Archives for June 2004

The Telegraph has begun a series of excerpts from Port Out, Starboard Home by Michael Quinion, to be published by Penguin at £12.99 on July 1 (in the UK, obviously). The first begins with a good summary of various wrong ideas people get about where words come from and continues with a discussion of the marvelous phrase “all mouth and trousers”

This strange expression comes from the north of England and is used, mainly by women in my experience, as a sharp-tongued and effective putdown of a certain kind of pushy, over-confident male. Proverbial expressions like this are notoriously hard to pin down: we have no idea exactly where it comes from nor when it first appeared, although it is recorded from the latter part of the 19th century onwards. However, we’re fairly sure that it is a pairing of “mouth”, meaning insolence or cheekiness, with “trousers”, a pushy sexual bravado. It’s a wonderful example of metonymy (“a container for the thing contained”).

The phrase seems to have become known, and surprisingly popular, among southern English writers in the last decades of the 20th century, perhaps as a result of the airing of a series of television comedies based in the North, such as the BBC’s Last of the Summer Wine. What is interesting about the saying from a folk etymological point of view is that its opaqueness has led its modern users to reinterpret it as “all mouth and no trousers”.

For example, an article in the Daily Record in 2002 quoted a Scottish politician as saying, “The First Minister is all mouth and no trousers”; a piece in the People newspaper described a pop group in the same terms; the Guardian in June 2002 said: “Bloody men. All mouth and no trousers.” It has reached the stage in which the older, non-negative form is in great danger of vanishing, though Australia and New Zealand seem to be staying with it (when they use it at all, which isn’t often).

Metropolitan writers are trying here to make sense of something obscure that they have not often heard in its native surroundings, and are getting it muddled. They confuse it with other put-downs that are conventionally phrased with a negative, such as “all talk and no action” or “all fur coat and no knickers”. To have no trousers on is not only embarrassing, the argument seems to go, but is a state in which one is not ready for action (outside the bedroom, that is).

It’s a pity it should be changing through ignorance. It’s a lovely phrase, as effective a snub as anyone could want – all the better for being slightly obscure – and it’s one that ought to be preserved pristine.

I look forward to forthcoming excerpts, and to the book. (Via Catalogue Blog.)

Music speaks for itself,
And needs no explanation
Or justification:
Either it is alive, or it is not.

The great soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy passed away yesterday at the painfully early age of 69 (Ben Ratliff has a good obituary in today’s NY Times) [archived]. I can’t communicate to you his keening, inimitable tone or explain how perfectly attuned he was to the oddly-angled music of Thelonious Monk (if you want to give him a try, there’s a list of recommendations here—I’d start with Reflections, whose plangent “Ask Me Now” and “Reflections” make my eyes smart every time); fortunately, as Ratliff says, he “insisted on a literary dimension to his work, incorporating texts by novelists, poets and philosophers,” so I can honor his memory by quoting a couple of poems he set so brilliantly on one of his best records, Owl (1977, available on the Saravah compilation Scratching the Seventies):

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Another new language blog, by Billy McCormac: “Lagomduktig documents my quest to unravel the mysteries of translating the Swedish language.” The title “is a combination of two more or less ‘untranslatable’ words: lagom (just enough, just right) and duktig (clever, smart).” If you have any interest in Swedish, check it out.

Update (June 2023). Lagomduktig gave up the ghost a little over a year later: “Both Paul and I are swamped with writing projects and other work, but we promise to get back to Lagomduktig as soon as possible.” Promises, promises…

I encountered a number of words new to me in an enigmatic post chez l’Eudæmoniste (chez whom there is nil postiche) that is either a riff on the word post itself or a gloomy meditation (or of course both). It consists of words and phrases built around the syllable post, beginning with the hapax postation (OED: ‘The placing of one thing after another’; only in 1607 Schol. Disc. agst. Antichr. i. ii. 95 The postation of the wine doth not preiudice it, therefore the postponing of the Crosse doth not preiudice it neither) and ending with a second hapax, postreme (‘Last, hindmost; absol. one who is last’: 1553 Bale Gardiner’s De vera Obed. G j b, They were counsailed of som bodye not to contende to be called supremes, as longe as they are still postremes), but the word that buttonholed me was postliminy, which turns out to mean ‘In Rom. Law, The right of any person who had been banished or taken captive, to assume his former civic privileges on his return home. Hence, in Internat. Law, The restoration to their former state of persons and things taken in war, when they come again into the power of the nation to which they belonged.’

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The ArtLex Art Dictionary has “definitions for more than 3,600 terms used in discussing visual culture, along with thousands of supporting images, pronunciation notes, great quotations and cross-references.” A sample entry:

Rayonism – A type of abstract or semi-abstract painting characterized by the fragmentation of forms into masses of slanting lines. It was practised from 1912-1914 by Natalya S. Goncharova (Russian-French, 1881-1962), Mikhail Larionov (Russian-French, 1881-1964), and a few other Russian painters. Larionov’s manifesto on Rayonism stated that it is a synthesis of Cubism, Futurism, and Orphism.” Aspects of each of those isms can indeed be seen in Rayonist paintings — Cubism’s breaking up of forms, Futurism’s movement of forms, and Orphism’s rich color. In addition, the Rayonists expounded a theory that objects emitted invisible rays which the painters could manipulate to their own purposes. “The rays which emanate from the objects and cross over one another give rise to rayonist forms. The artist transforms these by bending them to his desire for aesthetic expression.” Goncharova and Larionov often applied the paint in their Rayonist works with palette knives.

Also called “Rayonnism,” “Rayism,” and, in Russian, “Luchism.”

All the significant terms are linked to other entries, and the text is followed by reproductions of five Rayonist paintings. A very useful site. (Via wood s lot.)

Reading a review by A. Alvarez (one of my favorite depressive Brit writers) of a Caroline Moorehead biography of Martha Gellhorn (one of my favorite reporters) in the April 8 NYRB, I came across an excellent little snippet from a youthful letter of hers:

The great temptation is to do what I call “fine writing,” the beautiful mellow phrases and the carefully chosen words. That I must avoid like the plague; only the simple words; only the straight clear sentences. I am terribly frightened of “style.”

Not the final truth, of course, but a useful corrective to one’s florid tendencies.

Mark Liberman has a most interesting series of posts at Language Log, taking off from a querulous comment of mine on a Semantic Compositions entry (“I was disappointed in Mark’s post; I hate to see him joining the bandwagon of people making easy jokes about winetalk”). Anyone at all interested in the topic should read Apologia pro risu suo, Grand Cru Smackdown, and More on winetalk culture. I should say that I did not mean to imply that the exotic descriptions used by so many wine writers are all exact and scientific, or that I do not myself often find them funny as hell. In the immortal words of Theodore Sturgeon, “90% of everything is crud,” and that certainly applies to wine babble. I merely resent the fact that the noble art and science of wine appreciation is so frequently the target of free-floating populist resentment and suffers indignities not often heaped on, say, art historians (who are at least equally given to unverifiable specifications and unsuitable metaphors). I just wish Americans drank wine as routinely as soft drinks so they wouldn’t see it as some sort of Old World boondoggle.

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A new language blog—they’re coming thick and fast! Joshua (of Foolippic and Books Do Furnish A Room) has started Logomacy (Between logomachy and logomancy…) because:

First: I wanted to play around with the WordPress blogging software so that I can move away from the now moribund MovableType 2.6x
Second: Recently I’ve been doing a lot of stuff relating to words and language (reading linguistics blogs, studying Latin and Old English, creating wikis and blogs relating to both those pursuits) and while I’ve been blogging about some of it, I’ve been feeling that none of my current blogs is really appropriate for these topics. The handful of readers of Foolippic, for instance, don’t care about Old English at all (and nor should they).

His latest entry makes an interesting point about learning languages: “all language learning is over-learning. In other words the entire point of learning something in a new language should be to learn it until recall is not just effortless, but comes to mind unbidden before you even have to direct your attention to recall.”

‘I started to translate in seventy-three
in the schoolyard. For a bit of fun
to begin with – the occasional “fuck”
for the bite of another language’s smoke
at the back of my throat, its bitter chemicals.
Soon I was hooked on whole sentences
behind the shed, and lessons in Welsh
seemed very boring. I started on print,
Jeeves & Wooster, Dick Francis, James Bond,
in Welsh covers. That worked for a while
until Mam discovered Jean Plaidy inside
a Welsh concordance one Sunday night.
There were ructions: a language, she screamed,
should be for a lifetime. Too late for me.
Soon I was snorting Simenon
and Flaubert. Had to read much more
for any effect. One night I OD’d
after reading far too much Proust.
I came to, but it scared me. For a while
I went Welsh-only but it was bland
and my taste was changing. Before too long
I was back on translating, found that three
languages weren’t enough. The “ch”
in German was easy, Rilke a buzz…
For a language fetishist like me
sex is part of the problem. Umlauts make me sweat,
so I need a multilingual man
but they’re rare in West Wales and tend to be
married already. If only I’d kept
myself much purer, with simpler tastes,
the Welsh might be living…
Detective, you speak
Russian, I hear, and Japanese.
Could you whisper some softly?
I’m begging you. Please…’
—Gwyneth Lewis

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The excellent Grant Barrett (aka Mo Nickels) has started a new word site:

Double-Tongued Word Wrester records words as they enter and leave the English language. It focuses upon slang, jargon, and other niche categories which include new, foreign, hybrid, archaic, obsolete, and rare words. Special attention is paid to the lending and borrowing of words between the various Englishes and other languages, even where a word is not a fully naturalized citizen in its new language.

There are a lot of word sites out there, you say? Yes, but most of them are seriously untrustworthy, being concerned more with fun than with facts. This one you can take to the bank; Grant is an actual lexicographer, for Oxford University Press in New York City. The entries are not only fun and interesting, they come with extensive citations. The latest, for example, is “jitterbug n. a gang member; a juvenile delinquent.” Now, this is a meaning I was totally unaware of; I knew only the Merriam-Webster definition ‘a jazz variation of the two-step…; one who dances the jitterbug.’ (I checked Cassell to get the British perspective, and was surprised to find that the dance-related meanings are labeled “Hist.” and the primary meaning is given as ‘a person who spreads alarm,’ yet another meaning unknown to me!) The definition is followed by nine citations, from a 1941 Bosley Crowther movie review (“The big holdup job gets messed up by a couple of ‘jitterbugs’ who are assisting on it, the girl turns out a great disappointment, the gunman is rendered a fugitive with a moll and a dog who love him”) to a quote from last Sunday’s Palm Beach Post (“…he would join the idle, young black males in jail. ‘Jitterbugs,’ Lupo called them, using street lingo”). I’m going to bookmark the site instantly, and I suggest you all do the same.

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