775-1: Feedback, notes and comments

Sic! To misquote a famous Guardian correction, the absence of this column last week should not be taken as evidence of any sudden onset of accuracy in the world's press.

God willing and the creeks don't rise Lesley Shaw wrote to say that it's not only Americans who know this: "When I was growing up in a small Queensland bush town you often heard people say: 'See you if the creeks aren't up' and they meant exactly that. We always had enough food on hand (I still do in suburban Brisbane!) 'in case the creeks come up'. But it just as often had a metaphorical meaning." Murray Ball confirmed that it was "common when I was a lad growing up in rural Manitoba (Canada) in the 1940s and 1950s. Since the aboriginals in rural Manitoba were Cree or Sioux, it definitely had nothing to do with Creek Indians."

An abbreviation with the same sense was cited by Australian readers: DVWP, from "Deo volente" (God willing) + "weather permitting". Ama Bolton mentioned that her mother, born in Devon in the 1880s, used DV+WP instead and this form is also known in Australia. Although DV is common enough among churchgoers, the longer abbreviation is rare in print: I've come across just one example, in a letter to the Glasgow Herald in 1999.

Alamagoozlum Mary Louise Lyman recalled: "During Depression days at our house no food was allowed to go to waste, which often resulted in some rather odd but mostly tasty stews/casseroles that dad always called magoozlum. I never heard it in connection with maple syrup or an alcoholic drink." It isn't common in print, but it is in The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler: "I've written twelve best-sellers, and if I ever finish that stack of magoozlum on the desk there I may possibly have written thirteen." It has been defined as hooey, nonsense, tosh, tripe, twaddle or tommy-rot. Etymologists have suggested it may derive from the cartoon character Mr Magoo or from magoo, Hollywood slang for the gooey insides of custard pies (the throwing sort), but it seems at least as likely that it's a shortening of alamagoozlum.

Several readers have told me that, despite what I wrote in this piece last week, gomme syrup is still available, from the French company Monin.

Change in format As an experiment, next week's issue will be sent in both plain text and formatted versions in one message. Which you will see depends on your mail system and perhaps your settings. Most online mailers (such as Google Mail, Hotmail and Yahoo!) will show you only the formatted version. Offline readers (such as Outlook, Thunderbird, etc) should give you a choice of format to view. In case it all goes pear-shaped, I'll tell you now that next week's issue will be online at http://www.worldwidewords.org/nl/nbdg.htm. Your comments, as always, will be welcome. However, since no two mail readers agree about which formatting they support, requests to amend some part of the formatting are unlikely to be implementable. Formatting-wise, it's "keep it simple" all the way.