Things I once knew

 

When I look back over an increasingly long life, I am sometimes surprised by the things I once knew and which of them have stuck in my increasingly leaky brain.

Take using a theodolite, for instance. It’s the small box on a tall tripod which you see men use on footpaths around building sites (and they are always men; I wonder why). My theodolite lessons came on the first archaeological dig in which I participated, at the end of my first year at university. We were digging a very large midden under an extensive rock overhang and I think the theodolite was used to work out the height of various levels. There was no need for me to learn this rather arcane skill but the two chaps tasked with the job seemed to enjoy teaching. If I recall correctly, there was also the use of a slide rule, something which I suspect has gone the way of the dinosaur.

Now this is the extent of my memory of theodolites but there were several other things I learned that digging season which have stuck with me. For instance, if you dig a latrine in the bush, you have to pour creosote and lavender water into the trench on a regular basis to make it usable. Yes, much to the amazement of my friends, I survived four weeks of tent living and latrine use. I learned how to dress and undress inside a sleeping bag and I also learned how to make a Coolgardie Cooler, a rough substitute for a fridge based on the scientific fact that water cools as it evaporates. So you build a frame with shelves, cover it with some hessian, put a bucket on top with a tiny hole in its bottom and keep the bucket full. The slow drip of the water down the hessian evaporates and keeps your food cool. Brilliant!

I learned three other things in those four weeks. The most crucial was learning how not to get bitten by snakes as you walked through the bush. The secret is to make a loud tramping noise as you go, and always step onto logs, never over them, on the grounds that snakes often bask in the sun on the other side.

In these years before Vatican II, when the lives of Catholics were radically changed, Anglicans – my school mates – and Catholics had nothing to do with each other and whole professions were one or the other. So it shouldn’t have surprised me that, in my first meeting with a Catholic, she knew absolutely nothing about Judaism. She actually asked me if I had the same God as she did.

And the third thing was not to go in the public bar of a pub if you were female. Some lads who were giving me a lift home for the weekend took me to a pub – my very first time – and bundled me into the ladies section, to my surprise.

There is a range of other things I used to know which are spectacularly unimportant but it’s such a pleasure when my brain actually works properly so I’m going to list some of them.

For instance, I knew the longest word in the dictionary, which has now been replaced by something scientific. It was “antidisestablishmentarianism”.

I know the motto of NSW: “Orta recens quam pura nites” which more or less means “Newly rise, how brightly you shine”. I know one of Newton’s laws although I can’t remember which one. The one I know says: “A body at rest will remain at rest and a moving body will continue moving at constant speed unless acted upon by a force.”

Then there’s the opening words of Caesar’s Gallic Wars: “All Gaul is divided into three parts” or in the original Latin: “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres.” I admit I had to check the Latin but I’m puzzled why this particular bit of ancient writing stuck when so much else has gone. For instance, I spent a year studying Egyptian hieroglyphics and could stagger through a translation of hieroglyphic texts. Now … nothing!

I know the distance of the earth to the sun in miles: 93 mjillion. And I know that “buggerup” is the New Guinea Tok Pisin word for “broken down”. I was also told the probably apocryphal story that in Tok Pisin (New Guinea “pigeon”) the phrase for “helicopter” is “Mixmaster bilong Jesus Christ”!

These trips down memory lane may be continued next week. Stay tuned!.

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

US writer and critic Alexander Woollcott coined what is now an immortal phrase: “All the things I really like to do are either illegal, immoral or fattening.”

 

 French follies

 I have a penchant for anything to do with words, phrases, grammar and the like, as if you haven’t guessed so far!

Now penchant is obviously derived from the French and pronounced – if you need to know – ponchon, with a strangled “g” after the first “n”. This sent me down the particular rabbit-hole of French-derived words in common English usage. In fact they’re so common that we don’t really have to italicise them and some tend to lose their accents. Some derive from Old French, Middle French and Norman French and some are used identically in both French and English.

Many of them, as you would imagine, are words for food and dining generally. Let’s start with à la carte and bon appétit. Then there’s café, chef, hors d’oeuvre, picnic (from pique-nique), menu, éclair, aperitif, baguette and sauté. There’s champagne, gastronomy, omelette, restaurant, salad, soufflé, soup, utensil, vinaigrette and zest.

We all use en route, which Americans annoyingly pronounce en route instead of on
(with that strangled “g” again) route. We often say au revoir, we use au pair, we say beau, bouquet (especially if we’re called Hyacinthe Bucket), bureau, chauffeur, cliché, début, entrepreneur, exposé, fiancé (for men) and fiancée (for women).

One word which surprised me with its French derivation was gaffe which apart from its usual meaning of a socially embarrassing misspeak is, as gaff, also a word for boathook and for house in Ireland.

Genre has French derivation, so does impasse, queue, papier-mâché, rendezvous, souvenir (from the French for remember), voyeur, bizarre, blank (from blanc), blasé and bourgeois.

Abbey comes from the French as does arcade, boutique, cinema, garage and terrace. There’s kilogram, lacrosse, literature, machine, magnificent, massage, metabolism, metro, navy, neutral, nocturnal, novel, occasion, optimism, parasol, poetic, premiere and purify. Recipient is from French as are reservoir, ricochet, rich, ridicule, risqué, sabotage, sentiment, silhouette, solicitor, technique, television, tournament, uniform, valid and variety.

At the other end of the alphabet there are allowance, apostrophe, attaché, avant-garde, aviation, beret, ballet, bon voyage, bureau, cabaret, cadet, chauffeur, connoisseur, cul-de-sac, debris, déjà vu, delegate detour and dossier. Energy is from French, as are elite, envisage, expatriate, façade, faux-pas, gallery, gazette, heritage, homage, hotel, identity, illusion, insult irony and jubilee.

Undoubtedly there are many, many more.

In the area of grammar, I was thinking the other day about the subjunctive verb, as you do, and realised that despite years of learning Latin verbs, I have no memory of what the subjunctive was for. Ditto the pluperfect.

I am coming to terms with having lost the battle for the use when appropriate of “which” instead of “that”.

I refuse to use nouns as verbs as in “impact” the team, or “diarise” a date.

I’m not sure a country, in contradistinction to a person, can be reclusive; North Korea comes to mind.

I recently caught rather too many people saying that Charles was going to be coronated (instead of crowned).

And I cannot understand for the life of me (another weird saying) how schools can get away with using “incursion” as the opposite of “excursion”. So excursion is when the children leave the school to go somewhere and “incursion” is used when outsiders come into the school. In fact the word “incursion” means an invasion or attack and is simply wrong in the school context. Grrrrr!

And one small, strange phrase for this week: “All the corners of the globe”. Does this, I wonder, come from those marvellous old maps with “here be dragons” at the sides and no sense of the world being round? Yet globe is a word for an entirely round object. It’s a mystery.

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

Former British PM Harold Wilson: “I’m an optimist, but I’m an optimist who takes his raincoat.”

 

Mooching about

 

I went up to the shops today to have a mooch around, which naturally led to my need to know the etymology of “mooch”. Google led me to Wiktionary which gave me this: “From Middle English moochen, mouchen (“to pretend poverty”), from Old French muchier, mucier, mucer (“to skulk, hide, conceal”), from Frankish *mukjan (“to hide, conceal oneself”), from Proto-Germanic *mukjaną, *mūkōną (“to hide, ambush”), from Proto-Indo-European *(s)mūg- *(s)mewgʰ- (“swindler, thief”).” Isn’t it fascinating that a simple word used to describe a very ordinary stroll around the local shops goes all the way back to Proto-Indo-European, the earliest language as far as I know to have been described, although the meaning of mooch is now innocuous.

Then I remembered the song called“Minnie the Moocher”…

She was a “lowdown hoochie coocher.”

“She messed around with a bloke named Smoky
She loved him though he was cokey.”

 

Originally a song by Cab Calloway, it was much later taken up by The Blues Brothers. Down the etymological rabbit hole I went again to find out that “hoochie coochie” was a lecherous style of belly dancing!

This again took me to a bizarre song snippet my mother used to sing (without I suspect having any idea what it meant) which I may have told you about already but I think fits nicely with Minnie the Moocher whose boyfriend apparently used cocaine.

“I’ve been from Broadway down to Maine

Looking for a guy who sells cocaine …

So honey have a (make sniffing noise) on me

Honey have a (sniff) on me”!

 

Words are such glorious things. Take antimacassar for instance. It’s a piece of fabric, sometimes ornate, which hangs over the top of a chair or sofa. Its purpose was to stop the greasy brilliantine with which men smoothed their hair staining the fabric of the armchair or sofa. So that explains the “anti”.  The other part of the word comes from macassar oil, supposedly imported from the district of Macassar on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. This product was commercially advertised from 1809 as a men's hair tonic "infallible in promoting an abundant growth and in maintaining the early hue and lustre of the HAIR to the extent of human life".

 

I came across a reference the other day to a haversack, a word I hadn’t seen or heard for a long time. We call these useful bags backpacks

The word haversack is an adaptation of the German Hafersack and also the Dutch haverzak meaning "oat sack", (which more properly describes a small cloth bag on a strap worn over one shoulder and originally referred to the bag of oats carried as horse fodder).

The French was havresac, from Low German hafersach "cavalry trooper's bag for horse provender”, literally "oat sack," from the common Germanic word ...

Haver is a German, Dutch and English surname. In Germany or England it refers to oats and is used as an occupational surname for a grower or seller of oats. In the Netherlands it is an occupational surname for a wood or stone cutter, not close at all to the oats derivation. The verb “haver” is defined as to talk in a foolish way, or to go back and forth on a decision. An example of haver is to waste time talking instead of working or to waiver back and forth on a decision, to vacillate. In Scottish English, haver (from the Scots havers (oats)) means "to maunder; to talk foolishly; to chatter"; in British English haver means "to hem and haw; to be indecisive", a slight variation of meaning.

In the course of wandering down the rabbit hole of all of these words and meanings (from Alice in Wonderland of course …), I found a series of letters to the editor from the British Guardian newspaper about the meaning and derivation of some common phrases which the correspondents thought were named after real people. In like Flynn for example, was in some mysterious way referring to Erol Flynn. Happy as Larry apparently refers to Lawrence Olivier who was extremely happy to leave Brighton after a season there. And life jackets came to be called Mae Wests after the buxom film star.

The phrase “gone to ground” presumably comes from fox hunting but “gone for a burton” is more interesting. My family used this for tripping over and falling. But apparently it’s a British WWII airforce expression for someone gone missing or dead, with the burton referring to going for a drink as most of Britain’s beer was made in Burton on Trent. So apparently the comrades of a missing or confirmed dead comrade would say “he’s gone for a burton”, meaning he’s gone off for a drink but really meaning he wasn’t coming back again.

And one more word which tickled my fancy is cagoule, in British English a lightweight, hooded, thigh-length waterproof jacket. We call them windcheaters and the Canadians use windbreakers.

And naturally, I had to look up “tickle my fancy” and got the following:

“This idiomatic expression is used when something pleases you or strongly engages your interest, though it can also be used as a euphemism for sexual pleasure or attraction. If you break down the phrase, tickle is used to mean 'to excite or stir up in a pleasing manner' (think of the smiling, laughing reaction of a person being physically tickled), and fancy as a noun that means “a notion or whim, a fantasy”. Dating at least from the late 1700s, tickle your fancy's original definition may have originally been closer to our modern euphemistic approach. After World War II, British English speakers began using it in a rhyming slang expression that associated a “nancy” (a male homosexual) with tickling your fancy (arousing you sexually or performing sexual acts with you). An alternate version is found in strike your fancy.

And a tip from my friend Carolyn from last week’s White Elephant. She checked Wikipedia and found that there really was a white elephant so the phrase also had a meaning of unique and special as well as referring to bric-a-brac.

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

From US journalist Earl Wilson: “If you look like your passport photo, in all probability you need the holiday.”