797-1: Feedback, Notes and Comments

Binding cheese Jon Ackroyd commented, “A dear friend of ours in Vancouver used this very expression in conversation 45 years ago. I was about to mention this, but then I saw your comment from Mr Urdang in which he uses the phrase in the very context in which I first heard it. So I won’t mention it.” Thank you for not doing so. A robust refutation of Lawrence Urdang came from Paul Witheridge, who was born in 1943 in Toronto: “Rubbish! I’ve been familiar with the expression in Canada since boyhood and never heard it describe improved conditions. Rather, it is used as your correspondent cited: tighter or more challenging situations. My understanding of it has always been the constipation connection.” You may perhaps now better understand why the phrase confused me so much!

Adverbs in -lily Following up my snippet last week on friendlily, Arnold Zwicky pointed me to a Language Log column of his from March 2007 in which he includes a delightful extract from a piece by James Thurber about the utter unacceptability of such forms. You’ll find it at the end of his article. Anthony Allan e-mailed, “This item reminded me of instances when I’d wanted a more compact way of saying in a timely way. Timelily seemed awkward, but a South African friend suggested timeously. Would you care to elucidate?” With the aid of my trusty Oxford dictionaries, I can confirm the word exists, albeit mainly in Scottish use, with the sense “in good time; sufficiently early”. So it would be a useful substitute, if only it were more likely to be understood and less likely to be confused with timorously.

Correction The wind in California I mentioned in the williwaw piece was wrongly spelled. As Clark Stevens put it, “Around these parts, Santa Anna with a double n is the Mexican general remembered from Alamo times. The fire-fanning, east-to-west California wind is less one n, the Santa Ana.” This is taken by reference books to be from the name of the Santa Ana canyon, down which the winds blow, though they are known over a much wider area. Intriguingly, several readers argued it was neither, but santana, from the Spanish los vientos de Satanas, Devil winds. Some sources argue for yet a third source, Sanatanas, a corruption of a word from an unknown Native American language. I couldn’t possibly comment.