Of gaggles and scrums

 

I wish the US administration would stop doing unconscionable and reprehensible things, but, as with Rob Ford, it seems that with every new outrage I have another word to talk about.

With the banning of some of the most-respected American news outlets from a recent briefing, I became aware of the word "gaggle" used to mean a kind of informal press conference where reporters can ask questions but not make video recordings.

Like the very similar "cackle" applied to hens, "gaggle" started life in the 1300s as a verb, designating the sound made by geese, and almost certainly originating in an imitation of that sound. 

About 100 years later, it started to be used as a noun to mean a "flock of geese". This was one of those fanciful collective nouns for animals that were made up at the time (a parliament of owls, a murmuration of starlings..) and which for the most part have never caught on in general parlance.

But "gaggle" was  a hit. In the mid-20th century it started to be used for disorderly groups of people, especially if they made a lot of noise. This was particularly appropriate for groups of reporters all asking questions at once:
.

Date	(1999/08/23)
Title	Is Nothing Private?
Author	JOHN F. STACKS
Source	http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,991797,00.html

When it was reported that Senate minority Leader Tom Daschle told a gaggle of Washington reporters he thought George W. Bush had the right to refuse to answer questions about his long-past personal behavior

By 2004, we see it being applied specifically to the mini press conference:

Date	(2004/09/27)
Title	Bush's Iraq: A Powerful Fantasy
Author	JOE KLEIN
Source	http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,995237,00.html

FLYING TO MINNESOTA ON AIR FORCE ONE LAST WEEK, WHITE House press secretary Scott McClellan held a " gaggle " -- that is, a mini-press conference -- with reporters in the back of the plane.

 The analogous word in Canadian English is "scrum", taken from rugby. "Scrum" is a shortening of "scrummage", a variant of "scrimmage", which is ultimately related to "skirmish". 

For why the plural of "goose" is "geese", click here. 


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The dossier on "dossier"

A thick dossier

This week, according to Merriam-Webster dictionaries,

Lookups for 'dossier' spiked after the news that U.S. investigators had confirmed portions of a dossier on Trump's ties to Russia

Why do we call a collection of documents about a person or event this? 

The French dossier comes from the word for "back" (dos); a bundle of documents on a particular subject was called this because it had a label on the back. We borrowed "dossier" in the mid-19th century, although we had the perfectly good "file" already (more about that later). Of course English has never been reluctant to acquire more synonyms for words it already has. 

The early quotation that Merriam-Webster gives is

I may, however, mention from high legal authority, that the President laboured under a mistake when he demanded the displacement or even communication of the “dossiers” (legal papers) of the Boulogne and Strasburg affairs.
—Freeman’s Journal (Dublin, Ireland), 11 Jan. 1849

Various criminal cases in French-speaking jurisdictions were reported on in English newspapers, and the Dreyfus affair at the end of the 19th century gave the word a bit of a bump in English as journalists reported on the scandal. Perhaps the fact that French was the language of diplomacy contributed to the word being borrowed in government circles.

DOSSY-ay or DOSSY-ur?

It seems that "dossier" first entered English through print rather than speech, because the OED's entry, written in 1897, gives as its first pronunciation not the French "doe SYAY", but rather the anglicized "DOSSY uh". But, while a very few people still do say this (or its r-ful North American variant, "DOSSY ur"), with English speakers becoming more familiar with French, we have, over time, ended up with a hybrid English/French pronunciation: "DOSSY ay" is now overwhelmingly most common in all varieties of English.  A very small number of anglophones do, however, pronounce this word "DOE see ay".

FILE

Now, what about file? (Thank GOD everyone pronounces it the same!)

In Latin, the word fīlum meant "thread". This came into Old French as fil (pronounced "FEEL"), and it means "thread" to this day in French (as well as "wire" and other extensions of meaning). 

But English went a different way with "fil" after we borrowed it from French in about 1500, using it for a very specific kind of thread: a string or wire on which papers and documents were strung for safekeeping and reference. From there it was just a short step for "file" to refer to the papers themselves, and then to other methods of keeping and organizing them, until in the 21st century our "files" are made of electrons.

A CANADIANISM!

Here in Canada we have our very own extension of the word "file":

• 4. Cdn issues and responsibilities in a specified area, considered collectively: what progress has the prime minister made on the unity file?

Oddly enough, this is a context where other varieties of the language might use the word ... "dossier"! In fact, I suspect that this is a usage that arose as a loan translation of the French dossier in Canada's bilingual federal public service.

OTHER FILES

The "single file" sense of "file" is also ultimately derived from the same Latin word meaning "thread". The file we use on our fingernails is a different word, dating all the way back to Anglo-Saxon.  

And of course, all of these "files" have, quite naturally, generated verbs. Yes, more of those. No sign of "dossier" being used as a verb yet, but it's a fairly new word in English so it may be only a matter of time.

Meanwhile, please do not consign this blog post to the "circular file" (a term celebrating its 50th birthday in 2017)!

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Talking (glass) turkey

Christmas is coming, and you might think buying a raffle ticket for a turkey is a good idea. But would you enter a draw for a glass turkey? Why might anyone want to win something like the candy dish pictured above?

Well, if you're the lucky winner of such a raffle in Eastern Ontario, your prize will be something like this:

The Chesterville Ag Society is kicking off our holiday fundraising with a Glass Turkey of assorted alcohol and beers, in order to raise funds for upgrades at the Chesterville Fairgrounds for family events throughout the year.

Description
The winner of the "Glass Turkey" raffle will receive assorted alcohols purchased from the LCBO. The complete prize is valued at $315.05 and is made up of the following items:

• 12 Steamwhistle Pilsner
• 15 Bud Light
• Absolut Vodka (1.14 mL) 
• Assorted Ciders
• Assorted Wines
• Baileys (750 mL)
• Captain Morgan Spiced Rum (750 mL)
• Forty Creek Cream Liquor (750 mL) 
• Jagermeister (750 mL)
• Sauza Gold Tequila (750 mL)
• Sour Puss (750 mL)

I was alerted to this term on a recent visit to Ottawa, and on looking into it I found almost all the evidence is from the Ottawa region or the area of eastern Ontario between the Ottawa and St. Lawrence rivers.  There were some "glass turkeys" showing up in Guelph and Kitchener-Waterloo about an hour west of Toronto. The earliest evidence I could find was from Chatham in southwestern Ontario:

The Globe and Mail [Toronto, Ont] 28 Dec 1977: P.8. A Christmas raffle for an ounce of marijuana instead of a glass turkey - a jug of liquor - has started a narcotics investigation by RCMP and city police in Chatham. 

One strange outlier was from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, across the harbour from Halifax, but since this is a major base for the Canadian Navy, I blame it on naval personnel picking up the concept and term on one of their regular rotations to the national capital and then taking it to the Halifax region on their next posting. (Altruistically, of course, since it is well known that naval personnel do not indulge in alcoholic adult beverages.)

Do you know this term, and if so where did you become familiar with it?

For why we call (real) turkeys turkeys, though they don't come from Turkey, please click here:
http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2010/10/real-turkey.html 

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Do not mispronounce this!

It's Canada Day! Let us look at a Canadianism and how to pronounce it. 

This is "poutine":

Poutine. Do not pronounce like...

I will understand if you non-Canadians are mystified by the ingredients, which are french fries, cheese curds, and gravy. (Acadians in the Maritime Provinces have another kind of poutine, which is a dumpling made of grated and mashed potatoes with pork in the middle. Theirs is the older version of "poutine".)  Even my devotion to real-world research for the Canadian Oxford Dictionary could not persuade me to sample the Quebecois poutine, but it is quite popular with Canadians. 

The ultimate origin of this word beyond Canadian French is uncertain. It is probably derived from various similar words in many French dialects, and influenced by the English word "pudding" (which has a fairly disgusting etymology we'll get into some other time).

The story behind the concoction is that Fernand Lachance, a snack bar owner in Warwick, Quebec (pronounced WAR wick, by the way), when asked by a customer in 1957 to combine fries and cheese in a bag, told him it would be a "maudite poutine" (a hell of  a mess).  But the combination and the word stuck, and made its way into Canadian English starting in the 1980s. You can now buy poutine at Burger Kings across Canada.  Apparently a poutine stand has also just opened at Disney World. Here's the "nutrition" information for a serving of poutine, should you wish to be flabbergasted (not to mention flabby, if you actually eat it):

• Calories 800

• Protein  30g

• Carbohydrates  68g

• Sugar  2g

• Fat  45g

• Saturated Fat  17g

• Trans Fat 1.5g

• Cholesterol  95mg

• Sodium 2860mg

Concerns about health aside, though, the really important thing is not to mispronounce this word. It is pronounced "pooTEEN". But many Canadians have vague memories from their school French lessons that consonants at the ends of French words are silent. (They are sometimes, but not when followed by an "e".) Armed with this little-learning-is-a-dangerous-thing, they bravely order "poo TANG" (with a nasal "a" vowel).

Unfortunately this sounds like the French word putain (whore), ultimately derived from the Latin putidus (stinking, rotten, fetid).

...Putain

Please do not order a putain when you are at Burger King!

Another entertaining thing about "poutine" is that in French, "Poutine" is also the spelling for Vladimir Putin's surname. It always cracks me up when I read headlines in Quebecois newspapers like "Le pari risqué de Poutine" (Putin's risky gamble).

Although maybe they were talking about the risky gamble of eating poutine!

un maudit Poutine

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No rhyme or reason

There's a reason for those thistles and shamrocks

A Vancouverite facebook friend of mine recently posted that she had "rhymed off" her telephone number to someone. 

I leapt on it, as I am wont to do. "Did you know that 'rhyme off' is a CANADIANISM?" I exulted triumphantly (and felt quite smug when a few Americans chimed in to say that they had indeed been perplexed by her usage). "Ha!" said I. "Seeeeee! Other people don't use this!"

But I was much deflated the very next day when the First Law of Lexicography (The minute you make a pronouncement about a word not being used, you will be sure to hear it or see it in the mass media within 24 hours) raised its ugly head. Thanks to another facebook post, I learned that a certain Ross O'Carroll-Kelly (a name so cartoonishly Irish that it is, not surprisingly, a pseudonym) wrote this in The Irish Times: 

Sorcha goes, “Oh my God, Ross, this is the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done to me!”

I’m pretty sure it’s not. I could rhyme off a list, although I’m not sure it would help the situation.

Was I -- gasp -- WRONG about "rhyme off"?

The OED did not include "rhyme off" when they revised the entry for "rhyme" in 2010. Not surprising that they overlooked it, considering that there are only two instances of the phrase (both from Scottish speakers) in the 1.6 BILLION words of British Hansard (the record of the debates in the British parliament) between 1805 and 2005. Only one example (from Ireland) appears in the 100 million words of the British National Corpus. So it certainly isn't used in English English. 

The 1.9-billion word corpus of Global Web-based English has only 

5 examples from the UK, three of those being definitely Scottish, 

5 from Ireland,

none from anywhere else,

but a significant

18 from Canada

In contrast, in a mere 50 million words of the Strathy Canadian corpus, "rhyme off" appears 9 times. 

So I think we can still claim Canadian citizenship for this word. 

Or perhaps we should say Canadian landed immigrant status, because it seems we inherited it from our numerous Scottish and Irish settlers.

The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English has this entry:

rhyme off verb to recite; to talk (UK: SCOTLAND) From Scottish dialect rame (to talk nonsense; to reiterate): "For one thing, rhyming off the places he'd broken into."

The OED also has an entry for "rame":

Of uncertain origin.
Scottish, Irish English (northern), and English regional (northern)
To shout, cry aloud, scream; to keep up the same cry, to repeat the same thing continuously; to complain persistently.

So it would seem that "rhyme off" is actually a corruption by folk etymology of "rame off", and has nothing really to do with rhymes.  Clearly, it landed on fertile soil when it arrived in Canada, where it has continued to thrive. 

Tell us about YOUR usage of "rhyme off". Where are you from, and do you use it/recognize it, or not? 

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Eavesdropping about eavestroughs

A Wordlady correspondent has inquired about the word "eavesdrop", which has a quite entertaining history.

The eavesdrop (originally called an eavesdrip) was the area onto which water would run off the eaves, or overhang, of a house's roof. In Anglo-Saxon times, the law required that buildings be situated at least two feet from the property line so that rainwater running off the eaves would not damage the neighbour's yard. With my house in Toronto, the wall of which is 4 inches from the property line, I'd be in big trouble. 

The medieval English must have been an inquisitive lot, because by the 1400s we see reference to "eavesdroppers", i.e. people who lurk about in the eavesdrop so as to listen in on others' conversations. By the 1600s, this had been back-formed to a verb, "eavesdrop".

Now the question is, would that lurking person be standing under the eaves or, more logically, under one eave?

Unfortunately, we can't have a single eave in English. At least not any more. Originally, the Anglo-Saxon word efes WAS a singular noun. It just happened to end in -s (the plural was efesen). But, as we have seen before with skate, cherry, biceps and hero, apparently the English-speaking brain just cannot wrap itself around singulars ending in -s. So "eaves" came to be interpreted as a plural for which there is no corresponding singular.  

Now, here's an eavesdropping situation (related by my correspondent) that could only happen in Canada:
"On the weekend, a friend was telling me about her next-door neighbour eavesdropping on a conversation between my friend and an eavestrough installer, which I thought was a funny "eaves" coincidence."

"Eavestrough" is the word we Canadians use for what other English speakers call a (rain) gutter. It's one of those words that Canadians are usually astounded to learn are unique to us. It seems to be of American origin (below is the earliest Canadian and American evidence I could find of it), but whereas Americans seem to have stopped using it, it is going strong in Canada, and has even produced the derivatives "eavestrougher" and "eavestroughing".

1876 Toronto Globe 22 July p. 8

At about one p.m. to-day, during a thunder storm, one of the lightning rod spires on the house of H. Watson, of Clearville, was struck and melted. A portion of the fluid passed from the conductor and followed the eaves-trough into a rain barrel.

1845 The Farmer's Magazine p. 516
Similar tanks should be made to receive the water from the eavestroughs of all the buildings in the farm-yard.

If any of my non-Canadian readers use "eavestrough", I would be happy to hear about it.

P.S. If you find the English language fascinating, you might enjoy regular updates about English usage and word origins from Wordlady. Receive every new post delivered right to your inbox! If you are not already subscribed, you can either:

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Tweeting about bunnyhugs?

This article in the Toronto Star suggests that regionalisms such as "bunnyhug" (Saskatchewanian for "hoodie") might spread thanks to Twitter and Facebook. I want "jambuster" (Manitoban for "jelly doughnut") to take over the world! Get to it, you Manitobans!
All the same, I wonder how much people actually talk about their hooded sweatshirts and doughnuts on Twitter or Facebook.