assembled.
/Very Good, Jeeves!/, by P G Wodehouse, 1930.

Snootered to bursting point by Pop Bassetts and Madeline Bassetts and 
Stiffy Byngs and what not, and hounded like the dickens by a remorseless 
Fate, I found solace in the thought that I could still slip it across 
Roderick Spode.
/The Code of the Woosters/, by P G Wodehouse, 1938.

To be snootered is to be harassed, vexed or tormented.

We might indeed reasonably assume that the word is slang from 
Wodehouse’s schooldays at Dulwich College in south London. But we would 
be wrong. We would be equally wrong to connect it with the similar 
/snooker/, whether the game or the derived verb meaning to put somebody 
in an impossible position or to trap or entice them. Wodehouse actually 
borrowed /snooter/ from US slang during his early years in that country.

/Snoot/ as a noun has been recorded there since the 1860s. It’s a local 
pronunciation variation of standard English /snout/, a word of Germanic 
origin that has been in the language since about 1200. The American 
version was looked down on:

/Snoot/, of the human face or nose, apparently the same word as /snout/. 
A vulgar word in New England. ‘I’ll bu’st your snoot’; ‘hit him on the 
snoot’. As a verb in ‘to snoot round’, i.e. to nose around, it is 
reported from Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
/Dialect Notes/, 1890.

The verb evolved to mean treating a person scornfully or with disdain, 
leading to the adjective /snooty/ — snobbish, supercilious or stuck-up, 
figuratively with one’s nose in the air in a superior way.

Wodehouse created /snooter/ from /snoot/, presumably developing it from 
the sense of snubbing someone; he used it often enough — in at least 
eight of his books as well as in correspondence — that he became 
identified with it, so much so that the /Oxford English Dictionary/’s 
entry for the word has examples only from him. A couple of writers have 
since employed it, but it’s very rare.

Fard

I was consulting an old book when the Empress Poppaea’s name came up. 
You surely remember her: second wife of the Emperor Nero in ancient 
Rome, notorious for her intrigues, and commemorated in the clerihew:

The Empress Poppaea
Was really rather a dear;
Only no one could stop her
 From being improper.

The context was her skincare routine, which was like nothing seen in 
Rome before. It wasn’t just the daily baths in asses’ milk, but also the 
then newfangled overnight face packs of damp barley meal, followed by 
the daytime application of chalk and white lead.

The book introduced me to /fard/, to paint the face, and to the noun 
/fard/, a cosmetic.

Another example:

I think, that your sex make use of fard and vermillion for very 
different purposes; namely, to help a bad or faded complexion, to 
heighten the graces, or conceal the defects of nature, as well as the 
ravages of time.
/Travels Through France and Italy/, by Tobias Smollett, 1766.

English borrowed /fard/ from French in the sixteenth century but 
abandoned it again in the nineteenth. Though /fard/ would be a usefully 
brief alternative to “put on one’s makeup”, the chances of hearing 
comments like “I farded in the train on the way to work” are rather small.

If you know French, you may have guessed what this word means, since 
it’s still in that language in the sense of cosmetics or makeup (and it 
does have a verb meaning to put on makeup: /farder/). Nobody knows for 
sure where the French word came from: one suggestion is the Old High 
German /farwjan/, to colour, ancestor of the modern German verb 
/färben/. In its early years in French /fard/ could figuratively suggest 
a misleading appearance or language, which survives in the idioms 
/parler sans fard/, to speak candidly or openly, and /vérité sans fard/, 
the plain or unvarnished truth.

/Fard/ in English often specifically meant a white face paint (hence 
Smollett’s “fard and vermillion”, contrasting white and red). It was 
either the ancient unguent of lard mixed with white lead or a similar 
concoction based on a brilliant white compound of bismuth, sometimes 
called /blanc de fard/. Both were poisonous and long-term use damaged 
the skin.

The word occasionally appears as a deliberate archaism:

A trio of women holding hands, gaunt and thin as the inmates of a 
spitalhouse and attired the three alike in the same cheap finery, their 
faces daubed in fard and pale as death.
/Cities of The Plain/, by Cormac McCarthy, 1998. A /spitalhouse/, where 
/spital/ is a shortening of /hospital/, is a place set aside for the 
diseased or destitute, usually of a lower class than a hospital.

Sic!

• A mysterious headline from the /Western Mail/ of 4 June the following 
headline left Kate Lloyd Jones’s son puzzled about the size of the 
capsules mentioned: “Parents in laundry capsules ‘mistaken for sweets’ 
alert.”

• A widely reproduced item from the news agency AP, which Brian McMahon 
saw on 4 June, implied remarkable medical self-help at a car rally 
accident: “One spectator at the event ... broke an arm, while a woman 
received multiple injuries and a third person was forced to amputate a leg.”

• A geologically improbable opening to a report of 8 June in the 
/Hamilton Spectator/ of Ontario, Canada, understandably intrigued Ari 
Blenkhorn: “It had been a long drive. ... By 2:50 a.m. Monday morning, 
though they couldn’t see them in the darkness, the rolling hills of 
Alabama gently rocked the car.”

• Ian Harrison received a spam email from a South African cheap-deals 
site on 15 June, promoting a manual meat grinder which it claimed, “Can 
Be Used To Grind An Assortment Of Meats And Ingredients Made Of Cast Iron.”

• A headline on 9 June in the /Dominion-Post/ of Wellington, New 
Zealand, attracted Michel Norrish’s attention: “Grapes grown in 
graveyard produce a full-bodied wine”.

• On 14 June, Alec Cawley found that the BBC news website had this about 
a banned Malaysian Airline: “It has two Boeing 737-400 planes in its 
fleet, each able to carry about 180 passengers, eight pilots and 50 
crew.” Overstaffed, perhaps?

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