tawdry

13 February 2014

Something that is tawdry is cheap and gaudy. The word dates to the seventeenth century, and was also a noun, meaning “cheap, showy finery,” although only the adjective is much used today. In his 1676 play The Plain Dealer, William Wycherley writes of

taudry affected Rogues, well drest.

And in another Restoration comedy from the same year, The Man of Mode, George Etherege writes,

A Woman that Can doat on a senseless Caper, a Tawdry French Riband, and a Formal Cravat.

Tawdry comes to us from tawdry lace, an alteration of St. Audrey’s lace, a silk neckerchief popular with women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The term tawdry lace is about a century older than the adjective, appearing in the mid-sixteenth century. In his Shepheardes Calendar of 1579, Edmund Spenser says,

Binde your fillets faste, And gird in your waste, For more finesse, with a tawdrie lace.

The name comes from the story of Æþelðryþ or Ethelreda, also known as Audrey, a seventh-century Anglo-Saxon princess, the daughter of Anna, king of East Anglia. Audrey’s tale is recounted by Bede in his eighth-century Ecclesiastical History and by Ælfric in his late tenth-century Lives of Saints. It is said that Audrey took a vow of perpetual virginity and managed to get through two marriages without sleeping with either husband. Her first husband died before he could get her into the marital bed, and the second marriage was eventually annulled, much to the relief of the very frustrated young man, who had gone so far as attempting to bribe the local bishop to release her from her vow and who, when she fled his advances, had chased after her across England. After the annulment, Audrey took holy orders and went on to found an abbey in the town of Ely in East Anglia. Audrey died of a large tumor on her neck, which she attributed to punishment for having worn many expensive jeweled necklaces in her younger years.

After Audrey’s canonization, it became fashionable for medieval English women to wear silk scarves around their necks in tribute to her. Such scarves, and other articles, were sold at the fair held each year on her feast day. The merchandise at this fair was the type of stuff that you would find at any tourist trap, cheap and gaudy, hence the association with finery of inferior quality. St. Audrey’s lace may have been tawdry, but the woman was not.

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Sources:

“tawdry, n. and adj.,” “tawdry lace, n.” Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition, 1989.

take me to your leader

18 May 2016

The phrase take me to your leader is a science fiction cliché, so much so that in the 2007 “Voyage of the Damned” episode of Doctor Who the time-traveling, title character said, “Take me to your leader! I’ve always wanted to say that!” (Another phrase in that episode that the good doctor always wanted to say was “Allons-y Alonso!”)

Cartoon by Alex Graham depicting a flying saucer and two aliens addressing a horse, saying, “Kindly take us to your President!” From the 21 March 1953 issue of the New Yorker.

The current popularity of the phrase dates to the 1950s, but the phrase itself may be considerably older. The first known application of the phrase to first contact with extraterrestrials dates to 21 March 1953 and a cartoon by Alex Graham that appeared in the New Yorker. The cartoon depicts a flying saucer that has landed in a field and two aliens talking to a horse, saying, “Kindly take us to your President!”

By 1957 the phrase was firmly established in the public consciousness. In October of that year the Chicago Daily Tribune reported on a teen party that featured a “crazy hat” contest. One of the winning entries was called “Take Me to Your Leader.” While we can’t tell with absolute certainty that this is a reference to extraterrestrials, it’s a pretty safe bet that it is. And a few weeks later the same paper had an unambiguous use of the phrase in an alien context:

“Help! help! said the noises. “Take me to you leader!” “The men from Mars are here!” “We’re being invaded!"—these were some of the screams persons reported.

But before the extraterrestrial invasion of our popular culture, the phrase appears quite often in adventure fiction dating back to the nineteenth century. But it’s hard to tell from our twenty-first century perspective whether it was a catchphrase or simply a natural collocation of words. In other words, we can’t tell if take me to your leader was a well-known meme repeated for effect or just an ordinary way to say that you want to meet the head honcho.

Some early non-extraterrestrial examples are:

Mitford, Edward L., The Arab’s Pledge: A Tale of Marocco in 1830, London: Hatchard and Co., 1867, 63:

“You come alone; have you no token?”
“I have,” said he, “but it is as my life; take me to your leader.”

Ainsworth, William Harrison. Merry England: or, Nobles and Serfs. vol. 2. Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz. 1874. 207:

“’Tis true, nevertheless,” rejoined Chaucer. “Take us to your leader.”
“Not till we have further questioned you,” cried the man.

Dowie, John Alexander. Leaves of Healing, vol. 3, Zion Publishing House, 1897, 581:

Some of the band seized upon him not knowing who he was, and carried him off to rob him. He said: “Take me to you leader; take me to your leader at once; I have come into the mountains for that purpose.”

Hayans, Herbert, Clevely Sahib: A Tale of the Khyber Pass, Nelson, 1897, 114:

Rising unsteadily to my feet, I repeated the call for help, and was speedily surrounded by a body of soldiers.
“Take me to your leader quickly,” I gasped—“do not delay a second; it is a matter of life and death.”

Le Queux, William, Whoso Findeth a Wife, Rand McNally, 1898, 258:

“I’ll pay you nothing, not even a rouble, na vódkou, until you take me to your leader,” I answered defiantly.

Orczy, Emma, Leatherface: A Tale of Old Flanders, New York: George H. Doran, 1916, 288:

“Let me get to him ... take me to your leader ... I must speak with him at once!”

Streeter, B. H. and A. J. Appasamy, The Message of Sadhu Sundar Singh: A Study in Mysticism on Practical Religion, New York: Macmillan, 1922, 51:

On the way he fell into the hands of dacoits, who robbed him of the money and valuables, and mortally wounded him. He said to them, “I don’t mind your seizing all I have; only take me to your leader,” which they did.

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Sources:

“A Boy’s Queer Noises Curdle Lots of Blood.” Chicago Daily Tribune. 18 Nov 1957. 4.

“Dig Those Hats (Crazy) Made At Teen Dance.” Chicago Daily Tribune. 13 Oct 1957. w5.

Graham, Alex. Cartoon. New Yorker, 21 Mar 1953.

Partridge, Eric. Dictionary of Catchphrases. Ed. Paul Beale. Scarborough House. 1992.

Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. Yale University Press. 2006.

tabby

7 July 2019

Most of us know a tabby cat is either a female house cat or one with a striped or brindled coat regardless of its sex. But where does the word tabby come from? It has an unusual etymology, coming ultimately from Arabic and the history of Islam, and over the years it has been applied to things other than house cats, such as being used to refer to older, unmarried women.

The English word comes from the French tabis, in Old French atabis. This in turn comes from the medieval Latin attabi, which was taken from the Arabic ‘attābī, which is a reference to al-’Attābīya, a neighborhood of Baghdad. This quarter of the city is named for Attab ibn Asid, the first governor of Mecca following its conquest by Muhammad. Tabby, and its ancestors in these other languages, originally referred to silk taffeta, which was woven in the Baghdad neighborhood. The cloth was originally striped, but later came to be used for cloth of a single color that was waved or watered.

Tabby appears in English as early as 1638 referring to the cloth. It appears in an inventory of the possessions of Thomas Verney:

Now for some necessaries concerning myself. As first, for one good cloth sute, and one taby or good stuff sute.

The connection to cats is in place by 1665, where it appears in Thomas Herbert’s Some Years Travels Into Divers Parts of Africa and Asia the Great:

Cats be in more request with them than dogs; very large they are and tabby-coloured, streakt like those of Cyprus.

By 1695, the unmodified tabby was being applied to cats. From William Congreve’s play Love for Love of that year:

Look to it, nurse; I can bring witness that you have a great unnatural teat under your left arm, and he another; and that you suckle a young devil, in the shape of a tabby cat, by turns; I can.

The sense of a female cat was in place by 1826. From James Townley’s play High Life Below Stairs of that year:

Why, Mrs. Kitty, your cat has kittened—two Toms and two Tabbies!

It’s clear from this citation that the sense of tabby as a female cat developed in contrast to the male tomcat. It probably is a conflation of the name Tabitha, the word’s association with cats, and its sense of a spinster.

The word’s first association with human females is in Samuel Richardson’s 1748 novel Clarissa:

With horrible grave faces was I received. The two Antiques only bowed their tabby heads; making longer faces than ordinary.

Here tabby is referring to various shades of gray hair on the two spinster’s heads. But within a few years, the word was directly referring to elderly spinsters. From George Colman’s 1761 play The Jealous Wife:

‘Pon honour, I am not sorry for the coming-in of these old tabbies, and am much obliged to her ladyship for leaving us such an agreeable tête-à-tête.

This sense of a spinster, as the quote from Richardson indicates, got its start from gray hair, but the association of old women with cats, from the stereotype of spinsters keeping cats as pets and disparagingly in comparing their disposition to the animals’, certainly influenced the development of this sense.

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Sources:

American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2019, s. v. tabby.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s. v. tabby, n. and adj.

synergy

16 January 2014

Words come into and go out of fashion. Sometimes, a particular word will catch a wave of popularity and become overused to the point where it becomes essentially meaningless and is used primarily to show that the speaker is fashionable and up on the latest trends. Such words are buzzwords, and you often see them in business writing, as firms indicating through their language that they are on the cutting edge of their field by using cutting edge language. A good example of a buzzword is synergy. The word hit its peak of popularity in the early 1980s. It is still common, but perhaps not as overused as it once was.

Synergy is the cumulative effect of coordinated action by a number of independent factors. Anytime you have the whole being greater than the sum of the parts, you have synergy. It’s a modern word coined from Latin roots. The Oxford English Dictionary has one citation of synergy’s use from 1660, but this appears to be an outlier, and the use didn’t catch on back then. It was recoined in the mid-nineteenth century in medical jargon, where it was used to describe the effects of multiple organs working together. From an 1847 translation of Ernst Feuchtersleben’s The Principles of Medical Psychology:

The transition to the homogeneous is called irradiation (in motor nerves, synergy,—in sensitive, sympathy).

It took about a hundred years for the business world to become wise to the word, and synergy began appearing in business writing in the late 1950s. From Raymond Cattell’s 1957 Personality and Motivation Structure and Measurement:

Immediate synergy through group membership [...] expresses the energy going into the group life as a result of satisfaction with fellow members.

Synergy continued to be unremarkably used for several decades, until suddenly in the 1980s, for some reason or another, synergy became a business imperative. As The Economist put it in its 28 November 1981 issue:

Others, through mergers (eg, research houses into retail brokerage houses), have demonstrated that there is something to be said for synergy.

Suddenly, every company had to be exploiting the “synergistic effects” of something or other. The word appeared on just about every executive resume. Products named synergy hit the market. Companies even changed their names to incorporate the word.

Of course, in reality nothing had changed. Businesses have been “exploiting synergistic effects” for as long as there has been business. The word synergy became so overused that it became something of a joke. Since then, synergy has settled back into the frequency of use it had prior to the furor of the 1980s. It can again be used without triggering rolling eyes and sniggering, but one should be careful to not overuse it, or the synergistic effect of that overuse will once again become negative.

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Source:

“synergy, n.,” Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989.

sur-

27 February 2017

The other day I was wondering about the word surname. What is the sur-? prefix. The etymology, while perhaps not immediately obvious, is quite straightforward; the sur- is a French variation on the Latin super, meaning above or beyond. It comes to us, like many French roots, from the Normans. So a surname is one’s second or higher name, and the word dates to the fourteenth century.

But there are other sur- words, some like surname, borrowed whole from French (Anglo-Norman surnum, early fourteenth century), while others have been formed in English:

surcharge, an additional charge, originally a verb (1429) borrowed from the Old French surcharger and turned into a noun by 1601

survive, to live beyond or after (1473), from the Anglo-Norman survivre, which was formed from the Latin vivere, to live

surpass, to go over or beyond (1588), from the French surpasser.

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Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s. v. sur-, prefix