WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 660 Saturday 10 October 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/ccct.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: Scrumping. 3. This week. 4. Q and A: Punchline. 5. Q and A: Grasp the nettle. 6. Sic! A. Subscription information. B. E-mail contact addresses. C. Ways to support World Wide Words. 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- YAHOO! PROBLEMS I was told by Susan Smith of the Linguist List last Friday (too late to amend the following day's issue, which had already been sent) that Yahoo! had confirmed that it had resolved the issues affecting transmission. Special thanks go to her for her persistence in finding a solution to the problem. Many delighted subscribers e-mailed the following day to say they had received the issue promptly, in some cases for the first time in months. Let's hope the matter stays resolved! Many thanks to everybody for their forbearance while we sorted matters out. 2. Weird Words: Scrumping /skrVmpIN/ ------------------------------------------------------------------- We are in apple-harvest time in England, which makes me think of the one-time rural childhood pursuit of stealing apples from orchards. That's what "scrumping" means over here (Americans have another, low-slang, sense of the word that need not concern us). He sighed, more in sorrow than in anger; in fact there was hardly any anger at all, like vermouth in a really dry martini. God probably sighed like that when he looked at the tree and saw that someone had been scrumping apples. [Earth, Air, Fire and Custard, by Tom Holt, 2005.] It might sound like an immemorial practice, and probably is, but the word for it is surprisingly modern - the earliest example is from 1866. The source is uncertain but seems to be from a dialect term meaning something withered, shrivelled or dried up. It may be linked to the old adjective "scrimp", scanty or meagre, from which we get the verb "scrimp", to economise or be thrifty. Support for this comes from an early meaning of "scrumping", which referred to taking windfalls or the small apples left on the trees after harvest. This evolved into illicitly taking any sort of apples. It can even more broadly mean theft of any kind, though this is rare: When wireless networking first kicked off in the corporate world a couple of years ago, I honestly thought the concept of loitering outside with a Wifi portable, scrumping for free access would be incredibly short- lived. [Personal Computer World, Aug. 2004.] If you're familiar with British cider, you will know "scrumpy" for a cheap and rough, though strongly alcoholic, variety which is a hazard to the unwary. Its name is a relative of "scrumping" in its oldest sense because it was often brewed from small or unselected apples. Modern brands that go by that name are mild compared with the vinegary farm-made sort of old, which a farmer described to me in Herefordshire many years ago as "squeal-pig cider", this being the noise you made when you tried it. "It used to take three people to swallow a mug of it," another old countryman told me, "One to drink and the other two to hold him upright." The American adjective "scrumptious", for food that is appetising or delicious or which describes a very attractive person, seems not to be connected. 3. This week ------------------------------------------------------------------- WHATEVER ... On Wednesday, the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion of Poughkeepsie, NY, published the results of a telephone poll it conducted to find the words or phrases that most annoyed Americans. The word that came out top was "whatever" when used as a conversational term indicating indifference. Others mentioned were "you know", "it is what it is", "anyway", and "at the end of the day". A table of detailed results is via http://wwwords.org?MXPO. OUT OF DATE? Another survey published on Wednesday, this time by the charity Bookwatch in the UK, suggested that traditional nursery rhymes may be dying out because parents think them old-fashioned or uneducational. The survey found that only about a third of parents regularly read rhymes with their children; nearly a quarter said they had never done so. The survey was published to mark National Bookstart Day yesterday (Friday 9 October) in which a million books containing the nation's eight favourite nursery rhymes were to be distributed throughout the UK. Another survey by the same charity found that the top eight, in decreasing order of popularity, were Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Incey Wincey Spider, Round and Round the Garden, Baa Baa Black Sheep, The Grand Old Duke of York, If You're Happy and You Know It, Humpty Dumpty, and This Little Piggy. 4. Q and A: Punchline ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. Despite your concern about its linguistic entertainment value, I found your piece on "collapse of stout party" quite fascinating. Among other things it highlights just how different humour is in different cultures and times. The question it didn't answer for me though (and to be fair it wasn't asked) is which came first: Punch the magazine or punch the line? [Greg Balding; related questions came from Peter Morris and Bruce Beatie.] A. The question about the origin of "collapse of stout party" arose because of a crossword clue that included "punch line" as a hint and which led us to Punch magazine. It would be reasonable to guess that Punch, at one time the premier humour magazine in Britain, gave the language our term for the climactic final words or phrase of a joke or story. But not only wasn't it the source of "collapse of stout party", it didn't originate "punchline" either. It isn't even British, since the first recorded usages - a century ago - are from the US. The Oxford English Dictionary's first example is from the Marion Star of Ohio in 1916, but the idea was around earlier: The play was 'The Power of Politics' and it had a punch in every line. [Racine Journal-News (Wisconsin), 28 Feb. 1912.] It is true that ballads are deliberately written with all sorts of mathematical calculation as to "punch lines" and similar technical detail. But for all that success remains an inexplicable incident. [The New York Times, 7 Sep. 1913.] These confirm that it came out of show business and that the first senses were of delivering lines of a play or song to the greatest possible effect - punching them - or of creating lines to affect the hearer powerfully. Later it became applied in particular to the last line of a story that contains the point or joke. There can be no doubt that the figurative punches are from fists, the shock of receiving a blow being equated with the visceral response to hearing an unexpected or felicitous line. Punch magazine, by the way, took its name from the puppet companion to Judy, which was borrowed from a buffoonish stock character in the Italian commedia dell'arte, usually known as Punchinello. No connection at all with punches of the physical sort. 5. Q and A: Grasp the nettle ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. Is there any chance you can solve the "grasp the nettle" versus "grasp the mettle" debate? With grateful thanks. [Alex Keenan] A. Until you wrote, I hadn't heard there was a debate about this mainly British and Commonwealth idiom, which means to tackle some difficulty boldly. We have got to grasp the nettle to try and prevent tragic accidents like this one. [Highland News (Inverness), 1 Oct. 2009.] But it transpires that a significant number of people believe that it's correctly "grasp the mettle" and that "grasp the nettle" is a meaningless corruption. The former version reaches the printed page often enough that it's clear this view is fairly widespread: At least there's a sizeable market for publishing firms to go at, with an estimated 1.6bn internet users across the globe. Only those that grasp the mettle will prosper. [Evening Gazette (Middlesborough), 29 Sep. 2009. This form is far from new; the earliest example I've so far come across appeared in the Burlington Hawk-Eye of Iowa in April 1932.] People are clearly puzzled by "grasp the nettle". Why would anybody want to do that? Nettles sting. If you want to advise somebody to boldly tackle some obstacle, surely "mettle", a person's ability to cope well with difficulties, would be a better choice? The answer lies in a minor but intriguing bit of botanical lore. It is said that the hairs on the leaves of nettles sting you if you brush up against them but don't if you grasp them firmly. I haven't experimented myself and it's always possible that it's just an old wives' tale, or perhaps a wicked country joke on ignorant townies, though the story was first mentioned in Elizabethan times: True it is Philautus that he which toucheth ye nettle tenderly, is soonest stung. [Euphues, by John Lyly, 1578.] Whatever the truth of the belief, the idiom "grasp the nettle" is based on it. The earliest example of the full-grown idiom in its modern form that I know about is in a British book of 1830. As a proverb, on the other hand, it is much older, and was put into verse in the eighteenth century: Tender-handed stroke a nettle, And it stings you, for your pains: Grasp it like a man of mettle, And it soft as silk remains. [Works, by Aaron Hill, Vol 4, 1753. Hill was a dramatist and poet and at one time manager of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, where - in 1724 - he staged the first- ever performance of Handel's opera Rinaldo. The inclusion of "mettle" might seem to give comfort to those who prefer the "grasp the mettle" form, but it has obviously been included for the rhyme.] 6. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- "My favourite ambiguous headline," Andrew Haynes wrote from London, "was written years ago by a colleague at the pharmacy journal for which I used to work. Luckily for the journal's reputation, it was intercepted at page-proof stage and did not reach the printed page. A piece about appointments to the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs was headed, 'Two pharmacists on drugs misuse body'." Ralph Caruthers e-mailed from Texas to mention a headline in a recent issue of Aviation Week & Space Technology: "China offers U.S. a first look at its next human spacecraft." He wondered for a while where they attached the rockets, but later discovered the headline had been changed to read "... its next manned spacecraft." On 3 October, the Irish Times reported on the referendum about the European Union's Lisbon treaty. Peter Fellows-McCully found this sentence in it: "The group delivered 1.5 million leaflets to every house in the Irish Republic in the run-up to the EU reform poll." The Web site of The Citizen newspaper of Gloucester had a story on 2 October under the headline "Police found heroine on Gloucester driver". John Gray found that the story included a comment from his solicitor: "My client has made significant changes in his life." Clearly! The sweet smell of failure: a large number of news outlets reported the sentencing on Tuesday of Ian Clement, a former deputy mayor of London, for fiddling his expenses. (Margaret Chandler read it on Yahoo! news.) Many of the reports noted: "Sentencing Clement, the judge said he 'fragrantly and arrogantly' abused public money to indulge himself with meals." Did the judge really say that, or did the Press Association (which wrote and circulated the story) make a mistake and nobody queried it? 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, whose source is 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. 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