WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 565 Saturday 8 December 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: Sardoodledom. 3. Recently noted. 4. Q&A: Safe as houses. 5. Q&A: Toise. 6. Sic! 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- MY SENSE OF HUMOUR I was mildly concerned that the sick Sic! item that I included last week about the Observer's supplement Cooking With Kids might offend. Instead, James Harbeck wrote in to tell me about the Disney work that was awarded the title of World's Worst Book Title by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on 21 November. The title? Cooking With Pooh. Don't rush to get a copy, as it's long out of print. To judge from the price of a single used copy listed on Amazon.com ($199.00, and that's without the cookie cutters), it has become a collector's item. The newspaper said that it triumphed over several other nice titles, including Letting It Go: a History of American Incontinence; The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification (I mentioned it here last March; it won the Bookseller competition for the Oddest Title of 2006); and Everything You'll Need to Remember About Alzheimer's. 2. Weird Words: Sardoodledom ------------------------------------------------------------------- A play with an overly contrived and melodramatic plot. It certainly looks weird enough. Until recently it was known only to historians of the theatre, but it's having a rare moment in the spotlight. It was one of the words in the 2007 US National Spelling Bee, which brought on a fit of giggles on live television from the 11-year-old, Kennyi Aouad of Indiana, who was asked to spell it. So many people went to the Merriam-Webster Web site to look it up that the firm has recently included it in a list of 20 words from which visitors have been asked to choose their Word of the Year for 2007. It commemorates the French playwright Victorien Sardou. He was extremely successful in the 40 years from 1860, creating more than 70 plays, some for the English actress Sarah Bernhardt. (One he wrote for her in 1882, Fédora, gave the English language a new word for a type of hat.) His plays were melodramatic spectaculars, full of contrivance and written to a mechanical formula, often designed as vehicles for famous actors and actresses of the day. His last big success was the historical play Madame Sans-Gêne in 1892, seen in 1897 in an English version starring Ellen Terry in the Lyceum Theatre in London. In June 1895, George Bernard Shaw wrote a highly critical article in the Saturday Review under the heading "Sardoodledom", a word he invented for the piece. He described Fédora as "claptrap" and he criticised Sarah Bernhardt for becoming involved in "a high modern development of the circus and the waxworks". Shaw used the word again two years later in the same publication: "It is rather a nice point whether Miss Ellen Terry should be forgiven for sailing the Lyceum ship into the shallows of Sardoodledom for the sake of Madame Sans-Gêne." The word has since become shorthand for technically well-crafted works of the period - "well-made plays" - that were created as pure entertainment, lacking any moral or ethical position and featuring what one critic called "a poverty of thought". [Picture of Sardou from the December 1880 issue of Vanity Fair.] --*-- --*-- --*-- --*-- --*-- --*-- --*-- --*-- --*-- --*-- --*-- GIFTS FOR THE HOLIDAY SEASON If you have a friend or relative interested in words, you might do worse than consider giving one of my charmingly inexpensive and extraordinarily interesting books: Gallimaufry: http://www.worldwidewords.org/gallimaufry.htm Port Out, Starboard Home: http://www.worldwidewords.org/posh.htm Ologies and Isms: http://www.worldwidewords.org/ologies.htm --*-- --*-- --*-- --*-- --*-- --*-- --*-- --*-- --*-- --*-- --*-- 3. Recently noted ------------------------------------------------------------------- MORE VOTING When the 2007 edition of Susie Dent's annual Language Report came out from Oxford University Press this autumn (reviewed here on 6 October; see http://wwwords.org?SDLR), suggestions were invited, to mark the fifth publication year of the series, for the word which best represented the events or moods of the early 21st century. About 1,000 people took part. By a small margin they chose "9/11", referring to the terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001. Susie Dent commented that the term not only commemorates the events of that day but will remain as a permanent marker for the political actions that followed it. "Like 'ground zero'," she said, "it illustrates perfectly how history can be preserved in a word which is packed with associations and which will evoke it instantly." Runner-up was "footprint", as in "carbon footprint" (noted here in February 2007; http://wwwords.org?CRFP). Third was the phrase "sex up", whose specific associations for us in the UK are to a BBC report in May 2003 which gave huge offence to the government and led to the resignations of the BBC's chairman and director-general. In the report the journalist Andrew Gilligan said that British intelligence documents on Iraq had been "sexed up" in order to justify war. MOOFING I'm behindhand with a report on this word. It appeared in July in a press release from Microsoft, seemingly invented by some ingenious PR person. I thought it was too transient to bother you with, but a report in the Guardian last weekend resurrected it, so perhaps I should note it for the record. A moofer is a person who moofs, who works from anywhere except in an office. "MOOF" stands for "Mobile Out Of Office", one of the more strained acronyms in the language. There's now a Web site, moof.mobi, at which moofers can exchange experiences (not moof.com, as the Guardian had it). 4. Q&A: Safe as Houses ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. I am curious about the saying "safe as houses", which is more common in England than here in the States. What is it about houses that makes them so safe, compared with anything else? [Heather Upton, Los Angeles] A. It's not immediately obvious, I agree. And in the history of similes about security, "safe as houses" is a relative late-comer. You might at various times have been as safe as a bug in a rug (an alternative to the much older and better known "snug as a bug in a rug"), as a sow (or a crow) in a gutter, a mouse in a malt-heap (or in a mill or a cheese), as safe as a church, or a bank, or a fort, or a bunker, or simply as anything. Several of them suggest comfort or freedom from disturbance as much as physical safety. Other expressions of similar kind imply certainty - a sure thing or a safe bet. "As safe as eggs", for example, which is a variant on "as sure as eggs is eggs", which makes sense of a puzzling phrase, as eggs are notoriously unrobust. Likewise "safe as the bellows", a strange expression of the 1850s, which appears in Henry Mayhew's London Life and the London Poor (1851): "If you was caught up and brought afore the Lord Mayor, he'd give you fourteen days on it, as safe as the bellows". The reason for all these puzzling forms is that at one time "safe" could mean "certainly; for sure; assuredly", especially in dialect and colloquial English. Francis Grose wrote in 1790, "He is safe enough for being hanged" as an example of Cumberland dialect, which meant that the person was certain to be hanged. Among other cases, The English Dialect Dictionary a century later includes "it is safe to thunder", Lincolnshire dialect meaning it was sure to do so. As a result, "safe as houses" has often meant something that was certain to happen. In 1894, Mrs Arthur Stannard, writing as J S Winter, used it in her novel Red Coats, "You know the Colonel is as safe as houses to come round after church parade." In The Penang Pirate by John Conroy Hutcheson (1886) appears this: "If you was to strike one with a rope's end - if only in lark, mind you, to make him move quicker - why, you'd be a dead man 'fore morning, safe as houses!" In Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy of 1874 this dialogue appears: "'He must come without fail, and wear his best clothes.' 'The clothes will floor us as safe as houses!' said Coggan." There's clearly more going on than at first sight we might think. After all this time, we can't penetrate the minds of the inventors of the expression. But it's unwise to draw parallels with related expressions. "As safe as a church" and "as safe as a bank" suggest the security of a physical structure. But the reference is probably figurative in both cases - to God's protection and to financial security. John Hotten argued in his Slang Dictionary of 1859 that "safe as houses" may have arisen when the intense speculation on railways in Britain - the railway mania - began to be seen for the highly risky endeavour that it really was and when bricks and mortar became more financially attractive. But that ignores the figurative nature of the phrase, which, even so early after its coining, must have had little in users' minds to do with any actual building. 5. Q&A: Toise ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. I came across "toise" in the novel St Ives, by Robert Louis Stevenson: "'Are you acquainted with the properties of the spine?' he asked with an insolence beyond qualification. It was too much. 'I am acquainted also with the properties of a pair of pistols,' said I, toising him." Any idea what it means exactly? Is it a typographical error? [Daniel J Matranga] A. This is possibly the most obscure question I've ever been asked. My reason for including it is that it leads us up an interesting linguistic byway, where I hope you will not abandon me in despair at my antiquarian investigation of the incredibly obscure. The rag-bag of miscellaneous recollections that I call my memory reminds me that a toise was an old French unit of length. By an unremarkable coincidence, it appears in an SF book I've just been reading, Brasyl by Ian McDonald, in which the speaker is French: "The Amazon drops only fifty toises over its entire length". A few moments' enquiry turned up the extraordinarily useful fact that a toise is six French feet or about two metres, six and two- fifths English feet. It derives from Latin "tensa (bracchia)", the outstretched arms, from "tendere", to stretch. It was the distance between the fingertips when an adult male stretched his arms out horizontally side to side. The most interesting thing about it, the word in this sense being long defunct in France and virtually unknown everywhere else, is that it's closely similar to the nautical fathom, long regularised as six feet. This word comes from Old English, in which it refers to the same distance measured in the same way. Without doubt, fascinating cross-language stuff. But what does it have to do with the matter? The only person the OED cites as a user of the verb is Stevenson, both in St Ives and in his earlier work, The Master of Ballantrae: "At the same time he had a better look at me, toised me a second time sharply, and then smiled." The OED says it is "very rare", which is an undeniably accurate statement, since no other example exists in literature - at least that I can find. Stevenson being Scottish, I wondered if it might be a Scots term, but nothing like it appears in any of my dictionaries. It seems to derive directly from the French verb "toiser", originally to measure. My Larousse tells me that in French "toiser" today means to regard someone with contempt or defiance. So, to toise is figuratively to measure someone, to eye them from head to foot in an appraising and disapproving way. A century ago a critic in The Reader said that Stevenson's usage "seems a trifle strained". Can't dispute that. 6. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- Cliff Card was browsing the Web to read about the newly elected PM of Australia and came across the opening sentence of the biography entry in Wikipedia for Mr Rudd's wife: "Thérèse Rein is the 26th Spouse of the Prime Minister of Australia." Busy man. [Ms Rein is actually the spouse of the 26th Prime Minister of Australia.] Remaining with Australia and the new PM, Lesley Beresford reports that The Advertiser of Adelaide commented on changes to overseas positions in the wake of the election: "A brace of former Liberal heavyweights - three from [South Australia] - hold diplomatic posts and could be recalled by Prime Minister-elect Kevin Rudd at short notice". How many in a brace? [My dictionaries confirm just two. It's from Old French "bracier", to embrace, from Latin bracchia, "arms".] Across the water in New Zealand, John Neave scratched his head over an announcement on the TV One Sports News last weekend: "The All Blacks have only two weeks to complete their last-minute training." Something, as he says, doesn't quite add up. A Guardian piece on Tuesday described current political cooperation between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, even though sectarian separation between communities in Belfast is maintained by 30 big "peace walls". Michael White noted that this separation is increasing: "A new wall opened last month", which is of course the exact opposite of the intended effect. Greg Putz, the clerk of the Saskatchewan legislative assembly, was quoted on the CBC News Web site last Monday as saying "Many members have springs coming through and there's lumps and holes and they're hard to move." It might sound like politicians everywhere. But no, he was actually talking about the 100-year-old chairs that they sit in, which are to be replaced at a cost of about CDN$125,000. Many thanks to Harold Crandall for sending that in. ------------------------------------------------------------------- World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2007. All rights reserved. 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