Monday's Words - 'Upper Crust'

"Historical writers sometimes refer to the upper classes as 'the upper crust', but have you ever wondered where the term came from?  According to *Michael Quinion, in his 'World Wide Words' site, one suggestion is:

"......the old method of baking bread in an oven. This was heated by burning dry twigs in it and after raking out the ashes, the bread dough was put in to bake. The bottom of the resulting loaf was over-baked because it was sitting on the hot oven floor; ashes also stuck to it. The upper crust was properly baked, however, and was obviously more desirable......

......Tourist guides will explain that the upper crust was reserved for the master and mistress of the household and that the term "upper crust" was transferred to its consumers. The first part is probably true but the second isn't. There's no evidence for the term having evolved as a reference to the better bits of bread being reserved
for the highest-ranking members of a household, apart from a much-quoted oblique reference in John Russell's Book of Nurture of 1460, which reads, in modern English: "Cut the upper crust [of the loaf]
for your sovereign".

There have been other senses of "upper crust". The most common in the eighteenth century was of the upper surface of the earth and by analogy the crust that forms on the surface of partially melted and refrozen snow or on the mud of a partially dried-out pond. In the early nineteenth century, it became slang for a hat or the head......

...... "upper crust" was initially low slang, an insulting reference to people who considered themselves a cut above the rest. By this time, "upper crust" was so fixed a phrase in various senses that it's doubtful whether a direct mental link with bread was in its coiners' minds. The stress here was on "upper", as a symbol of
supposed superiority.

Even though it was originally British, it rapidly spread to North America and later to the rest of the English-speaking world; in the process it shifted sense to refer to those who were actually at the top of the social pyramid, the "quality", though never quite losing its derogatory implications."

Have you ever used the phrase 'upper crust' yourself? And if so do you have any other ideas as to its possible origins?

'STARQUEST'    'CHILDREN OF THE MIST'  (The sequel to Starquest)  Dancing With Fate      'Freeread':'A BARGAIN WITH DEATH 'STARQUEST'    'CHILDREN OF THE MIST'  (The sequel to Starquest)  Dancing With Fate      'Freeread':'A BARGAIN WITH DEATH'
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*World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2011. All rights reserved. The Words website is at http://www.worldwidewords.org .

Monday's Word - Tagarene

http://www.flickr.com/photos/morten_liebach/

No, that's not my desk. (Although I have to admit there are times when it gets pretty close to it.)

This is a good illustration of 'Tagarene' (or clutter)

My source of wisdom when it comes to all things wordly, Michael Quinion* states:

"You're unlikely to know this word - variously spelled - unless you come from north-east England, especially the Newcastle area. But it
does occasionally pop up in prose that gains a wider audience..."
"...A tagarene shop was a kind of junk shop, sometime specialising in old clothes but often carrying a much wider range of miscellaneous oddments, particularly marine scrap. The tagarene man who ran it
did much of his trade with ships..."

"...Such collections of bric-a-brac, oddments and general detritus were likely to have made a tagarene shop an excessively untidy place and it's easy to see how the phrase came to refer to a muddle.

Nobody knows its origin. The Oxford English Dictionary tentatively suggests it's based on "tag". Local people remember "tagger" in the sense of marine scrap, though the evidence doesn't show whether it's the origin of "tagarene" or a shortening of it. One suggestion is that it's Arab in origin. Some Moors in north Africa have that name; it's been proposed that it was adopted by them after they had been expelled from Spain in medieval times. (A link to "Tangerine", a person from Tangiers, which gave its name to the orange exported from that city, is improbable.) It's unlikely to be true, but the suggestion isn't as daft as it sounds, because the Newcastle area has long had an Arab community."


So, is your desk clean or a bit of a tagarine? And do you find it easier to write in a clutter, or have everything on your desk neat and tidy?


*World Wide Words is copyright © Michael Quinion 2011. All rights reserved The  original post can be found at:  http://www.worldwidewords.org

Have a great week folks - and if you missed Smashwords' half price offer on Dancing With Fate, drop me a line a Lyn at hywelalyn dot co dot UK and I'll send you a discount coupon.

You can now also purchase a digitally signed E-copy of Starquest or Children Of The Mist at Kindle.  (You'll need to sign in with 'Twitter')

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Monday's Word: Brotch

One of the most idyllic places to set your romatic novel would surely be a thatched cottage - which brings me nicely to today's word, 'brotch'.

According to *Michael Quinion, in his 'Word Wide Words, the 'yealms', or individual bundles of straw that are laid onto a roof in the thatching process, are
'fixed in place by hazel sticks called brotches, a
word that was once commonly spelled "broach" or "broche" and which could mean a pointed device of several kinds. It's the same word as "brooch" for the ornamental pin.

Now who wouldn't want to spend a romantic weekend in a cottage like this? I'm not sure I'd even be thinking about how the roof was constructed.:)

*World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2011. All rights
reserved. The original article is at the Words website  at http://www.worldwidewords.org





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Monday's word - Pottage

Borrowing from my favourite 'Wordsmith' Michael Quinnion, here's one for those of you who write historical fiction.


POTTAGE
Here's what he says:

"Old-time cookery could at its best be as sophisticated in its own way as ours is today, but for ordinary people it often consisted of variations on the theme of putting ingredients in a pot of water
and boiling them. The name of one such ancient dish appears in a moderately well-known expression:

    Ford was certain of only one thing: he did not intend to ... sell humanity's birthright for a mess of
    pottage.
    [Methuselah's Children, by Robert Heinlein, 1963.]"
(Great book that, by the way, if you enjoy Science Fiction!)

He goes on: Those who know the Bible will recognise the allusion to the story of Jacob and Esau in Chapter 25 of Genesis. The expression "sell one's birthright for a mess of pottage" isn't in the 1611 King
James Bible, but is a heading in the 1560 Geneva Bible.  Pottage
comes from French "potage", a word that may still be found on the
menus of posh English restaurants, which meant something put into a
pot, hence a stew - the Biblical original was made from lentils...

...Pottages were important in medieval cookery - pottage, bread and ale were the staples for much of the population. For ordinary people pottages were often no more than oatmeal, stewed roots or boiled vegetables, as in the pease pottage that some of us remember from the children's rhyme:

    Pease pottage hot,
    Pease pottage cold,
    Pease pottage in a pot,
    Nine days old.
    ["Pease", from Old English "pise", peas, is the  original form, usually plural, that led to "pea" being
    mistakenly created as the singular.]

If you'd like to know more about this interesting word the full version on on Michael Quinnion's site here:

http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/prbv.htm#N2


*World Wide Words is copyright © Michael Quinion 2011. All rights reserved The  original post can be found at:  http://www.worldwidewords.org

I'd be interested to know if my American friends know this word - I certainly remember the rhyme from my childhood in Wales, but wonder if it's travelled across the pond?

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Monday's Words Sphexish

Well it's June already, and although it's not as hot as it has been, as soon as we get a spell of warm dry weather, no doubt the garden will be invaded by wasps, which brings me to today's word, courtesy of Michael Quinion.

"Scholars of ancient languages will immediately spot that this word has something to do with a wasp, since "sphex" is the name of that 

insect in classical Greek. In more modern times, it has been given 

to a genus of solitary digger wasps. Therein lies a tale.

When such a wasp returns to its burrow with a paralysed cricket to 

feed its grubs, it will leave it at the entrance while it checks 

inside that all is well. It then comes out again and drags its prey 

inside. This gave a naturalist with a cruel streak an idea for a 

bit of behavioural research. He moved the cricket a little way away 

while the wasp was in its burrow. When the it surfaced and found 

its cricket was missing, it searched for it and returned it to the 

entrance to its burrow. It then repeated its search of the inside. 

No matter how many times the cricket was moved, the wasp repeated 

the same steps robotically without working out what was going on.

Douglas Hofstadter recounted the story in one of his Metamagical 

Themas columns in Scientific American in 1982 and coined "sphexish" 

for this unthinking deterministic or pre-programmed behaviour, in 

which the wasp was at the mercy of its instincts and environment. 

In a book derived from his columns, Hofstadter later suggested that 

humans might likewise exhibit such robotic behaviour: "

(I feel sorry for the cricket).


Now there's an idea for a Science Fiction story.  Hang on though. Most days I get up and before I even have my breakfast, immediately switch on my computer and check my emails. Even though I've made a resolution to write for two hours before looking at my emails, I still do it - I just can't bear the thought I might miss something important!  Oh dear that sounds ditsinctly sphexish, doesn't it!

*World Wide Words is copyright © Michael Quinion 2011. All rights reserved The  original post can be found at:  http://www.worldwidewords.org

Monday's word - CAD

Not the hero of your average romantic novel - but he might be the villain. 

 My source of wisdom on all wordy things, Michael Quinion, has this to say: 

"A man who behaves dishonourably, especially towards a woman...




Cad is the classic British contemptuous epithet of the nineteenth century....

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 work 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 one of those new-fangled London omnibuses, 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 and by about 1840 it had achieved its full flowering as a term for a man whose behaviour was unacceptable."

So if you're writing a Victorian romance, remember the cad, he might be just the character you need to show up your hero's uncaddish qualities. What do you think?

*World Wide Words is copyright © Michael Quinion 2011. All rights reserved The  original post can be found at:   http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-cad3.htm

MONDAY'S WORD - THE WHOLE SHEBANG

 I often use this phrase - 'THE WHOLE SHEBANG:

 Dictionary definition:

An entire system;

but hadn't given much thought as to its origins, until I came across it in Michael Quinion's World Wide Words.

He has this to say about it:

"It's possible to say a surprising amount about this American expression, though nobody has yet unequivocally traced it to its source.

It starts to appear in printed sources in the early 1860s, as a term on the frontier and among the military for what Samuel Bowles described in his book of 1865, Across the Continent, as "any kind of an establishment, store, house, shop [or] shanty". One type of establishment was an inn or saloon, a use of "shebang" that was previously known only from later in the century but which I have now found from the 1860s. This is the earliest so far:

    'Along all the roads on the reservation to all the  mines, at the crossing of every stream or fresh-water spring, and near the principal Indian villages, an inn or  "shebang" is established, ostensibly for the entertainment of travellers, but almost universally used  as a den for supplying liquor to Indians.
[Annual Report of the US Department of the Interior, 1862.]'

It was also a term of frontiersmen for a shanty or rough cabin and by soldiers (this is the Civil War period, remember) for a bivouac or other temporary accommodation. The poet Walt Whitman wrote in his diary in December 1862 about the terrible conditions of the soldiers following the first battle of Fredericksbug, often living in "shebang enclosures of bushes"...

...As some very early examples refer to drinking establishments, it is tempting to look to the Irish "shebeen", an unlicensed and often disreputable drinking place (in origin the Anglo-Irish síbín, from séibe, a mugful) as its origin. A shift from "shebeen" to "shebang" has been seriously suggested by the experts and seems to be a very plausible origin...

Whatever the source, "shebang" took on yet a third sense early on to mean something like "the business" or "the current concern", so leading to "the whole shebang", the entire setup, or whole affair or matter...
 ...The most likely source is again military. Officers are recorded during the Civil War as "running the shebang" (for example in a diary of 1864 reproduced in Susanne Wilson's compilation Column South of 1960), in which "shebang" seems to refer to the whole of an encampment or other military establishment, a straightforward
extension of the idea of a single bivouac."

Isn't that interesting.  Do you use this phrase, and if so have you any other ideas as to its origins?

*World Wide Words is copyright © Michael Quinion 2011. All rights reserved The  original post can be found at:   http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/ibvg.htm

Monday's word

 Spaghettification!

 Now what on Earth do you think that weird word means? Not what you might think.  In fact it's loosely connected to my favourite sub-genre, science fiction, although it is an actual scientific phenomenon.

According to Michael Quinion*:
 
 "It has nothing to do with Italian cuisine but refers to what happens to anobject that is caught in the gravitational field of a black hole.Some theories hold that it is stretched vertically and compressed
horizontally until it looks like a length of spaghetti. The term has been around for at least a decade and is said to derive from acomment by Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time that an
astronaut passing through the event horizon of a black hole would  be 'stretched like spaghetti'."

Hmm, I'd better be careful when I send my hero to inspect a black hole then, it may not be the handy portal to another universe he'd hoped for!

(That's not an actual black hole in the picture, by the way, nor is it a weird sort of celestial eye -  just my attempt to illlustrate this post.  An actual black hole is so dense that nothing, not even light, can escape from it, so it's invisible in the blackness of space.)

*World Wide Words is copyright © Michael Quinion 2011. All rights reservedThe  original post can be found at:
http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/lxux.htm

Monday's Word - SIDEKICK

 As writers, we often introduce a 'sidekick' into our stories.  Even if we're writing romance, the sub genres, mystery, suspense, and especially fantasy or Science Fiction, Western Historicas, often need someone at the hero or heroine's side, to assist them on their quest, and sometimes to provide a little comic relief.  But do you know where the term 'Sidekick' orginated from?  Well, according to Michael Quinion in his 'World Wide Words'
 
"Scott W Langill recalled a book of the 1930s by a
pickpocket that mentioned this and noted that the side pocket - the side kick - was the hardest pocket to pick and that the slang term for a buddy and its connotation of trustworthiness both came from it. You may judge the etymological insight of the writer from his view that the rear trouser pocket, in pickpockets' slang called the "prat", was the origin of "prat fall".

It's the other way around -"prat", as a slang term for a buttock, dates from about 1560 and the hip-pocket sense is twentieth century. Unfortunately for the tellers of trouser pocket tales, "kick" for a pocket was British slang, not American, whereas the buddy meaning of "sidekick" is definitely from the US.

Others mentioned several specialist uses of "kicker" that might have contributed to its meaning. One is the poker sense of a side card that breaks a tie. Another is the printer's sense of a device that after a set count of pages pushes one slightly to the side so pages can be easily counted or separated into sets.

A third is that the original sidekicks would have ridden horses, encouraged by kicks to their sides, so a sidekick was one who rode alongside you. "

So what do you think, which of the theories would you subscribe to? 

Myself, I think all three have something going for them - although as a 'horseperson' I'm not too keen about people 'kicking' their horses sides - a gentle nudge with the heel is all that should be necessary, but that's another topic altogether!


Reproduced with permission
*World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2010. All rights reserved. The Words Website is at: http://www.worldwidewords.org/

Tolfaedic

 Welcome to Monday morning at my blog.  Sit down and help yourself to cakes.  You notice there are thirteen, just to make sure, in case anyone feels short changed.  Which leads me nicely into today's word courtesy of Michael Quinion*

"In centuries past, merchants selling goods by number often supplied
a larger quantity than the nominal total. The baker's dozen of 13
is well known. Less so is the measure of 120, which was once known
variously as the great hundred, long hundred or small gross.

The number 120 is the result of measuring items by twelves rather than by tens, a survival of the duodecimal system used by many civilisations in antiquity and of which relics like the dozen and the gross still survive. It's known, though very rarely, as the"tolfraedic" system. In origin the word is Icelandic, from "tólf",twelve, plus "ráða", to speak. Relatives of the term were used in Iceland and throughout Scandinavia to distinguish between hundredsthat were ten tens and hundreds that were ten twelves (in Icelandic called "tolfrátt hundrað").

The long hundred was so widely used at one time in England that aproverb was created to remind people that:

Five score's a hundred of men, money and pins; sixscore's a hundred of all other things.
[Quoted in Curiosities in Proverbs, by Dwight Edwards
Marvin, 1916.]

It was common, as just one example out of many, to sell nails bythis measure (though why pins weren't is a curiosity now lost inhistory). The medieval Anglo-Saxon Chronicle even stated that theyear is 305 days long. This wasn't an astronomical error, but thetolfraedic system in action. Three long hundreds is 360; add in the
extra five and you have the usual year length."

So now, if anyone asks you how many days are in a year, you can say 305, and explain you're counting in 'Long Hundreds'!

*World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2010. All rights reserved. The Words Web site is at http://www.worldwidewds.
Reproduced with permission

Monday's word - straddle

 No, I'm not straddling a fence or anything like that!  This is a word that Michael Quinion has featured in his 'Worldwide Words this week:
 "Readers of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy may recognise this as the name of one of the villages of the Bree Land. It suggests the strength and stoutheartedness of a people who for him meant all that was solid and dependable about traditional England. Like most of Tolkien's words, it's no accident. He was borrowing an Old English word that meant variously a foundation or support.

We've almost entirely lost it today, though it survived for some centuries in English dialect, most commonly in the south of the country. One sense was of a stump of a tree that was left in the ground after felling so that a clump of thin stems could grow from
it, a technique called coppicing. It could also refer to a tree left in place when all around had been felled, so that it would grow to full size, called a standard, unencumbered by neighbours. The connection between these senses is that one form of woodland
management was called "coppice with standards", which combined the two methods. "Staddle" seems to have been used indiscriminately for
both components.

The sense you're most likely to encounter, however, especially if you visit a museum of historic buildings, is of a stone carved in the shape of a mushroom, with a conical stem and a wide rounded top. This isn't a staddle, strictly speaking, but a staddle stone. It was one of the supports that kept the actual staddle, the wood or stone base of a hay rick or granary, clear of the ground.

I think this is a good example of names being used effectively, to give a place name a sense of purpose. It's also a word that you might find useful if you write historical fiction, to add touch of authenticity.


*World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2010. All rights reserved. The Words Web site is at http://www.worldwidewds.
Reproduced with permission

Mondays Word - Guddling

 I've given the blog a 'makeover'.  Do you like my new 'look' ?  Drop me a comment and let me know!

Monday's Word is Guddling.   A Fishing term.  Now it has to be said, the idea of catching a fish by fooling it with a few feathers and then piercing its mouth with a nasty, sharp hook, holds no appeal to me, mainly because I can't help sympathising with the poor creature.  However, 'tickling' a fish, especially if its for food, doesn't seem quite so cruel. This is what Michael Quinion* has to say about the practice.

"Guddlers live in difficult times, since the activity that goes by the name of guddling is illegal in many places, including the UKand most US states.


It's a method of fishing that requires only the bare hands, hencerather too convenient for poachers who find rods and tackle bothcumbersome and revealing. It's also called tickling and is linked in particular with fishing for trout. In parts of North America itspractitioners call it noodling, though they usually reserve it for hunting catfish, a beast so well equipped to fight back that to do so is to engage in an extreme sport.

'Trout guddling requires patience and skill: There had been a swift and noiseless rush underneath the stone; a few grains of sand rose up where the white under part of the trout had touched it as it glided beneath. Slowly and imperceptibly Winsome's hand worked its way beneath the stone. With the fingers of one hand she made that slight swirl of the water which is supposed by expert "guddlers" to fascinate the trout, and to render them incapable of resisting the beckoning fingers.

[The Lilac Sunbonnet, by S R Crockett, 1894.]'

The verb "guddle" has been most associated with Scotland, and maybe derived from Gaelic, though its antecedents are obscure."

I've always known the term as 'tickling'  so 'guddle' was a new word for my personal dicitionary!

*World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2010. All rights reserved. The Words Web site is at http://www.worldwidewords.org/

Monday's Word - Hyetal

There is a strange belief with some people that it always rains in my native Wales. Not true - and even if it were I would reply that it's what keeps Wales Green. In fact I remember summers as long and hot and sunny as one could wish for. However, be that as it may, I came across this in Michael Quinion's *'World Wide Words' which I thought rather interesting:

"You may wish to save this adjective for a rainy day, when you can enliven the inevitable discussion about the weather by dropping itinto the conversation. Do not, however, expect it to be understood,even though you're merely referring to rain...

'Hyetal' comes from Greek "huetos", rain, and is related to Greek"hyei", it is raining. It means "relating to rain". A hyetal chart is a rain chart; an isohyetal is a line on a map connecting placesof equal rainfall; a hyetograph is a self-registering rain gauge;and hyetology is the study of the geographical variation and annual
distribution of rainfall. Meteorologists, the main users of theword and its compounds, have extended the meaning to include all forms of precipitation."

Well, it could come in useful for scrabble contests!

*World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2010. All rights reserved. The Words Web site is at http://www.worldwidewords.org/

By the way, I'm guest blogging at Anna K Lanier's Blog today.  If you'd like to drop by and leave me a comment it'll stop me feeling too lonely!

Mondays Word - Tumbarumba

I'm not given to swearing on my blog, and no, a tumbarumba is not a swear word - but there is the word b----y a little further down, so if you're a sensitive soul, be warned! LOL

According to Michael Quinion, "A tumbarumba is not a belly-dance to South American music, as a contestant in an Australian words competition once suggested. Nor does it directly address the small Australian town of that name that lies south-west of Canberra in New South Wales...

"No, 'tumbarumba' is another name for tmesis, one form of which is that curious trick of stuffing one word into the middle of another. "Abso-bloody-lutely", "a whole nother", "fan-bloody-tastic" and "any-blooming-where" are classic cases, though many of the most powerful examples include the F-word. For a reason buried in local linguistic history it's a verbal tic Australians are fond of, who insert their favourite adjective, "bloody", to great effect. "


I also recall Eliza Doolittle used the device in the musical 'My Fair Lady "...Oh so luverly sitting abso-blooming-lutely-still..."

Michael Quinion says the origin of the term is disputed, which may be so, but what a fun word to play with!

What do red roses and candles have to do with 'tumbarumba'? I hear you ask. Abso-blooming-lutely-nothing - I'm just still in a bit of a Valentine's mood, that's all! (Don't forget the CRR Blog Carnival in the previous post!)

*World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2009. All rights reserved. The Words Web site is at http://www.worldwidewords.org/

Monday's Word

I haven't had a 'Mondays word for a couple of weeks, owing to Christmas and New Years posts taking precidence, however with the festivities over, I will once more wish everyone a joyous 2010 and get back to the 'usual format'.

As a fantasy/futuristic writer, I enjoy coming up with weird animals, especially if they have something about them that Earth bound readrs can recognise, without having to stretch their credulity too far. Of course there is a rich source of fabulous and mythical animals in literature and legends and I was interested in this creature which popped up in Michael Quinion's 'World Wide Words' this week, the manticore. The name can be traced back to an Old Persian word meaning a man-eater, and first appeared in English in John Trevisa's text. This is what else he has to say about it:

"This mythical beast is a favourite villain in fantasy stories and games, so much so that it is surely more widely known today than it has ever been. As one example, Harry Potter fans will know thatHagrid bred those nasty blast-ended skrewts from manticores.

The manticore was first mentioned in classical Greek writings 2,500 years ago, which reported rumours from the east. This is the way it was described in a famous medieval work by an English writer, which he based on Greek sources:

'It is said, that in India is a beast wonderly shapen, and is like to the bear in body and in hair, and to a man in face. And hath a right red head, and a full great mouth, and an horrible, and in either jaw three rows of teeth distinguished atween. The outer limbs thereof be as it were the outer limbs of a lion, and his tail is like to a wild scorpion, with a sting, and smiteth with hard bristle pricks as a wild swine, and hath an horrible voice, as the voice of a trumpet, and he runneth full
swiftly, and eateth men.'
(De Proprietatibus Rerum (On the Order of Things), by Bartholomaeus Anglicus, written about 1240. )"

Apparantly other writers and illustratorshave described the manticore as having wings, or the body of a tiger (which led to his name occasionally being rendered through folk etymology as "mantiger") he has been said to come from Africa as well as India.

All accounts agree that the manticore preyed on human flesh and would devour its victim leaving no trace behind - not a bad cover up for a murder in a fantasy story - at least it would give the poor old dragon a rest from being blamed for every mysterious disappearance!


(Illustration from Medieval Bestiary)


*World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2009. All rights reserved. The Words Web site is at http://www.worldwidewords.org

Monday's Word

This picture has absolutely nothing to do with this week's word, but I rather like it. It was taken at our local Christmas tree farm.

I'm quietly celebrating as yesterday I pushed over the 50,000 word mark for my NaNoWriMo. I have yet to validate it, but I'm quite pleased with myself, here were times I thought I'd 'Lost The Plot, but I managed to make up a nine thousand word deficit in two days, and the it all seemed to come together. Anyway, here is my gleaning from Michael Quinion's 'World Wide Words' site.

"TWINING A minor lexicographical result of the devastating floods in Cumbria last week has been the appearance in at least two UK national newspapers of the dialect word TWINE, to complain or whine ("Cumbrians are a unique breed. They say what they see. They are hands-on people. They will twine and moan but then they will just get on with it." - Metro, 23 November).

It was at one time widely known throughout Scotland and the north of England. By way of
another of its senses, to be fretful, ailing or sickly, it may be connected with "dwine", another dialect word, to pine or waste away, which is from an ancient Scandinavian source."



*World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2009. All rights reserved. The Words Web site is at http://www.worldwidewords.org

Monday's Word: Acersecomic

I love long hair. My heroine, Jess, in Starquest has long red hair. My heroine in 'Dancing With Fate, the Greek Muse Terpsichore, has long dark hair my heroine, Tamarith in the sequel to 'Starquest', 'Children Of The Mist', Tamarith has amazing black har which reaches to her feet.

I was therefore interested to know more about the word that appeared in Michael Quinion's 'World Wide Words' this week. 'Ascersecomic'.

He says (quote:) "The legitimacy of this word rests entirely on two appearances in dictionaries, in 1623 and 1656. It seems never to have been used seriously and ever since has been held up as an example of an odd word...

...It means a person whose hair has never been cut. Though that may appear comic to some, there's nothing humorous in its etymology. The word derives from the classical Latin "acersecomes", a long-haired youth, a word borrowed from an earlier Greek one that was
made up from "kome", the hair of the head (which is where "comic"comes from in the ending), "keirein", to cut short, and the prefix "a-", not. Though this sounds like a aged curmudgeon's way to talk about unkempt youngsters who weren't like that in his day, it was actually neutrally descriptive - it was usual for Roman and Greek youths to wear their hair long until they reached manhood.

Greek "kome" has given us one sense of "coma": a diffuse cloud of gas and dust surrounding the nucleus of a comet. The same "-comic" ending turns up in two terms that, if possible, are even rarer: "acrocomic", having hair at the tip, as in a goat's beard ("acro-"means tip) and "xanthocomic", a person with yellow hair (from Greek "xanthos", yellow)."

So there you have it, it would seem the term was orginally more likely to be applied to young men than women - but then a lot of us ladies have a soft spot for men with flowing locks!


*World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2009. All rights reserved. The Words Web site is at http://www.worldwidewords.org

Monday's Word - Abditory

This is another of those words I came across at Michael Quinion's* 'World Wide Words:

"abditory" according to Michael, " It's a hiding place, from Latin "abditorium",
a hiding place, whose source is "abdere", to put away or hide. It
appears in the story Instead of Evidence, in which explosive
devices were found in an abditory in a factory.

The Oxford English Dictionary notes its first example from 1658,
but it has never been in common use. Oddly, it is now more often
employed than at any time in its history, not only because of Rex
Stout but also by SF and fantasy authors, who have occasionally found it useful to help build a sense of otherness."

Well I have to admit I've never come across this word before, but next time my hero or heroine needs to hide something, they can secrete it in an 'abditory'!

By the way, the picture has nothing to do with today's word - I just like it!

*World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2009. All rights reserved. The Words Web site is at http://www.worldwidewords.org

MONDAY'S word

Not so much a word today, as a phrase.

"She would love him to the BITTER END"

Noting particularly unusual about that espression, you might think. But where did it orginate from?

The question of whether it originated in
nautical references to the end of mooring ropes that are attached to bitts, that is the posts on jetties and quaysides, was asled on Michael Quinion's 'World Wild Words'* recently.

Michael answered: "The idiom has had two senses. "To go on until the bitter end" today means that someone will persevere with something until it is quite finished, no matter how unpleasant or difficult that is. However, some dictionaries add a second sense: to continue to the last and direst extremity, such as total defeat or even death. The two are obviously linked, the former being a weaker version of the latter.

As you say, in nautical terminology the bitts are posts for fixing ropes to. The word is usually plural because bitts normally turn up in pairs, so that a sailor can speedily wind a rope around them in a figure of eight pattern to hold it fast without having to tie a knot. Alternatively, he can take a turn of a line around the bitts to control the rate at which he's paying it out. They're a standard part of shipboard equipment. They also turn up on quaysides, though
these are often larger and singular and are called bollards.

The word "bitt" may be Scandinavian, though nobody knows for sure. "Bitter" goes back to the early seventeenth century...

"Admiral William Smyth explained in The Sailor's Word-book in 1867 that "When a chain or rope is paid out to the bitter-end, no more remains to be let go." Hence, so the argument goes, the meaning of the idiom. But there's nothing that's necessarily unpleasant or difficult in that definition. And it's hard to imagine its giving rise to the second sense - the ultimate and direst end. Modern works usually say that the idiomatic meaning arose when a ship was trying to anchor but the water turned out to be deeper than expected; the whole cable would then be run out without the anchor touching ground.

"There is another possibility. Some larger dictionaries note this:

For the lips of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil: But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell.
[Proverbs 5:3-5, from the King James Bible, 1611.]

"It may well be that two distinct strands developed in parallel - a literal one from the maritime world and a figurative one based on the Biblical quotation. They may well have influenced each other. We have no way of knowing. But enough evidence exists for us to be able to say that it wasn't just a sailor's expression, conceivably even that the figurative meaning isn't nautical at all."

*Thanks to Michael Quinion of WORLD WIDE WORDS. World Wide Words is copyright (c) Michael Quinion 2009. All rights reserved. The Words Web site is at http://www.worldwidewords.org