WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 552 Saturday 8 September 2007 ------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Contents ------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Feedback, notes and comments. 2. Weird Words: Turgescent. 3. Recently noted. 4. Q&A: Like the clappers. 5. Book review: Foyle's Philavery. 6. Sic. 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- HETEROGRAPHY Following the Weird Words item last week, Jim Muller e-mailed from South Africa: "You may be familiar with this piece of heterography I inherited from my father: 'Though the rough cough and hiccough plough me through!' A slightly liberal interpretation of the spelling of hiccup, perhaps, but it does make the point more spectacularly." To follow up the point about spelling - "hiccough" was standard in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and is still often to be found in some regional varieties of English. J K Rowling spells it like that, for example in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix: "At this, Professor Trelawney gave a wild little laugh in which a hiccough was barely hidden." The word has been spelled down the centuries in many ways: "hick-hop", "hicket", "hickock", and "hickup". The spelling "hiccough", which assumed the word was based on "cough", is well-meaning but wrong. It's actually from the sound of the thing it described. 2. Weird Words: Turgescent ------------------------------------------------------------------- Becoming or seeming swollen or distended. On 1 July 2003, the British newspaper The Observer reported various comments that had been made by visitors to its Web site: "Meanwhile 'stochata' suspects that George Orwell is 'the reason we have the word "turgescent" in the English language.' No-one at The Observer was aware that we did have the word 'turgescent' in the English language, so we're grateful for that, at least." You may share the Observer's misapprehension, though you can be excused, as "turgescent" rarely appears except in technical fields such as anatomy or botany. In these you may find usages such as "the mucosal lining of the nasal septum is less turgescent than that of the nasal conchae" or "the stigma often remains turgescent and fresh for a period of 6 to 7 days". You can also occasionally encounter it in the turgid prose of some fantasy writers. "To one who dared peer within," wrote Clark Ashton Smith in his short story Demon of the Flower, first published in 1933, "the cup was lined with sepulchral violet, blackening toward the bottom, pitted with myriad pores, and streaked with turgescent veins of sulphurous green." "Turgescent" is from Latin "turgescent", beginning to swell, from "turgere", to swell. This last word is also the origin of "turgid", swollen or distended, and of "turgor", the normal swollen condition of cells or tissues. Another Latin verb meaning to swell, "tumere", has bequeathed us "tumescent", with a similar meaning, though one that often appears in sexual contexts. 3. Recently noted ------------------------------------------------------------------- YO, WOMAN! For the first time in its 522 years, a woman began work on Monday as a member of the Yeomen of the Guard who act as warders at the Tower of London. Because one condition for joining the Guard is a continuous period of 20 years in the armed forces, reaching at least the rank of staff sergeant, it is only recently that women have become eligible to join the warders' ranks. Most papers that reported the event jokingly called the new member, Moira Cameron, a yeowoman, no doubt believing they had invented it. But it turns out to have a long history - the OED's first example is from 1852. It became more widely known during the First World War when women began to serve in the US Navy. They had the official rank of Yeoman (F), "F" denoting female, as you would guess. An informal term was "yeomanette", which the women hated; "yeowoman" was a common alternative. The last member of the group, Charlotte Winters, died only last March at the age of 109. Both "yeomanette" and "yeowoman" vanished after the War except in reference to this period. Among other meanings, yeoman was the name given to a superior servant in a noble or royal household, one who often ate meat (in Old English, humbler servants were called loaf-eaters, who mainly subsisted on bread). Such well-fed menials were derisively named "beef-eaters" and this is the source of the famous nickname of the members of the Yeoman of the Guard, who acquired it in the seventeenth century. These days they carry it with pride. ------------------------------------------------------------------- KNOW SOMEBODY WHO WOULD LIKE THIS NEWSLETTER? Feel free to forward it. ------------------------------------------------------------------- 4. Q&A: Like the clappers ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. On an Open Country program on Radio 4 I heard an interesting explanation of the phrase "to go like the clappers", to move very fast. "Clappers" in this context were stock rabbits, kept for breeding and so likely to be exceptionally fast. It is, of course, not my normal practice to doubt anything that I hear on the BBC, but I had always assumed that the clappers in question were those used to ring bells, so could you silence my unworthy suspicion by confirming the rabbit etymology? [David Sutton] A. I'd like to, but serried ranks of lexicographers behind me are silently shaking their collective heads in dismissal of the idea. Though rabbits can move really fast when they want to (hence the North American expressions of the same idea, "quick like a bunny" or "quick like a rabbit"), why rabbits kept for breeding should be exceptionally fast is hard to understand. But a connection between rabbits and "clapper" does exist, which may well have led to people becoming confused. From the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, the word was used for a rabbit-burrow or a place where tame rabbits were kept. It's from the same Old French source as modern French "clapier", a rabbit hutch. An early example is in Randle Cotgrave's A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues of 1611. He says of "clapier" that it's French for a "clapper of conies" ("coney" being the usual word at the time for an adult rabbit), "a heap of stones &c., whereinto they retire themselves; or (as our clapper), a court walled about, and full of nests or boards, or stones, for tame conies." A story often mentioned online refers to an ancient Shrove Tuesday custom in parts of England and Wales. Mostly people repeat the tale told in Old Stone Crosses of the Vale of Clwyd by Elias Owen, which was published in 1886: "Most people turned out to beg, or Hel Ynyd, on Shrove Tuesday. They received from the farmers fine flour, milk, lard etc. Eggs were clapped for; boys went about with two stones as clappers, and when opposite a farm house they clapped away with all their might and received for their pains a gift of eggs." The crucial thing that these explanations miss is the dating. It's clear from the evidence that the expression is British military slang of World War Two, or perhaps a year or two earlier. The first example I can find is in an article in a Canadian newspaper, the Lethbridge Herald, of September 1942, listing current RAF slang: "A pilot chased by the enemy 'goes like the clappers' or full out." The usual explanation in dictionaries is that the clapper is one of the devices given that name, in particular the clapper of a bell. A group of bellringers in a church tower ringing changes on the bells do make the clappers collectively move fast, and would explain the use of the plural in the expression. It might instead refer to the clapper of a handbell, which moves faster than that of the clapper of a church bell, especially if vigorously rung. However, the early examples of the phrase come without any context to make it crystal clear what kind of clappers are meant. Though not by any means impossible, it seems unlikely that services personnel would create a slang term from church bell ringing. Might a different bell be meant, perhaps an electric one, whose clapper goes a lot faster than one on a church bell or handbell? Were the aircrew scrambled for action on hearing such bells, or did they have another urgent meaning? Perhaps somebody who knows about the period can tell us more. There is a further possibility. Another form, recorded by Eric Partridge, was "like the clappers of f**k" (*). This is intriguing, as "clappers" as a slang term for the testicles was known in the British military in the 1930s, so called because of their castanet tendency if unrestrained. Might "going like the clappers" be a crude reference to sexual activity? It's not mentioned in the reference books, and the lack of evidence means that it is impossible to say either way. But it's an intriguing alternative to the usual stories. --- * Please forgive my seeming prudishness; I have elided the word so that this issue will not be troubled by the nannying censoriousness of obscenity filters; it may be read in its full unexpurgated glory at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/uwvn.htm . 5. Book review: Foyle's Philavery ------------------------------------------------------------------- Do not look for this word in your favourite dictionary. The author, Christoper Foyle, scion of the family that founded the bookshop of that name in Charing Cross Road, London, says that "philavery" was invented by his mother-in-law during a game of Scrabble. He says it means "an idiosyncratic collection of uncommon and pleasing words", a word loosely constructed from Greek "phileein", to love, and Latin "verbum", a word. This little book contains several hundred words that Mr Foyle has collected down the years, each with a sentence attached explaining its meaning and context. The same page that contains the word "philavery", for example, also includes "perspicuous", clearly expressed or easily understood speech or writing; "phallocrat", a person who assumes or advocates the existence of a male-dominated society; "phlogiston", a substance believed in earlier times to exist in combustible matter; "phrenologist", someone who studies the shape of a person's head to assess their character; "piblokto", a condition affecting Inuit people and Arctic animals in winter, when excitable, hysterical or irrational behaviour is followed by depression or stupor; and "Pierian", relating to Pieria, or to the Muses of ancient Greece (hence, of learning or poetry and, though Mr Foyle doesn't mention it, the famous couplet by Alexander Pope: "A little learning is a dangerous thing; / drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring"). I suspect everyone will find words here that strike them as neither uncommon nor pleasing, but that's idiosyncratic for you. What you will find is a browsable set of mostly interesting oddities, with many accompanied by quirky comments. My favourite, which will be understood by anybody who has attempted to navigate the eponymous bookshop, is his note under "oubliette": : Derived from French oublier 'to forget', this misleadingly pretty and inoffensive-sounding word reveals an unpleasant concept, and the startling ideology behind its use. During the recent major refurbishment of Foyles bookshop in Charing Cross Road, one of the biggest bookshops in the country, which has occupied the same building for nearly one hundred years, we explored passages and rooms in the labyrinthine interior which had lain unexplored for decades. Although we did not find any 'oubliettes' containing the forgotten remains of bygone book thieves, we did find a lift whose existence was a complete revelation to every member of staff. [Christopher Foyle, Foyle's Philavery: A Treasury of Unusual Words; hardback, pp233; Chambers, July 2007; ISBN-13: 9780550103291, ISBN- 10: 0550103295; publisher's price £9.99.] AMAZON PRICES FOR THIS BOOK Amazon UK: GBP5.94 http://wwwords.org?FP34 Amazon USA: Not listed Amazon Canada: CDN$20.99 http://wwwords.org?FP92 Amazon Germany: EUR16,95 http://wwwords.org?FP17 [Please use these links to buy. They get World Wide Words a small commission at no extra cost to you.] 6. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- Last Saturday, the Guardian published a correction: "In The Looming Food Crisis, G2, page 4, August 29, we wrote about a man who beat bats to death with a dingy paddle; we meant dinghy paddle." In the Free Times of Columbia, South Carolina, dated 25-31 July, an advertisement for legal services for divorce seekers appeared that said "Call TOLL FREE, to listen to a 24-hour recorded message." Bruce Robb felt he really didn't have that kind of time available. Rebecca Eschliman forwarded a news report from UPI dated 25 August: "Yemen's severe weather conditions result in casualties every year, despite forecasters' advice to avoid mountainous regions during the rainy season. Fatalities and injuries caused by lightning strikes are also common due to the state's typography." It's all those damned exclamation marks that litter the landscape. ------------------------------------------------------------------- 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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