KIBOSH


I was doing a crossword today and the answer to one clue was "put the kibosh on" which I got, but it led me to wonder about the origins of the word. I found this site which discussed it but didn't come to any definite conclusion. It is in my pocket Oxford Dictionary but not in my Oxford Word Histories.  Can't seem to put a link to it. 

https://blog.oup.com/2013/08/three-recent-theories-of-kibosh-word-origin-etymology/#:~:text=is%20vanishingly%20small.-,J.,are%20common%20terms%20in%20heraldry.

TABOO


My carer and I were doing a crossword over a cup of coffee and the clue was taboo (the answer was 'prohibited') and I wondered where taboo had originated. She looked it up and said it was of Tongan origin and brought into English by Captain Cook. There is a very similar word in Maori 'tapu' which means both sacred and forbidden. Things are either tapu or noa. The head is tapu, food is noa, therefore you shouldn't pass food over the head.
According to my Oxford Word Histories this only came into ordinary English in the 1930s. But Cook would have heard it in the 18th C. Where did it go to and why did it come back?

It depends on what your book regards as "ordinary" English, I suppose. If it had indeed taken leave of absence in English I don't think it could have got very far though.

It was certainly in English (and German) in the first few years of the 20th century when Freud's popular "Totem and Taboo" was published in several languages, in which the word understandably figures extremely prominently indeed. Sigmund's book, according to the author, was itself prompted by a criticism of Jung's writings on the same topic (Freud was intelligent enough to know that all things religious were man-made, including totems and taboos, and disliked Jung's silly ascription of such things to some hirsute man in the sky, which Freud knew was completely man-made too) so Jung had also used it apparently.

My own OED, admittedly getting on a bit, is normally very precise about earliest written instances but is tellingly vague about "taboo". It names Cook as a supposed introducer of the word but neglects to name the actual journal, which isn't like the OED. It appears they must have hit a snag when they actually checked out the provenance commonly believed. They cite a book of sermons delivered by a lad called Braithwaite in the 1850s however, so at least one can assume it had some kind of currency 80 years before when your book says it made it into the vernacular.

As to just how vernacular its use might have been however these references don't really give us a clue - it might have been doing the rounds amongst social anthropologists, psychologists and certain people of theological bent, but whether the hoi polloi had adopted it is another matter. I did find it used in an advertisement for Karloff's "The Mummy" (1932) so I assume that Hollywood marketing people would only have used it if they reckoned the great unwashed already knew what they were on about, in the US at least.

nordman wrote:

...(Freud was intelligent enough to know that all things religious were man-made, including totems and taboos, and disliked Jung's silly ascription of such things to some hirsute man in the sky, which Freud knew was completely man-made too)...

Lord, nordmann, I declare that - to misquote Jane Austen - it is better to be without intelligence than to misapply it as you do (sometimes). Jung's views on religion and his various disagreements with Freud were rather more complex than your comments suggest.

But this thread is not the place for any discussion of such matters. It's too nice a spring day outside anyway to get bogged down in religious argument.

PS I think someone once came up with a foul-smelling concoction called "Taboo" - sold in fancy packages in Harrods and other retail outlets. But I may be confusing Taboo with Dior's Poison, both names pretty off-putting for a scent.

GUNGSWIZZLED

A word concocted by Roald Dahl (as he was wont to do) to fill a semantic gap which English, despite the plethora of vocabularities at its disposal, had neglected to previously fill.

Gungswizzled is used to denote a person or argument (or both) which, when not being completely muddled, is completely wrong or, even when avoiding being in outright error simply reverts to being so abjectly confused and confusing as to be indistinguishable from being mistaken in the first place.

Freud, it is safe to say, certainly would have suspected Jung as being a candidate for the application of this description. And if Jung was indeed as gungswizzled as Freud might once well have believed, then one can only imagine what Sigmund would also have thought about those who should leap to Jung's defence.

A plexicated twizzler of two probably equally mideous individuals, as Dahl might have added. Though there is no sense, as you say, in both of us getting flussed or falling out over two such grunions' now long defunct squibble, even if one of them did believe in a redunculous lickswishy pappa-pappy taking credit for our all too human piggery-jokery while the other put it all down to mere ringbellers.

As ever, I am all of a churgle, which is what is so bloody annoying about you, nordmann.

Temperance wrote:

As ever, I am all of a churgle, which is what is so bloody annoying about you, nordmann.

Temp you let me bloody search with your "I am all of a churgle"...
https://ew.com/article/2016/09/13/oxford-roald-dahl-dictionary-words/#:~:text=8.,churl%2C%20you%20gurgle%20with%20laughter.
Of course "babblement" I immediatly understood as it is so easy understandable half Flemish, half French, as we also used to and yes as the rest of that mixed Flemish/French...(but perhaps that English perhaps more Flemish than French?)
Kind regards from Paul and happy that I succeeded with your I guess unintended puzzle or perhaps indeed a little bit...

NIDDY NODDY


Strictly speaking it's two words but I only just found out that a niddy noddy is a device for making the winding of a skein of wood easier.  Nothing to do with the head of Enid Blyton's fictional character, Noddy, going nid-niddy-nod. Before I signed in this time although the 'Log in' or 'Log out' heading was set to 'Log in' my Res Hist alias was highlighted as still being active on the board. I checked with my mobile phone in case I hadn't logged out there but I wasn't shown as being currently active on the site there.  Hopefully when I log out this time it will work properly. 

Along the lines of double words I was thinking of Dilly Dally, which my little Oxford Dictionary says is a repetition of dally, and when I looked up dally it said from dalliance.

Don't dilly-dally was an expression of my mother (often addressed to me when I was dawdling!) having perhaps in turn been made common in her parents' generation through the old Music Hall song 'Don't Dilly Dally on the Way', also known as 'My Old Man (said follow the van)' which had been popularised by Marie Lloyd. It needs to be sung in a cockney accent.



My old man said "Foller the van,
And don't dilly dally on the way".
Off went the van wiv me 'ome packed in it,
I walked behind wiv me old cock linnet.
But I dillied and dallied, dallied and I dillied
Lost me way and don't know where to roam.
Well you can't trust a special like the old time coppers.
When you can't find your way 'ome.

In a similar vein there's also shilly-shally, meaning to vacillate, which seems to have developed in the early 1700s as a duplication of "shall I". It is written as "shill-I, shall-I" in William Congreve's 'The way of the world' (published 1700), where it means a pensive "shall I, or shall I not?".

Meles meles wrote:

Dilly-dally was an expression of my mother's (often addressed to me when I was dawdling!) 

MM and Caro,

when I saw the expression I immediately thought on the German "dalli, dalli" which means "quick, quick","hurry up" It was one of the first words that I learned with German technical assistants in the factory.
And it was also a German TV show: presented by the Jewish Hans Rosenthal
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Hans_Rosenthal
I know it is again a new https link and even in German, but what the heck Temperance...
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalli_Dalli

But I mention it because I suppose MM understands German and it proves how touchy the German-Jewish link still was years after the war...
"Die 75. Sendung fand am 9. November 1978 statt. Hans Rosenthal hatte im Vorfeld versucht, diesen Sendetermin, der auf den 40. Jahrestag der Novemberpogrome 1938 fiel, zu verschieben, was vom ZDF jedoch abgelehnt wurde. Rosenthal gab nach und moderierte die Sendung, trug darin allerdings schwarze Kleidung. In den Ratepausen wurde statt Schlagern Opernmusik gespielt.^[4]
Während einer Sendung im Jahr 1983 appellierte Rosenthal an den Bürgermeister von Bad Hersfeld ein dort geplantes SS-Kameradschaftstreffen zu unterbinden und rief zu Protesten auf. Das Treffen fand dennoch statt, wurde aber von Gegendemonstrationen begleitet.^[5][6"

(As Rosenthal had to play in 1978 on the same date of November progroms in Germany of 1938 he tried to move the date to another time, but the ZDF (I know the ZDF from hours and hours looking to their TV that they are in my opinion a bit of seeking compassion for the Germans immediately after the war and  during the war for the Russian repression...)
rejected it. Rosenthal did the performance but as opposition he appeared in black costume. And in the pause he let play opera music instead of German evergreens.
In a perfomance in Bad Hersfeld in 1983 he tried to let the mayor forbid a planned meeting of former SS and called for protests. At the end the meeting occured nevertheless, but became accompagnied by counter-demonstrators.)

"Dawai, dawai"
I didn't learned it in my Russian lessons, but from a Belgian POW I suppose from German concentration camp into a Russian camp immediately after the war in the "Russian zone"...
I checked it this evening in German and indeed it is the same as the German "dalli dalli" but according to the Germans a bit "sharper"...
and it is seemingly a kind of a Russian "pop"? it is not my kettle of fish and so I am not sure what it really is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uv3vRaNr9fw

And back to the concentration camps and indeed as my Belgian POW told me about "dawai, dawai" the Russians would have used it: from a German POW in Russian captivity (I don't find a direct translation of the Dutch: krijgsgevangenschap, German Kriegsgefangenschaft)
MM as I suppose again that you will understand the German:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ULvNhF69fU
The title is, dawai dawai, but i didn't hear the wort in the 11 minutes.
nevertheless is it in my opinion interesting as a story about Russian captivity and even from a German...

Nobody has to read it all...only just that what they are interested in...and even if "they" are interested in nothing I won't be losing any sleep for it 
And excuses for the heavy loaded about concentration camps and Jews U turn of this thread...

Kind regards to both, Paul.

You may have misunderstood me as I didn't make it clear: I meant of course that my mother's expression was don't dilly dally, ie don't dawdle.

There's also willy-nilly, which these days usually means haphazardly, carelessly or in an uncontrolled manner, regardless of ones wishes. 

In the sense of "willingly or unwillingly, whether you like it or not" it seems to come from the old expression "will you, nill you", or similar (the word "nill" is from the Old English "nyllan", a combination of "ne" (no) and "willan" (will). In that form Shakespeare used it at least twice, first in 'The Taming of the Shrew' when Petruchio tells Katherine that he'll marry her, whether she wants to or not: "And, will you, nill you, I will marry you". The second usage is in 'Hamlet' when a gravedigger comments on whether Ophelia deserves a Christian burial after her suspicious drowning: "if the man goe to this water and drowne himselfe, it is will he, nill he, he goes, marke you that, but if the water come to him, and drowne him, he drownes not himselfe." NB The expression "will he nill he" isn’t in the First Quarto (1603) which is the earliest published version of the play, but it’s in the Second Quarto (1604-5) and the First Folio (1623).

However the expression seems to originate much earlier. The earliest Old English ancestor of "willy-nilly" given in the OED is "sam we willan sam we nyllan" (whether we wish to or wish not to), in King Ælfred’s translation (circa 888) of 'De Consolatione Philosophiæ', a sixth-century Latin work by the Roman philosopher Boethius: "we sceolon beon nede geþafan, sam we willan sam we nyllan, þæt he sie se hehsta hrof eallra goda" (We must grant, whether we wish to or not, that He is the crowning pinnacle of all things good). A shorter version, "wille we, nelle we" (willingly or unwillingly, one way or another) occurs a century later in the 'Lives of the Saints', believed written in the 990s by the Benedictine abbot Ælfric of Eynsham: "forðan þe we synd synfulle and sceolan beon eadmode, wille we, nelle we" (Therefore we are sinners and shall be humble, willingly or unwillingly). A reverse version of the expression, "nil we, wil we," occurs a few hundred years later in 'Cursor Mundi', an anonymous poem composed before 1325 and possibly as early as 1300, written in Middle English: "ded has vs wit-sett vr strete; nil we, wil we, we sal mete" (Death surrounds us in all places; one way or another, we shall meet).

Then there's also "wishy-washy", to mean weak, feeble or poor in quality, which seems to originate in the late 17th century as a reduplication of "washy" meaning thin or watery. By the 19th century it could also be used to refer to a weak person meaning they were indecisive and vacillating.

Interesting, MM. I love it when something in English makes it right back to Saxon. It's amazing how little actually does.

In 1823 a guy called Edward Moor was attempting to trace "conceited" terms (as he called them) which had entered the vernacular in his beloved Suffolk and which he claimed all originated within "nursery rhymes and the like" (of which he heartily disapproved). However he was surprised to find, after consultation with linguists, local sources and other interested parties via a request from him printed in national newspapers that many of these childish terms he despised in fact had rather august pedigrees, some even being commonly used legal terms according to court documents going back to the 15th century. The ones he therefore changed his mind about and which, he was forced to acknowledge, were bona fide English terms in their own right and not at all childish included:

higgledy-piggledy
hurly-burly
hodge-podge
mingle-mangle
arsy-versy
kim-kam
hub-bub
crawly-mauly
hab-nab
crincum-crankum
crinkle-crankle
flim-flam
fiddle-faddle
gibble-gabble
harum-scarum
helter-skelter
hiccup-sickup
hocus-pocus
hotch-potch
hugger-mugger
humdrum
hum-strum
hurry-scurry
jibber-jabber
prittle-prattle
shilly-shally
tittle-tattle
topsy-turvy

Many of these are still in common use today, but there are some I wish had never gone out of fashion. "Hiccup-sickup", for example, would have been very useful - and reassuring - to know existed back in my early experiments with alcohol. And why "arsy-versy" ever went out of fashion defeats me - especially since the invention of infernal combustion contraptions. It meant going backwards without paying attention to where one was going, an all too common practise which surely deserves one word unique to it.

"Kim Kam", common enough for Samuel Johnson to have included it in his dictionary, was a variant of "kam". Both versions meant "awry", but not just slightly out of kilter. For something to be "kam" it also inferred that one felt uneasy contemplating it, or that it produced feelings of foreboding or even dread. "Clean kam", as Shakespeare chose to use it *, is how people placed verbal emphasis on something they saw as eerily disfigured or unnatural, which is probably what then became "kim kam" in the vernacular. Even the etymologically suspicious Moor agreed that this one not only was most un-childish but was long overdue a resurrection in popularity even in his day. Our own paltry and restricted use of "cam" as a purely mechanics-related expression these days hardly does justice to the huge import its etymological ancestor once conveyed.



* In "Coriolanus", ACT III, scene 1, when there's a right ding-dong going on about our eponymous hero's character - Sicinius hates the guy but a few others are hoping to stick up for him. Menenius Agrippa, the politician that he is, is trying to see both good and bad in the lad, stating - rather unbelievably - that he reckons Corrie has unselfishly spilled as much of his own blood for his country as he ever caused the enemy to spill, but that now he's a bit of a wally, right enough. This pushes Sicky into spluttering hyperbole calling Mennie's defence of the guy as bloody weird as the guy himself, to which Junius responds by helpfully pointing out to the rest of us the difference in degree between "kam" and "awry".

Menenius Agrippa. blah blah blah - the blood he hath lost - blah blah - he dropp'd it for his country - rhubarb blah rhubarb - were to us all - expletive deleted - a brand to the end o' the world.
Sicinius Velutus. This is clean kam!
Junius Brutus. Merely awry: when he did love his country, it honour'd him.

At school we were told 'willy nilly' came from the Latin 'volo nolo' but I must admit wyllan nyllan seems much closer.  I watched a short video about Thames barges (referring to their history) and a wag had put something like bargees and dockers being likely to have an argy-bargy in the comments.  I don't know the etymology of the word but as it means an altercation it may be a corruption of 'argument'.

Argy-bargy seems to be a late nineteenth-century modification of a Scots phrase which had appeared earlier in the same century in the form argle-bargle. The first part of this older version was indeed a modification of the word argue, while the second part, whether as bargle or bargy, never had any independent existence and was no more than a nonsense rhyming repetition of the first bit.

Robert Louis Stevenson in 'Kidnapped' (1886) has: "Last night ye haggled and argle-bargled like an apple-wife." An apple-wife was a seller of apples from a stall, the female equivalent of a costermonger (who, historically and etymologically, also sold fruit, including the popular, large, medieval variety of apple called a costard). By repute apple-wives and costermongers were notoriously argumentative and foul-tongued.

The English language does seem to be particularly fond of these rhyming pairs, apparently still creating them on a regular basis: super-duper is first attested in the 1940s; pooper-scooper apparently dates from 1976; and stoli-bolli (a vodka-spiked champagne cocktail, taking its name from Stolichnaya vodka and Bollinger champagne) originated in an early 1990s episode of the BBC comedy 'Absolutely Fabulous'.

Do other languages have such rhyming expressions? I can't think of any in French, unless, like super-duper, they have been adopted from English.

Admiral Sir Archibald Berkeley "Arky-Barky" Milne's career was , alongside that of his junior, Admiral Troubridge, a victim of "Goeben" and "Breslau" escaping toTurkey on the outbreak ofWWI. Milne, then c-in-c Mediterranean Fleet expected the German ships to head for Gibraltar (or by some accounts, to interfere with French troop movements from Algeria) and left only a light cruiser to cover the eastern routes from Italy. Troubridge, his 2-i-c made contact but failed to engage. Troubridge was acquitted at his court-martial, but both were regarded as "tarnished" by the affair.

Was HMS Troutbridge in 'The Navy Lark' radio comedy a deliberate play on Admiral Troubridge's name and his tarnished reputation?

LadyinRetirement wrote:

At school we were told 'willy nilly' came from the Latin 'volo nolo' but I must admit wyllan nyllan seems much closer.  I watched a short video about Thames barges (referring to their history) and a wag had put something like bargees and dockers being likely to have an argy-bargy in the comments.  I don't know the etymology of the word but as it means an altercation it may be a corruption of 'argument'.

In Dutch we have the same "willens nilllens" and it seems to come from the Latin "nolens volens" (the reverse of the Dutch and English). And in our dialect we use the French: bon gré, mal gré (willingly, unwillingly) (in Dutch: goedschiks, kwaadschiks) (and we have also: "tegen wil en dank" (literal: against the will and thanks))
And in German they stick still to the medieval Latin: "nolens volens"...

LiR you said "wyllan nyllan" much closer...
How close with "volens nolens"?
https://nl.wiktionary.org/wiki/willen
"willen" from:
Middelnederlands: willenOudnederlands: willenGermaans: *wiljananIndo-Europees: *uelh₁-, *ulh₁-, *uolh₁-^[2]

Related in Germanic:
West': Engels: want (Angelsaksisch: willan), Duits: wollen, (Oudhoogduits: wellen), Fries: wolle (Oudfries: willa, wolla)Noord: Zweeds: vilja, Deens/Noors: ville, (Nynorsk: vilje, Oudnoords: vilja), IJslands/Faeröers: viljaOost: Gotisch: wiljan
Related in Romance:
Frans: vouloir Italiaans: volere Latijn: velle
 
Hence "willy-nilly" from "volens nolens" (verbs: velle, nolle)? Or from Indo-European...?

Kind regards, Paul.

Meles meles wrote:

Was HMS Troutbridge in 'The Navy Lark' radio comedy a deliberate play on Admiral Troubridge's name and his tarnished reputation?

Doubt that. Troubidges are one of the commoner names in the lists of Admirals (as are Hoods) There was actually a frigate contemporary with the program - when she was scrapped, the cast (who had been unofficially "twinned" with her) tried to buy her bell. No luck.

Wlliam of the uncertain jousting prowess, in "The Taming of the Shrew  And will you, nill you, I will marry you. Now, Kate, I am a husband for your turn; For, by this light, whereby I see thy beauty, — Thy beauty that doth make me like thee well, — Thou must be married to no man but me; For I am he am born to tame you, Kate, And bring you from a wild Kate to a Kate Conformable as other household Kates.

MM, offhand in French I can think of 'pêle-mêle'.  I've heard "C'est tout le pêle-mêle" when something, say a room, was particularly untidy.   There's also 'le tohu-bohu' which relates to confusion or chaos https://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/tohu-bohu/78283 and (says Wikipedia) there is an Italian restaurant by that name in Hennebont, Brittany.

Oh well done LiR. Apparently the modern French pêle-mêle comes from 12th century Old French, pesle mesle, rhyming pesler, meaning "to run or bolt", with mesler "to mix or mingle". The French espression was adopted into English in the 16th century. Sir Thomas North in his 1579 translation of 'Plutarch's Lives of the noble Grecians and Romanes' used the term to mean "in disordered confusion or with reckless haste": "He entred amongest them that fled into their Campe pelmel, or hand overheade."; while Shakespeare's 'Richard III' provides the first usage with modern English spelling: "March on, joine bravelie, let us to it pell mell, If not to heaven then hand in hand to hell."

I wonder though, is there is a connection at all with Pall Mall, the street in London? This was previously a small alleyway named after pall-mall, or paille-maille, or pell-mell, which was a game rather like croquet, that was once played in the alley itself or adjacent to it. The game pall-mall would appear to derive its name, from the French maillet, a mallet, combined with pall, meaning a ball, which came into Old French from the Latin pila, a ball (the English words pill, pellet, ball and bullet ultimately have the same origin). A suggested alternative origin for the pall/paille element is from the French paille, meaning straw, on the basis that the hoops or targets used in earlier versions of the game were sometimes made of bound straw. It was introduced from France to Scotland in the 16th century (both Mary Queen of Scots and James VI played it) and then to England, possibly by King James himself after his succession as King of England, particularly as he mentions "palle maillé" among the "faire and pleasant field-games" suitable for his son Prince Henry. Sometime around 1630 a Frenchman named John Bonnealle laid out a court for playing pall-mall in an open area known as St. James's Field (later called Pall Mall Field) on the south side of St. James's Square and which connected to the alley/street now called Pall Mall.


A game of "pell-mell" between Frederick V of the Palatinate and Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange, by Adriaen van de Venne, c. 1620–1626.

If, as it appears, the game was similar to modern croquet (redolent of genteel Victorian summer tea parties at the village parsonage) I doubt it had a reputation for being disorderly, haphazard or confused, and so the expression pell-mell, to mean with confused or reckless haste, is probably completely unrelated, but with etymology you can never be entirely certain.

For a while I used to go to a croquet game weekly, but I never really understood the rules, even in the days when memories didn't slide away from me as soon as they were told to me. But I don't think of it as a gentile game. It seemed quite vicious with people trying to bash the balls through the spaces and keep your ball out. But of course I played it in NZ so it might be different here. It was certainly just a women's game when I played but whether that was because men played at a different time or just not at all I don't know.

Someone has just asked me to edit some of their writing because they are not sure about punctuation, and I said I would be happy to do that, as I was wanting to do some editing work. But now you see I am not sure already if I should have used a comma before the "I don't know" at the end of that paragraph. 
I read some dreadfully edited self-published books and was thinking I could set myself up as an editor but I would have no idea what to charge, especially since I am an amateur. 
Off the subject, I know. Sorry.

Croquet.
Gentle.
No.
If as the saying goes, soccer is a game for gentlemen that is played by hooligans, and Rugby is (or was once) a game for hooligans played by gentlemen, croquet seems to have been a game for ladies played by termagants. It seems to have had a fearsome reputation amngst the country house party set.

Caro, sorry if you've already thought of this, but could you look on sites like fiverr* or LinkedIn where independent contractors advertise and see what rates freelancers in your specialism are offering there?  This blog post is from 3 years ago so may be out of date but there is a tabulation of rates half to three-quarters way down the page. https://www.louiseharnbyproofreader.com/blog/how-much-does-fiction-copyediting-and-proofreading-cost  I realise that you already have work and aren't seeking it; I mention these sites simply as a possible way of assessing the rates people are offering.  Realwaystoearnmoneyonline is an American site - in this article from 2020 it mentions rates offered on some sites. https://realwaystoearnmoneyonline.com/editing-and-proofreading/  

*Strictly speaking the jobs on fiverr are for 5 US dollars but of course it works out mainly as multiples of 5 US dollars.

Does anyone know the etymology of hurdy-gurdy.  Wikipedia was informative about different varieties of hurdy-gurdies but I couldn't find an explanation as to how the name arose.

LiR,

Re hurdy-gurdy, whether this link may help I don't know - I just got confused - https://www.wordnik.com/words/hurdy-gurdy

Most dictionaries play it safe and say "hurdy gurdy" is probably simply imitative of the sound the machine makes.

However this rather unsatisfactory explanation of its etymology evidently didn't sit too well with the OED compilers from the 19th century who noticed that it was very close to "hirdy girdy", a word that English had already adopted from a very ancient root in Scottish dialect, where (ironically enough given MM's contribution above) it served roughly the same descriptive function as "pell mell", used in any instance where a sense of chaotic, unstructured and frantic activity needed to be conveyed. They could even cite recorded evidence of where it already had been applied to cacophonous noise pretending to be music - and that's from even before the bagpipes had arrived on Scottish soil!

I'm with the OED on this one - the semantic similarities of this older usage and application are too close to its more confined modern meaning to be dismissed out of hand. A clue that we are safe in this assumption is the fact that the language of the people whose society so enthusiastically adopted use of the crank-turned instrument - the Germans - shun this etymology completely and simply refer to it as a "drehleier" (rotation player). In normal circumstances when a new name for a new instrument gains traction - and the hurdy gurdy as an instrument owes its invention very much to German technical innovation - standard linguistic principles dictate that it is the originators' chosen term which will predominantly survive, even when translated into or adopted by other tongues. The fact that English speakers already had an alternative oven-ready semantic package "hurdy gurdy" which could be applied with immediate intelligible effect simply reinforces, in my view, a reason to be grateful to the Scots for having originated it, even if they also very likely had to undergo the self-inflicted agony of bagpipes to ensure its currency while waiting for the machine to appear as a candidate for semantic baptism.

Much like the Germans, in France, where the hurdy-gurdy is still a fairly common folk instrument particularly down south in the Pays d'Oc, it is known as a vielle à roue (a wheel fiddle) or just a vielle for short, despite a vielle or vièle strictly being a different instrument, one known in English as a fiddle. The medieval fiddle was distinct from a violin (it has different tuning for one thing) although it is ancestral to the modern violin/viola/cello.


A modern reconstruction of a vielle after a 15th century Flemish painting.

One should also distinguish the original hurdy-gurdy from the Victorian barrel-organ, which was often popularly known as a hurdy-gurdy when it was played in the street by buskers. The original hurdy-gurdy plays by a wheel rubbing against the strings, which are 'stopped' using finger-operated keys - but the barrel- or street-organ, while again being operated by turning a crank, actually plays using organ pipes, a bellows and a barrel with pins that rotates and plays programmed tunes recorded on perforated paper rolls. The French call this type of instrument an orgue de Barbarie (Barbary organ).


A 19th century organ-grinder with his portable barrel organ and traditional monkey to collect the pennies.

Green George wrote:

Croquet.
" croquet seems to have been a game for ladies played by termagants."

GG, I learned for the first time in my life today the word "termagant"
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/termagant
But to be honest I know as many men as women of that kind...what is the male of "termagant"?
Kind regards, Paul.

PaulRyckier wrote:

...what is the male of "termagant"?
Kind regards, Paul.

Termaguncle.

Don't mention it, nordmann.

For similar in a short term might even consider odd return.

Priscilla wrote:

For similar in a short term might even consider odd return.

The odder the better - wouldn't have it any other way.

Odd's fish ma'am, but did not expect to see you return before this year's end!


I first came across Odd's fish! in some old play, but had no idea what it really meant. Still haven't tracked its origin down, but I think it's a minced oath (see below) meaning "God's face". The Tudors liked referring to various parts of the Deity's anatomy, but the Puritans were not amused. They never were, of course.


Odd's Fish



“Odd’s Fish” was the favourite exclamation of King Charles II. It also featured in the play ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’ and was said by Captain Hook (a character who based his image on King Charles) in the 1953 Disney version of 'Peter Pan’.
It is what is known as a 'Minced Oath’ a specific kind of euphemism or disguise mechanism, whereby an offending term or taboo phrase is distorted or “minced” so that it no longer offends. (We still have the idiom “not to mince one’s words” meaning to speak frankly.)
Other examples are, God’s truth becoming strewth!, by God! becoming egad or plain Gad !, Jee whiz for Jesus, Crickey for Christ, Lummey! for Lord love me!, tarnation for damnation, heck for Hell, Deuce for the Devil.
In the late sixteenth century there were increasing Puritan injunctions against the use of profanity on the stage, so that there is no doubt that the response was the great number of minced oaths. Consequently, the name of God was either distorted to gad or abbreviated to od , producing curious forms like ’od’s my will for “as God is my will” and ’od’s me for “God save me.”
The minced oaths caught on in their own right and were still used after the Restoration.

The original name of the hurdy-gurdy appears to have been "organistrum", and it appears, in a two-plyer form, in many depictions of angelic musicians. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCjXkV1aaC8

Nielsen, nordmann, MM and Gilgamesh, thanks so much for demystifying the origins of the hurdy-gurdy.

Temperance wrote:

I first came across Odd's fish! in some old play, but had no idea what it really meant. Still haven't tracked its origin down, but I think it's a minced oath (see below) meaning "God's face". The Tudors liked referring to various parts of the Deity's anatomy, but the Puritans were not amused. They never were, of course.

There was also odd's bodikins ... another minced oath, either alluding to God's body or perhaps referring to the nails used in the crucifixion. Shakespeare often had no truck with such minced oaths, preferring to ignore the impropriety and say it as it was outloud, as in the slightly bizarre line from Henry IV Part II, 1597:
FIRST CARRIER: "God's body! the turkeys in my pannier are quite starved."

Perhaps he was rebuked for that. In any event by 1600, when he wrote Hamlet, he had gone halfway towards the euphemistic version:
POLONIUS:My lord, I will use them according to their desert.
HAMLET: God's bodykins, man, much better: use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?

https://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-name-in-English-for-words-like-easy-peasy-hoity-toity-argy-bargy-dilly-dally-shilly-shally-honey-bunny-and-dingle-dangle
I hope this link isn't too long.  Apparently the term for words like 'argy-bargy' is 'rhyming reduplication'. There could be other terms for the same thing.

MM wrote:

There was also odd's bodikins ... another minced oath, either alluding to God's body or perhaps referring to the nails used in the crucifixion. Shakespeare often had no truck with such minced oaths, preferring to ignore the impropriety and say it as it outloud, as in the slightly bizarre line from Henry IV Part II, 1597:
FIRST CARRIER: "God's body! the turkeys in my pannier are quite starved." 

Yes - but writers had to be careful as the Puritan faction gained more influence. Not just writers - even the young Edward VI got into trouble for using "monstrous blasphemies" like "God's eyeballs"! His unfortunate whipping boy, Barnaby Fitzpatrick, was beaten in Edward's presence for having taught the young king how to swear. When questioned why he had "so abused his trust", the young whipping boy replied that he thought it (swearing) was "the proper thing for a King to do". Echoes of some of Henry VIII's terrifying roars, perhaps - or of the king's uncle, the sailor*, Thomas Seymour's, favourite expressions?

Now interested to find out when the "Odd's" euphemism was first recorded in 17th century literature. Must have been pre-Restoration.

PS *Some of the Tudor oaths referring to God, especially those used by sailors, were absolutely dreadful. It became, apparently, a sort of competition in profanity! No wonder "Odd's" became the euphemism for "God's"!

LadyinRetirement wrote:

https://www.quora.com/Is-there-a-name-in-English-for-words-like-easy-peasy-hoity-toity-argy-bargy-dilly-dally-shilly-shally-honey-bunny-and-dingle-dangle
I hope this link isn't too long.  Apparently the term for words like 'argy-bargy' is 'rhyming reduplication'. There could be other terms for the same thing.

My favourite of those is the Anglo-Indian "Hobson-Jobson" as in this work : https://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/hobsonjobson/

Still thinking about rhyming dupication in French (and other languqges) and further to LiR's excellent mention of pêle-mêle (pell mell, in English), etymologically related is the French, méli-mélo. Again it derives from mêler (to mix together) and so means a confused mix or a muddle, and so one might say, "cette affaire est un véritable méli-mélo" (this business is a real muddle, or, what a terrible muddle this business is), or in a more benign manner my frozen food supplier offers "un méli-mélo des legumes" and another of fruits de mer, ie bags of frozen mixed veg' and assorted seafood.

Another reduplicative rhyming expression which occurs in both English and French is bric-a-brac, meaning miscellaneous items, and which more often occurs in French as the expression "de bric et de brac" meaning by hazard or at random, as in, say, "leur appartement est meublé de bric et de brac" (their appartment is furnished with random bits and pieces). The OED translates the phrase by using the English rhyming expression "by hook or by crook" but I don't think that's quite right as the English phrase implies some degree of compulsion by circumstance as well as perhaps being constrained by needing permission. In the general sense of denoting general, random, stuff, "bits and bobs", or "odds and ends" etc, it appears in various forms in French: "en bloc et en blic" (15th century), "à bricq et à bracq" (16th century), "de bric et de broc" (17th century), "en bric-à-brac" (Académie française, 1825). It acquired the modern English meaning of small objets d'art, curios, trinkets, knicknacks and other relatively inexpensive items of a decorative nature, only in the mid-19th century. The origin is uncertain but I suspect it is related to une bricole, a trifle or small inexpensive trinket, token of gift, or as in "il ne reste que des bricoles" (there are only a few odds and ends/bits and bobs/odds and sods, left) and hence probably the modern French term, bricolage, meaning DIY, ie doing repairs and small odd jobs.

Simply repeated words are actually quite common in French: often onomatopaeic in nature, they occur in colloquial language, slang, baby talk, or to imply a familiar diminutive. For example: mama, papa, pépère (grand-dad: un père is a father), tonton (uncle, from a masculine form of tante: aunt, and then in circular reasoning, aunt can take a feminine diminutive form of tonton, to become tantine: aunty), fifille (from une fille, a girl), nounours (a teddy bear: un ours is a bear), dodo (sleep, beddy-byes: dormir is to sleep), bonbon (a sweet: bon is good, nice), chou-chou (little cabbage, said as a term of endearment), chien-chien (doggy) etc.

And then there's da-da, or dada, which is common babytalk for a horse, ie a horsey or gee-gee. It seems to have derived from the imagined sound the hooves make: da-da, da-da, da-da, or maybe from the rider's encouragement to the animal, as in gee-up or giddy-up, and was particularly associated with hobby-horses, that is the children's toy in the form of a horse's head attached to a stick. Like the English word hobby-horse it has subsequently developed to also mean a pet peeve or obsession. It was also adopted as a name by Dadaism, the avant-garde art movement of the early 20th century. There's no consensus on how exactly the art movement came to take the name but a common story is that the German artist Richard Huelsenbeck slid a paper knife at random into a dictionary, where it landed on "dada", the colloquial French term for a hobby horse. Others note that it suggests the first words of a child, evoking a childishness and absurdity that appealed to the group, while some speculate that the word might have been chosen to evoke a similar meaning (or no meaning at all) in any language, reflecting the movement's internationalism.

French can also use simple repetition just to add emphasis. For example when you rush to the corner shop for a bottle of milk, only to find the proprietor already pulling down the shutters and about to go for lunch, you might ask: "Vous êtes fermés?" (Are you closed?) hoping he might let you nip in for a few seconds. But he might reply, "Désolé, je suis fermé fermé" (sorry, I'm closed closed, ie I really am closed).

What a rich survey of French rhyming duplications as in English, MM.

"méli-mélo"...
We have the equivalent in Dutch, but perhaps not completely a rhyming duplication...
"mengelmoes" meaning exactly the same...(mishmash)
From menghmoes (1599)
http://www.etymologiebank.nl/trefwoord/mengelmoes
We have also in our Flemish Dutch: micmac
From French micmac:
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/french-english/micmac
"mess", "wheeler-dealing"

"bric-a-brac" In the Dutch Flemish we have in the same sense: "bric en (and) brac": "rommel, prullaria" (debris, rubbish, knickknack)
bricolage" also used in Flemish Dutch: "knutselwerk" (tinkerwork?), but overhere more with a negative connotation of "prutsen" (mess around) (as something not done as it has to be)

We have also: "dodo, bonbon, chou-chou" in our Flemish Dutch in the same sense, but no "chien-chien" there it is "boubou" (french articulation).

"da-da" but here it is "dada" (dag-dag, see you, see you), but also indeed: het is zijn "dada" niet (it is not his best known thing, his best speciality?)

To my knowledge no repetition of the same word for emphasis in both West and East Flemish, nor in Dutch...

Kind regards, Paul.

Well, Spicer-Simpson deliberatelychose French reduplcations for his squadron https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5cp-QFzfxU

Green George wrote:

Well, Spicer-Simpson deliberatelychose French reduplcations for his squadron https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5cp-QFzfxU

 
Gil, thanks for Mimi, Toutou and Fifi..."mimi"we have overhere for a cat (female) as we have "minou"...

In the half of your youtube I started to think about the story of "The African Queen", which I saw thrice...and see at the end of the film it was confirmed: this episode was used for the film...

Kind regards, Paul.

Mimi also appeared as the heroine of the Halas & Batchelor animated series Foo Foo, with the villainous Go Go as his adversary always trying to bear her off to a fate worse than erasure.

If you are to believe the OED then it made it into the Antipodes from American English and the word's origin is "popularly" believed to have arisen from an association between the perceived communal industry of the insect with similar human activity. However, in something that may be more than coincidence, an older English use of "bean" or "been" to describe the same activity can be attested as far back as Middle English and this was apparently derived from "bene" which had three distinct applications - prayer, benefit or, interestingly enough, communal unpaid work performed by feudal vassals for their lord or their church.

I am not aware of any equivalent in current English use except where it may have been only recently reintroduced from American using the "bee" version of the word, as you also apparently do (I had mistakenly assumed it to be exclusively American in its vernacular use). In Norwegian the feudal concept of communal labour that is classed as voluntary but which tradition and social pressure renders less so persists, as does the word "dugnad" to describe it. These days we still convene annually to do a flurry of odd-jobs and DIY to spruce up communal areas of our apartment blocks or neighbourhoods and even get fined for non-attendance at said "dugnad", the money then used to pay for materials etc. My "Stor Norsk-Engelsk Leksikon" however tells me there is no direct translation for this in English, except the American "bee" in some contexts of its use. Interestingly enough it says the northern Germans have a similar tradition, where it is sometimes called "benefis" - which may indeed put paid to the supposed insect root.

Caro, I'm just glad to be of help if I can.

I know I mentioned 'xanxan' at one time but I got it wrong.  It's 'xanthan' (as in xanthan gum), so when (hopefully) things get back to normal I'll tell the lady I know who plays Scrabble competitively that 'xanthan' is a useful word (apparently 'xanxan' isn't, or wouldn't have been if it was the correct spelling because there's only one 'x' in Scrabble.

Unless you use one of the blanks, LIR!