Assassins and Dutch courage

The starting point for today's ramblings is the word assassin. Followers of The Old Man of the Mountains (shaik-al-jibal) were known for (in the words of Etymonline)  "murdering opposing leaders after intoxicating themselves by eating hashish." It goes on:

1530s (in Anglo-Latin from mid-13c.), via medieval French and Italian Assissini, Assassini, from Arabic hashīshīn "hashish-users," an Arabic nickname for the Nizari Ismaili sect in the Middle East during the Crusades, plural of hashishiyy, from the source of hashish (q.v.).

The Etymonline entry for hashish reads

hashish (n.) 

also hasheesh, 1590s, from Arabic hashīsh "powdered hemp, hemp," extended from sense "herbage, dry herb, rough grass, hay."

and quotes English Words of Arabic Ancestry:

Its earliest record as a nickname for cannabis drug is in 13th century Arabic. Its earliest in English is in a traveller's report from Egypt in 1598. It is rare in English until the 19th century. The word form in English today dates from the early 19th century. The word entered all the bigger Western European languages in the early to mid 19th century if you don't count occasional mentions in travellers' reports before then.  

That mention of cannabis invites the reflection that the English word canvas is related. Unstressed vowels between consonants (like the second a in cannabis) are, as students of language change over time say, unstable: they tend to disappear.

Here , relatively early in the life of this blog, I was writing about a spiral ring found in Pompeii,  with an inscription that included the word domnus (sic, no i).

... no-one could presumably suggest that there was not room, in a 10-15 cm spiral ring, for one little I, or that this one-stroke character was too complex for an otherwise impeccable craftsman! No, people were dropping the unstressed I in speech; and this accounts for words like the Italian Donna and Spanish Doña when the  Latin was Domina . (I changed the sex of the lordly person, because in the masculine the attrition of an unstressed vowel has gone one step further in Spanish – Don [which dropped its unstressed vowel {HD 2019: that is, after dropping the unstressed i it dropped the unstressed u}].)

It would have been less contentious to cite the Portuguese donna, as in current Spanish the change has gone further, with the introduction of the ñ.

Anyway, the same happened to the unstressed a in cannabis (though in a different context, of course – not, as linguists are wont to say diachronic) to produce the word "canvas" – woven from that "herbage, dry herb, rough grass, hay.".

The -in of assassin is, incidentally,  a false  plural, like "a criteria", "a panini", "a cherubim".

<THE_USUAL_PROVISO prescriptivism="0">
(I hasten to add that that "false" is an indication of how the word was formed, not a value judgement. Some of these mistakes are becoming standardized.  I won't say "a panini" but at some stage that sort of finger-in-the-dikery will become misplaced  A mistake is at the root of many words. My favourite, and oft-cited, example is the French  word for bat – discussed at length here. [I recommend that piece, but if you don't have time the short version is this: a chauve-souris is not a bald-mouse but an owl-mouse.])
</THE_USUAL_PROVISO>

If the notion of a fighting force getting high before spilling blood seems odd, try your preferred search engine with the string US Army Vietnam drug-taking. I get nearly 22 million hits.

But Vietnam was by no means the first theatre of war that encouraged....

 <QUOD_SCRIPSI_SCRIPSI translation="Youi'd better believe it">
 "Substance abuse in the Vietnam War wasn’t just limited to the marijuana and heroin enlistees could buy on the black market. Military commanders also heavily prescribed pills to help improve soldiers' performance."

History.com
</QUOD_SCRIPSI_SCRIPSI>

 .... drug-taking. The Phrase Finder writes

'Dutch courage' derives from the English derision of the Dutch which came about during the Anglo-Dutch wars. 

Strictly, the Phrase Finder is at pains to point out that the use of alcohol to "stiffen the sinews" wasn't the chief aim of the original users of the expression. Rather, the Anglo-Dutch wars encouraged the use of 'Dutch as a pejorative:

• Dutch bargain - a contract made when one is drunk.
• Dutch concert - where several tunes are played at the same time.
• Dutch feast - where the host gets drunk before the guests.
• Dutch treat - a 'treat' at which one has to pay one's own share.
• Double Dutch - nonsense.

I'm not sure I buy the pejorative idea. After all, a "Dutch auction" isn't a substandard or risible auction, it's just a different sort of auction  So I am not so quick to dismiss the idea that Dutch fighters had a nip of the hard stuff before an engagement. They wouldn't have been the first to do it, and gin was cheap and plentiful

Time to return to real life.

b

Quod erat pudendum

Prove is a tricky word; "to try, test; evaluate; demonstrate," says Etymonline
with the line  between test and show falling about halfway down that list. The idea of trying is (it seems to me – I can't think of a way to show this) waning in English; in Spanish, on the other hand, the trying end of the "meaning pool" is quite deep: a stall-holder in a food market in Barcelona will invite passers-by to probar their produce, whereas the equivalent stall-holder at a Farmer's Market in Swindon would say "Try some"; calling "Prove it" wouldn't help sales.

It was not always this way .  When a printer wanted to test how accurate his typesetter had been, he produced a proof copy – whence comes the use of proof as a verb meaning "read and correct a proof copy" (which is not to deny that proof was already a verb; Etymonline puts it at 1834).


Which brings us to "the proof of the pudding is in the eating", mangled by people who didn't understand this meaning of proof.  There are various juxtapositions of words beginning with p. Something is (?) "the proof in the pudding"...

<example source="Boston Globe, 2003, quoted in Quinion piece, vide infra">
"While the team’s first Super Bowl victory back in 2002 could be explained away by some skeptics as a fluke, the second victory is the proof in the pudding in cementing the Pats’ status as the cream of the NFL crop."
 </example> 

...but far and away the winner is "the proof is in the pudding". Google shows the size of the victory – about 6 times more for the meaningless newcomer.

Full form: 159,000 results

Demonstrative charcuterie:  1,080,000  results

In a 2012 edition of Morning Edition, Boston Globe language columnist Ben Zimmer anointed the meaningless interloper thus:

Well, the proof is in the pudding is a new twist on a very old proverb.

Hmm...."New twist", sounds pretty catchy. He goes on to fill in the back story:

The original version is the proof of the pudding is in the eating. And what it meant was that you had to try out food in order to know whether it was good....Back then, pudding referred to a kind of sausage, filling the intestines of some animal with minced meat and other things - something you probably want to try out carefully since that kind of food could be rather treacherous.

OK. That's the way language works: a sort of linguistic Gresham's Law:

Bad language drives out good

But I know what I know; my prescriptivist in descriptivist's clothing credentials are unchanged. My lip will always curl when I hear about the proof being in the pudding. And I agree with Michael Quinion's

The proverb is ancient — it has been traced back to 1300 in a rather different form and is recorded by William Camden in his Remains Concerning Britain of 1623. It’s sad that it has lasted so long, only to be corrupted in modern times.

More here

But that corruption is terminal. "Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour. England hath need of thee..." Well, best not to make a fuss.  :-)

b

Et in arcadia Lego

What people say and the way they say it often grates with me. This is my problem rather than theirs, but as I've said elsewhere, I'm a prescriptivist in descriptivist's clothing, Believe me, my life would be a lot easier if I didn't have a gnome brandishing a red pen sitting on my shoulder  muttering 'That's wrong' all the time. Meanwhile, on my other shoulder, the Good Fairy of Descriptivism says 'No it's not. Take a chill pill. That's how language works.'

Politicians are frequent offenders, because of the need to produce verbiage at the drop of a hat (or maybe that should be at the thrust of a microphone). As it happens – with no particular political axe to grind – my latest irritant has come from the mouth of Theresa May, who in a Commons debate accused Jeremy Corbyn of letting anti-Semitism run rife in the Labour Party.


"Run RIFE"? The British National Corpus (hereafter "BNC")  has no instances of run rife, and 1 of ran rife. [With this and other BNC searches, click on the link and sit back while the search engine does its stuff – which might take a second or two, depending on the usual computicle variables: Your BIT-RATE May Vary] .

On the other hand, in BNC, with the searchstring * riot, run riot is 3rd most common with 44 instances, running riot is 11th most common with 16 instances, ran riot is 12th most common with 15 instances, and runs riot is 20th most common with 7 instances. Running is what happens in the vicinity of the word riot: or, as a bean-counter might say "run is the most common verb to appear in collocation with riot"; this search (for any verb preceding riot) confirms it; (the figures don't match; I don't know why [e.g. 44 instances of run riot according to the first search, but 36 in the second],  but they're in the same ball-park).

But whenever the prescriptivist gnome says "That's wrong" I risk coming a cropper. Another Corbyn-related word supplies an example, only this time he was the speaker; the word was ram-packed. When he used it I thought "Well, he means jam-packed, doesn't he, he just made up this new word to emphasize how people were crammed in [to a Virgin train, if you must know]."

BNC  is too small to have a statistically convincing number of examples of jam-packed, so I've turned to the less authoritative but much more populous {if that's the word – one populates a database, so no one can say people have to be involved} Google. Given the Google treatment,  jam-packed has more than nine million hits  – more than a match, I thought, for the arriviste "ram-packed" (which of course the Good Fairy says is fine, but...).

However, ram-packed is more than a match for jam-packed, as this search shows; 22.5 million, rather than a piffling 9.27 million. It was an arriviste to my limited ken, but not to English.  Wiktionary says it was formed from ram and packed (natch)

... originally (since at least the 1940s) literal, referring to something packed with a ram. (Possibly reinforced by the rhyming synonym jam-packed.)

So he who hesitates has a chance of getting things right.

b

Confession of a prescriptivist in descriptivist's clothing

Word Watch

Funny how bees get attracted to bonnets. When I started writing for a living (not so much an author, more a glorified typist) I was warned against an arriviste word. As I started working for DEC (before HR started to insist on a full polysyllabic "Digital Equipment Corporation", which usually evoked a quizzical look, followed by the response "Oh, you mean DEC") in 1984, the word had just started its assault (to use the prescriptivist's word, although the descriptivist might defend its  appropriateness by noting its derivation from the Latin saltare [="jump"]) on the citadel of linguistic rectitude. Collins English Dictionary shows this sudden uptick:

This curve suggests (as I was told at the time) that in the early '80s some group of linguistic vandals (probably Those Damn Yanks [traditional Bogeymen of prescriptivist rants])...

<digression subject="traditional Bogeymen">
(as has been the regular slur since the early days of the Republic). It is the price the USA pays for being such a fertile source of the innovations that make English so rich.
</digression>

...probably on an MBA course (contrasting management styles), started introducing the  "proactive/reactive" distinction. And this was  not a case of a word being resurrected after pre-Victorian popularity, as is sometimes the case with "new" words decried by old fogeys.

But the flatness of that ground-hugging frequency curve until the early '80s shouldn't be thought to imply that the word just didn't exist before then. Etymonline traces it back to 1921:

proactive (adj.) 

also pro-active, of persons or policies, as an opposition to reactive, 1921, from pro- + active. From 1933, in psychology (learning theory).

I don't think I'll ever use it, as active – in the right context – can usually do the same job. But my lip will curl less when others use it.

b

PS: And here are a few clues:

• After uneven exchange with Romans (five against six hundred), Boudicca might camp in one. (7)
• Just take the first amendment: "Here I am" – whingeing, I'll be bound. (8)
• Might be cooked up for one of ducal rank/ego. (4,1,1,6) 

Update: 2016.12.08.23:15 – Added PPS

PPS: Oops – Fixed one of the clues; saying which would give the game away.