COOKED

A headline on the back page of the Guardian last week read “Wenger denies ‘cooked’ Vieira extra time off”. In translation this says that Arsène Wenger, manager of the British football team Arsenal, was denying that his French captain Patrick Vieira was really tired enough to need a rest.

There are lots of other idiomatic uses of the words cook and cooked of course: to cook the books is to alter figures dishonestly, a phrase much in evidence in American business circles recently; in science, data that has been cooked has bee made up to support a theory; chess aficionados use it of chess problems in which the intended solution doesn’t work or there is another way of solving it not thought of by the setter; on the other hand if something or someone is cooking, it’s doing well. But, I’d not encountered cooked in the sense of “exhausted” before.

A small detective investigation followed, with the assistance of Nicholas Shearing at the Oxford English Dictionary and the slang lexicographer Jonathon Green, who shared the examples they had of the word. It turns out that cooked has been in English since the nineteenth century in the sense of being in a bad situation or in serious trouble. It looks as though it is an elliptical form of to cook someone’s goose, meaning to spoil someone’s plans or cause someone’s downfall (before you ask, nobody knows where this comes from). It isn’t widely known, though it does still pop up from time to time — in 1995 the Globe and Mail in Toronto had this: “If you began an election with an eight-point lead, you were home free. If you were eight points behind, you were cooked”. Some of the examples down the years suggest that the bad situation may have come about through exhaustion. For example, in 1913 the Harrow school magazine contained: “They were utterly cooked. They had ceased to have any conscious control of their muscles”.

Vieira was quoted in the Guardian as making his comments to the Paris newspaper L’Equipe, so presumably he had actually used the French idiom “Je suis cuit” that can have the same sense and which is in wide use by French sportsmen (there are much older senses in French of cuit meaning drunk or being done for), though it doesn’t seem to have yet reached dictionaries in France. So did the Guardian translate Patrick Vieira’s words with the known English sense in mind? The obvious assumption was that it did. But it turns out that L’Equipe had actually translated a comment that had appeared in English in the previous day’s Evening Standard in London (professional rivalry presumably explains why the Guardian hadn’t quoted the Evening Standard directly). One must assume that either Patrick Vieira had mentally translated “Je suis cuit” into literal English or that somebody on the Evening Standard had done so for him. It looks as though the word cooked has been borrowed anew from French and isn’t a new sense of the older English slang term.

The results of some online searches support this. A glossary of cyclists’ slang says cooked means “Running out of energy while riding”. There are many examples from bike racing of its being used in this way. Knowing France’s influence in professional cycling, it seems possible that cyclists have likewise borrowed the phrase from French. Further evidence online suggests that it may be moving from cycling into sport in general (its appearances in the Guardian and Evening Standard may help that along).

It shows once again that language can change in ways that are often more complicated and mysterious than one might think — especially with slang — and that one can’t take anything for granted.

BARKING MAD

[Q] From Paul Hughes: “Where does the term barking mad come from? My theory is that it comes from: One stop short of Barking, referring to the London underground station. Any other ideas?”

[A] I can see the way you’re thinking: there are lots of phrases along these lines (sorry, accidental pun) that suggest somebody has less than his full complement of little grey cells: “Two sandwiches short of a picnic”, “three sheep short in the top paddock”, “two bricks short of a load”.

And the name of the East London suburb is a seductive choice for the origins of this slang term. Peter Ackroyd, in his recent book London: A Biography goes so far as to suggest that monks in medieval times had a lunatic asylum there, which gave rise to the term. The problem with Mr Ackroyd’s idea is that the evidence strongly suggests the term is nothing like so old as that.

The Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary contains not a single reference to barking mad and I can’t find an example in my electronic database of more than 4,000 works of literature. Eric Partridge, in his Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, dates it to about 1965.

Nicholas Shearing of the OED kindly hunted through their database of citations and found that their earliest reference is actually from as far back as 1933, from Mr Jiggins of Jigginstown by Christine Pakenham (Countess Longford): “But he was mad! Barking mad!”. By the 1960s, barking was being used alone. Subscriber Anne Hegerty found this in a Nancy Mitford story, Don’t Tell Alfred, of 1960: “If Dr Jore comes here every day like he says he’s going to he will drive me mad. Really, properly barking”.

All these pointers add up to a strong presumption that barking mad is a bit of relatively modern British slang. The idea behind the saying is most likely that the person referred to is so deranged that he or she barks like a dog, or resembles a mad dog, or one that howls at the full moon.

Today's Partners' links

Title
Music Instruments
URL
http://www.top-music-gear.com/
Description
Extensive collection of over 7000 music instruments and accessories.

Title
Mp3 Players with FM transmitter. Your Mp3 Player in the car
URL
http://fe1000.co.uk
Description
Mp3 players and mp3 video players with fm transmitter. UK retailer of Netac Mustic players. We offer mp3 video like A210, A200, A200C, A150, mp3 player like A100, A110. All with FM transmitter

MILQUETOAST

[Q] From Jonathan Bennett: “I used the word milktoast the other day to describe a person who is unmotivated, ambivalent, and apathetic in their general demeanor. I was questioned on the true meaning and origin of the word. Am I using it correctly? What is its actual meaning, and where does the term come from?”

[A] You’re not quite there. The usual spelling is milquetoast, but said the same way as your spelling. And the usual sense is that of a person who is timid or meek, unassertive. Such people may appear apathetic or unmotivated, but that’s not the reason for their being quiet.

It’s an eponym, named after a fictional cartoon character named Caspar Milquetoast, invented by the American illustrator Harold T Webster in 1924. The strip was called The Timid Soul and appeared every Sunday in the New York Herald Tribune up to his death in 1953. Mr Webster said that his character was “the man who speaks softly and gets hit with a big stick”.

The name is just a Frenchified respelling of the old American English term milk toast, an uninspiring, bland dish which was created from slices of buttered toast laid in a dish of milk, usually considered to be food for invalids. There’s an even older foodstuff, milksop, which was untoasted bread soaked in milk, likewise something suitable only for infants or the sick. From the thirteenth century on, milksop was a dismissive term for “an effeminate spiritless man or youth; one wanting in courage or manliness”, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it. Mr Milquetoast is in the same tradition.

Today's Partners' link

Title
Dominican Republic Real Estate - Dominican Republic Properties
URL
http://www.dominican-estate.com
Description
Dominican Republic Real Estate for Sale, Villas, Lots, Land, Homes, Houses, Constructions, Commercials in Sosua, Cabarete, Puerto Plata. We have the largest inventory of real estate listings in the area.

Title
The Homefinding and Fostering Agency
URL
http://www.homefindingandfostering.co.uk/
Description
The Homefinding and fostering agency was set up to raise the standards of fostering in London and Kent. With over 120 children in placement and 90 foster carers working for us, we excel in high quality care for children. We have achieved “excellent” in our care standards and continue to ...

Title
Link Exchange Tools by LinQueue Provides You With Stable Backlinks
URL
http://www.linqueue.com/
Description
Link exchange tools provide you with an easy way to get backlinks: Get other webmasters to link to your site. See wheter your partners have properly included a link to your site. Find out important information about your link partners. Get started today -- it`s free!

COCKPIT

[Q] From Rick Loiacono, Florida: “If I don’t find out where the air-force term Cockpit came from, I’m going to go mad. What do you think?”

[A] When you stop and think about it, the term for the pilot’s cabin on an aircraft — and other spaces such as the driver’s compartment in a racing car or a helmsman in a small yacht — is curious, isn’t it? Its origin is exotic and disquieting to modern minds.

The experts are sure that it does come, as its name might suggest, from a place where cock fights were held. The word is recorded from the latter part of the sixteenth century, during the reign of the first Elizabeth. It came about because the fighting area for cocks (one of the favourite recreations of the time, together with bull- and bear-baiting) was often thought of as a pit. It was a roughly circular enclosure with a barrier around so that the birds couldn’t escape, fitted up with rows of seats like a small theatre so that the spectators could look down on the action. The first recorded mention is in Thomas Churchard’s The Worthiness of Wales of 1587: “The mountains stand in roundness such as it a Cock pit were”. Shakespeare uses it as an allusion to the round shape and noisy crowdedness of a theatre when the Chorus in Henry V laments its inadequacy to portray tumultuous events: “Can this cockpit hold / The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram / Within this wooden O the very casques / That did affright the air at Agincourt?”

More than a century earlier, Elizabeth’s father, King Henry VIII, had bowling alleys, tennis courts and a cock-pit built on a site opposite the royal palace of Whitehall. A block of buildings later erected on the site were taken over in the seventeenth century for government offices such as the Treasury and the Privy Council. That explains the entry in Samuel Pepys’s Diary for 20 February 1659: “In the evening Simons and I to the Coffee Club, where nothing to do only I heard Mr. Harrington, and my Lord of Dorset and another Lord, talking of getting another place at the Cockpit, and they did believe it would come to something.”

A little later, the term came to be applied to the rear part of the lowest deck, the orlop, of a fighting ship (orlop is from Dutch overloop, a covering). During a battle it became the station for the ship’s surgeon and his mates because it was relatively safe and least subject to disturbance by the movements of the ship. Like all lower-deck spaces, it was confined, crowded, and badly lit. During a battle, it was also noisy, stinking and bloody. All this reminded people of a real cock-pit, hence the name. About 200 years ago, on 21 October 1805, Admiral Lord Nelson died in the cockpit of HMS Victory during the battle of Trafalgar.

The move to today’s sense came through its use for the steering pit or well of a sailing yacht, which also started to be called the cockpit in the nineteenth century. This was presumably borrowed from the older term because it was a small enclosed sunken area in which a coxswain was stationed. (The word was cockswain to start with, he being the swain, or serving man, who was in charge of a cock, a type of ship’s boat.) From here, it moved in the early twentieth century to the steering area of an aircraft, and later still to other related senses.

Hypernova

Sometimes the super- prefix just isn’t extravagant enough, or it’s been used already, or linguistic inflation has set in. This term seems to be a product of all three, since it is an even more spectacular cosmic event than the well-known supernova. But perhaps the superlative is warranted in this case, as the last such event spotted from Earth was widely reported as being so intense that if it had happened near to us we would have fried (luckily, it happened long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away). Such cataclysmic explosions — the biggest bangs since the Big Bang, NASA called them, with perhaps permissible overstatement — are about a hundred times as powerful as the biggest supernovae and may be caused by the total collapse of a very large star. They have been suggested as a possible origin of intense bursts of gamma rays that have been observed by space-borne detectors since the 1970s. In January 1999 the source of one was seen for the first time as it was happening.

By this time, theorists had built up a picture in which GRBs [gamma-ray bursters] result from the collision of two high-density neutron stars or from a “hypernova” — the total collapse of a very massive star.

[Science, Mar. 1999]

Really big stars such as Eta Carinae may go out in an even more spectacular explosion called a hypernova. Such a hypernova could produce another phenomenon known as a gamma-ray burster, which sends powerful gamma radiation out into space.

[Minneapolis Star Tribune, Jun. 1999]

Fair to middling

[Q] From John Rupp, Dallas, Texas: “I have often heard the phrase fair to Midland (middlin’?) in response to the inquiry ‘How are you doing?’ Any ideas on the origins of this phrase?”

[A] I do like “fair to Midland”. It sounds like a weather forecast: “fair to Midland, but the North will have rain”. That’s a Texas variation on the phrase, a joke on the name of the city called Midland in that state. It’s really fair to middling, of course, a common enough phrase — in Britain as well as North America — for something that is moderate to average in quality, sometimes written the way people often say it, as fair to middlin’.

All the early examples I can find in literary works — from authors like Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott and Artemus Ward — suggest it became common on the east coast of the US from the 1860s on. The first example in the Oxford English Dictionary is from Artemus Ward: His Travels of 1865: “The men are fair to middling”. Another is from Horace Greeley’s Recollections of a Busy Life of 1869 in which he records seeing a play: “The night was intensely cold, in-doors as well as out; the house was thin; the playing from fair to middling; yet I was in raptures from first to last”.

Hunting around, I’ve found an example three decades earlier, from an article with the title A Succinct Account of the Sandwich Islands, in the July 1837 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger of Richmond, Virginia: “A Dinner on the Plains, Tuesday, September 20th. — This was given ‘at the country seat’ of J. C. Jones, Esq. to the officers of the Peacock and Enterprise. The viands were ‘from fair to middling, we wish we could say more.’ ”

So the phrase is American, most probably early nineteenth century. But where does it come from? There’s a clue in one of the OED’s later citations, from the Century Dictionary of 1889: “Fair to middling, moderately good: a term designating a specific grade of quality in the market”. The term middling turns out to have been used as far back as the previous century for an intermediate grade of various kinds of goods, both in the US and in Britain — there are references to a middling grade of flour or meal, pins, cotton, and other commodities.

Which market the Century Dictionary was referring to is made plain by the nineteenth-century American trade journals that I’ve consulted. Fair and middling were terms in the cotton business for specific grades — the sequence ran from the best quality (fine), through good, fair, middling and ordinary to the least good (inferior), with a number of intermediates, one being middling fair. The phrase fair to middling sometimes appeared as a reference to this grade, or to a range of intermediate qualities — it was common to quote indicative prices, for example, for “fair to middling grade”. The reference was so well known in the cotton trade that it seems to have eventually escaped into the wider language.