I just watched Jean Grémillon’s 1941 movie Remorques, part of the Criterion Channel’s French Poetic Realism series (which is introducing me to filmmakers I’d barely heard of, like Grémillon and Julien Duvivier); it’s an excellent movie (with a screenplay by Jacques Prévert), but I’m posting because I didn’t know the word remorque ‘towline,’ and it’s got an interesting etymology — it’s from Latin remulcum:
From Ancient Greek ῥυμουλκέω (rhumoulkéō), from ῥῦμα (rhûma, “tow-line”) + ἕλκω (hélkō, “to drag”); for first element see ἐρύω (erúō, “to pull”).
And its Romance descendants are all distorted in minor ways: Italian rimorchio (from a diminutive *remurculum) and the verbs Portuguese rebocar and Spanish remolcar. If I had read more sea stories and watched more movies set on ships, I’d know more nautical terminology!
Current edition of the RAE Dictionary-
Remolcar
Del lat. remulcāre, y este del gr. ῥυμουλκεῖν rymoulkeîn, de ῥῦμα rŷma ‘cuerda’ y ὁλκός holkós ‘tracción’.
1. tr. Dicho de un vehículo: Llevar por tierra a otro.
Sin.:
arrastrar, tirar, acarrear, trasladar, transportar.
2. tr. Llevar una embarcación u otra cosa sobre el agua, tirando de ella por medio de un cabo o cuerda.
Sin.:
arrastrar, tirar, acarrear, trasladar, transportar.
3. tr. Dicho de una persona: Traer a otra u otras, contra la inclinación de estas, al intento o la obra que quiere acometer o consumar.
The third is thought provoking. Here’s a DeepL translation:
tr. Said of a vehicle: To carry by land to another.
Sin.:
arrastrar, tirar, acarrear, trasladar, transportar.
tr. To carry a boat or other thing on the water, pulling it by means of a rope or rope.
Without:
arrastrar, tirar, acarrear, trasladar, transportar.
tr. Said of a person: To bring another or others, against their inclination, to the attempt or the work that he wants to undertake or consummate.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
The 1737 Diccionario de Autoridades offers, unsurprisingly, only the nautical ( tugboat or equivalent ) sense. It gives remulcare as the Latin antecedent.
Both the literal and metaphorical meanings are at play in the film: in the first part, the plot turns on a greedy captain deliberately breaking the towline so that Jean Gabin’s tugboat won’t get the money for bringing him into port, and later on the femme fatale brings Gabin, against his inclination, into her adulterous clutches.
Metaphorical wordplay in French cinema? I’m shocked, I tell you!
pulling it by means of a rope or rope. [DeepL]
The original has cabo o cuerda. How hard could it be to use ‘cable’ for one of those ‘rope’s?
How hard could it be to use ‘cable’ for one of those ‘rope’s?
That’s the free version of DeepL, aka DimL.
Score one for GT, which has “To carry a boat or other thing on the water by pulling it by means of a rope or cable.”
Not to be confused with DeppL, courtesy of the world’s largest newspaper of Germany.
In Italian “rimorchiare” also means to pick up a stranger, at a club or something like that. With no reluctance on their part implied. But “abbordare,” to approach/accost someone (often to start hitting on them) also happens to be a ship-related term: to come alongside to ram or board in the naval warfare sense.
to pick up a stranger, at a club or something like that
Like “pull a girl” in English. (Though not American?)
Draguer
http://stella.atilf.fr/Dendien/scripts/tlfiv5/advanced.exe?8;s=4061000205;
Though not American?
Definitely not American.
I’m American, and I’ve heard this usage in the phrase “pulling bitches”.
OK, one more example of my decrepitude.
Perhaps that’s an Iowa-specific expression, or generationally marked? I’m not unaware of the relevant sense of “bitches” but I can’t say I’ve heard that one.
I’m hoping for an opportunity to enter a room containing people I know well, and say “sup bitches!” It should be soon, otherwise the expression might well have fallen out of fashion.
@Stu: Maybe it will stay in fashion longer in Iowa, but you may not want to travel that far? (I say this lovingly, as the grandson of an Iowa farmboy who abandoned his wholesome native country for the wicked/decadent big city in the form of first Minneapolis and later Pittsburgh.)
Thanks, JWB. I’ve made a note of Iowa as a State of Last Resort For Day-Old Urban Slang.
Heck, they probably still say “heck” in Ioway!
no, “pulling” in this sense is very much present in the u.s. – like, i’m a devoted subculturalist in my late 40s, don’t use Tiktok or Instagram, and listen to less pop music than i have at any point since my teens, and to my ear it’s a fairly ordinary mainstream locution, just from being Somewhat Online and having friends in their 20s and 30s. it’s recent-ish, but on the scale of years; i don’t have a guess about its trajectory.
Finally had the sense to check Green’s — it’s his “f) to pick up for sexual purposes, to seduce” and goes back to 1926.
It’s not necessarily predatory: I cherish the remark of a girl in a pub to an admirer whose attentions she approved of: “Get yer coat, you’ve got a pull.”
Indeed, a very similar example in Green, I see:
2007 UK] R. Milward Apples (2023) 134:
“Is that a ladder in your tights or a stairway to heaven?”
“Get your coat, love, you’ve pulled.”
Girls love poetic imagery, I find.
Girls love poetic imagery, I find.
This is not necessarily a good thing. Consider the case of Madeline Bassett.
R. Milward Apples
An exotic name !? But no, the internet supplied the missing comma: R. Milward, Apples.
Are the stars not God’s daisy chain, in a very real sense?
For the “even Homer nods” file: in the Green’s entry linked above, the following 21st century Extremely British example is miscoded as a U.S. example: “He was inappropriately trying to pull a bird, innit.” The cite to Mae West circa 1926 does confirm that was an American usage but doesn’t really disconfirm the possibility that it’s an archaism now extent only in Ioway and suchlike places. It seems possible that more specialized related uses like “(h) (US black) of a pimp, to enlist a new prostitute” might have undercut the broader “mainstream” use? I don’t know how that relates to rozele’s experience of use by The Young People, especially the Very Online Ones. A survival or a recent borrowing from BrEng?
Also the reverse: “Get your coat, you’re pulled.”
https://www.threads.com/@katabianac/post/DFGTN1XT5_h
the following 21st century Extremely British example is miscoded as a U.S. example
It’s worse than that: over 60 citations to “Spectator” are miscoded as US, even though many of them are from Addison and Steele’s Spectator of the early 1700s, many more are probably from the still-running Spectator in London, and a couple are marked “Melbourne”. The 2014 quote under pull links to a bibliography entry for “Natchitoches Spectator, Natchitoches LA 1867-68”, which has 66 citations linked, but none of them are from 1867-1868. This sort of glitch is probably inevitable in a one-man project with no publisher support. (The location flags on each individual citation were newly developed for the online version, they weren’t in the print edition.)
BTW, hat’s mention upthread of the archaic variant “Ioway” made me think of what I thought was the stock phrase (perhaps a bit condescending?) “sweet Ioway.” But upon further inquiry that turns out to be original to the source from which I apparently picked it up and has never been used again in any other document known to google. The full phrase is actually “[those] kids from sweet Ioway,” which occurs three times (once without “those”) in the late Paul Nelson’s* 1975 obituary/elegy “Valley of the New York Dolls,” with TKFSI being sort of a synecdoche for the sort of normal-American typical-teenager buyers of commercially-successful rock music albums back then, with whom the Dolls had failed to find favor despite the best hopes of their small-but-fervent faction of advocates, very much including Nelson himself. (There’s a lot of useful insight into the piece although it also obviously lacks a certain objectivity since Nelson had been a participant in as well as observer of the saga.)
*The one wikipedia disambiguates as “Paul Nelson (critic).” The piece is included in the posthumous anthology _Everything Is an Afterthought: The Life and Writings of Paul Nelson_, although it can also be located elsewhere, including on the Village Voice’s not entirely moribund website.