WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 571 Saturday 19 January 2008 ------------------------------------------------------------------- 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: Cad 3. Recently noted. 4. Q&A: Reticule. 5. Q&A: Naff. 6. Sic! 1. Feedback, notes and comments ------------------------------------------------------------------- SAFE HARBOUR/HAVEN Several members of the legal profession in the US pointed out that "safe harbor" is a term of art, which refers to some procedure in a law or regulation that affords protection from liability or penalty if followed. Irving S Schloss noted, "I do not mean to denigrate the creativity of my brethren at the bar, but we would be hard put to create a synonym or an equally descriptive tag phrase." Another specialised meaning was noted by Lin Gilbert: "To shipping, 'safe haven' means a port where a ship that is damaged or threatened by the weather may take refuge. The more common term now seems to be 'port of refuge'." SCAMBLE Following my notes on the close relationship between this Weird Word last time and the newer verb "to shamble", many people asked about the noun, which in the plural is an ancient term for a slaughterhouse and survives, for example, the name of the street in York. In Old English a shamble was a stool (it's from a diminutive form of Latin "scamnum", a bench) but later it came to refer to a trestle table, then to a butcher's stall in a market and so to the slaughterhouse sense. Oddly, it was the legs of the trestle tables that provoked the modern verb "shamble", since it developed out of the phrase "shamble legs" for someone who walked with their legs straddling like those of the trestles of a shamble. DECIMATION David Tuggy e-mailed from Mexico to tell me about the verb "vigesimate". The Oxford English Dictionary doesn't include it, though it has "vigesimation", the act of putting to death one in every twenty, a less severe punishment. It is an exceedingly rare word about which I can find no further information. The OED has it from only one source, Nathan Bailey's Dictionary of 1727. 2. Weird Words: Cad ------------------------------------------------------------------- A man who behaves dishonourably, especially towards a woman. If ever any person justified this epithet, it was Major-General Sir Harry Paget Flashman, VC, KCB, KCIE. George MacDonald Fraser, who has recently died, borrowed the fictional bully of John Brown's Schooldays and made him the hero of a series of novels. The conceit of the books was that Flashman ended up as a famous and highly decorated soldier, although by his own admission he had throughout been a scoundrel, cheat, lecher, poltroon and cad. "Cad" is the classic British contemptuous epithet of the nineteenth century. It appears, as one example, in Jerome K Jerome's Passing of the Third Floor Back: "That you and your wife lead a cat and dog existence is a disgrace to both of you. At least you might have the decency to try and hide it from the world - not make a jest of your shame to every passing stranger. You are a cad, sir, a cad!" Its history is as weird as one might like. The word started life as "cadet", either a military trainee or a member of a younger branch of a family. That developed into "caddie", now solely a golfer's bag carrier, but in the eighteenth century any lad or man who hung about in the hope of getting casual employment as an errand-boy, messenger or odd-job man. Both "cadet" and "caddie" were shortened to "cad". Early on - for reasons unknown - it had the sense of an unbooked passenger who had been picked up by the driver of a horse- drawn coach for personal profit. By the early 1830s, it had come to mean the conductor of a new-fangled London omnibus, the man who rode inside to take the fares. Might the job have been one that was taken as casual employment by caddies? My references don't say. In 1895, George Augustus Sala commented in London Up to Date: "An omnibus conductor, nowadays, would, I suppose, were the epithet of 'cad' applied to him, resent the appellation as a scandalous insult; and, indeed, 'cad' has come to be considered a term of contempt, now extended to any mean, vulgar fellow of whatever social rank he may be." The shift seems to have happened at the university of Oxford. Lads from the town who hung about colleges in the hope of casual work of the caddie type were called cads by the undergraduates. It became a contemptuous way to describe townsmen townsmen and by about 1840 it had achieved its full flowering as a term for a man whose behaviour was unacceptable. 3. Recently noted ------------------------------------------------------------------- WORDS OF THE YEAR 2007 Don't groan. This lot are more interesting than most we've featured here, not least because there are more to choose from. This contest, surely the final one for 2007, is being run by the Macquarie Dictionary in Sydney, Australia. Its editors have chosen five words in each of 17 categories and want visitors to its Web site (http://www.macquariedictionary.com.au) to vote for one from each set. The closing date is 31 January. Most sets, such as those entitled Carbon Terms (including "carbon footprint" and "carbon sequestration") and Travel (including "slow travel" and "health tourism") contain newish terms that have wide circulation in the English-speaking world. But others are what the Adelaide Advertiser called Australish terms or the Sydney Morning Herald has referred to as Strine (from a famous typically slurred pronunciation of "Australian" by Australians that was immortalised a quarter century ago in the title of a book, Let Stalk Strine, by Afferbeck Lauder, whose pseudonym has to be said by an Australian for you to fully appreciate the joke. (*)) Colloquial terms include "floordrobe", "lady garden" and "salad dodger", respectively a floor littered with discarded clothes, a woman's pubic region, and an overweight person. Other body terms include "arse antlers" (a tattoo just above the buttocks, having a central section and curving extensions on each side), "butt bra" (a garment worn as a support for the buttocks), and "manscaping" (a male grooming procedure in which hair is shaved or trimmed from all over the body). The Social Terms section has "kipper" for an adult child still living in the home of his or her parents (supposedly from "Kids In Parents' Pockets Eroding Retirement Savings") and "slummy mummy", for a mother of young children who has abandoned all care for her personal appearance, a play on "yummy mummy" for an older, immaculately-groomed and attractive woman. A couple of characteristically Australian terms in the Environment section are "toad juice", liquid fertiliser from pulverised cane toads (a nasty introduced pest in the north of the continent), and "green shoe brigade", those people who stand to profit from dubious practices conducted in the name of environmental protection (this is formed from "white shoe brigade", a deeply derogatory term for the unscrupulous property developers who built up the coast of Queensland in the 1980s). UNWORD OF THE YEAR Perhaps a quick dose of inverted selection will clear the head. On Tuesday, a jury of German linguists announced its Unwort des Jahres, the word that the group considered to be the worst linguistic misjudgement ("sprachliche Missgriff") of 2007. It's "Herdprämie", literally "stove reward". A debate has been taking place in Germany about the need to provide more childcare facilities, the alternative being to persuade more mothers to stay at home to look after their children by paying them Betreuungsgeld (child-raising money). The chairman of the jury, Prof. Dr. Horst Schlosser, said that "the word defames parents, especially women, who educate their children at home instead of claiming a place at a day nursery." ------ (*) Alphabetical Order. 4. Q&A: Reticule ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. I was recently told that "reticule", a lady's small purse of the 18th century, was actually called a "ridicule" because some thought it was a silly fashion accessory. Is "reticule" the correct term, or is this a sort of folk etymology that sounds very logical but may not be correct? Thanks for your assistance. [Anne Breden] A. If it's not just a silly joke, then it may be a folk etymology. But it's more likely that the person who told you the story has got their facts backwards. The reticule was indeed sometimes slangily called a ridicule during the early nineteenth century, but it was either an ignorant or a joking transformation of the older term. Charles Dickens used it in Oliver Twist in 1838: "Tills be blowed!" said Mr. Claypole; "there's more things besides tills to be emptied." "What do you mean?" asked his companion. "Pockets, women's ridicules, houses, mail- coaches, banks!" said Mr. Claypole, rising with the porter. If my understanding of fashion history is correct (it's hardly my field, I have to admit), the reticule was the forerunner of the modern woman's handbag and so isn't a fashion accessory as such but a much-needed costume item. Not knowing she was to achieve eternal fame in the Oxford English Dictionary for putting the word down on paper for the first time, Catherine Wilmot explained it in a letter of 13 December 1801 (the word is therefore nineteenth-century, not eighteenth). Reticules, she wrote, "are a species of little Workbag worn by the Ladies, containing snuff-boxes, Billet-doux, Purses, Handkerchiefs, Fans, Prayer-Books, Bon-Bons, Visiting tickets." They were highly variable in appearance and materials, though their most common construction, especially early on, was a bag of woven cloth of some type, fastened by a drawstring. This explains the name. "Reticule" comes from Latin "reticulum", a diminutive of "rete", a net, from which we also get such words as "reticulation", a pattern or arrangement of interlacing lines that resembles a net (you may recall Samuel Johnson's famous definition of "network" here: "any thing reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections"). It was a variation on the older "reticle", which survives (mainly in North America, I'm told) as an alternative for "graticule", a network of lines such as the latitudes and longitudes on a map or crosshairs in the eyepiece of a device such as a telescope, for which "reticule" is also used. 4. Q&A: Naff ------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. The Economist often gives me a new word, but I'm confused by its reference to the British entertainer Bruce Forsyth: "The jokes he makes in his high-camp nasal voice are too naff for reproduction in an upmarket newspaper. Yet Mr Forsyth is the improbable face of Britain's favourite television programme." Is "naff" an odd way to spell "naif"? [Robert L Sharp] A. No, it's a word in its own right, though one with a mysterious and intriguing history. Something that's naff in Britain (and also Australia) is inferior and lacks taste or style. I'd not describe Brucie's jokes by that word, though they're often so old they have whiskers on. Many attempts have been made to explain the origin, which are made more difficult by there being not only an adjective but also a verb, which usually appears as the impolite instruction to "naff off!", an obvious euphemism for "f**k off!" (*) The adjective featured in a famous BBC radio comedy series of the 1960s, Round the Horne, written by Barry Took and Marty Feldman. A regular sketch featured a couple of gay men named Julian and Sandy, who frequently employed "naff" as a term of abuse: "I couldn't be doing with a garden like this... I mean all them horrible little naff gnomes." Round the Horne undoubtedly brought the word into the wider British vocabulary. It became famous later when Princess Anne supposedly told photographers to "naff off" when they snapped her coming off her horse and taking a ducking at the Badminton Horse Trials (though a reporter who was there told me some years ago during a radio broadcast that this was a euphemism by journalists reporting the incident and that Anne actually used the F-word.) To what extent the verb and adjective are connected is disputed. The verb is recorded some years earlier (in 1959 in Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse) and may simply be a variation on "eff off", where "eff" is a written version of the letter "F", meaning the F-word, as in "to eff and blind", to use vulgar expletives. Some hold that "naff" is an acronym from the phrase "Not Available For F**king", though this seems, if it ever existed, to have been a post-hoc reinterpretation. Some dictionaries, such as Collins and Chambers, suggest it was formed as backslang from "fan", a short form of "fanny" in the British sense of the female genitals. The idea that it derives from NAAFI, the Navy, Army, and Air Force Institutes, who provide canteens and shops for British service personnel, is a stretch too far. More sensible is the idea that it comes from dialect, either from the northern English "naffy", "naffhead", or "naffin" for an idiot or simpleton, or Scots "nyaff", a puny or insignificant person. But the most plausible origin takes us back to Julian and Sandy. Their patois was Polari, the old showmen's private language that had been taken up by homosexuals. (See http://wwwords.org?P23J for my article about it.) If "naff" is from Polari, as in phrases like "naff omi", a dreary man, it's most probably from the sixteenth- century Italian "gnaffa", a despicable person. ------ (*) Please excuse the elisions - this is to stop newsletters being trapped by obscenity filters and doesn't indicate any sudden onset of prudishness. If you want to read this article with the words written out in full, consult the online version. 6. Sic! ------------------------------------------------------------------- Commenting on the item last week about a bag of peanuts that was labelled "may contain traces of nuts", Scott Pollard noted that such warnings are common these days: Sainsbury's smoked salmon is labelled with the useful allergy advice "contains fish". A bad case of cliché overload vexed Mary Ellen Foley. The Winter 2007 number of Keeping You Posted, a free publication for customers of the British Post Office, includes this comment from actor and director George Clooney: "I think the internet is a free-for-all. Until someone figures out how to tame the wild wild west, then I don't really know if you can put the genie back in the bottle." Alan Featherstone heard a comment from cricketer Geoffrey Boycott on BBC Radio 5 Live on 11 January. Referring to the recent squabble between the Australian and Indian cricket teams about taunts passed between opposing team members (it's called "sledging", derived from "sledgehammer"), he said that umpires who were seeking a quiet life tended to "turn a blind ear" to sledging. The San Francisco non-profit organisation Community United Against Violence has some unfortunate phrasing in job titles, according to Mara Math. "They have just posted an opening for a 'Hate Violence Advocate' who will report to the 'Hate Violence Director'. The job description offers 'long-term disability' as the position's final benefit. It's a really tough job hating all that violence." Simon Behenna says "G'day Michael" from Australia and notes, "This is from the first line of an online car ad: 'Deceased Estate, this car was my father's pride and joy. The only reason it is being sold is because he no longer requires it.'" Marie-Louise Edwards forwarded a fractured foreignism from a hotel in Paris: "Cultivate a different art of life to make your life being be our purpose. On this subject, the colors harmony gives a very chic parisian charm, an invitation to relaxation an dreams, particularly in our romms who will provide to you the most marrowy comfort. To make your trip to Paris one of the most unforgivable moment of your life." She says her sister has booked in for a visit shortly. I hope that she will find the romms to be as marrowy as advertised. ------------------------------------------------------------------- World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2008. 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. Reproduction in printed publications or on Web sites or blogs needs prior permission, for which you should contact the editor at wordseditor@worldwidewords.org . -------------------------------------------------------------------