World Wide Words -- 05 Mar 16

[Michael Quinion via WorldWideWords]

World Wide Words

Saturday 5 March 2016.

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  Feedback, Notes and Comments

More on catchphrases

Patricia Norton emailed from New Zealand to solve the mystery of the 
catchphrase “Mind how you step over those mince pies!” It’s a 
misremembered phrase from by Sara Cone Bryant/’s Epaminondas and His 
Auntie/, a 1907 American children’s story now often regarded as racist 
or patronising. In the tale, about a black mother and her child 
Epaminondas, his mother tells him, “You see these here six mince pies I 
done make? You see how I done set ’em on the doorstep to cool? Well now, 
you hear me, Epaminondas, you be careful how you step on those pies.” At 
the end of the story, as he had been told to do, Epaminondas carefully 
stepped on every one.

“I had to chuckle,” Judy Swink wrote from California, “when I read the 
catchphrase ‘I’ve arrived, and to prove it, I’m here!’ Many years ago, 
our aunt was expected to arrive by train in Norfolk, Virginia, from 
Boston. When my parents went to meet her, she didn’t descend from the 
train. My parents then went home and called her home in Massachusetts, 
where she answered the phone. When my mother asked why she hadn’t called 
them if she wasn’t coming, her reply was that she assumed that when she 
didn’t get off the train, they’d know she wasn’t coming. This has been a 
favorite family story since I was a child in the 1940s or 1950s.”

Ian Pike wrote, “Hearing about the old gent who would say, ‘I’ve come to 
tell you I’m not coming’ reminded me of my next-door neighbor from my 
childhood in small-town New Hampshire. He was a backwoods character with 
no education, no teeth, and a Yankee dialect so thick he was actually 
hard to understand. Whenever anyone knocked on his door he would holler, 
‘You’re in or you’re out!’ as an invitation to come in. However, because 
of his toothless and accented speech, it sounded like ‘Y’in ya’out’.”

Beside oneself

“I liked your entry on being /beside oneself/,” H C Erik Midelfort 
emailed, “but I wanted to note the parallel usage of the term /ecstasy/, 
which derives from the Latin /ecstasis/. It meant literally being beside 
oneself or outside oneself, as in trance, ecstasy, or rapture.”

“You'll probably hear from many others on this one,” wrote Don Neuendorf 
(as it happens incorrectly). “But a very common use of the Greek idiom 
for insanity is found in the gospel of Mark 3:21. Jesus is thought by 
his family to be /exeste/ — from /ex histemi /— standing outside himself.”


  Caucus

Current political events in the USA have again brought this word to the 
forefront of newspaper reporting. Its accidental similarity to 
/Caucasus/ and /Caucasian/, the only other words in English that look 
anything like it, has sometimes led people up a false trail. The true 
origin of /caucus/ has puzzled people almost from the moment it first 
appeared in the middle of the eighteenth century and attempts to solve 
the mystery have been notable for confusion, disagreement and 
misinterpretation.

The only fact that everybody agrees on is that its birthplace is the New 
England city of Boston. Its first appearance, so far as anybody knows at 
the moment, is under a different spelling in the Boston Herald of 5 May 
1760:

[C]ertain Persons, of the modern Air and Complexion, to the Number of 
Twelve at least, have divers Times of late been known to combine 
together, and are called by the Name of the New and Grand Corcas, tho’ 
of declared Principles directly opposite to all that have been 
heretofore known.

Its earliest known use in its usual spelling was in a diary entry of 
February 1763 by John Adams, later to be the second president of the USA:

This day learned that the Caucus Club meets at certain times in the 
garret of Tom Dawes, the adjutant of the Boston (militia) regiment. He 
has a large house, and he has a movable partition in his garret, which 
he takes down, and the whole club meets in one room. There they smoke 
tobacco until you cannot see from one end of the room to the other. 
There they drink flip, I suppose, and there they choose a moderator, who 
puts questions to the vote regularly; and selectmen, assessors, 
collectors, wardens, fire-wards, and representatives, are regularly 
chosen before they are chosen in the town.

/Flip/ is now better known as eggnog.

Even as early as 1788, Dr William Gordon, in his four-volume work /The 
History of the Rise, Progress, and Establishment, of the Independence of 
the United States of America/, had to say that “All my repeated 
applications to different gentlemen have not furnished me with a 
satisfactory account of the origin of /caucus/”. He wasn’t even quite 
sure what it meant: “It seems to mean, a number of persons, whether more 
or less, met together to consult upon adopting and prosecuting some 
scheme of policy.” He went on:

More than fifty years ago [that is, in the 1730s], Mr. Samuel Adams’s 
father, and twenty others, one or two from the north end of town, where 
all the ship business is carried on, used to meet, make a caucus, and 
lay their plan for introducing certain persons into places of trust and 
power.

This link to ships led the lawyer, philologist and scholar John 
Pickering to suggest in 1816 that it was a corruption of /caulkers’ 
meeting/, on the presumption that they were attended by caulkers and 
ropemakers, the former being responsible for sealing the seams between a 
ship’s planks with tar. (Incidentally, Pickering was no fan of new words 
from his native USA: he adds of /caucus/, “It need hardly be remarked, 
that this cant word and its derivatives are never used in good writing.”)

Gordon’s reference to the north end of town prompted a wild guess that 
it was from an obscure Latin word for the north wind, /caucus/. Some 150 
years later, the /Century Dictionary/ of 1889 sought another classical 
origin in the Greek /kaukos/, a cup, “in allusion to the convivial or 
symposiac feature of the club”. Other suggestions make it a corruption 
of /circus/ or /concourse/ or of /Cooke’s House/, the Boston mansion 
once owned by Elisha Cooke where meetings were held before they moved to 
Tom Dawes’ capacious attic.

Quite the most intriguing suggestion was put forward in 1872 by Dr James 
Trumbull, a lifelong member of the Connecticut Historical Society, who 
had made a study of the native languages of New England. He put forward 
the idea that it derived from an Algonquin word, /cau’-cau-as’u/, a 
councillor or “one who advises, urges, encourages”. This had turned up 
in a slightly different form in Captain John Smith’s The Generall 
Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles of 1624:

In all these places is a severall commander, which they call Werowance, 
except the Chickahamanians, who are governed by the Priests and their 
Assistants, or their Elders called Caw-cawwassoughes.

Trumbull argued that Native American terms were often adopted by clubs 
and secret associations in New England. It seems plausible but there’s 
no direct evidence.

Several other descriptions in addition to Gordon’s imply that meetings 
of the kind described, held behind closed doors in smoke-filled rooms 
for selecting candidates and controlling the political process, had been 
in existence for decades before the word /caucus/ first appears.

As so often with etymology, we have arrived at no very clear conclusion, 
but I hope you will agree that the journey to nowhere has been 
moderately entertaining. On the other hand, it’s certainly possible that 
some earlier variant will eventually turn up, perhaps from as far back 
as the 1730s. With extraordinary luck, this might even give us a better 
idea of its provenance.


   From my reading

·News of the US presidential campaign has to share space in British 
newspapers with the forthcoming referendum on whether the UK should 
leave the European Union. This is rapidly becoming a lexicographical 
hotspot. I’ve commented before on /Brexit/, short for British exit, but 
February saw several appearances in more upmarket papers of the rather 
strained neologism /Bremain/ for the opposing idea. Journalists have 
created /Brexiter /for a supporter of withdrawal (and /Brexiteer/, also; 
you will note the subtle negative associations of that extra /e/), but 
not so far its equivalent /Bremainer/. But I’ve started to see 
/Bremaineer/ and /Bremainster/ as well as the more conventional 
/remainer/. Suggestions of a partial return after a Brexit has been 
termed /Bre-entry/. There’s plenty of time for more inventions, as the 
referendum isn’t until June 23.

·The word /averagarianism/ is a bit of a mouthful and not one, I 
suspect, that will ever appeal to the public at large. Its related 
adjective and noun, /averagarian/, stands a better chance of acceptance. 
Both have popped up recently in reviews of Todd Rose’s book /The End of 
Average/. He attacks the culture of making decisions about people in 
education and the workplace on the basis of what an idealised average 
person would do. “Nobody is average,” he asserts. Most readers would 
assume, as I did, that Rose invented both words, but it turns out 
otherwise, with /averagarian/ appearing first 152 years ago in /The 
Cornhill Magazine/, a famous British literary journal whose first editor 
was the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray. The word is in an article 
from the issue of August 1864, /Morality of the Doctrine of Averages/, 
which contains a critique of statistics not so far from that of Rose and 
comments, “a planet in which goodness was cast up in the total from 
columns of averages, and wickedness reckoned simply as so much in the 
hundred, would be a world unhumanised altogether.”

·Drought many of us are all too familiar with, but I was slightly 
startled to see an article in /New Scientist/ that referred to a /wind 
drought/. It seems that parts of the USA are experiencing a prolonged 
period of lighter than usual winds which have caused electricity 
generation from wind farms to fall by 6% last year. It’s not the only 
figurative application of /drought/ I’ve seen; /energy drought/ and /gas 
drought/ have previously appeared, though uncommon, and /petrol drought/ 
turned up in a British local newspaper report last month (the one 
filling station in Hexham in Northumberland was without fuel for a 
week). Let’s hope these compounds don’t become common enough that we 
shall have to start referring to /water drought/ to make clear what sort 
of drought we mean.

·’Tis March, and so time for the annual wordfest of titlology that is 
the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year. The shortlisted 
titles, selected by Horace Bent of The Bookseller are, as listed in the 
press release: Behind the Binoculars: Interviews with Acclaimed 
Birdwatchers; Reading from Behind: A Cultural Analysis of the Anus; 
Paper Folding with Children; Soviet Bus Stops; Reading the Liver: 
Papyrological Texts on Ancient Greek Extispicy; Too Naked for the Nazis; 
and Transvestite Vampire Biker Nuns from Outer Space: A Consideration of 
Cult Film. A check of the titles shows the selectors have abbreviated a 
couple, thereby making them seem slightly odder than they really are: 
Paper Folding with Children has the joke-ruining subtitle Fun and Easy 
Origami Projects, while Too Naked for the Nazis actually has the full 
title Wilson, Keppel and Betty: Too Naked for the Nazis (it’s about a 
fondly remembered British music-hall trio’s bizarre speciality act). 
Cast your votes on The Bookseller’s website; the winner is to be 
announced on 18 March. Extispicy, by the way, is an ancient Latinism 
meaning the inspection of the entrails of sacrificial victims for 
divination.

·We’ve long had predictions of /peak oil/, the point at which the 
maximum rate of extraction of petroleum is reached, after which it’s 
expected to enter terminal decline. The term has spawned many imitators, 
including /peak coal/, /peak gas/, /peak grain/, /peak copper/, /peak 
lead/, and even /peak car/, a hint that the private motor vehicle is 
drifting down a long slope towards dissolution, and /peak startup/, 
meaning that the rate of new company formation is faltering. You may 
recall my mentioning /peak beard/ a couple of years ago, the suggestion 
that hirsuteness is going out of fashion. The peak that has been 
featured in my daily paper this week is /peak stuff/, the idea that 
people — at least in Britain — are falling out of love with material 
objects and are ceasing to consume so much. That’s such a wide-ranging 
concept that we may hope we’ve at last seen /peak peak/.


  Kick the bucket

Q. From Fred: Could you tell me where the phrase /kick the bucket/ 
originated?

A. This is one of many idioms created down the years to avoid making too 
blunt a mention of the unpleasant subject of death by cloaking the idea 
in euphemistic, elevated or humorous terms. They range from 
Shakespeare’s /shuffle off this mortal coil/, through the 
eighteenth-century’s /hop the twig/, to George Eliot’s /join the choir 
invisible/, many of which were guyed in Monty Python’s famous dead 
parrot sketch.

The earliest unequivocal appearance of /kick the bucket/, at least so 
far as we know at the moment, was in a serial story in a British 
magazine. At this point the hero, a sailor, has recovered from a severe 
illness:

My old mess-mate, Tom Bowline, met me at the gangway, and with a salute 
as hearty as honest, damn’d his eyes, but he was glad I had not kicked 
the bucket; while another swore roundly, that I had turned well to 
windward, and left death and the devil to leeward; and a third more 
vociferously exclaimed, I was born to dance upon nothing.

/The History of Edward and Maria/, in The /London Magazine/, Aug. 1775. 
/To dance upon nothing/ meant to die by hanging.

In the same magazine five years later, a writer confirmed the meaning of 
the idiom while commenting how opaque it was. It had turned up in a 
gossipy letter which a friend had received and passed on to him, which 
included the sentence “as to your enquiries about old Wentworth, poor 
man! he died extremely rich; his disease stuck so close to him that it 
has obliged him to kick the bucket”. The article writer noted:

I should have been at a loss also to have known the significance of 
/kicking the bucket/, but am told it is an expression used to inform us 
of a person’s death, although I should no sooner apprehend it to be so 
than if I were told he had let fall his watch, or rapped at my door.

/Observations on the Errors and Corruptions that Have Crept into the 
English Language/, in /The London Magazine/, May 1780.

So much for the early history of the idiom, which does little or nothing 
to illuminate its origins. These may never be known for certain, though 
theories abound.

One story, hard to credit, is that the bucket is one on which a suicide 
might stand when hanging himself — kick away the bucket and the job is 
done. This theory only appeared long after a report in a Bath newspaper 
on 25 September 1788 of the suicide of a man called John Marshfield, who 
killed himself in just this way; in 1896 John Farmer and William Henley 
noted in Slang and Its Analogues that it had been claimed as the sad end 
of an ostler at an inn on the Great North Road.

Farmer and Henley place greater credence on a very different story, 
which was given rather more support than it deserved by being 
tentatively suggested as the origin in the first edition of the Oxford 
English Dictionary in 1888. An extended version of the attribution 
appeared 15 years later in a letter from the splendidly named Holcombe 
Ingleby of Norfolk, which he said was “one familiar to me from my youth up”:

When a butcher slings up a sheep or pig, after killing, he fastens to 
the hocks of the animal what is technically known in the trade as a 
/gambal/, a piece of wood curved somewhat like a horse’s leg. This is 
also known in Norfolk as a /bucket. /... /Bucket/, I may add, is not 
only well known in Norfolk in this sense, and commonly used, but with 
some of our folk is the only word known for the article in question. To 
“kick the bucket,” then, is the sign of the animal’s being dead, and the 
origin of the phrase may probably, if not indisputably, be referred to 
this source.

/Notes and Queries/, 21 May 1904. His /gambal/ is usually rendered as 
/gambrel/ or /gambril/, which is presumably why he stated that he 
couldn’t find the word in the /New English Dictionary/ (the name then 
for what is now called the /Oxford English Dictionary/).Editor Henry 
Bradley had actually included /gambrel/ in the F-G volume published in 1901.

The OED’s editors suggested that the word might not refer to our modern 
/bucket/, but to the Old French /buquet/ for a balance or a trebuchet, 
the medieval siege weapon for hurling missiles at the enemy.

It may reasonably be objected that the animal couldn’t possibly kick the 
bucket, as it was already dead by the time that its rear legs were 
fastened to it. Advocates of this origin must also explain how a 
specialist dialect expression from rural Norfolk came to be so widely 
taken up at the end of the eighteenth century and why there are only 
indirect references to this sense of /bucket/ and never any examples of 
its actually having being uttered.

A third theory also appeared in Notes and Queries, in 1947. It was in 
reference to a supposedly old custom of the Catholic church:

After death, when the body had been laid out, a cross and two lighted 
candles were placed near it, and in addition to these the holy-water 
bucket was brought from the church and put at the feet of the corpse. 
When friends came to pray for the deceased, before leaving the room they 
would sprinkle the body with holy water. So intimately therefore was the 
bucket associated with the feet of deceased persons that it is easy to 
see how the saying came about.

Or perhaps not.

[/This piece is an updated and enlarged version of one that first 
appeared in this newsletter in February 1999. My thanks to the various 
members of the American Dialect Society who discovered the early 
examples, and to etymologist Professor Anatoly Liberman, who wrote about 
the expression in two issues of his blog /The Oxford Etymologist/in 
February 2016./]


  Oryzivorous

Pronounced /ɒrɪˈzɪvərəs/.

Though /oryzivorous/ appears in a scientific glossary in 1857, there is 
no example of its appearing in print before modern times and even then 
almost exclusively in works that specialise in strange and exotic words. 
This suggested that finding out why anyone bothered to invent it might 
be worth enquiring into.

The root is classical Latin /oryza/, rice. Add to that the ending 
/-vorous/, devouring or eating, and you get an adjective meaning 
“rice-eating”. This is common enough, both among people and animals, but 
nobody seems to have felt the need for a pompous Latinate formulation to 
describe it.

When I searched for it, I kept turning up the supposed scientific name 
for a small bird, /Dolichonyx oryzivorous/, which I was pleased to 
discover was a migratory blackbird which may be seen in North America in 
the spring and summer. This is commonly called the bobolink, an odd name 
that’s said to be from /Bob o’ Lincoln/, the way that English-speaking 
American colonists in the eighteenth century rendered the bird’s call. 
It does indeed eat rice, voraciously when it can get it, though it’s 
happy to eat seeds of many other kinds.

This happy encounter with a species I’d never heard of turned out to be 
the result of a repeated error, because its correct name is /Dolichonyx 
oryzivorus/, without the final/o/. The scientific name was given to the 
bird by the famous Swedish naturalist Karl Linnaeus in 1766. However, he 
called it /Emberiza oryzivorus/, putting it in the same genus as 40 or 
so species of buntings. However, it was soon realised the bobolink 
wasn’t really a bunting and since 1827 it has been the lonely sole 
member of the genus /Dolichonyx/, a word that derives for no very clear 
reason from Greek /dolichos/, meaning “long”.

We may guess that /oryzivorous/, with that extra /o/, came into being in 
that glossary solely because Linnaeus had created the closely similar 
/oryzivorus/.


  Sic

Hilary Powers found this in an Associated Press story dated 23 February: 
“Kelly said he’s not sure how long the next phase of the investigation 
will take. Scientists need to replicate the behavior of air bags over a 
period of several years, which will take time, he said.”

A Sunday Telegraph article on the late Harper Lee which Michel Norrish 
was reading quoted a friend: “She had this wonderful childish twinkle in 
her eye and she defied conventional morays.” Don’t eel out of the error, 
subeditors, try /mores, /as in the customs and conventions of society.

An even worse misspelling was committed by political activists in 
Alberta, whom Clyde McConnell pointed out had written on Facebook that 
they wanted a /kudatah/. It took a moment to connect it with /coup d’état/.

“Curtains for Swaziland?” emailed Nigel Johnson, reporting that the 
headline overa story on the website of the Anglican News Service dated 2 
March read: “Swaziland declares national emergency as draught intensifies.”

Another misspelled headline, on the /Daily Telegraph/’s site on the same 
day, led Bob Hughes to comment that the action seemed a little harsh: 
“Judge scalds Madonna and Guy Ritchie for public custody battle over 
15-year-old son Rocco.”

One of the weirder science-related headlines of recent times was found 
by Emery Fletcher on the arstechnica website on 12 February: 
“Potentially deadly drug interactions found mining FDA complaint bin”.

Slavery is still with us, Beverley Rowe suspects, having seen the 
headline “Owner of Pinewood Studios, home to James Bond and Star Wars, 
could be sold.” Rowe saw it in The Guardian, but it remains visible only 
on the ITV news website.

A report in the /Daily Mail/ on 4 March read: “The Los Angeles Police 
Department confirmed the discovery of the knife to Daily Mail Online. ‘A 
knife was recovered on the property. We are currently meeting on it.’ ”


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