WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 539 Saturday 12 May 2007 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Sent each Saturday to at least 48,000 subscribers by e-mail and RSS Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448 http://www.worldwidewords.org US advisory editor: Julane Marx ------------------------------------------------------------------- Contents ------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Feedback, notes and comments. 2. Topical words: Larval therapy. 3. Weird Words: Pillaloo. 4. Recently noted. 5. Q&A: Shyster. 6. Sic! 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- LOLLAPALOOSA Several readers wondered whether the creation of this word had been influenced by the name of the appaloosa horse, while others had been told this as fact. The appaloosa, which has dark spots on a light background, is the traditional breed associated with native Americans. Its name comes either from an Indian tribal name or the Louisiana place name Opelousa, or just possibly from the Palouse River in Idaho. "Opelousa" was recorded in 1849 in a German book about Texas but the word appears for the first time in a form near to its current spelling only in 1924 (and thereafter in many variant spellings that strongly suggest a recent oral origin) so it is probably too recent to have influenced "lollapaloosa". SAY UNCLE Following the discovery by Dan Norder of this American idiom in newspaper jokes, George H Goebel, Assistant Editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English, points out that the joke was British in origin and that the idiom therefore almost certainly derives from it, not the other way around. For the full details, see the Web page http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-say1.htm . BOUGHT AND BROUGHT The item about this shift in last week's issue brought forth several comments. Michael Shannon e-mailed, "As I've mentioned before, here in Australia the reverse is true. All too often you'll hear someone say they have 'brought' something at the shops instead of 'bought'. I've been hearing this ever since I arrived in Australia back in 1989 so I can only assume that it was prevalent before then. It's the most irritating mispronunciation I've ever heard." James Brunskill confirmed its popularity in the region: "In New Zealand, we almost exclusively use 'brought' - 'I brought a new car today'." Perhaps the author Sebastian Faulks, the writer of the item, has a lot of antipodean friends? And many of you pointed out that "thought" changing to "taught" is exemplified by Tweetie Pie in the Warner Bros cartoons ("I Taut I Taw A Puddy Tat"). I should have thought of that. BRAVE NEW WORDS Andrew Pearce commented, following my review last time of this dictionary of science fiction, that "Your example of a Big Dumb Object (the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey) is not big enough. While I don't think there's a formal lower size limit, they tend to be much bigger - astronomical in size. Examples are Dyson spheres and Niven's Ringworld, both of which have millions or more times Earth's surface and occupy whole 'planetary' orbits. Lindig Harris objected to my description of the book as pioneering, as she has a copy of Futurespeak: A Fan's Guide to the Language of Science Fiction, published in 1991. This was new to me, but a copy is even now on its way from a US bookseller. 2. Topical words: Larval therapy ------------------------------------------------------------------- This is not a subject for the squeamish, but the term is currently appearing on news pages as well as in research publications. Larval therapy involves introducing larvae or maggots of the bluebottle or greenbottle to wounds to clean them and encourage healing. There's nothing new about either the idea or the name. Experience on battlefields in the American Civil War and the First World War showed that wounds healed quicker among casualties who had been left untreated long enough to be infected by maggots hatched from fly eggs. The maggots of these flies remove dead tissue and secrete chemicals that inhibit bacteria, but avoid live flesh, so giving healthy tissue the chance to regrow. The technique was used during the 1930s and 1940s to treat burns, abscesses, leg ulcers and gangrene. It went out of fashion when antibiotics came in after World War Two, though I've read it is still taught to army surgeons in some countries. It's coming back into use, not least because it can successfully treat wounds infected with bacteria resistant to antibiotics. It has been reported this month that a team at Manchester University has found maggots can heal foot ulcers infected with the superbug MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus). The team has been awarded a grant to carry out a controlled trial. Early doctors called it "maggot therapy", employing a medieval word that might be a variation on the old Germanic "maddock" or "mathe", now known only in dialect, or which the Oxford English Dictionary thinks might have been influenced by Magot or Maggot, pet-names of Margery or Margaret. But there's nothing in the least affectionate about "maggot" itself and doctors came to realise that calling it "maggot therapy" was a public-relations no-no, though the term is still around in the literature. In the early 1930s "larval therapy" began to appear instead, based on a rather more recent and specific scientific term that had been borrowed from Latin "larva", a ghost, spectre, or hobgoblin, which figuratively took a grub to be a ghost of the final adult form of an insect. However, "larval therapy" was not so much better that it entirely extinguished shudders from fastidious potential patients. Around a decade ago, "biosurgery" became popular as a euphemistic alternative. But this has come much more common in surgery to mean the employment of biological replacement materials ("biomaterials") to reconstruct or seal tissues within the body. So the unambiguous term "larval therapy" continues in use. It's also sometimes called maggot debridement therapy or biodebridement, in which debridement is the cleansing of a wound, a nineteenth-century borrowing from French, literally meaning "unbridling", though the link with saddlery is obscure. 3. Weird Words: Pillaloo ------------------------------------------------------------------- A cry of lamentation or distress. This is an Irish word and one not known outside Ireland, or even much within it these days, the word having dropped out of ordinary speech. You may find it spelled "pililiú", or "pililoo" or in other ways. It's a close relative of "whillaloo" and "ululu", two other Irish words with similar senses. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us "pillaloo" began its life centuries ago as a hunting cry. Among its appearances was that in 1888 in The Astonishing History of Troy Town by Q (Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch), though you might have some difficulty picking the sense out of his representation of the local speech: An' the wust was, that what wi' the rumpus an' her singin' out "Pillaloo!" an' how the devil was amongst mun, havin' great wrath, the Lawyer's sarmon about a "wecked an' 'dulterous generation seekin' arter a sign" was clean sp'iled. Henry Murray's usage in Lands of the Slave and the Free of 1857 is very much easier on the modern eye and ear: The dialogue was brought to a sudden stop by the frantic yell of the juvenile pledge of their affections, whose years had not yet reached two figures; a compact little iron-bound box had fallen on his toe, and the poor little urchin's pilliloo, pilliloo, was pitiful. 4. Recently noted ------------------------------------------------------------------- SPELT VERSUS SPELLED A puzzled American reader queried my use of "spelt" last week, wondering if perhaps I had misspelled "spelled". I must confess to uninhibited inconsistency. In the 539 newsletters to date, "spelled" has appeared 126 times and "spelt" just 35 (but "misspelled" - used 12 times - has never been spelt as "misspelt"). "Spelt" is the traditional British participle and past tense but is unknown in American English. The style is still the standard over here, though it is shifting towards the other form, in part under US influence. There has never been any doubt in Britain, however, that when we have spelled out the facts of a matter, we do so in that spelling. We might also these days borrow a US meaning of the verb and say that we have spelled a person in a task, never spelt them. But then, the whole matter of strong versus weak verbs is a minor hazard for cross-Atlantic writers and editors. I'm reading a book by an American author in which one character "shined a light". I might on infrequent occasions have shined my shoes, but never a light, as I would always prefer to have shone one. The tendency has been for strong verbs to change into weak ones over time, only the most common ones surviving. But in an interesting reversal, about a century ago North Americans created (strictly re-created) a strong past tense "dove" ("he dove into the water") to replace "dived". It is common in some places, though it is very regional in acceptance. 5. Q&A: Shyster ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. In a recent online discussion about singing masters and hymn- book salesmen of the 19th century, the word "shyster" was used to describe certain members of that fraternity. Someone objected to the term as anti-Semitic. And now, of course, all sorts of opinions and etymologies are popping up. Would you be so kind as to clarify the term's history for us? [Annie Grieshop; a related question came from Morandir Armson] A. The supposed anti-Semitic origin links the word to the name of the vengeful money lender Shylock in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, with the occupational ending "-ster" added. This is untrue. It is also often claimed to come from the name of a New York lawyer named Scheuster; in the 1840s, his unscrupulous ways are said to have so annoyed Barnabas Osborn, the judge who presided over the Essex Market police court in that city, that he supposedly began to refer to "Sheuster practices". No such lawyer has been traced and it's clearly just a folk tale. Unsuccessful attempts have also been made to link it to a Scots Gaelic word and to bits of English slang. Whatever its origin, we use "shyster" to mean a person who uses unscrupulous, fraudulent, or deceptive methods in business. Historically, it has mainly been applied to lawyers. There's good reason for that, as Gerald Cohen discovered when he traced its true origin some 25 ago. Professor Cohen found that "shyster" appeared first in the New York newspaper The Subterranean in July 1843, at first in spellings such as "shyseter" and "shiseter" but almost immediately settling down to the form we use now. The background is the notorious New York prison known as the Tombs. In the 1840s it was infested by a group of ignorant and unqualified charlatans, who pretended to be lawyers and officers of the court. Before "shyster" came into being, "pettifogger" was the usual term for them, a word of obscure origin for lawyers of little scruple or conscience that dates from the sixteenth century. Mike Walsh, the editor of The Subterranean and the first user of "shyster", summed up these plaguers of the Tombs in this passage: Ignorant blackguards, illiterate blockheads, besotted drunkards, drivelling simpletons, ci-devant mountebanks, vagabonds, swindlers and thieves make up, with but few exceptions, the disgraceful gang of pettifoggers who swarm about its halls. Mike Walsh described "shyster" as both obscene and libellous. The circumstances surrounding its first appearance suggest that in New York underworld slang it was a term for somebody incompetent, so a potentially libellous description, and that only later - largely through the publicity that Walsh gave it in his newspaper in the years 1843-1846 - did it come to refer specifically to a crooked lawyer. Professor Cohen concluded the word derives from German "Scheisser" for an incompetent person, a term known in New York through the many German immigrants there. Mike Walsh considered it obscene because it derives from "Scheisse", shit, through the image of an incontinent old man. This is plausible, because British slang at the same period included the same word, meaning a worthless person; the usual spelling was "shicer", though it appeared also as "sheisser", "shiser" and "shycer". It's recorded first in print in Britain in 1846, but must be significantly older in the spoken language. (It was taken to Australia and from the 1850s was used there for an unproductive gold mine.) It may have been exported to New York by London low-lifers. 6. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- As a coda to comments last week that mentioned canola, do you feel there's perhaps something slightly inappropriate about a report in last Saturday's Guardian which referred in all seriousness to some British farmers producing "extra-virgin rapeseed oil"? A nice eggcorn appeared in Parade Magazine last week, Laurie Graham notes from San Francisco, in an article about how to sell your home more quickly. In a section suggesting that pot plants would help to entice people to enter, it says "I'd rather see one really good- sized plant in a beefy pot than three wishy-washy plantings in mishmashed pots." Following the quite splendid example of bad translation last week, James Pendlay sent a copy of the safety instructions for a radio- controlled toy car, of which item 6 is almost poetic: "Don't let the wet water of car, and not want under the rainy day is open-air usage". That's pretty clear in its meaning, though the advice to avoid the "mightiness of sunlight bottom" is puzzling, as is item 9, which advised that "if the car dash to piecesed, and should pass by the per son check or profession personnel maintain the rear can continue to use." The native-language text of this last item is pictured in the online version of the newsletter, so somebody will be able to tell me what the devil that was all about. "This is an old classic of a mistake," e-mailed David McKeegan, "which makes it all the more surprising that I saw it just this morning in my local leisure club. A poster advertising their 'St Tropez' tanning system announced, in large white letters on a black background 'NOTHING LOOKS BETTER'. Nothing to boast about, I'd have thought." Elizabeth Cowan reports that last Saturday's Ottawa Citizen ran a story on a traffic accident involving a local sports celebrity, who "got out of the car donning sunglasses and a fresh white suit." Ms Cowan hopes that was the newspaper's error. ------------------------------------------------------------------- World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2007. All rights reserved. The Words Web site is at http://www.worldwidewords.org . ------------------------------------------------------------------- You may reproduce this newsletter in whole or part in free online newsletters, newsgroups or mailing lists provided that you include the copyright notice above. 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