820-1: Feedback, Notes and Comments

Jane Halsey commented on the phrase not on your tintype: “It might have started out as an expression of absolute disbelief, meaning ‘You could show me a photo and I still wouldn’t believe you!’ and then morphed into a more general expression of absolute disagreement or refusal. The cheapness of this kind of photo might have added a backhanded swipe at the person you were disbelieving or disagreeing with.” Jane Steinberg suggested a similar idea: “I had a friend, a Jewish refugee from Munich, who would vigorously opt out of a choice by declaring, in a thick Münchener accent, ‘Nett ahngemahlt!’, ‘not even in a painting!’ It seems similar to the tintype expression, to be so averse to something you wouldn’t even do it in a picture.”

A common response to the piece was to quote a little puzzle poem in various versions, which I have been able to trace back as far as this, though it’s presumably rather older:

Once a big molice pan met a bittle lum

Sitting on a sturb cone chewing gubber rum.

“Hi,” said the molice pan, “won’t you simme gum?”

“Tixxy on your nin type,” said the bittle lum.

Ice-breakers, by Edna Geister, 1920.

Many subscribers picked up on the unfamiliar word overhauls in a quotation in the piece that came from George Ade’s Fables in Slang (“Git into some Overhauls an’ come an’ he’p me this afternoon.”) It’s a mistaken spelling of overalls, a term of the latter eighteenth century in army and civilian life for protective over-trousers (in the US and British armies, these were originally worn over breeches and stockings but the overall replaced them as part of the uniform). In the following century the term was extended to protective clothing with a bib top or a complete top, the latter also being called coveralls. Almost from the beginning there was confusion about their name in the US: the Dictionary of American Regional English has an example from 1781 in which the word was written as overhalls. Overhauls came along later as a very common version, in the mistaken belief that they were called that because they were hauled on over the trousers. Similar reasoning caused coveralls to be written as coverhauls.

Several readers pointed out following my piece on nidicolous and nidifugous that two other terms form a pair with senses that are equivalent. They are altricial and precocial, introduced by the Swedish zoologist Carl Jakob Sundevall in 1836. He coined the former from Latin altrix, foster mother or wet nurse. Altricial refers to a bird or other animal born in an underdeveloped stage, needing care and feeding by the parent, the same idea as nidicolous. The latter is from scientific Latin praecoces, the plural of classical Latin praecox, early or premature. (You may know it from dementia praecox, literally “early insanity”, an old medical term for schizophrenia that presents in adolescence; it’s also the root of precocious.) Precocial means a creature hatched or born in an advanced state, able to feed itself almost immediately, the same sense as nidifugous. It’s curious that we’ve ended up with two equivalent pairs of technical terms.