Welsh Rabbits and Midwifery

The wonderful things you find in dictionaries. This from Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811):

Welch Rabbit


[i.e. a Welch rare-bit] Bread and cheese toasted. See Rabbit.—The Welch are said to be so remarkably fond of cheese, that in cases of difficulty their midwives apply a piece of toasted cheese to the janua vita to attract and entice the young Taffy, who on smelling it makes most vigorous efforts to come forth.

Incidentally, it is, or was, Welsh rabbit before it was Welsh rare-bit. The rather unkind idea was that Welsh things were poor substitutes*. For example, a Welsh carpet was a pattern painted, or stained, onto a brick floor; a Welsh diamond is a rock crystal; and a Welsh comb is your fingers.

Do any Welsh midwives read this blog? Is this still the standard method?

Come on out

*But Ian Rush was great.

P.S. Janua vita[e] means the gate of life. Its meaning should be obvious; if it's not, consult your parents. The usual Latin phrase is Mors janua vitae, meaning Death is the gate to [everlasting] life. It's therefore the same root as January and janitor and Janus.

Gundy-Gut

A gundy-gut is a fatso, a porker and a lard-arse. But you had guessed that already, hadn't you? It's like a greedy-guts, but a little more fun, and a little more Eighteenth Century.

The Inky Fool contemplating elevenses

You Pigeoning Pigeon

A brief look at British fauna:

Chicken - Coward
Cow - Unpleasant lady
Dog - Ugly lady
Catty - Unpleasant, complaining
Pussy - Coward (also a specific kind of scarf worn by pupils at Winchester College)
Sheep - One who follows
Sheepish - Subservient
Fox - Pretty young lady
Fox - Decieve
Horse - Heroin
Stag - Engaged drunk
Crow - To boast
Rabbit - Talk constantly
Rat - Traitor
Squirrel - To hoard
Pig - Greedy person

Pigeon - ?

Duck actually derives from the verb to duck meaning to go under water. The Old English word was ened.

The lack of a meaning for pigeon bothers me. I want to go around calling people pigeons. I want to shout: "Stop pigeoning, you bloody pigeon." But I fear that I would be being more meaningless than usual.

Pigeon used to have several meanings: a young girl, a sweetheart, a coward, one who was swindled or possibly a combination of all four. Pigeon milk was "An imaginary article for which children are sent on a fool's errand" (OED). Letters sent by carrier pigeon were called pigeongrams. But these are all obselete so pigeon is now ripe for signification. Suggestions in the comments, please.

This from London Fields by Martin Amis:

At one point as I walked under a tree I felt the warm kiss of a voluptuous dewdrop on my crown. Gratefully I ran a hand through my hair - and what do I find? Birdshit. Pigeonshit. I'm feeling okay for once, I'm feeling medium cool, and a London pigeon goes and takes a dump on my head. It had this effect on me: despair. I swore and stumbled around, bedgraggled, helpless, the diet of a London pigeon being something that really doesn't bear thinking about. I mean what the digestive system of a London pigeon considers as waste...

Incidentally, Pidgin English is so called because pidgin was, apparently, how the Chinese used to pronounce business.

Yet another website posting photographs of pussies

Conglomerate

The iconic British chocolate manufacturer Cadbury fell last night to an £11.7 billion takeover by the US food conglomerate Kraft.
    - Today's Times, first line, front page.

Inky Fool is concerned with words, not right and wrong. Inky Fool as, Auden nearly put it, makes nothing happen. But given that I don't give a damn about Cadbury or Kraft and don't even like chocolate much, I adored the bias worded out in this opening line.

I'm not talking about iconic, although the word is delightfully meaningless. Two thousand things have been iconic in British news in the last month, including a lighthouse in Suffolk, Rotherham United's stadium, and Ken Dodd. Journalists are all, I suppose, iconodules.

Nor was it the healthy, flat-cap wearing, horny-handed-son-of-toilish manufacturing that Cadbury's do. That would have meant nothing had it not been contrasted with the evil, evil, evil conglomerate.

There's something so sinister about the word. Say it aloud. It sounds like a portmanteau of coagulate and clot. Company suggests good company. Corporation implies co-operation, with only a hint of corpse (to which it is related). But conglomerates. Conglomerates buy your soul, melt it down and make it into pigs.

Conglomerate, though, is a technical term. In fact it derives from geology where it means one of those rocks that looks like lots of different pebbles have been stuck in cement. Like this:

Then in 1967 people started to wonder what to call all these strange companies, the product of interspecies mergers, that operated ferry lines, manufactured teapots and sold inflatable underwear all at once.

I assume that it was a geologist who had the bright idea of bringing the word conglomerate out from its rocky obscurity. In this business article of 1968 the writer still felt the need to explain the geological meaning of the term. So that's what a conglomerate is now: it's a company that combines unrelated businesses (including melting down your soul to make pigs).

And here's the funny thing: Kraft is not a conglomerate. Like Cadbury, it only makes food.

Empress Irene, noted iconodule, would no doubt have defended Cadbury, which will now become a corporate corpse.

P.S. There was a period in the 1980s when Kraft was a conglomerate, but all that was spun off years ago.

Pejoratives

Years ago, at university, a friend of mine asked me what the pejorative of Greek was. I asked him what he meant and he said that the French were Frogs, the Italians Wops, the Germans Krauts, the Spanish Dagos and he wanted to know what the Greeks were. We couldn't work it out but we had fun trying. We had a good sense of hummus.

Just so you know, here are the etymologies of the major European pejoratives:

Frog Short for frog-eater (1798). Previously (1652) the pejorative for Dutchman because Holland is so marshy.

Kraut From the German for cabbage. First recorded in 1841, but popularised during the First World War.

Hun meant destroyer of beauty in 1806, long before it became the pejorative for German. That's because the Huns like the Vandals were a tribe who helped to bring down the Roman Empire (the actual order was Vandal, Goth, Hun pushing each other from Germany through France to Spain and North Africa). Matthew Arnold called art-haters Philistines on the same basis of naming people you don't like after an ancient tribe. It was Kaiser Wilhelm II who first applied it to Germans in 1900 when he urged the army he was sending to China to mimic the behaviour of their supposed Hunnish forbears and "Take no prisoners", a phrase that is usually attributed to him, although someone had doubtless said something like it before ("I'll be back" is similarly attributed to the film Terminator). The word was taken up as a pejorative during the World Wars as, though the Germans imagined their ancestors to be raffish and rugged, we thought them beastly.

Wop (1912) American term, from Neapolitan dialect guappo meaning dandy or gigolo.

Dago (1823) From Diego (obviously). Originally for either Spanish or Portuguese sailors.

Spic (1913) American term for anyone in the slightest bit Hispanic. Derives from "No speak English". Or maybe from spaghetti via spiggoty (1910).

Yank is far more complicated, which is why I'm sticking to Europeans. A rundown can be found here.

I, meanwhile, am a Limey (contra scurvy), Beefsteak (contra cows), Pommy ((?) rhyming slang pomegranate=immigrant or maybe Prisoner Of Her Majesty(?)), Sassenach or Sasnaes (Scots and Welsh terms for Saxon), depending on which of my detractors you ask. I believe in Kenya I may be a mzungu, but that's only because in dictionaries mzungu is always the last word listed under M.

I firmly believe that the pejorative should be a part of speech listed in dictionaries along with the accusative, genetive and so forth. In schools, pupils would conjugate words by chanting, "Child, children, brat."

I may start a campaign.

An early campaign against the use of pejoratives