803-1: Feedback, Notes and Comments

Hootenanny Linn Schulz pointed me to a discussion thread on the Mudcat Café website. One post quoted from Pete Seeger’s book, The Incompleat Folksinger, published in 1972. Seeger says he encountered the word when he and Woody Guthrie played at one of the monthly fund-raising music events run by the people behind the Washington New Dealer newspaper in Seattle. They called them hootenannies, which Seeger says won out by a nose over wingdings. Seeger says he started to use the word for informal folk evenings in people’s homes. So there is a direct line of descent from the sense of an unspecified object through the New Dealer’s choice of name via Pete Seeger to the wider folk-music community.

Philip Miller recalled yet another vintage sense of the word: “In the very early 1970s I was living in rural southern Michigan. I had a hand-cranked food mill to purée potatoes, make applesauce, and the like. My landlady, an elderly native of the area, saw it in my kitchen and exclaimed, ‘A hootenany! I did not know they still made them.’ This intrigued me, for I only knew the word in the folk-music context. She said that when she was a girl, around the time of the First World War, that is what the rural folks called a food mill.”

One nonsense word in a quote in the piece was dingus. This is so characteristically American that it was surprising to be told by Julie Swenson that it’s also a common South African word. There’s doubt about where it was created — though some books say it was originally South African, the earliest US example on record is from 1876 while the first South African one is dated 1898. It might, of course, have been independently invented. Either way, it originated in Dutch ding, a thing. In South Africa the word has a wider range of meanings — it can be a person whose name one can’t recall (a what’s-his-name) as well as a thing. And unlike the US version, it’s said with a soft g.

Reversed words Following on the note in this column last time about the inversion of sense of hoi polloi in the US, Julia Cresswell noted, “It is not the only word or phrase that has reversed meaning in US use recently, influenced by similar sounding words. Two of my favourites are sacrosanct, taken to mean ‘blasphemous’ (presumably influenced by sacrilegious) and nonplussed used to mean ‘not surprised’. Presumably here the non has dominated.”