[WFOTM] Bosom

ed. note: this installment, dedicated to my diminishing tracks of land, comes courtesy of Mark Morton's The Lover's Tongue (2003), a book that has supplied many a fine euphemism in my stories. And which, if I remember correctly, was purchased for the princely sum of $1 from a Xtian book store. Without further ado...

Bosom.

Denotes the breast of a human, male or female, not the breasts of a woman; a man for example, can hold a child to his bosom. This is good for Thomas Jefferson, who otherwise might have been arrested for saying,

The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have passed at home in the bosom of my family.

For centuries the phrase Abraham's bosom has denoted the heavenly place into which the souls of the righteous are gathered [ed. perhaps bringing further elucidation to the lyrical musing of Cornershop's everyone needs a bosom for a pillow].

It has been used since the early twentieth century to denote a woman's breasts. James Bond, for example, gets "a quick glimpse of fine bosoms" in 1965's The Man with the Golden Gun. This use of bosoms is undoubtedly the source of the slang term bazooms, which emerged in the 1920s.

Morton goes on to quote the Good Book: 'bazumbas begat bazongas, which begat gazongas, which begat kazongas, which began kajoobies, which begat jaboos' [ed. Possibly Revelations? Perhaps a rereading is in order...]

[WFOTM] Word Fact of the Moment #5

Fyemartin

A term of reproach?

Halliwell-Phillips, in his elucidating and quite often unintentionally hilarious Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words from the 14th Century (1847) has some doubts upon the actual meaning of this sixteenth century zinger. He quotes Richard Maddox, MS. Addit. 5008:

1582. Feb. 22, we went to the theater to se a scurvie play set owt al by one virgin, which ther proved a fyemartin without voice, so that we stayd not the matter.

Quite outside of the matter of whether our narrator should have been attending a "scurvie play" or not (and in attending should have expected some sorts of hooligantry), exists Halliwell-Phillips' questioning of whether Fyemartin is a term of reproach in context.

As it turns out, a Fyemartin - or a "Freemartin," in less archaic and more earthy terms - is a sterile female animal with strong masculine traits, a hermaphrodite. Something that happens in mixed sex cattle twins and in for a long time in folklore was assumed to be the same in mixed sex human twins.

Dymphna Callaghan's Shakespeare without women (2000), clears this up, "the {aforementioned} incident is, then, not about female performance but about poor masculine performance and demonstrates that an inadequate voice in the matter of female impersonation might well result in playgoers quitting the theatre, or, as Marston's players suggest, the actor being hissed from the stage" (p71).

[WFOTM] Word Facts of the Moment #4

Nice

originally meant foolish, from the Latin nescius, ignorant, Chaucer has --

For he was nyce and knowth no wisdom

and he uses 'nice fare' for foolish to do. To be 'over-nice' still means to be foolishly particular, and 'more nice than wise' also carries the original meaning. Archdeacon Hoare*, however, derives the word from the French niais, simple; and speaks of 'That stupid vulgarism by which we use the word nice to denote almost every mode of approbation for almost every variety of quality; and from sheer poverty of thought, or fear of saying anything definite, wrap up everything indiscriminately in this characterless domino - speaking in the same breath of a nice cheesecake, a nice tragedy, a nice oyster, a nice child, a nice man, a nice tree, a nice sermon, and a nice coutry; as if a universal niaiserie (for nice seems to originally to have been only niais) had whelmed the whole island...'

Another meaning of nice is over-fastidiousness, or affectation of purity and delicacy, often employed by the most vicious people. It is in this sense that Swift said, 'a nice man is a man of nasty ideas.'

---
* Personally, I don't know how seriously I could take a sermon by Archdeacon Hoare.

[WFOTM] Word Facts of the Moment #3

Belomancy

Divination by means of arrows.

Shipley's Dictionary of Early English (1955) classes belomancy under aeromancy as one of many methods of divination involving appearances in the air, including but not limited to these gems:

aichomancy: divination by sharp points
aleuromancy: divination by dough
anthomancy: flowers (she loves me, she loves me not)
axinomancy: divination by balanced hatchet
cleromancy: divination by dice (not unlike praying for that d20, eh?)
dririmancy: divination by dripping blood

Mostly, I envision the following scenario whereby the practitioner of belomancy, seeking to know whether his brother is going to die or not, shoots a random volley of arrows into the sky in the general vicinity of his sibling. Although, aichomancy also sounds fun:

"Tell me the future!" Poke. Poke.

"You're going to get punched in the head if you don't stop poking me."

[WFOTM] Word Facts of the Moment #2

Hurrah:

Probably a corruption of Tur aie! 'Thor, aid,' a battle-cry of the Norsemen. - Wace. *

The word is very generally now (ca. 1888), and was formerly invariably, spelt huzza. The pronunciation in Pope's time, and even until living memory, was hurray. The following couplet from the 'Rape of the Lock,' shows the current pronounciation at the time the poem was written:

One self-approving hour whole years outweighs
Of stupid starers, and of loud hazzas.

Ed note: Important to note the pronounciation discrepancies if one finds themselves inadvertently the passenger in a time machine whereby they end up in a locale predating 1888. Otherwise, you would be seen immediately as an inter-time interloper. The teeth wouldn't give it away at all. No way.

* This has Victorian romanticism written all over it (i.e. "I pulled this out of my corset"). In fact, Catherine Lucy Wilhelmina Powlett Cleveland's The Battle Roll (1889) seems to further this madness:

Thor-aide the old Scandinavian cri de guerre once in general use among the Northmen which was exchanged for Dex aie (Dieu-aide), their war cry at the battle of Hastings. (p163).

[WFOTM] Word Facts of the Moment

So, I stole this book from work: "Word facts and phrases," which I have found to be inordinately hilarious. So I thought I would occasionally bug the hell out of my listers by divulging the secret history of some of the English language's craziest phenomenon.
* * * * *

Gibberish:
The etymology of this word is uncertain.*

Johnson says, "As it was anciently written gebrish, it is probably derived from the chymical [Chemical] cant, and originally implied the jargon of Geber [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geber] and his tribe." Geber was an alchemist, and, as Nares says, "Considering the great prevalence of that affected science, and the early ridicule thrown upon it, [Johnson's theory] is not improbable."

*I don't think they needed to elucidate further, really.

ed. Note: I think this might also be one of those words, like "Gyp," which don't appear to modern users to be highly culturally insensitive until you realize it's foundation.