823-1: Feedback, Notes and Comments

Betwixt Following my piece on this word last week, several readers asked about twixt. Randall Bart recalled the one-time slogan of the Yorkshire Post, Twixt Trent and Tweed, in reference to the rivers that border its circulation area. Grammarians call this an aphetic form, in which an unstressed syllable at the beginning of a word has been lost. Twixt was often written with an initial apostrophe to indicate this.

Taffy Other readers followed up my item on toffee-nosed two weeks ago that mentions this word by asking about the nickname Taffy for a Welsh person, which notoriously appears in the old nonsense rhyme that begins “Taffy was a Welshman / Taffy was a thief”. It has no connection with the toffee sense, being supposedly from the Welsh pronunciation of the common personal name David (Dafydd in Welsh, said rather like “davith”).

Sitting bodkin As an addition to the original story I have since found this further definition for bodkin:

Amongst sporting men, applied to a person who takes his turn between the sheets on alternate nights, when the hotel has twice as many visitors as it can comfortably lodge; as, for instance, during a race-week.
[The Slang Dictionary, by John Camden Hotten, 1869.]

What, if anything, this has to do with sitting bodkin escapes me!

Boontling Despite my assertion in the last issue, there is no such place as Anderson County, Northern California. It’s Anderson Valley in Mendocino County. And it was incorrect to describe Boontling as a dialect, though this was the term Time magazine used. It’s actually a private vocabulary, a jargon or cant.

Forefront In the last issue I wrote at the forefront, a form Warren Montgomery queried, since he felt it was correctly in the forefront. It’s worth mentioning as an example of a recent change in prepositional usage that has gone largely unnoticed. In works of the nineteenth century and before, the at version was rare. The Google Ngram viewer, based on an analysis of Google Books, suggests it has greatly risen in popularity since the 1960s and overtook the in form around 1995:

Current newspaper databases suggest that the shift is much greater even than this, with the at form more than five times as common as the in one. The original idea was of being in the front ranks of an army rather than being at a specific place, and it’s the loss of the specific military image and the conversion of the phrase into an idiom that has led to the shift.

Sic item Numerous readers commented on my inclusion of the second Sic! item last week, “Baby born after crash kills parents”. The usual response was puzzlement, those readers only having read it in the intended sense of “(baby born after) crash kills parents” and failing to spot the alternate reading “(baby born after crash) kills parents”. I included it as an example of a type of syntactic ambiguity which linguists have taken to calling (perhaps all too appositely in this case) a crash blossom. The name was coined following a headline in the newspaper Japan Today in 2009, “Violinist linked to JAL crash blossoms”. Three readers found its inclusion to be in bad taste. If I had had known more about the circumstances, I might well have avoided including it.