813-1: Feedback, Notes and Comments

Happy New Year. Thanks for your patience during my absence in December.

In the last issue, dated 1 December, I wrote about maggot in its sense of a whimsical or eccentric idea. Many readers told me that a musical association also exists — some seventeenth and eighteenth century country dances include it in their titles, usually linked to a person’s name, such as Mr Isaac’s Maggot, Huntington’s Maggot, Hill’s Maggot, Betty’s Maggot, and Mr Beveridge’s Maggot.

Other readers mentioned that figurative senses of maggot are still in active use in Ireland. Roger O’Keeffe noted that it’s a term of abuse for an undesirable person and that many readers may know it in that sense from the British Christmas favourite Fairytale of New York by the Pogues. Others mentioned the Irish idiom acting the maggot, playing the fool.

Following my snippet about torrefy in the issue of 24 November, Peter Rugg mentioned Carwardine’s Tea and Coffee House in Bristol, which once boasted the slogan, “The Liquefaction of our Torrefaction Always Brings Satisfaction”. Chas Blacker wrote from Somerset, “A Bristol University student production of Macbeth once replaced the line ‘the multitudinous seas incarnadine’ with an admiring ‘the multitudinous teas in Carwardine’s’.”

The World Wide Words website has been nominated for the Macmillan Dictionary Love English Awards 2012. You may like to vote. (You will need to scroll down almost to the bottom — it's a long list of nominations!) Voting closes on 21 January.