NEWSLETTER 595: SATURDAY 12 JULY 2008
Contents
1. Weird Words: Doryphore/ˈdɒrɪfɔː/ 
A pedantic critic of minor errors; a nit-picker.
We owe this word to Sir Harold Nicolson, who introduced it to the world in the Spectator magazine in August 1952. In an issue of the same magazine later the same year, he described a doryphore as a “questing prig, who derives intense satisfaction from pointing out the errors of others.” A writer in the New Yorker in 1989 described being taken out to lunch one day by the magazine’s editors: “They were rigidly abstemious, lest they fuddle their minds and give hostages to subsequent doryphores on returning to work.” (Your present editor follows a similar regime, with less success.) In 1996, Herb Caen commented in the San Francisco Chronicle: “For a doryphore, what is more delightful than a mistake in a correction?”
Sir Harold took it from French, in which it’s the usual name for the Colorado beetle, hence a pest. Doryphora was at one time the genus of the potato beetle, though its formal name these days is Leptinotarsa decimlineata (decimlineata, ten-lined, in reference to its striped back). The old genus name was taken from Greek doruphoros, a spear-carrier, which echoes a one-time folk name for the insect in the US, the ten-striped spearman. The French presumably acquired their term for it from its old genus name.
As an aside, doryphore was French slang for the occupying German soldiers in World War Two and later became a derogatory term for tourists, much as the locals in Cornwall call them emmets (ants).
2. Recently noted
Ponglish We have lots of examples of words for composite languages in which native vocabulary has been influenced by English: Franglish, Japlish, Spanglish, Hinglish, Chinglish, Russlish. Ponglish is the newest, an unfortunate coinage. It results from the influx of many thousands of Polish workers to the UK since Poland joined the European Union. Until now their main contribution to English culture has been to generate dinner-party wonder at plumbers and electricians who turn up on time, do a good job and charge reasonable prices. The Daily Telegraph wrote last week that Ponglish was particularly trendy among young Poles, who have created terms like drinkowac (dreen-ko-vatsh), which means to have a drink, or perhaps two. Workers going home to Poland have taken Ponglish with them, so stay-at-home Poles have learned new words like szopink (shopping) and tiszert (T-shirt). Polish orthography, although consistent, seriously distorts the spelling of English words, particularly when Polish endings are added; drajwnic means nothing to an English speaker until it is said (“driveneech” — it just means driving). Highstreet has quickly been adopted by Poles in London, a contributor to the piece noted, because Poles don’t have the equivalent of the way that London is made up of lots of little towns, each with a main street.
Testing, testing Anthony Stevens introduced me to a jargon term of food retailers he had heard from his son, who works for the British supermarket chain Tesco. It’s a partial acronym, wibit, used as a test to decide whether to send items to waste or put them back on the shelves as reduced-price goods. It stands for “Would I Buy It?” A second form is used by management staff to ask of a shop-floor worker: wybit?, meaning “Would You Buy It?”. Both are rare in print, but have clearly been in use for many years. They are, as Mr Stevens points out, rare examples of interrogative acronyms.
3. Questions & Answers: Noggin
[Q] From Larry Nordell: “What’s the origin of noggin for a person’s head? Is it regional slang? I do not see it in my compact Oxford English Dictionary (which is the edition of 1933, I believe). My Webster’s Dictionary gives it only as the third definition with no etymology.”
[A] The Oxford English Dictionary’s come on a bit since then. The Second Edition of 1989 suggested, on the basis of early examples then known, that it was US slang. A recent revision online has taken the origin back a century and found that it started out as British sporting slang, originally from boxing.
Noggin has been in the language since the late sixteenth century. The first sense was that of a small cup or other sort of drinking vessel. This may well have been regional to start with, but became established as a standard term. It’s much better known, though, as the name for a small quantity of alcohol, usually a quarter of a pint, in which the name of the container has been transferred to its measure and its contents.
It seems to have been the idea of a container that gave rise to the fresh sense of a person’s head, which started to be used in the eighteenth century. The first known example is from a farce called The Stratford Jubilee, which mocked the festival of the same name organised by the actor David Garrick in Stratford-upon-Avon in September 1769 to commemorate William Shakespeare (during which, by the way, the British weather did not co-operate: it bucketed down with rain): “Giving him a stouter on the noggin, I laid him as flat as a flaunder.” (A stouter is a stout blow; flaunder would now be spelled flounder.)
Noggin is a good example of that rare and memorable phenomenon, a slang term that is long-lived, since it has stayed in the language, always as slang, for two and a half centuries.
4. Questions & Answers: Slanging match
[Q] From Evan Parry, New Zealand: “How did the expression slanging match develop? It’s meaning is well-known, but how did slang, meaning informal language, make its way into this compound noun?”
[A] Its meaning is well-known in British and Commonwealth circles, but puzzled comments when I used it a couple of years ago suggest that Americans are less familiar with it. A slanging match is a vituperative argument or an exchange of abuse.
The experts are sure the origin is indeed the noun slang, which dictionaries note is itself slang in origin, though nobody has the slightest idea where it’s from. It dates from the middle of the eighteenth century. Before then the usual word was cant, for the secret language of thieves and beggars. This is from Latin cantare, to sing, via a disparaging reference to medieval church services and the whining speech of some beggars.
The link with slanging match comes about through slang becoming a verb meaning to abuse or insult people, which is known from the early decades of the nineteenth century. Since much slang is itself disparaging or insulting, it’s not hard to see how this developed. In 1864 Charlotte M Yong wrote in her novel Trial, “I never had such a slanging in my life!”
Slanging match appears at the end of the century to mean a bout of verbal fisticuffs. An early example is in a book by Thomas E Taylor entitled Running the Blockade: A Personal narrative of Adventures, Risks, and Escapes during the American Civil War: “A slanging match went on between us, like that sometimes to be heard between two penny steamboat captains on the Thames.”
Intriguingly, in view of its current distribution, early examples were as common in the US as they were in Britain. It would seem that Americans fell out of love with it but we Brits didn’t.
5. Sic!
• The curse of the misplaced apostrophe struck the Sunday Telegraph’s Web site last weekend. A story was headlined “Civil servant’s £128 million in bonuses”. “That’s one lucky civil servant,” commented Eric Thompson, “Clearly I retired too soon.”
• Lots of people forwarded an Associated Press headline: “Panda moved after China quake gives birth to twins.” One earthquake is enough for anybody; to have twin offspring is surely overkill.
• The last US National Symphony Orchestra concert led by Leonard Slatkin prompted a headline in The Washington Post: “Slatkin Gets His Rich Desert”. Walter Sheppard said, “My wife and I were in the audience, but we couldn’t decide whether he got the Gobi, the Mojave, the Sahara, or the Painted.”