WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 774 Saturday 18 February 2012 -------------------------------------------------------------------- Author/editor: Michael Quinion US advisory editor: Julane Marx Website: http://www.worldwidewords.org ISSN 1470-1448 -------------------------------------------------------------------- If you want to leave the list, see the instructions at the end of this issue. Please don't e-mail me unless you are having real difficulties! A formatted version of this e-magazine is available online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/syhp.htm Contents -------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Feedback, notes and comments. 2. Weird Words: Alamagoozlum. 3. Wordface. 4. Q and A: God willing and the creek don't rise. A. Manage your subscription. B. E-mail contact addresses. C. Ways to support World Wide Words. 1. Feedback, notes and comments -------------------------------------------------------------------- HALT Numerous readers noted the continuing use of compounds of this term, such as "halting", as in "halting speech". Others commented in terms such as those of Richard R Losch: "Is it possible that in earlier times 'lame' meant completely crippled, as opposed to 'halt', merely somewhat impaired?" There's something in this. Many dictionaries in essence equate the terms, defining "halt" as meaning lame. But, in an entry written a century ago, the Oxford English Dictionary defines one meaning of "lame" as "disabled in the foot or leg, so as to walk haltingly or be unable to walk", a higher level of disability than just a limp. Dr Johnson, in his Dictionary of 1755, says likewise that "halt" means "to be lame"; however, he defines "lame" as "crippled; disabled in the limbs", again a more severe affliction than the way that "halt" seems to have been used. In this connection, I've since found a very much earlier use of the phrase "halt and lame" in Cursor Mundi, a Northumbrian poem of the fourteenth century. The OED says that "lame" in those days could mean disabled in any part of the body, not merely the legs, which suggests that the phrase then did imply two different conditions. Over time, as "halt and lame" became a set phrase, we may guess that the difference in meaning between its two words lessened and it became similar in type to repetitive expressions such as "kith and kin" and "time and tide" (in the latter, "tide" means a season or moment in time, as in "eventide"). MORE POTTERING (OR PUTTERING) ABOUT Following last week's piece, several readers asked whether the "putter" spelling had a connection with the golf club called a putter. It doesn't. "Putter" in this sense derives directly from the verb "putt", which is a variant form of "put". While looking into "potter/putter", some unsystematic investigations in dictionaries had turned up an old English dialect sense that stood apart from the others: to trample in soft mud. In the eastern US many years ago, it was a boy's sport of trying to run on broken ice without falling in the water. I was delighted to learn from the Dictionary of American Regional English that in Rhode Island within living memory pieces of ice floating on salt water were given the name of "bandudelums". 2. Weird Words: Alamagoozlum -------------------------------------------------------------------- It's a wonderful word, one of the best of the exotics that came out of North America in the nineteenth century. It's still to be found, though you're likely to encounter it in the company of the Corpse Reviver, the Fogcutter, the Monkey Gland and the Widow's Kiss. The original alamagoozlum was maple syrup. The name may have been a blend of French-Canadian and American terms, since it's conjectured it was created from "à la" (as in à la mode) and "goozlum", with a "ma" thrown in to make it bounce better in the mouth. The goozlum or goozle was the throat, windpipe or Adam's apple, possibly a variant form of "guzzle". The word was rarely recorded in the old days. The Bradford Era of Pennsylvania in 1888 did its best to confuse unwary etymologists by composing a ditty that included the lines, "From Alamagoozlum / To Kalamazoo, / We can bamboozle 'em!" Today, alamagoozlum is almost entirely the province of those well- informed mixologists who know their old-style cocktails. Charles H Baker recorded it in 1939 in The Gentleman's Companion or Around the World with Jigger, Beaker and Flask. It's not a drink for the faint- hearted, either to create or consume, since it includes Chartreuse, gin, Jamaican rum, orange curaçao, egg whites, Angostura bitters, and a big dollop of syrup. Curiously, none of the recipes that I've seen even mention maple syrup, the classic ingredient being gomme syrup (perhaps from French "gomme" or an old form of English "gum"), which is a now unobtainable but one-time fashionable mixture of a simple sugar syrup with gum arabic. 3. Wordface -------------------------------------------------------------------- HAS THE OTHER ONE DROPPED? At a party, Daniel Elasky and friends - for no good reason that he can recall - were reading job titles from the US Census Bureau's Occupational Classification. They spluttered a bit when they reached ODD SHOE BOY. It's hardly a job title that a modern youth would aspire to. But it was indeed a class of work (one can hardly dignify it as an occupation) in the US boot and shoe industry, and seems to date from the early twentieth century. He would run errands or do jobs that needed no training. ODD SHOE GIRLS also existed and - if we're to judge by the number of advertisements for them - were more common. But they required experience. (So did an even more odd-sounding job from the Classification, a BAD WORK GIRL, who repaired mistakes in a dress factory.) A report of 1915 noted that in one shoe factory the cobbler was paid $12 and the odd shoe boy $6 a week. The job has vanished, as have so many specialist trades, but as recently as 1968 it was being advertised alongside other work in the industry: We have immediate full time openings for experienced Shankers, Heel Attachers, Last Pullers, Innersole Packers, Upper Trimmers. Sole Layers, Odd Shoe Boy, Sock Liners, Heel Paddlers Cleaners, TCF Pressers. Also inexperienced help wanted. [Lowell Sun, (Massachusetts), 30 Aug. 1968. We may assume that the reason only one odd shoe boy was wanted was that they necessarily always came singularly.] MULL THIS OVER? Lorna Russell e-mailed from New Zealand about a headline she had seen: "Agency mulled to run emergency 111 system". She had never seen "mulled" used in this way before and wondered if it was an error. I'd never come across it either and it's not in my dictionaries but a search found many examples of similar usage, mostly in India and south-east Asia. I conclude that "mulled to" is an extension of "to mull over", to think about or ponder something, but meaning instead "be minded to" do something, to be disposed to do a particular thing. Can anyone comment? 4. Q and A: God willing and the creek don't rise -------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. An item that has been floating around the internet claims that the expression "God willing and the creek don't rise" referred to the Creek Indians, not a body of water. It mentions Benjamin Hawkins of the late 18th century, who was asked by the US president to go back to Washington. In his reply, he was said to have written, "God willing and the Creek don't rise". Because he capitalized "Creek" it's asserted that he was referring to the Creek Indian tribe and not a body of water. Is this derivation correct? [Bob Scala] A. Quite certainly not. Every researcher who has investigated the saying has dismissed an Indian connection as untrue. The tale is nevertheless widely reproduced and believed. It's worth looking into because of the way in which it has been elaborated in the version you quote. Anecdotal evidence from people who have got in touch with me down the years suggests that it has been in regular use throughout the lifetimes of some elderly folk in parts of the US. I'm told it was a sign-off tag line of the 1930s US radio broadcaster Bradley Kincaid. If we relied on written sources it would be hard to believe in such continued use. The written record dates the saying from about the middle of the nineteenth century. But I know of just four instances from that century. Then there's a long gap in the record before it began to appear again in the 1950s. It took a further decade for it to become popular as a supposedly hayseed utterance, sometimes as "and the crick don't rise" to reflect a regional form. The earliest example known is this mock rustic speech: Feller-citizens - I'm not 'customed to public speakin' before sich highfalutin' audiences. ... Yet here I stand before you a speckled hermit, wrapt in the risen-sun counterpane of my popilarity, an' intendin', Providence permittin', and the creek don't rise, to 'go it blind!' [Graham's American Monthly Magazine, Jun. 1851.] And this is one appearance in a newspaper: We are an American people, born under the flag of independence and if the Lord is willing and the creeks don't rise, the American people who made this country will come pretty near controlling it. [The Lafayette gazette (Louisiana), 3 Nov. 1894.] You will have spotted that neither of these capitalises "creek", which suggests they didn't have the Creek people in mind. In fact, virtually all the examples that I've found in books and newspaper archives down to the present day are in lower-case. That argues for a more mundane origin: the old-time difficulties of travelling on dirt roads that forded rivers and streams; a sudden storm could cause water levels to rise without warning and render the route impassable. "If the creek don't rise" was a whimsical way of saying that the speaker would carry out some task provided that no figurative obstacle were put in his path. It can be summarised as "if all goes well". It's a more conditional statement of intent than "come hell or high water". (See http://wwwords.org?CHOHW.) The saying has been attributed to Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson among others, on the usual principle that attaching a famous name to a story validates it. Mentioning Benjamin Hawkins is a masterstroke, since he was the General Superintendent for Indian Affairs between 1796 and 1818 and was principal Indian agent to the Creek nation; he became so close to its people that he learned their language, was adopted by them and married a Creek woman. Who better to write about the risks of the Creek rising in revolt? But if the supposed letter was ever written, it doesn't now exist in any archive that any researcher has so far found (his letters have been published, if anybody would like to check). It must surely be the creation of a fertile modern mind desiring to put the flesh of evidence on the dry bones of outright invention. And even if it did, the initial capital letter would mean nothing, as at the time it was still common practice to capitalise all nouns. A. Manage your subscription -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 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 website 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 2012. All rights reserved. The Words website 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 websites needs permission from the editor beforehand (wordseditor@worldwidewords.org). -------------------------------------------------------------------