WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 639 Saturday 16 May 2009 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Sent each Saturday to at least 50,000 subscribers by e-mail and RSS Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448 http://www.worldwidewords.org US advisory editor: Julane Marx ------------------------------------------------------------------- A formatted version of this e-magazine is available online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/ewqn.htm To leave the list or change your subscribed email address, see Section A below or go to http://wwwords.org?SUBS. Don't e-mail me with subscription matters unless you are having problems. This e-magazine is best viewed in a fixed-pitch font. For a key to phonetic symbols, see http://wwwords.org?PRON Contents ------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Feedback, notes and comments. 2. Weird Words: Slumgullion. 3. Recently noted. 4. Book review: I Love It When You Talk Retro. 5. Q and A: Cocksure. 6. Sic! A. Subscription information. B. E-mail contact addresses. C. Ways to support World Wide Words. 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- THAT'S CUTE! My list last week of quaint American expressions that included "cute" brought forth questioning responses, such as this one from Anne Virtue: "Is cute really used with all of those terms? I've heard some of them but never heard cute used in the following expressions: 'snug as a bug in a rug', 'slippery as a weasel' and 'smart as a fox'." Other readers have supplied further variations: "cunning as a fox", "cunning as a shithouse rat" (an Australianism) and so on. In the "cute" forms, as I mentioned, the word could have its old sense of clever, shrewd or quick-witted, which has survived longer in British English than in American ("she might be too cute to fall into the trap", Agatha Christie once wrote). People have in some cases very understandably changed "cute" into "cunning" or "smart" so that the expressions continue to make sense. All the examples I quoted have appeared in print, even "cute as a bug in a rug", for which I could supply three dozen cases, despite the belief of at least that many readers that it doesn't exist. But I also concur with Charles Earle Funk in Heavens to Betsy (1955): "Sometimes the expression [cute as a bug's ear] is paraphrased into 'cute as a bug in a rug', but this is a poor foist of new upon old. 'Snug as a bug in a rug', the utmost in contentment and comfort, dates back two hundred years." Claire Trazenfeld extended my list: "When I was a child growing up in New Hampshire in the 1940s, the expression 'cute as a trout's tit' was not uncommon. I often heard it used by my father, who was from northern Vermont and born in the late 19th century." PHANTASMAGORIA Steve Doerr and Marc Picard tell me that French sources suggest the second part of this word is from "allégorie", allegory, rather than from "agora", a place of public assembly, as the Oxford English Dictionary suggests. The two are connected, of course, as "allegory" comes in part from a Greek verb that once could mean "harangue", and which derives from "agora". 2. Weird Words: Slumgullion /slVm'gVlj@n/ sl{revv}m{sm}g{revv}lj{schwa}n ------------------------------------------------------------------- The word sounds vaguely unpleasant, a good example of form matching meaning, since Americans have for 150 years used it for a variety of things that are unpleasant to various degrees. Dictionaries often say this was its first appearance in print: Then he poured for us a beverage which he called "Slum gullion," and it is hard to think he was not inspired when he named it. It really pretended to be tea, but there was too much dish-rag, and sand, and old bacon-rind in it to deceive the intelligent traveler. [Roughing It, by Mark Twain, 1872.] A slang dictionary two years later defined slumgullion as "any cheap, nasty, washy beverage". Another, roughly contemporary, memory is this: The meals are all alike - a potato, a slice of something like bacon, some gray stuff called bread, and a cup of muddy, semi-liquid coffee like that which the California miners call "slickers" or "slumgullion." [Travels in Alaska, by John Muir, 1915, describing a trip he made in 1879.] Today it means a cheap stew made by throwing anything handy into a pot with water and boiling it, an improvised dish which has had many other names, such as Mulligan stew and Irish stew. Other senses include fish offal or the waste from processing whale carcasses (in Moby-Dick, published in 1851, Herman Melville called it "slobgollion"). We now know the word is a good deal older than the Mark Twain book. Many early examples refer to yet another old sense listed in the dictionaries, for the muddy waste left after washing gold ore in a mining sluice. Were those who were instrumental in wilfully creating this unconstitutional debt ... compelled to shovel tailings and clean reservoirs half full of slumgullion until it was paid? [Mountain Democrat, California, 3 Jan. 1857. Tailings are ore residues.] From this and other appearances, including the diaries of forty- niners, it seems certain that the word originated in this sense in the California gold fields, probably around 1850. It may be the same word as Melville's (the similarity in form is persuasive), suggesting that miners borrowed it from an older unrecorded word that also provided Melville with his version. They later applied "slumgullion" figuratively and disparagingly to foodstuffs that were muddy or semi-liquid. American dictionaries guess that it may be a combination of "slum", an old English term meaning slime (nothing to do with a squalid urban area, the word for which is an old bit of slang of unknown origin) plus "gullion", English dialect for mud or a cesspool. This is still known in Scots and is probably from the Irish goilín for a pit or pool. This certainly fits the mining context of early uses. 3. Recently noted ------------------------------------------------------------------- FLIP! Since the start of the twentieth century, "flip" has had a second career as a euphemism for the F-word. Another use appeared in 2007, for purchasing the latest must-have item with the aim of immediately selling it for a profit via the Internet. The scandal concerning expenses claims by MPs now rocking the British political establishment has led to a further meaning appearing in the press. MPs whose constituencies are some way from Westminster are allowed to claim running costs of a second home. To flip is to change the place one claims as this second home to maximise the potential for claiming expenses. One MP, we learned, changed hers three times in one year, charging for repairs on each. Others have altered the status of their second homes, after claiming expenses for repairs and improvements, to avoid paying tax on the proceeds of selling them. Though this slang sense is common in the news at the moment, it's hardly likely to become a settled part of the language. BAD HAIR DAY While we're on British parliamentary slang, another term came up last week during a briefing for lobby correspondents. In a question about an article critical of the government written for the Observer newspaper by Hazel Blears, a government minister, a journalist asked the official spokesman, "Did the prime minister give her a 'hair dryer'?" This turned out not to refer to a gift, but to a Downing Street insiders term for a severe dressing-down. As a candidate for permanent inclusion in English, this has to be counted a total failure. 4. Book review: I Love It When You Talk Retro ------------------------------------------------------------------- Waves of technological advance can leave English phrases washed up on the shore, flotsam with no obvious origins for those too young to know what generated them. We still dial telephone numbers and hang up the phone even though the verbs refer to types of phones that have been out of use for decades. We may refer to the flip side of a situation or describe a person as talking like a broken record or of being stuck in a groove, even though gramophone records are obsolete. Similarly, common phrases often have their origins in popular cultural references that are opaque for those who weren't around to experience the originals: double whammy, show me the money, I'll have what she's having, the $64,000 dollar question, the seven year itch, Stepford wife, will it play in Peoria?, the Twinkie defense, where's the beef? Ralph Keyes calls such verbal fossils retroterms. This book has hundreds of them, at the risk of taking readers to the brink of indigestion. They're arranged in chapters by themes such as sport, politicians, films and comics and the workplace, ending with a look at phrases of today that might turn up in a future edition of the book. Most are from the US, but some older ones are part of the common currency of all English speakers. Mr Keyes is good on his American popular culture, but stumbles when etymology is involved. Though "skeleton in the closet" was indeed introduced by Thackeray (and "closet" was what he wrote, though the British form today is "skeleton in the cupboard"), it is extremely unlikely that it came about through the practice of doctors keeping the skeletons of bodies they had dissected locked in a closet out of public view. Why would they want to keep them? It's surely a folk etymology. It is improbable that "reading between the lines", to look for a hidden meaning, derives from the use of invisible inks to send a secret message hidden in an innocuous one. Folk etymology again. "Old fogey" for a person with antiquated views is not from a US military term, "fogey pay", for long-service pay. "Fogey pay" is known, of course, but dates from the latter part of the nineteenth century; "old fogey" is 100 years older - it's in Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue of 1785, where it is said to mean an invalid soldier; our standard English sense and the military one both derive from it. Did "third degree" for harsh questioning by police derive from a harrowing induction rite for the highest grade in freemasonry? It has been known since Shakespeare's time as a simple grade or level and was used for the classification of burns before it turns up in the interrogation sense. As the US legal term for the least serious grade of a particular crime is also earlier, it's more likely to be the origin. "Yellow journalism" and "yellow press" didn't derive from William Randolph Hearst's sponsorship of a bicycle race across America in 1896 (participants wore yellow jerseys) but from Joseph Pulitzer's experiment in colour printing in the New York World in 1895 in which a child in a yellow dress ("The Yellow Kid") was a figure in a cartoon. Many other examples could be cited, which demonstrate the pitfalls faced by an expert in another field who attempts etymology without sound preparation and being primed to question the origins given in his sources. Such errors spoiled the book for me. Readers prepared to take his etymological assertions with a large pinch of salt may still find this a pleasant trip down nostalgia alley. [Ralph Keyes, I Love It When You Talk Retro; St Martin's Press; 1 Apr. 2009; hardback, 310pp. including index; ISBN 9780312340056; list price US$25.95.] AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK Amazon UK: GBP13.91 http://wwwords.org?ILTR4 Amazon US: US$17.13 http://wwwords.org?ILTR2 Amazon Canada: CDN$18.24 http://wwwords.org?ILTR7 Amazon Germany: EUR21,99 http://wwwords.org?ILTR3 [Please use these links to buy. They get World Wide Words a small commission at no extra cost to you.] 5. Q and A: Cocksure ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. I've just discovered your web site and it's immensely enjoyable. I have a word that came to mind, "cocksure", and I wonder if you might know of its origin? [David Nix] A. It's good to hear you like the site. Just for once I can repay a compliment by providing a straightforward answer, though it's more complicated than it looks. It seems obvious at first sight that "cocksure" means "as sure as a cock", as an allusion to the arrogantly self-confident strut of a barnyard cockerel. That would fit the form of phrases like "coal- black" or "stone-deaf". The problem is that "cocksure" has changed what it means down the centuries and the obvious answer doesn't fit the facts. Back in the sixteenth century, if you said you were cocksure you meant that you were absolutely safe, free from danger or secure in your position. This example, a late one in this sense, would be misunderstood by us today: All such persons as shall be nominated by the Parliament, shall be cock-sure in their Authority. [The History of the Wicked Plots and Conspiracies of our Pretended Saints, by Henry Foulis, 1662.] The word evolved through the idea that somebody was trustworthy or reliable, or absolutely certain to do something, to today's sense of being dogmatically certain in one's own mind about some matter or of being presumptuously or arrogantly confident. So where does it really come from? It seems certain that the "cock" in "cocksure" is a euphemism for God, which appeared in a variety of medieval oaths down to the time of Shakespeare, including "cocks bones", "cocks passion", "cocks wounds" and "cocks bodikins". So the original meaning of "cocksure" was that a person enjoyed a security or quality of rightfulness equivalent to that of God. 6. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- Proving that you can't keep a good man down, Mike Troy reports that an obituary in the Journal News (White Plains, NY) on 30 April said that "Philip was survived by his predeceased father, Domenick." On a related note, the subject of a UN Wire e-mail of 14 May was "Guatemala in crisis as slain lawyer blames president". On reading the item Rebecca Katumba learned the lawyer had recorded a video just before his murder telling viewers to blame Alvaro Colom, the president of Guatemala, in the event of his death. Allan Richardson was reading the Lonely Planet guide to California. On page 30, he learned that "A rarer sight are desert tortoises, whose slow pace has landed them on the endangered species because they're often overrun by cars." Thanks to Nancy Shepherdson, we now know that Wednesday's Daily Herald newspaper, which serves the northern suburbs of Chicago, had a grammatically correct but misleading headline: "Battery charges dropped against wife." It's a side of the Taliban one often doesn't see, commented Dave Muir, having read this sentence in the Wessex edition of Compass magazine for May 2009: "Lahore is so far untouched, but the Taliban are said to be setting up crèches of arms in every city, even as far south as Karachi." A. Subscription information ------------------------------------------------------------------- To leave the list, change your subscription address or resubscribe, please visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/maillist/index.htm . You can also maintain your subscription by e-mail. For a list of commands, send this message to listserv@listserv.linguistlist.org: INFO WORLDWIDEWORDS This e-magazine is also available as an RSS feed, which you can read at http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/newsletter.xml . Back issues are at http://www.worldwidewords.org/backissues/ . B. E-mail contact addresses ------------------------------------------------------------------- * Comments on e-magazine mailings are always welcome. They should be sent to me at wordseditor@worldwidewords.org . I do try to respond, but pressures of time often prevent me from doing so. * Items for "Sic!" should go to wordsclangers@worldwidewords.org . Submissions will not usually be acknowledged. * Questions intended to be answered in the Q and A section should be addressed to wordsquestions@worldwidewords.org (please don't use this address to respond to published answers to questions - e-mail the comment address instead). * Problems with subscriptions that cannot be handled by the list server should be addressed to wordssubs@worldwidewords.org . To allow me more time for researching material, please don't e-mail me asking for simple subscription changes you can do yourself. C. Ways to support World Wide Words ------------------------------------------------------------------- The World Wide Words e-magazine and Web site are free, but if you would like to help with their costs, there are several ways to do so. Visit http://www.worldwidewords.org/support.htm for details. ------------------------------------------------------------------- World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2009. All rights reserved. The Words Web site is at http://www.worldwidewords.org . ------------------------------------------------------------------- You may reproduce brief extracts from this e-magazine in mailing lists, newsletters or newsgroups online, provided that you include the copyright notice given above. Reproduction of substantial parts of items in printed publications or Web sites needs permission from the editor beforehand (wordseditor@worldwidewords.org). -------------------------------------------------------------------