World Wide Words -- 05 Nov 16

[Michael Quinion via WorldWideWords]

World Wide Words

Saturday 5 November 2016.

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Feedback, Notes and Comments

It was a pleasure to learn on Tuesday that Randy Cassingham, who writes 
the /This Is True/ newsletter, had included /World Wide Words/ in his 
Top 11 Hidden Gems of the Internet suggested by his subscribers. He 
described the site as “a treasure trove of past articles: the kind of 
site where you pop in ... and don’t look up again for hours.” Check out 
the others here: http://wwwords.org/hdngms. A special welcome to the new 
subscribers who joined through consulting the list.

The piece below about the expression /happy as a sandboy/ is a 
substantial revision with new information of one first written in 2002.

Fizgig

Today — 5 November — is one of those periodic celebrations of failure we 
Brits so much enjoy, in this case the inability of Guy Fawkes to blow up 
Parliament on this day in 1605. For the four centuries since, the day 
has been celebrated with fireworks and bonfires.

One such firework was the /fizgig/, an unspectacular device that hissed 
rather than banged, for which reason it has also been called a serpent; 
a conical form has the name volcano. A English poet once compared a man 
to one:

Northmore himself is an honest, vehement sort of a fellow who splutters 
out all his opinions like a fiz-gig, made of gunpowder not thoroughly 
dry, sudden and explosive, yet ever with a certain adhesive 
blubberliness of elocution.
Letter from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Thomas Poole, 16 Sep. 1799.

/Fizgig/ in the sense of the firework is now quite dead, as are most of 
the other senses that this weirdly catholic word has had. The original 
was a frivolous woman, fond of gadding about in search of pleasure — an 
alliterative-minded seventeenth-century man wrote of “Fis-gig, a flirt, 
a fickle .... foolish Female”. The word was built upon /gig/, another 
word that has had many meanings; Chaucer knew it as a fickle woman but 
Shakespeare considered it to be a child’s top. The first part of 
/fizgig/ is obscure. It can’t be /fizz/, effervescence, because that 
came along much later, probably as an imitative sound. It may be the 
same word as the obsolete /fise/ for a smelly fart.

Another defunct meaning of /fizgig/ is that of a harpoon, a fish-spear:

Two dolphins followed us this afternoon; we hooked one, and struck the 
other with the fizgig; but they both escaped us, and we saw them no more.
/Journal of a Voyage from London to Philadelphia/, by Benjamin Franklin, 
1726.

This was sometimes perverted into /fish-gig/ by popular etymology. It 
has no link with the other senses but derives from the Spanish word 
/fisga/ for a harpoon.

/Fizgig/ principally survives in Australian slang, where it means a 
police informer. It turns up first in the 1870s, perhaps as an extension 
of the female sense, considered stereotypically as dashing about madly 
and gossiping indiscreetly:

Without their allies — “the fizgigs,” the police seem powerless to trace 
the authors of the robberies which are now of such frequent occurrence.
/Victorian Express/ (Geraldton, WA), 15 Nov. 1882.

Spin a yarn

Q /From From Ada Robinson/: I came across the phrase /spinning a yarn/ 
(in the sense of telling a story) recently, and for the first time 
wondered about its origin. Can you shed light on how the word /yarn/ 
acquired the second meaning of a tale?

A It’s puzzling because we’ve lost the context.

We know that sailors were the first to use /spinning a yarn/ — often in 
the extended form /spinning out a long yarn/ — to refer to telling a 
story that described a speaker’s adventures and exploits.

We start to see the expressions in print in the early nineteenth 
century, though its ultimate origin is unclear. However, we do know that 
one task of sailors was to make running repairs to the various ropes of 
the ship — the cables, hawsers and rigging. As with people on shore, 
/yarn/ was their word for the individual strands of such ropes, often 
very long. Their term for binding the strands into fresh rope was 
/spinning/ or to /spin out/. The next part is a jump of imagination, for 
which you may substitute the word guess, though I would prefer to call 
it informed speculation. The task of repair was necessarily long and 
tedious. We may easily imagine members of the repair crew telling one 
another stories to make the time pass more easily and that this practice 
became associated with the phrases.

By the second decade of the century, the term was being used ashore and 
became a popular slangy idiom. One appearance was in a jocular report of 
a police court action in Edinburgh which centred on a sailor who had 
stolen a milk cart:

When the first witness was put in the box, and had his mouth most 
oracularly opened, preparing to speak, Jack, twitching him by the collar 
with his forefinger, caused him at once to descend, and exclaimed — 
“Avast there; none of your jaw; who wants you to spin out a long yarn?”
/The Edinburgh Advertiser/, 17 Nov. 1826.

In time, /yarn/ came to refer to the stories. Many must have been 
exaggerated or bombastic and that sense of something not readily 
believable still attaches itself to the word. In Australia and New 
Zealand the word has softened in sense to mean no more than chatting.

Chalazion

Peter Gilliver, the eminent lexicographer with the /Oxford English 
Dictionary/ whose book I mentioned last time, quoted this word in an 
interview a couple of weeks ago. He said he had found it when a 
youngster in a children’s dictionary that was full of such unusual words.

I made the mistake of looking for it in Google Books, where I found 
several works which explained it in terms such as “a common 
lipogranulomatous inflammation of the sebaceous glands of the eyelids, 
most often the meibomian glands.” Some works also noted that it’s 
sometimes known as a /hordeolum/. In confusion, I visited Dr Gilliver’s 
wonderful online repository of knowledge, in which /chalazion/ is 
defined as “a small pimple or tubercule; especially one on the eyelid, a 
stye.”

/Chalazion/ is the diminutive of Greek /chalaza/ for almost any lump, 
including a small hailstone and a pimple. The /OED/ helpfully pointed me 
to its entry for /chalaza/, which stated that in English it’s a 
zoological term for “Each of the two membranous twisted strings by which 
the yolk-bag of an egg is bound to the lining membrane at the ends of 
the shell.”

The /meibomian/ glands make a lubricant for the eye. Their name isn’t 
from a classical language but derives from a seventeenth-century German 
anatomist named Heinrich Meibom. And /hordeolum/ derives from the Latin 
word for barley grains

The plural of /chalazion/, should you ever suffer from more than one, is 
/chalazia/.

In the news

*Words of 2016.* The annual lexicographical wordfest began on Thursday 
with a list of topical terms from /Collins Dictionary/. Its choice for 
Word of the Year was /Brexit/, Britain’s exit from the European Union. 
The term went from nowhere to established part of the language in an 
extraordinarily brief time. The earliest recorded use may have been the 
one in /The Guardian/ on 1 January 2012 but it became widely used by the 
general public only in the early months of this year. The publisher 
suggests it//“is arguably politics’ most important contribution to the 
English language in over 40 years”. It has spawned many spin-offs, 
including /Bremorse/ for the regret by people who voted to leave but 
realise they made a mistake and would like to /Bremain/ or /Breturn/. 
Other words in the Collins topical list are /hygge/, a suddenly 
fashionable and much written about Danish concept of creating cosy and 
convivial atmospheres that promote wellbeing, and /uberization/, derived 
from the name of the taxi firm Uber, for the adoption of a business 
model in which services are offered on demand through direct contact 
between a customer and supplier, usually via mobile technology.

*Fount of fonts.* Subscriber Bart Cannistra came across a news item 
about a new pan-language collection of fonts from Google and Monotype 
that supports more than 100 scripts and 800 languages in a common visual 
style. Its name is Noto, which its website says is short for “*no* more 
*to*fu”. It explains that /tofu/ is digital typographer’s jargon for one 
of those little rectangular boxes that appear when your browser doesn’t 
have the appropriate font to display a character. The boxes sometimes 
have a question mark or cross inside them but it’s their rectangular 
shape that has given them the name, since they reminded some unheralded 
type designer of the cuboid blocks of tofu.

*Not that kind of girl.* Readers outside the UK are most likely 
unfamiliar with the term /Essex Girl/, which /Collins Dictionary/ 
defines as “a young working-class woman from the Essex area, typically 
considered as being unintelligent, materialistic, devoid of taste, and 
sexually promiscuous.” It’s in the news because two Essex women have 
begun a petition to have the term stricken from dictionaries because 
they’ve had enough of derogatory references. They have been criticised 
for starting the petition because it only leads to more public mention 
of the term. The term came to public attention in 1991 with the 
publication of /The Essex Girl Joke Book/ (typical example: “How does an 
Essex Girl turn on the light after sex? She opens the car door”), but 
the stereotype is best known through the long-running ITV programme /The 
Only Way is Essex/. The /OED/ has already refused to remove the term, on 
the excellent grounds that it’s part of our living language.

What am I? Chopped liver?

Q /From Mary Clarke/: Your piece on Joe Soap made me think of the phrase 
/What am I? Chopped liver?/ Is this a New York expression or a Jewish 
expression? I ask this because we seem to eat more chopped liver here 
than anywhere else and because one of the nicest compliments I’ve ever 
received was from a friend who said my chopped liver was better than her 
Jewish grandmother’s.

A This takes me back. In November 1999, when this newsletter had already 
reached issue 167, I mentioned that a reader had asked about this but as 
it was unfamiliar to me, I asked for elucidation. The resulting flood of 
emails was overwhelming. Though I summarised the results the following 
week, I realise now that I never went into detail, nor posted anything 
on my website.

A dish of chopped liver — fried chicken livers with eggs, spices and, if 
you’re being really traditional, schmaltz and gribenes (respectively 
rendered chicken fat and fried chicken skin as a form of crackling) — is 
common at Jewish celebratory meals. It’s also a standard dish in New 
York Jewish delicatessens. But it’s inexpensive and never a main dish, 
wherein lies the core of the idiom. Sol Steinmetz, the American linguist 
and Yiddish expert, explained that “Chopped liver is merely an appetizer 
or side dish, not as important as chicken soup or gefilte fish. Hence it 
was used among Jewish comedians as a humorous metaphor for something or 
someone insignificant.” Robert Chapman argued in his /Dictionary of 
American Slang/ that the idiom originated in the 1930s in this sense.

Early in its development a negative reference to chopped liver 
developed, which instead suggested something excellent or impressive. It 
parallels another American idiom, /that ain’t hay/. The idiom appeared 
in various forms, such as /it ain’t chopped liver, that’s not chopped 
liver/, and /it’s not exactly chopped liver/. The first of these forms 
is noted by Jonathan Lighter in his /Historical Dictionary of American 
Slang/ from a Jimmy Durante television show in 1954. It must surely be 
older. This is another version, from a little later:

Some of the critics put it right up there with “My Fair Lady.” Even 
before it lifts the curtain there is a million dollars in advance orders 
and this as the boys say is not chopped liver ...
/The Victoria Advocate/ (Victoria, Texas), 8 Mar 1959.

The form that you mention appears in the historical record a few years 
later still. Somebody exclaiming /What am I? Chopped liver? /is 
expressing annoyance at being thought unworthy of attention: “What about 
me? Why am I being ignored? Don’t I matter?”

It could be New York Jewish. It has the right cadence for a Yiddish 
exclamation and chopped liver, as we’ve seen, is an archetypal Jewish 
dish. And the experts suggest it grew out of a catchphrase of comedians 
in the Borscht Belt of the Catskill Mountains patronised by Jewish 
people from New York City. But there’s no certain connection. What is 
clear that it filled a need and that even by its earliest written 
appearances it had already reached places well away from centres of 
Jewish life.

Happy as a sandboy

Q /From Niki Wessels, South Africa; a related question came from Robert 
Metcalf in Singapore/: Our family recently discussed the expression 
/happy as a sandboy/, and wondered where and how it originated. My 
dictionary informs me that a sandboy is a kind of flea — but why a boy, 
and why is it happy?

A Let me add an explanatory note to your question, as many readers will 
never have heard this saying. It’s a proverbial expression that suggests 
blissful contentment:

Made me think it might be a good idea to mark the occasion. Nothing too 
big, you understand. Not looking for fireworks and flags or anything. 
I’m a modest man with modest needs. Give me a bit of cake, maybe some 
tarts, throw in a couple of balloons and I’m happy as a sandboy.
/Bristol Evening Post/, 11 Aug. 2015.

It’s mostly known in Britain and Commonwealth countries. An older form 
is /as jolly as a sandboy/, which is now rarely encountered. The first 
examples we know about are from London around the start of the 
nineteenth century.

A sandboy in some countries can indeed be a sort of sand flea, but this 
isn’t the source of the expression. Incidentally, nor is there a link 
with the /sandman/, the personification of tiredness, which came into 
English in translations of Hans Christian Andersen’s stories several 
decades after sandboy.

The sandboys of the expression actually sold sand. /Boy/ here was a 
common term for a male worker of lower class (as in /bellboy/, /cowboy/, 
and /stableboy/), which comes from an old sense of a servant. It doesn’t 
imply the sellers were young — most were certainly adults — though one 
early poetic reference does mention a child:

A poor shoeless Urchin, half starv’d and suntann’d,
Pass’d near the Inn-Window, crying — “Buy my fine Sand!”
/The Rider, and Sand-Boy/ in the /Hereford Journal/, 13 Jul. 1796. The 
title contains the earliest known reference to a sandboy. The poem was 
unattributed but is almost certainly by William Meyler of Bath. Note 
that to be described as suntanned wasn’t then a compliment; it implied 
an outdoor worker of low class.

The selling of sand wasn’t such a peculiar occupation as you might 
think, as there was once a substantial need for it. It was used to scour 
pans and tools and was sprinkled on the floors of butchers’ shops, inns 
and taprooms to take up spilled liquids. Later in the century it was 
superseded by sawdust.

Henry Mayhew wrote about the trade in his /London Labour and the London 
Poor/ in 1861. The sand was dug out from pits on Hampstead Heath and 
taken down in horse-drawn carts or panniers carried on donkeys to be 
hawked through the streets. The job was hard work and badly paid. Mayhew 
records these comments from one of the excavators: “My men work very 
hard for their money, sir; they are up at 3 o’clock of the morning, and 
are knocking about the streets, perhaps till 5 or 6 o’clock in the evening”.

Their prime characteristic, it seems, was an inexhaustible desire for 
beer. Charles Dickens referred to the saying, by then proverbial, in 
/The Old Curiosity Shop/ in 1841: “The Jolly Sandboys was a small 
road-side inn of pretty ancient date, with a sign, representing three 
Sandboys increasing their jollity with as many jugs of ale”. An early 
writer on slang made the link explicit:

“As jolly as a sand-boy,” designates a merry fellow who has tasted a drop.
/Slang: A Dictionary of the Turf, the Ring, the Chase, the Pit, of 
Bon-tom, and the Varieties of Life/, by John Badcock, 1823. To have 
become an aphorism by this time, /sandboy/ must surely be older than the 
1796 poem quoted above.

Quite so. But I suspect that the long hours and hard work involved in 
carrying and shovelling sand, plus the poor returns, meant that sandboys 
didn’t have much cause to look happy in the normal run of things, 
improving only when they’d had a pint or two. Their regular visits to 
inns and ale-houses presented temptation to a much greater degree than 
to most people and it has also been suggested that they were often paid 
partly in beer.

So sandboys were happy because they were drunk.

At first the saying was meant ironically. Only where the trade wasn’t 
practised — or had died out — could it became an allusion to unalloyed 
happiness. To judge from the answers to a question about its origin in 
/Notes & Queries/ in 1866, even by then its origin was obscure.

Sic!

• A headline on the /Hertfordshire Mercury/ site on 14 October — 
“Tributes paid to Waltham Cross Labour councillor who was a ‘real 
character’ following his death” — led Ross Mulder to wonder what the man 
was like during his life.

• If you’re going to do something, do it properly. Ted Dooley found this 
news in an email from the /Minneapolis Star Tribune/ on 7 October: “Ryan 
D. Petersen, 37, was convicted Friday morning of first-degree 
premeditated murder for fatally shooting a law clerk eight times earlier 
this year.”

• A puzzling statement from /The Age/ of Melbourne of 10 October about 
the illegal demolition of a heritage-listed pub was submitted by Susan 
Ross: “A petition law students started this week demanding the pub be 
rebuilt by Tuesday afternoon had more than 5000 signatures.” A comma 
after “rebuilt” might have helped.

Useful information

*About this newsletter:* World Wide Words is researched, written and 
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