WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 657 Saturday 19 September 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/sjqo.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: Jorum. 3. What I've learned this week. 4. Q and A: Topsy-turvy. 5. Book Review: It's all in a Word. 6. Sic! A. Subscription information. B. E-mail contact addresses. C. Ways to support World Wide Words. 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- GULL My passing mention of this old slang term for a dupe (also as a verb meaning to deceive) provoked many readers into asking if it might be derived from "gullible". It looks very plausible, but the evidence shows the link is the other way: "gullible", "gullibility" and related words all derive from "gull". "Gullible" isn't recorded until 1825 and is probably a back-formation from "gullibility", a word that dates from 1793. In turn this is from "gull", as a joke on the long-dead "cullibility" with the same sense. That derives from "cull" or "cully", a simpleton, fool or dupe or a prostitute's customer. The story of "gull" and "cull" are clearly intertwined, but it's impossible to work out how. PANDICULATION I'm grateful to Michael Turniansky and Daniel Olson for resolving the minor mystery of the size of the pandiculator, mentioned last time. They found an illustration of the device in an advertisement, which that the size mentioned was of it folded for storage. I've added the advert to the item, which is online via http://wwwords.org?PDLR. 2. Weird Words: Jorum /'dZO@r@m/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- "None so knowing as he, / At brewing a jorum of tea!", wrote Sir William Gilbert in one of his Savoy Operas, The Sorcerer. The vicar was brewing a pretty potent potion. A jorum, as you may have gathered, is an old word for a large bowl or jug used for serving drinks such as tea or punch. By Gilbert's day, the word had been around for about 150 years. It appeared for the first time in another lyric, in a play by Henry Fielding, The Author's Farce and the Pleasures of the Town, first performed at the Haymarket Theatre in London in 1730. Nobody knows for sure where Fielding got it from. It has no clear connection with any other word in the language. The experts point, a little cautiously, at this as a possible source: Then Toi sent Joram his son unto king David, to salute him, and to bless him, because he had fought against Hadadezer, and smitten him: for Hadadezer had wars with Toi. And Joram brought with him vessels of silver, and vessels of gold, and vessels of brass. [Second book of Samuel 8:10, from The King James Bible, 1611.] (This may remind readers of the names for sizes of wine bottle that I wrote about back in June - see http://wwwords.org?WBSZ.) Charles Dickens was very fond of it. He used "jorum" in five of his novels - The Pickwick Papers, Great Expectations, The Old Curiosity Shop, Martin Chuzzlewit and Oliver Twist - as well as in several of his other works, including Pictures from Italy and The Seven Poor Travellers. The nineteenth century seems to have been the heyday of the word, on both sides of the Atlantic: The amiable creature beguiled the watches of the night by brewing jorums of a fearful beverage, which he called coffee, and insisted on sharing with me; coming in with a great bowl of something like mud soup, scalding hot, guiltless of cream, rich in an all-pervading flavor of molasses, scorch and tin pot. [Hospital Sketches, by Louisa May Alcott, 1863. This account of her time as a nurse at a hospital in the District of Columbia was a popular success.] It is now rarely encountered. 3. What I've learned this week ------------------------------------------------------------------- AD WHAT? In asking about its history, Ed Vanderkloet introduced me to a phrase I'd not come across before: "ad infinauseam". A punning blend of the Latin phrases "ad infinitum" and "ad nauseam", it has been around for longer than you might think. There's a hint that it appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1942 (I can't confirm the date on the snippet in Google Books) but the earliest example that I can identify for certain is this one: But what is most annoying about this is their habit of saying good-by in fifteen different ways: "Bye-bye, honey-bunch; Toodle-de-do, sweet; I give you a teeny- weeny bye kiss, lovely one; Bye, honey, now will you think of me?", and so on ad infinauseam. [What Men Don't Like About Women, by Thomas D Horton, 1945.] Mr Vanderkloet asks, "Would you consider it to have progressed beyond cute or clever to the point of becoming recognized as a term?" Probably not. It has never become popular and its position as a niche witticism is unlikely to change, especially as knowledge of Latin is now so patchy among English speakers. SPOTTED EUPHEMISM In an issue back in 2001, I briefly reported that the British supermarket chain Tesco was undertaking a survey to find out if the traditional dish Spotted Dick should be renamed Spotted Richard to spare its more easily embarrassed customers. (An item in the Daily Telegraph in 2002 said Tesco had changed the name but had later changed it back.) The issue resurfaced in a story in many UK newspapers on 9 September and was also picked up in US news media. They reported that the pudding has been thus renamed in the Flintshire County Council canteen at Mold in North Wales. A council spokesman agreed that it was correctly called Spotted Dick but that canteen staff had renamed it "because of several immature comments from a few customers". It's "spotted" because of the dried fruit dotted through it but nobody knows who Dick might have been. One theory is that it's a reformulation of "dough" (another dish, plum duff, has a similar origin). SAFOT (Snappy Acronyms For Our Time) Most of us are familiar with such well-established humorous initialisms as YUPPIE, from "Young Urban Professional", DINKIE, "Dual Income, No Kids" and even HOPEFUL, "Hard-up Older Person Expecting Full Useful Life". This week, two further examples came my way. One was in a report in the Observer last Sunday about a consequence of our recent economic woes, which has forced unemployed young people to turn to their ageing parents for financial support. There are so many of them that they're become known as KIPPERS, which expands to "Kids In Parents' Pockets Eroding Retirement Savings". The term goes back at least to 2003. In his New York Times blog on 10 September, Ben Schott noted an Australian member of the class, which does seem to be new: NETTEL, a person having "Not Enough Time To Enjoy Life". It refers to families in which both parents work full-time, juggling work and child care to maintain a high standard of living. It is said to have been coined by the social researcher Bernard Salt. 4. Q and A: Topsy-turvy ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. In your piece on "murder" (http://wwwords.org?MRDR), meaning to eat with gusto, you advert to the title of the film, Topsy Turvy. This quaint expression for upside down or dishevelled, or "all ahoo" as Patrick O'Brian often calls it, must have an interesting history? [Colin Burt, Australia] A. It certainly does, though nobody is quite sure exactly what it is. That's because the expression is so old that some detective work is needed to identify its components. It's first recorded in 1528 but is almost certainly a lot older. Right from the beginning of its known history it could mean either upside down or utter confusion. We may guess that the former was the earlier sense and that the latter came along later as an extension from the idea of things being thrown about and ending up in a chaotic jumble. The Oxford English Dictionary comments that "numerous conjectures and suggestions (many of them absurd and impossible) have been offered". One result is that the word has been written in dozens of different ways to reflect writers' ideas about where it came from and what the "correct" form ought to be. One curious idea was that it referred to a practice of laying sections of cut turf (British plural "turves", hence adjective "turvy") face down to keep them fresh; another that it was once "t'other way"; a third that it was some way connected with "topsail" (often said /tQpsl/, with the second syllable swallowed). So we have recorded forms like "topset torvie", "topside turfway", "tipsy-turvy" (a drunken lawn-layer?), "topside thother-way", and the Scots "tapsalteerie". The consensus is now that the source of the first element is the obvious "top". The second part is probably from the long-obsolete verb "terve" or "tirve", to overturn, which may derive from the Old English verb "tearflian", to roll over and over or to wallow. The remaining puzzle is the "-sy" ending on the first word. It might be that an early form was something like "top-so-terve", matching the pattern of "up-so-down", an old form of "upside-down". The OED also points out forms like "arsey-versy" as possible parallels. So there are unanswered questions, as so often with old terms. But the framework is clear enough. 5. Book Review: It's All in a Word ------------------------------------------------------------------- A British Sunday newspaper used to say on its masthead "All human life is here". Vivian Cook's book might similarly be subtitled "All English language is here". In 321 pages Professor Cook (he's professor of applied linguistics at Newcastle University) packs 121 little chapterettes with themes that include medical slang (gassers are anaesthetists and slashers are surgeons, while TEETH expands to "Tried Everything Else, Try Homeopathy") and the differences between the lyrics of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones (the latter are tougher and more streetwise, employing words such as "hiding", "rocking" and "flying", while the Beatles' ones are more touchy-feely with "loving", "feeling" and "holding"). If you'd like to know how the vocabulary for ways to cook your food differ between English and Japanese, learn which words were first used by Geoffrey Chaucer, discover Basic English, review your jazz slang, learn regional British words for alleyways, such as snicket, vennel or ginnel (though he doesn't include the one I learned as a child in Sussex: twitten), you'll find them all here in bite-size chunks. You can take a brief lesson in Pig Latin (the examples are taken from titles of Abba songs) and a semantic differential test illustrated by a quiz on what Queen Elizabeth II means to you (there are lots of quizzes, for example to test your vocabulary or discover how good you are at guessing unfamiliar words from context). However, some comments are surprising, such as his assertion that "around 700" words are first found in Shakespeare's writings. This is an underestimate: the OED lists 1,869. Writing about the vocabulary of poets, he supports his very reasonable view that Eliot's "aetherial", spirit-like, is not a word in current everyday use by telling us that the OED has no twentieth-century examples. It hasn't, but then the entry that includes it hasn't been revised since it was first published in 1891. In a discussion of the variations in numbers of words for colours in different languages, he asserts that Welsh only has two basic colour words, for black and white - it certainly has fewer than in English but a look at any Welsh dictionary will show a good selection. This, you will have realised, is not a read-right-through book, but a dipping-into miscellany, a potpourri or gallimaufry. If you are feeling unkind, you might call it a mish-mash of itsy-bitsy items (he has a section on reduplicated words, including dialectal ones such as "borus-snorus", in Dorset formerly meaning happy-go-lucky, which Thomas Hardy employed in Under the Greenwood Tree). The word "quirky" might have been invented for this book. You're intended to have fun with it. But if your desire is for more meat on your linguistic bones, you may be disappointed. [Vivian Cook, It's All in a Word, published in the UK by Profile Books on 17 Sep. 2009; hardback, 321pp; ISBN-13:9781846680069, ISBN-10: 1846680069; publisher's UK price GBP10.99.] AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK Amazon UK: £6.04 http://wwwords.org?AIAW9 Amazon US: Not yet available Amazon Canada: CDN$19.52 http://wwwords.org?AIAW3 Amazon Germany: EUR12,99 http://wwwords.org?AIAW6 [Please use these links to buy. They get World Wide Words a small commission at no extra cost to you.] 6. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- "I can't get the image out of my mind!" e-mailed Cathy Varney from New Mexico. She had just read an AOL Travel item dated 12 September about pirates attacking a cruise ship: "Though that was a scenario akin to Chihuahuas attacking a Great Dane, [as] anyone who has ever met a viscous Chihuahua knows, they have sharp teeth." Classic greengrocer's apostrophes were spotted by Pat O'Halloran on a sign in a shop in Eyam, Derbyshire - "Ice creams, discount's for school's". Were the discounts in exchange for grammar lessons? Jennifer Atkinson winced, as most women would, on reading a report in the Hobart Mercury, Tasmania, on 11 September: "Because of her injuries, Corbin was told she would never have children. But she again proved doctors wrong when she gave birth to twin three-year- old girls...". Julane Marx sat down to read last weekend's Home section of the Los Angeles Times, to find that the lead article on the front page described a small architectural gem built in a Malibu canyon with spectacular ocean views and an additional feature: "Come night, coyotes make their plaintiff cries under a sky filled with more stars than you can count." Typical, she notes, of litigious Los Angeles! A. 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