Criminal Etymologists
January 20, 2010
The other day I was talking to my daughter and I used the word “hoodlum” (I don’t remember the context, but I was probably describing what all the boys in the high school she would soon be attending were like and why she should avoid having any contact with them). She didn’t know the word. Usually, she hates it when I use words she doesn’t know—“eighteenth-century words,” she calls them—but this time, after the obligatory dissing, she expressed some interest and asked if it meant the same thing as “’hood,” as in “Boyz ‘n da.” I told her it didn’t, but in fact I hadn’t the slightest idea where “hoodlum” came from.
It turns out that nobody has much of an idea where it comes from. Some claim that it derives from “huddellump,” which in the Bavarian dialect means “rags” and “a slovenly, careless person,” but since the word first appeared in 1871 in San Francisco, this seems something of a stretch, and even one of the etymologists who puts forward the theory admits that it is “a guess,” and then adds rather lamely, “though perhaps better than average.”
The San Francisco origin has tempted another etymologist to suggest a rather different origin. In the late nineteenth century, he says, San Francisco was hit by a crime wave, and one of the gang leaders responsible was a man named Muldoon. Newspaper writers wanted to blame someone, but since there was no legal evidence that Muldoon was the real culprit, in their stories they spelled his name backward just to be safe, attributing every robbery, assault, or act of petty larceny to someone named Noodlum. But that was so obvious—and it so obviously left them open to a law suit—that they changed the ‘N’ to an ‘H’ and, voila, Hoodlum was born.
It’s a flimsy theory that doesn’t have much evidence to support it, and I was ready to dismiss it out of hand until I remembered the putative origin of the closely related word, “hooligan.” This word is said to derive from an Irish family who lived in Southwark, London, around 1900. Their surname was Hooligan, and they were reputed to be behind the crime wave that gripped the city at that time.
Still, as the poet and amateur etymologist John Ciardi remarked about this supposed origin of the word hooligan, “never trust an Englishman to be accurate in ridiculing the Irish; with the English the ridicule comes first and the details may be freely invented along the way.”
—Dennis
The Wonder of Naked Grammar
January 18, 2010
I just finished the lovely novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. One of the book’s two alternating narrators is Paloma, a precocious 12-year-old French girl who has opinions on all sorts of things, including grammar:
Personally, I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty. When you speak, or read, or write, you can tell if you’ve said or read or written a fine sentence. You can recognize a well-turned phrase or an elegant style. But when you are applying the rules of grammar skillfully, you ascend to another level of the beauty of language. When you use grammar you peel back the layers, to see how it is all put together, see it quite naked, in a way. And that’s where it becomes wonderful, because you say to yourself, “Look how well-made this is, how well-constructed it is! How solid and ingenious, rich and subtle!”
I finished the novel late Saturday night. When I got up Sunday morning, Dennis told me I should read the Washington Post column by the paper’s ombudsman, Andrew Alexander. ”It’s about their copy-editing problem,” Dennis said, handing it to me while I sipped my coffee. We’ve both been annoyed by the increase in errors in the Post.
The column’s lead grated on my nerves: “When it comes to typos and syntax, retired English teachers and armchair grammarians delight in playing ’Gotcha!’ with the Post…” The tone was dismissive, as though only grumpy old retired folks wearing Depends and wielding washed up red pens cared about mistakes. To diminish the importance of accuracy and quality in a publication’s prose is short-sighted. The Washington Post is a newspaper with a national, even international reputation, and its currency is the written word. It’s like a chef being cavalier about the ingredients that go into a recipe. Who cares if we use basmati instead of arborio rice in that saffron proscuitto risotto. Really?
Alexander explains that the errors are caused by a shrinking staff due to buyouts, and to the changing and increasing duties due to technological advances of those copy editors who do remain. I understand that times are tough for newspapers but I also believe that copy editing should be a priority when triaging resources. I don’t want to be an armchair grammarian and when I’m a retired English teacher I hope I have better things to do than police the Washington Post for comma splices and dangling modifiers. What I do want is to read sturdy, clean prose and well-reported journalism. I’ve always turned to the Post for that, and I hope I can continue to in the future.
–Barbara
On Fox News and Down the Toilet
January 12, 2010
The Washington Post’s lead story in Style today quotes Republican strategist Todd Harris as noting that Sarah Palin’s new gig on Fox will give her “a platform she can use to stay relevant, to stay in the public eye and to flush out some of her policy positions.”
When I read that I thought for a moment this was another instance where the Post’s recent lack of attention to copy editing was coming into play. But the quote is repeated twice in the hard copy of the paper — both in the body of the piece and as a takeout quote – and so my next thought was the quote was accurate and that perhaps it was a case of the speaker misspeaking. Or miss-thinking. Didn’t Harris mean to say “flesh” rather than “flush”?
To “flesh out” would mean to articulate more fully, to detail or delineate. To “flush out” is a hunting term meaning to force an animal to stop hiding (visions here of that poor turkey being slaughtered in the background as Palin was being interviewed in the foreground). Or maybe Harris didn’t misspeak. Maybe he did mean exactly what he said — to flush out as in to clean out a system with a flow of water. Was Harris implying that Palin’s policy positions needed an enema?
Ghosts of Ghostwriters Past…
January 4, 2010
One of my Christmas presents this year was Memoir: A History by Ben Yagoda. Dennis took the not-so-subtle hint I left in an earlier post that this would be a much appreciated gift.
I wasn’t disappointed. With plenty of time to read as I sat by the fire, snowed in, literally (thank you, Arlington County, for the crappy plowing job you did in our neighborhood), I was able to catch up on my reading. First I read Jon Loomis’s quirky, entertaining Mating Season, then Lorrie Moore’s amazing novel A Gate At the Stairs, and then, finally, I got to Yagoda’s book. My approach mimicked our daughter’s eating style: good stuff like pasta first, necessary and healthy stuff like vegetables second. I thought the memoir book would be the veggies of my reading list. It was certainly good for me, but it also turned out to be a wonderful read. I’m very interested in the whole genre of autobiography and memoir, I suppose because I’ve done more ghostwriting than I’d like (or am contractually able) to admit. Ghostwriting is to memoir what Asperger’s Syndrome is to autism. It’s on the spectrum but it’s a diluted form.
Yagoda has a section on ghostwritten celebrity memoirs and it’s clear that he did his research. He tells many amusing ghost stories, my favorite one about baseball great Ty Cobb and his hapless ghostwriter Al Stump — talk about a Dickensian name– whom Yagoda notes was “living out a ghostwriter’s weird version of Stockholm syndrome.” He talks about what a horrible, cruel guy Cobb was to work for, and how he quit the project twice and was fired once, but always came back. You see, Cobb was dying and Stump just felt compelled to help the guy and finish the book. Yagoda quotes Stump as having later said that he felt bad about the book, that it was a cover-up, I guess meaning it didn’t reflect what really happened. “I felt I wasn’t being a good newspaperman.” Understandable. There is an unhappy tango between fact and fantasy, as any journalist who has ghostwritten a book knows. The celebrity wants the story to be told in a sanitized way either because he believes that’s what really happened or he wishes that’s what really happened. It takes the skills of a “newspaperman” and the imagination of a fiction writer to pull off a successful ghostwritten book. Which leads me to the article I clipped from the Post Outlook section on Sunday (I know, how quaint that I’m one of the six readers who still has one delivered and thrown in the bushes every morning.). A terrific book review by Tom Miller uses the occasion of the publication of a novel called The Autobiography of Fidel Castro to explore the notion of autobiography and who is best suited to write the story of a life. It brought to mind an article on poynter.org that I refer my students to about the art of profile writing. It quotes Malcolm Gladwell as saying something along the lines of when you write profiles the least important person to interview is the subject himself. After my years as a ghost, I’d have to agree.
