Slush Funds and Slush Piles

A timely repost from two years ago:

London thaws. Snow becomes slush. I nearly went my length today and as I tottered, windmilling my arms like a mad semaphorist and trying to defy Newton, I suddenly thought: "Why a slush fund?" And that question only led to "Why a slush pile?"

A slush pile, dear reader, is the pile of unasked for manuscripts that accumulates in the corner of a publisher's office until some semi-literate work experience girl is asked to read them and post them back wither they whenced. Was the slush in slush pile purely derogotary, I wondered? Or was there some sense in which frozen writing was slowly thawing?

Once upon a time slush was just melting snow - either from some Scandy language or simply onomatopoeic - but then in 1869 the Oracle came along. The Oracle was Mark Twain's nickname for a pompous travelling companion he had on a cruise of the Mediterranean. In Innocents Abroad the Oracle describes poets thuslyly:

I never see one of them poets yet that knowed anything. He'll go down now and grind out about four reams of the awfullest slush about that old rock [Gibraltar at sunset] and give it to a consul, or a pilot, or a nigger, or anybody he comes across first which he can impose on. Pity but somebody'd take that poor old lunatic and dig all that poetry rubbage out of him. Why can't a man put his intellect onto things that's some value? Gibbons, and Hippocratus, and Sarcophagus, and all them old ancient philosophers was down on poets

We can deduce two things from this: that slush must already have been American slang for drivel, and that poets haven't changed much.

We imported this sense of slush quite quickly and by 1896 The Times was saying that the campaign against capital punishment was "steeped in a sloppy and slushy sentimentalism". Now there's clearly an alliterative bias in the choice of words here right down to the sl, but some sense is implied, I think, of the inchoate nature of slush: ice, water and dirt all mixed together. Inchoate, slushy sentiment is set against ordered, frozen reason. From this we seem to have got the sense of a slushy novel and from that (I'm theorising, of course) we would get the slush pile.

However, on consideration I think it more likely that I've been wasting your time. It could simply be that the snow piled at the side of the road is the last survivor of a thaw and so a slush pile would be the ignored and bothersome stuff that has been put to one side waiting to miserably disappear.

As for a slush fund, that's quite different. That's fat. There's a rule of etymology that pretty much all words are somehow maritime in origin. As Churchill almost put it "Don't talk to me about naval tradition. It's nothing but rum philology and the lash." [comma deliberately omitted] Anyway, in the eighteenth century sailors used to keep all the fat that boiled off their meat rations. They called it slush, perhaps because it sloshed around. When the ship got to port they would sell all their slush (don't ask me to whom) and the money would be divided among the ship's officers. Hence slush fund.

In case you cared - and I am confident you don't - I recovered my balance and, with cautious steps and slow, through London took my solitary way.

Everybody gathered round to hear Nelson inventing a word

P.S. Apparently Churchill did not say "rum, sodomy and the lash", although he wished he had, and Bismarck never said "A language is a dialect with a navy". Ah well.

All Washed Up

I had always thought that when somebody is all washed up, finished, past his sell-by date, a nobody etc, that the reason he is washed up is that he resembles the flotsam and jetsam washed up on a beach. He has been deposited by the high tide of fame upon the shores of obscurity.

I was wrong. The washing up here, is the same one that you do with dirty dishes.

You see, you wash up dishes once you're finished with them. Similarly, when an actor has finished his show he washes up i.e. he gets the make-up off his face and cleans the thespian grease from his hands.

The OED quotes the following extract from a 1925 article in the World newspaper, which, as the title doesn't suggest, reported New York stage gossip. Here an Italian performer with a trained canary is being fired.

‘That guy might be all right if he washed up,’ commented Buck.... Just then the stage manager called out: ‘What will I do with this act, Mr. Ziegfeld?’ ‘Wash up him and the bird,’ said Flo [Ziegfeld] and that was the last of the Italian and his trained canary... Hype Igoe, the World's sporting writer, heard of the incident... and in commenting... upon Frank Moran, heavy weight pugilist, advised that matchmakers ‘wash him up’. The phrase caught the sporting fancy‥and has become a colloquial fixture... as a meaty synonym for finals and farewell.

I can't find the full original, but I have conceived a sudden desire to start training a canary.

You're all fired.

An Egg Dance

Over on the Dear Dogberry page, a reader has asked why we have the phrase walking on eggshells when walking on eggs would make much more sense. For myself, I can't understand why you would do either. However, upon investigation I've discovered that walking on eggs was the original version of the phrase. The OED records it from 1734, where as the walking on eggshell doesn't pop up until 1860.

A much more amusing variant is a thing called an egg dance, which can be performed at home, but probably not on your best carpet. All you'll need is a bunch of eggs, which you arrange on the floor, and a blindfold, which you put over your eyes. You now dance around trying not to tread upon any eggs however lightly.

Egg dancing gets a mention in a sixteenth century play called The Longer Thou Livest, The More Fool Thou Art.

Upon my one foot prettily can I hop
And dance it trimly about an egg.

And there's a good description of it from 1801:

This performance was common enough about thirty years back, and was well received at Sadler's Wells; where I saw it exhibited, not by simply hopping round a single egg, but in a manner that much increased the difficulty. A number of eggs, I do not precisely recollect how many, but I believe about twelve or fourteen, were placed at certain distances marked upon the stage; the dancer taking his stand, was blind-folded, and a hornpipe being played in the orchestra, he went through all the paces and figures of the dance, passing backwards and forwards between the eggs without touching one of them.

As you can imagine, an egg-dance became a byword for any intricate and difficult task, and makes a lot more sense than walking on either eggs or eggshells.

Scrambled eggs at the Inky Fool offices

P.S. The first part of the Etymologicon was read out by Hugh Dennis on Radio 4 this morning. You can listen to it by following this link.

Skinning a Flint

The other day I happened to use the word skinflint, and even as the word was popping out of my mouth, it occurred to me to wonder where on earth it had come from. Does it meant that you're flinty-skinned? Or that you have such a lean and hungry look that it appears that your skin is drawn over flintlike bones?

It turns out that neither is the case. Instead, there is a dead phrase whose cadaver lurks in that word. Once upon a time, avaricious people were said to be so greedy that they would skin a flint for its hide. Presumably, back when central heating was expensive and furry animals were abundant, people would occasionally skin dogs and cats (there's more than one way to do this) and, I imagine, even mice and rats in order to save money at the tailor. The absurd pinnacle of such skinning would be the attempt to skin a flint.

Daniel Defoe wrote a book called the Complete English Tradesman (1727), in which he warns that a successful merchant is liable to end up with the following reputation:

That he has been a Hard-Head, a Devourer, a Jew; for these, and more such are the general Titles by which such Tradesmen are usually distinguished and known; that he will let no Body live by him, that he will skin a Flint, that he will buy cheaper than any Man can fell, and sell dearer than any Man can buy; that he cares not who sinks if he can but swim; that he grinds the Faces of his Workmen, and will hardly let a poor Man live by his Labour: Thus he has got what he has by griping and squeezing of labouring Men; and that it will never thrive with him, and the like.

There was even a sister phrase to flay a flint and a later American variant that he would skin a flea for its hide and tallow. All lost and gone to the great phrasebook in the sky.

P.S. For those of you who live within striking distance of Islington, I will be along for the author evening at the Waterstones on Islington Green tomorrow (Wednesday) night. Essentially, there'll be mince pies and wine from 5 till 8 and all are welcome and I undertake to sign copies of The Etymologicon with any personalised dedication that your big heart requires.

Bring me my best skinning-knife.

Currying Favour and Curried Horses

It's a little odd that even at the finest of Indian restaurants you can't order a curried favour. In fact, currying favour gets odder the more you look at the phrase. That's because favour isn't favour. It's a horse.

Once upon a time, six or seven hundred years ago there was a French allegorical poem called the Roman de Fauvel. It's about a horse called Fauvel who leaves his stable, moves into the biggest room in his master's house, and installs a custom made hayrack.

The point of the allegory is that the second the horse appears to be in charge everybody suddenly wants to be his friend. People come from far and wide to groom Fauvel.

For some reason this story was immensely popular and got translated into English, with the name Fauvel unchanged. However, the English word for grooming a horse was currying. It's a verb that is, apparently, still used in equestrian circles*. Thus a phrase developed. Anybody who sycophantically went round trying to be nice to a lord was said to be currying fauvel.

However, once the old French allegory had been forgotten, the idea of currying fauvel started to look rather odd. What the hell was a fauvel? Nobody knew any more.

Confusion about the phrase lasted until 1560 when the Geneva Bible came up with this line:

He thoght by this meanes to courry fauour with the worlde

It makes sense. Nobody knew what a fauvel was, but everybody knew that a sycophant wants a favour. So every since then favours have been curried and patronage has been vindalooed.

And here is the original favour being curried.

*I have never moved in equestrian circles myself. I can't seem to maintain a stable relationship.

P.S. There's an article about my book, The Etymologicon, in today's Sun.

Leaving in the Lurch

The other day, I was promising not to leave a friend in the lurch when I noticed that I had no idea what a lurch was or how, exactly, you could be in one. I like to keep my promises nebulous.

I had always thought that leaving in the lurch had something to do with lurching back and forth, or that political favourite: a sickening lurch to the right.

However, sideways lurching is of nautical origin and has nothing to do with being in or out of the lurch. This latter lurch is helpfully defined in John Florio's 1598 Worlde of Words:

Marcio, a lurch or maiden set at any game.

A lurch is a score in a game, specifically it's a thrashing where one player doesn't win even a single point. If I beat you at tennis by a game to love that's a lurch. In fact, there are all sorts of terribly technical variants. In the game of cribbage a lurch involves scoring 61 before your opponent has scored 31. In whist it's something else, and in some sport it means scoring five before the other player scores one.

Anyway, lurch became a term for any uncomfortable pickle or scrape that you might find yourself in. And thus you can have a chap at your lurch, give a chap the lurch, or leave somebody in the lurch.

Now, if you're British, go and get yourself a copy of today's Times. If you turn to page 30 you'll see Matthew Parris writing about my book The Etymologicon, which is out in three week's time, but can, as you'll know, be pre-ordered here.

The Inky Fool prepares for a comeback

Red Herrings

Yesterday, I explained how harking back was to do with calling back dogs who have lost the trail of scent. Harking back is thoroughly necessary when the dogs are following a red herring. Hounds love the smell of a good red herring. Thomas Nashe observed, back in 1599, that:

Next, to draw on hounds to a sent, to a redde herring skinne there is nothing comparable.

So, if you want to lead a dog astray the best thing to do is to drag a red herring along the ground, thus making a false trail of scent for them to run after. It appears that this was originally done just to give the dogs and horses some exercise. You laid out a herring trail and then went for a jolly good gallop. This from the Gentleman's Recreation of 1697:

Now, that I may not leave you in Ignorance what a Train-scent is, I shall acquaint you that it has its Name as I suppose, from the Manner of it, viz. the trailing or dragging of a dead Cat or Fox (and in Case of Necessity a Red-herring) three or four Miles, (according to the Will of the Rider, or the Directions given him) and then laying the Dogs on the Scent.

Nineteenth century huntsmen, though, got wilier. They used red herrings as deliberate distractions to train hounds to follow the original scent. They would lay out one scent of proper prey, and then drag a red herring across it. If the dogs followed the red herring they were harked back to the original trail.

So in 1836 The Times could write metaphorically that:

Mr. Rice called Lord Lyndhurst's intimation that the Government might take off the whole of the stamp duty ‘a false drag—the scent of a red-herring to draw off the hounds’.

And thus the modern red herring. There is also a phrase 'Neither fish, nor fowl nor good red herring.' But nobody knows where that comes from at all.

And now go and look at this on Facebook: Waterstones are giving away advanced copies of my book! I saw the first copies yesterday and they are more beautiful than all other things on earth. So go to Waterstones and like it all those other facebiblical things that folk do.

Fishing with the Inky Fool

Bob's Your Uncle

As a follow on from yesterday's post on avuncular nepotism, here's a brief account of exactly why Bob is your uncle.

It should be noted that there are several theories for this, and a new one is invented every week, but the standard line* is that it refers to the political career of Arthur Balfour. Balfour was Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1902 to 1905, which, given the size of the British Empire, made him pretty much the most powerful man in the world. However, it was not always thus. When he was first elected to parliament in 1874 he was considered a bit of a joke; and when he was suddenly made Chief Secretary for Ireland in 1887, everybody thought that it was rampant nepotism because the prime minister who promoted him was his uncle, Robert Cecil.

So, Balfour's easy success was down to the fact that Bob [Cecil] was his uncle.

As I said, there are a bunch of other theories, partially because the earliest written reference comes in 1931. However, if you wanted to know what Uncle Bob looked like, you should (probably) see the picture below.

*Despite what a citationless Wikipedia article may tell you.

Hanging Out with Pickwick

There's a strange feeling that you get when you're reading an old novel and find what you thought was a new phrase. Take, for example, hanging out. It's a phrase that I would have imagined was invented by surfers in the 1960s. So when you come across it in Dickens' Pickwick Papers from 1837 it feels decidedly odd:

Mr. Bob Sawyer, thrusting his forefinger between two of Mr. Pickwick's ribs, and thereby displaying his native drollery, and his knowledge of the anatomy of the human frame, at one and the same time, inquired—


'I say, old boy, where do you hang out?' Mr. Pickwick replied that he was at present suspended at the George and Vulture.

Not only was the phrase around, but it was familiar and annoying enough to be parodied. In fact, hang out comes from the idea of hanging out a sign to show that you're there for business. The same thing once struck me when I was reading Great Expectations. Wemmick is miserable and tells Pip:

"It's a bad job," said Wemmick, scratching his head, "and I assure you I haven't been so cut up for a long time."

Pickwick Papers also contains a character called Mr Phunky, which may be a forerunner of our more modern term. It was only eight years later, in 1845, that a writer called Samuel Naylor was able to pen the immortal line:

I do feel somewhat funky.

Anyway, here's a recording of an interview with Mr Pickwick.

Zugzwang, the devil, and Beowulf

Zugzwang is a chess term. When any move you can make will land you in more trouble, that's a zugzwang. It's from the German for move (zug) and compulsion (zwang). But try saying it aloud. It's glorious. It has a sort of back-and-forth motion to it.

Essentially, zugzwang is the same as being caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, except that it implies more options. The misery and melancholy of the zugzwang can extend in every direction.

Incidentally, you may have been wondering why I didn't capitalise the devil in devil and the deep blue sea. The reason is that the phrase has nothing whatsoever to do with his satanic majesty. Like so many phrases it's nautical.

The devil of a ship is, according to Smyth's Sailor's Word-Book (1867),

The seam which margins the waterways on a ship's hull 

Which means that it's a strip on the outside of the ship, just above the waterline. Occasionally, sailors used to be sent down to caulk the devil, which was a very precarious job because you were caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.

That, in turn reminds me of one of the finest moments in Anglo-Saxon poetry, with which I shall leave you for today. It's from Beowulf and describes the lake where Grendel and his mother live. Here's Seamus Heaney's translation:

A few miles from here
A frost-stiffened wood waits and keeps watch
Above a mere; the overhanging bank
Is a maze of tree-roots mirrored in its surface.
At night there, something uncanny happens:
The water burns. And the mere-bottom
Has never been sounded by the sons of men.
On its bank, the heather-stepper halts:
The hart in flight from pursuing hounds
Will turn to face them with firm-set horns
And die in the wood rather than the dive
Beneath its surface. That is no good place.

Which is classic case of elaphine zugzwang.

Poor bit of a ship.

(Incidentally, I wrote about this song before. Link here.)

The Four Corners of the Earth

And he shall set up an ensign for the nations, and shall assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth.

So said Isaiah (11v12) and it's rather odd, because at first sight it would appear to contradict the newfangled theory that the earth is round. When you think about it more, though, it becomes yet odder, because it seems to suggest that the earth is not simply flat, it's square.

So did the ancient Hebrews believe that the earth was square? No. The Hebrew word here is kanaph which means, among other things, quarter. It's the four quarters of the earth: North, South, East and West.

So were the sixteenth century translators of the Bible twisting things to make it look as though the earth was square? No. Back then corner didn't have to mean corner in the modern sense. It could also have this definition from the OED:

...a region, quarter; a direction or quarter from which the wind blows (obsolete)

Winds could come from different corners, meaning quarters or points of the compass. So in the gulling scene in Much Ado About Nothing you can get this exchange:

LEONATO No, nor I neither; but most wonderful that she should so dote on Signior Benedick, whom she hath in all outward behaviors seemed ever to abhor.


BENEDICK Is't possible? Sits the wind in that corner?

It's hard to find any civilisation that ever definitely believed the earth was flat. Not only did the ancients know it was round, but a clever chap called Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the earth with an error of only 2%.

The Medievals knew it too. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville* (C14th) says clearly that "the world is quite round" and "those men who live right under the Antarctic Pole [star] are foot against foot to those who live right below the Arctic Pole [star], just as we and those who live at our Antipodes are foot against foot." Because antipodes means foot against foot.

Mandeville then writes:

I have often thought of a story I have heard, when I was young, of a worthy man of our country who went once upon a time to see the world. He passed India and many isles beyond India, where there are more than 5,000 isles, and travelled so far by land and sea, girdling the globe, that he found an isle where he heard his own language being spoken. For he heard one who was driving a plough team say such words to them as he had heard men say to oxen in his own land when they were working at the plough. He marvelled greatly, for he did not understand how this could be. But I conjecture that he had travelled so far over land and sea, circumnavigating the earth, that he had come to his own borders; if he had gone a bit farther, he would have come to his own district. But after he heard that marvel, he could not get transport any farther, so he turned back the way he had come; so he had a long journey! Afterwards it happened that he went to Norway, and a gale blew him off course to an island. And when he was there he knew it was the island he had been in before and heard his own language, as the beasts were being driven. That could well be, even if men of limited understanding do not believe that men can travel on the underside of the globe without falling off into the firmament. For just as it seems to us that those men there are under us, so it seems to them that we are under them.

The truth is out there.

*One of my favourite books.

Thinking Inside The Box

The Guardian has a list of of the most annoying and hackneyed words and phrases in English. You can take a look at it here. The first on the list, chosen by Adam Horowitz, is thinking outside the box. Indeed, he suggests that anybody who uses the phrase should be sealed in a box.

I hated this phrase too, until I learned where it comes from. And I can therefore inform you all that the box referred to is, in fact, a square.

The phrase originates in a rather clever puzzle that was thought up in 1914, which I shall replicate here. Try and join all nine dots in the picture below using only four straight lines and without taking your pen from the paper (or computer screen).

Simple, isn't it?

What? No?

Well, try thinking outside the box.
Solution here.

 

Pandora thinking outside the box