WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 758 Saturday 15 October 2011 -------------------------------------------------------------------- Author/editor: Michael Quinion US advisory editor: Julane Marx Website: http://www.worldwidewords.org ISSN 1470-1448 -------------------------------------------------------------------- A formatted version of this e-magazine is available online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/ixps.htm Now on Twitter: http://twitter.com/wwwordseditor And RSS: http://www.worldwidewords.org/rss/newsletter.xml This e-magazine is best viewed in a fixed-pitch font For a key to phonetic symbols, see http://wwwords.org?PRON Contents -------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Feedback, notes and comments. 2. Weird Words: Gainsay. 3. Wordface. 4. Q and A: Burden of one's song. 5. Sic! A. Subscription information. B. E-mail contact addresses. C. Ways to support World Wide Words. 1. Feedback, notes and comments -------------------------------------------------------------------- IDIOTICON Peter Judge reminds us that "idiom" is another word that traces its ancestry back to classical Greek "idios" for something private (its equivalent in French, "idiotisme", shows the historical link with our "idiot"). HOMOPHONES Following up my mention of these in the piece last week about "punt", Gerry Foley pointed out that other languages have it worse: "The incidence of these words in English pales in comparison with Mandarin. I just looked up the word 'he' which sounds like English 'her' with a rising tone. There are at least 25 words with this sound, most represented by distinct ideograms, having meanings as diverse as: river, small box, Holland, what, lotus. There are many further meanings for the word 'he' that carry one of the other three tones of the language. Many words in Mandarin carry similar numbers of homophones; yet, as with English speakers, this doesn't lead to a lot of confusion. Interestingly, one of the arguments made against changing written Chinese to a phonetic system based on Roman letters is that the traditional ideograms (of which there are many thousands) help to distinguish all these homophones in writing." 2. Weird Words: Gainsay -------------------------------------------------------------------- Most dictionaries mark this verb - to deny or contradict - as formal or literary; some go further and suggest it's archaic; the Oxford English Dictionary, in an entry written over a century ago, stops partway, describing it as "slightly archaic" (is that like being a little bit pregnant?). The number of times the verb turns up in books and the better sort of newspapers might make you doubt that verdict, but inspection shows that it's formulaic and almost always used in the negative, in forms such as "no one can gainsay" or "it is impossible to gainsay". Positive cases are rare and remarkable and do feel archaic: One can gainsay de Gaulle's conclusion, or at least his overall description of the profession of arms, without contradicting his general - and even obvious - point that history can be interpreted at one level as the history of 'force'. [The Warrior Queens, by Antonia Fraser, 1988.] The word is a compound of the verb "say" with the most definitely archaic prefix "gain-", against. This came from an Old English word that's related, for example, to modern German "gegen", against; it is a close relative of "again", and turns up also in "against" itself. So "gainsay" literally means to speak against something. The verb has largely lost its mental associations with "say". Though its forms conform to those of the root in writing - "gainsaying", "gainsays", "gainsaid" - they don't in speech, because they're so rare that people say them as they're spelled. "Gainsays" rhymes with "days" and "gainsaid" with "shade" (which is why it also appears as "gainsayed"). 3. Wordface -------------------------------------------------------------------- PUBLICANS AND SINNERS A delightful collection of alcoholic epithets appears in Leslie Hotson's 1949 work, Shakespeare's Sonnets Dated: "London beer made of filthy Thames water was so celebrated and sought after that despite the diligent bezzling and beer-bathing of English tosspots, bench-whistlers, and lick-wimbles the hard-working brewers of England made enough not only to satisfy the home market, but to supply a large export trade as well." TOSSPOT was a habitual drinker, one who tossed back the contents of his pot to make ready for the next. A BENCH-WHISTLER in Shakespeare's day was an idler who spent his days sitting on the alehouse bench, supping beer (and no doubt whistling between sips). I can find scant evidence for LICK- WIMBLE, though it turns up in a satirical print of about 1632 in the collection of the British Library as one in a list of "downright drunkards". A WIMBLE was a gimlet or auger and a WIMBLER was a maker of holes of various sorts; by analogy with "lickspittle", a toady or sycophant, we may guess that a lick-wimbler insinuated himself into convivial company to cadge drinks, though presumably not by boring them. BEZZLING was drunken revelry or dissipation, from Old French "besiler", to plunder or ravage and a BEZZLER figuratively plundered an alehouse's stock by consuming it on the spot. These are relatives of EMBEZZLE, whose first sense in English was to carry off anything that was owned by somebody else, but which later narrowed its focus to fraudulently appropriating money. 4. Q and A: Burden of one's song -------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. A newspaper account in 1877 of the murder of my great-great- grandfather (the first police officer to be killed in the line of duty in my Texas home town), contains an odd phrase that puzzles me and may be of interest to your detective work: "Perry Davis, the burden of his song, was indicted by the Grand Jury." What can you tell me about the peculiar expression, "burden of his song"? [Neill D Hicks] A. The literal meaning of the burden of a song is its refrain or chorus. Its most famous appearance is probably this: There was a jolly miller once Liv'd on the river Dee; He worked and sung from morn till night, No lark more blithe than he; And this the burden of his song For ever us'd to be, I care for nobody, not I, If no one cares for me. [The Miller of the Dee, from Love in a Village, a comic opera by Isaac Bickerstaffe (1762), now a popular folk song in several extended versions. You might get extra points in a pub quiz for knowing that the character in the play who sang it was Master Hawthorn, a farmer.] "Burden" in this sense is first recorded in the seventeenth century. It's the result of a mistake. The original is the French "bourdon", among other things the drone of bagpipes and the bass string of a violin. In late medieval times it was brought into English for a singer's bass accompaniment to a song. By Shakespeare's day, it had become permanently confused with "burden", probably because the bass part was figuratively thought to be "heavier" than the melody. As the bass often contributed to the refrain, the part that may be repeated many times and which often sums up the sense of the piece, the idea grew up that the burden "carried" the meaning of the song. "Burden" later extended to mean the chief theme or leading idea of any written work or utterance. It forms part of several phrases - the most common is yours, but variants are known such as "the burden of his confession" and "the burden of his story". ("Burden of proof" is unconnected, as "burden" here refers to an obligation, which is figuratively perceived as a heavy weight.) The idiom "burden of his song" is now extremely rare but was better known a century or more ago, as these two examples show: The meal was of the most substantial kind, and while both the showman and his wife did ample justice, they were unceasing in their attentions to me, the burden of their song being, "Make yourself at home, sir," an entreaty with which their evident sincerity made it easy to comply. [The Great Army of London Poor, by Thomas Wright, 1882.] "'Was ever a woman so pampered? And that young man - he might have been my own son. He had the run of my house. And yet see how they have treated me! Oh, Dr. Watson, it is a dreadful, dreadful world!' That was the burden of his song for an hour or more." [The Adventure of the Retired Colourman, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes, 1926.] In the newspaper item that you quote the phrase is used intriguingly differently. You supplied a number of verbatim extracts from the Waco Daily Examiner, which make clear that Perry Davis murdered your great-great-grandfather. The sentence you quote, "Perry Davis, the burden of his song ..." is the beginning of a news report on 28 August 1877; "his" can only be Perry Davis himself. I read this to mean that Davis was the author of his own misfortunes, perhaps through a misunderstanding of "burden" by the writer. It's rare to find the expression referring to a person, rather than an idea, but it's not utterly unknown. On rare occasions it was used for the focus of an individual's attention or his primary concern, as here: He seemed to have intense affection for that boy: for him Danny was the burden of his song; he was very affectionate towards his children, but particularly towards Danny. [The New York Herald, 13 Apr. 1870.] 5. Sic! -------------------------------------------------------------------- Department of double time. Karen Courtenay found this in the Boston Globe of 8 October: "Jeff Lane, an environmental specialist for Boston public schools, [added] that the state now requires annual tests twice a year." Liz Broomfield initially misread a report on the BBC's website on 8 October: "David Cameron wants initial findings of a Ministry of Defence inquiry into Defence Secretary Liam Fox's work relationship with a friend on his desk on Monday." It was later reworded. "We were in Maine recently," wrote Larry Nordell, "and found a neatly printed but disconcerting sign in a motel bathroom that said 'Please put only toilet paper in the toilet. All other wastes go in the waste basket.'" A. Subscription information -------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 2011. 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). -------------------------------------------------------------------