Living under a hen

Alice Taylor’s Quench the Lamp is a warm and funny memoir of her childhood in rural Cork in the 1940s, full of anecdotes and observations on farm activities, family dramas, eccentric neighbours, and Irish life before and after electrification.

A chapter on thrift and the “art of making do” shows how objects’ versatility was engineered and enhanced. Pot lids warmed beds, goose wings dusted cobwebs, turf dust was deployed when the cat did “what he must where he shouldn’t”. Bags and boxes were strategically repurposed once emptied of their original cargo.

Newspaper served a multitude of roles, some of them still current even in urban lifestyles:

Our newspaper, the Cork Examiner, was a multi-purpose item. It cleaned and polished windows and it covered bare timber floors before the first lino or tarpaulin went down, thus providing underlay and insulation. Placed in layers on top of wire bed-springs, it eased the wear on the horsehair mattress; cut into the right shape, it became insoles in heavy leather boots and shoes and, later, in wellingtons when they became part of our lives. Even though it could never be described as baby soft, it was the forerunner of the multi-million-pound industry that subsequently provided soft solutions in the toilet-paper business. Rolled into balls it was a firelight, its effectiveness improved by a sprinkling of paraffin oil. Ned [a local shop owner] shaped it into funnels and filled it with sweets to make a tóimhsín, as he called it. At home it lined drawers and was considered mothproof and, when nothing else was available, it was used as a dustpan. One of our more industrious neighbours regularly covered her potato stalks with newspaper at night and this protected them from frost.

Taylor says those who excelled in the frugal art ran the risk of being considered thrifty to a fault – it would be said of them that they “could live under a hen”. Or you might say someone “could live in your ear and rent out the other one without you knowing it”.

A tóimhsín or tomhaisín /’t̪oːʃiːn/, by the way, is Irish for a small measure or amount, or in this case a cone-shaped paper bag or poke, often used for holding sweets. It comes from tomhais “measure, weigh”, and is sometimes anglicised as tosheen, to-sheen, or toisheen.

A prison pun

Horatio Bottomley (British politician and co-founder of the Financial Times) was in prison for fraud in the 1920s. On one occasion, so the story goes, he was visited by a chaplain who saw him sewing mailbags and said: “Ah, Bottomley. Sewing, I see.”

To which Bottomley replied, “No, sir. Reaping.”

(Adapted from J. P. Bean, Verbals: The Book of Criminal Quotations, and other sources. For anyone unsure of the pun, it’s a play on sew/sow homophony and the saying “You reap what you sow.”)

A kempt back-formation

The word unkempt (untidy, dishevelled, slovenly, uncombed) is common enough, but kempt (tidy, neatly kept, combed) is much less so. I’m not sure why: it is itself a neat word, expressive and economical. Here’s an example from Denis Johnson’s great war novel Tree of Smoke:

At this point Jimmy Storm took notice of a patron sitting down to another table, a rather tall young Asian woman, prepossessing, strikingly kempt, sheathed in a glamour of silk . . .

Most sources say kempt is a back-formation from unkempt, which has been around for centuries. In Middle English unkempt took the form unkemd – from un- + kembed (or kempt), past participle of kemb “to comb”. Comb gradually replaced kemb except in isolated dialectal use.

We find kemb in Chaucer: “His longe hair was kembed behind his back.” In Old English it was cemban; the American Heritage Dictionary says this is derived from the Germanic form *kambaz, originating in the Indo-European root gembh- “tooth, nail”.

Jack Winter’s comical essay How I Met My Wife is full of unusual and improbable words created by removing negative prefixes, and sure enough he makes use of kempt: “Her hair was kempt, her clothing shevelled, and she moved in a gainly way.” Various poems exploit the same terrain.

But kempt, as we’ve seen, can also be used with a straight face; contemporary examples may be browsed at Wordnik, many of them in the compound adjective well-kempt:

On the whole, she was not much cleaner or any better kempt than the ragamuffin boy. (Margaret Peterson Haddix, Uprising)

With his thick gray hair, salt-and-pepper beard, and aviator glasses, he looked like a well-kempt Jerry Garcia. (Paul Elie, ‘The Velvet Reformation’)

[Image shows a Scythian comb, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. I think its handle is a metaphor for knotty hair.]

Peppercorn rent

I saw a curious phrase used in John Clay’s fine biography R. D. Laing: A Divided Self (Hodder & Stoughton, 1996). Laing and colleagues were looking for new premises for their experimental psychotherapy, and Kingsley Hall in London’s East End was a possibility. (It would become “a hallowed shrine of the counter-culture movement”.) Clay writes:

Sid Briskin visited and reported back favourably. Then he and Laing, both dressed soberly, went to visit the trustee of the building, Sidney Russell, Laing mentioning his working-class Glasgow background to provide credibility. Russell was convinced and offered them a five-year lease at a peppercorn rent.

Peppercorn refers to the dried berry of the pepper plant, and the word later became generalised, or semantically broadened, to also mean “a small or insignificant thing” (AHD4), “something trifling” (Collins), “anything very small or insignificant” (Random House), etc.

Peppercorn rent is a phrase in its own right, dating back several centuries, meaning a very low, nominal or token rent given as “a simple acknowledgement that the tenement virtually belongs to the person to whom the peppercorn is given”, as Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable has it. But this negligible financial exchange was once quite literally pepper-based.

Oxford Dictionaries labels the phrase British and say it originates in a once-common practice of “stipulating the payment of a peppercorn as a nominal rent”. Merriam-Webster has similar information: (1) “a rent formerly often stipulated in deeds and consisting in supplying a certain amount (as a pound) of black peppercorns at stated intervals”; (2) “a merely nominal rent in kind operating to keep alive a title.”

There’s a little more history on peppercorn rent (and rose rent!) in Curious English Words and Phrases, and some legal notes at Wikipedia. Before reading the book on Laing, I don’t think I’d ever noticed it before. Are you familiar with the phrase, or have you ever paid a peppercorn rent?

[image source]

Folktale diffusion and ethnolinguistic variation

I’ve been stop-starting my way happily through Celtic Fairy Tales and More Celtic Fairy Tales, two late-19thC collections by the great Australian folklorist Joseph Jacobs, combined in a plump Senate paperback and handsomely illustrated by John D. Batten:

Google’s Ngram Viewer and wild treacle

I have two new posts up at Macmillan Dictionary Blog. If you subscribe to it, or follow me on Twitter, you may already’ve seen them, in which case please indulge or disregard.

The first is a report on the new features of a recently relaunched linguistic corpus tool: Google’s Ngram Viewer 2.0:

It has improved the datasets and publisher metadata and added many more books to the corpus, so the results are more accurate and comprehensive than before. The interface remains much the same – you can modify searches by timeframe, degree of detail, and corpus type, including several different languages – but it comes with a whole new bag of tricks.

A significant innovation is the ability to search by part of speech. Say you want to look for a word as a verb, but it also functions as a noun. Just append “_VERB” to your search term – the capital letters are essential – and the Ngram Viewer filters accordingly.

You can also now compare BrE and AmE in the same graph. Here’s one I did of color vs. colour on both side of the Atlantic (click to enlarge):

See colour’s conspicuous double-dip in early-19th-century U.S.? Read on for my interpretation of this shift.

*

My latest piece, Getting ‘treacle’ from wild animals, traces the strange origins of treacle, beginning with the Proto-Indo-European root *ghwer- “wild”, from which we get Latin ferus (→ fierce, feral) and ferox (→ ferocious).

*Ghwer- also gave rise to the Greek word thēr, meaning “beast” or “wild animal”, whence the diminutive thērion – a word Aristotle used to refer to vipers. We see the same root in Therapoda (“beast feet”), a category of dinosaurs . . . . From thērion came thēriakos (adj.) “of a wild animal”, which led to thēriakē “antidote for poisonous wild animals”.

Latin borrowed this as theriaca, which became *triacula in Vulgar Latin. From this we get Old French triacle “antidote”, subsequently imported into Middle English and later to become treacle. Treacle was used especially against venomous bites such as snakes’ – the remedy often included snake flesh – then gradually the word’s meaning shifted from antidote to general cure or prophylactic. Sir Thomas More mentions “a most strong treacle against those venomous heresies”. Eventually the medicinal connotations faded.

You can read the rest of this peculiar etymology at Macmillan Dictionary Blog, and older posts are available here.

Edit: Something else I meant to mention. A couple of weeks ago Macmillan announced it would be phasing out its printed dictionaries. Editor-in-Chief Michael Rundell writes about the decision here. “[E]xiting print is a moment of liberation,” he says, “because at last our dictionaries have found their ideal medium.”

Ancient people names in Ireland

Gearóid Mac Niocaill’s book Ireland before the Vikings (Gill and Macmillan, 1972) has an interesting passage on the names adopted on the island during the 4th, 5th and early 6th centuries. He refers to “a mosaic of peoples” who are “dimly perceptible” amid the settlements and political changes he has been discussing, and whose names appear in various forms:

ending in -raige (‘the people of’), or as Dál (‘the share of’) or Corco (perhaps ‘seed’) plus a second element, or as a collective noun ending in -ne. Some contain animal names, such as Artraige ‘bear-people’, Osraige ‘deer-people’, Grecraige ‘horse-people’, Dartraige ‘calf-people’, Sordraige ‘boar-people’; others, such as the Ciarraige, the Dubraige and Odraige, have a colour (ciar ‘black’, dub also ‘black’, odor ‘dun’) as the first element; others, such as the Cerdraige, seem to have an occupational term as the first element.