808-1: Feedback, Notes and Comments

Sobriquet A frequent comment about last week’s Weird Word was that readers pronounced the final t. This seems much more common in the US — in Britain, we have largely retained the French pronunciation. Somebody coming across it for the first time will most likely say it as an English word; it’s rare enough that a spelling pronunciation isn’t likely to be corrected through hearing the word said.

Marc Picard told me about the entry in Guiraud’s Dictionnaire des étymologies obscures for the word. According to this, “it’s actually from briquet which today means a ‘(cigarette) lighter’ but which used to be the name of the piece of metal on which a stone was rubbed to create a spark and start a fire. The movements to do this, called battre le briquet, ‘to strike a light’, were thought to resemble the derisive gesture which consisted of rubbing beneath a person’s chin repeatedly with one’s index finger. This was probably often done when calling somebody names such as Fatso, Shorty, Baldy and the like, and so came to mean ‘derisive nickname’.”

Hebdomadal A response last week from Canada to the previous week’s Weird Word mentioned les journaux hebdomadaires. Claude Baudoin e-mailed: “What an interesting combination of words: journal comes from jour, meaning day, so it literally means a daily newspaper. It would seem that my Quebec cousins have thus invented the weekly daily!”

Lump Following up notes here last time about lumpers, several readers noted that the term was known in Australia and the UK as well as in North America. Irish and British readers mentioned the native phrase on the lump, a form of self-employment, especially in the building trades. Workers were paid a lump sum for a job, without deduction of tax, rather than a weekly wage. The practice was made illegal in the early 1970s.

Conglomerating Last week’s issue contained a query from Jae Kamel about the meaning and origin of the rare word hetegonic. He and I are indebted to Doug Wilson, who found the noun form hetegony:

The study of the sequence of processes by which the solar system originated has often been called cosmogony, a term which, however, is used in many other connections. As the origin of the solar system is essentially a question of the repeated formation of secondary bodies around a primary body, the term hetegony (from Greek hetairos or hetes = companion) has been suggested.
[Plasma physics, Space Research and the Origin of the Solar System, by Hannes Alfvén, Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1970. Professor Alfvén shared the 1970 Nobel Prize for physics with Professor Louis Néel. It is probable that the former invented the word.]

Correction The writer of the classical Greek period, mentioned last time in my piece about hair of the dog, was Lucian of Samosata, not Lucien.