Shirr madness on the runway

This photo ran in Tuesday's New York Times with a caption describing the garment as a Jil Sander "beaver coat, longhaired on the top, shirred below."

Shirred is a perfectly good fashion word -- shirring is gathering fabric on a cord or thread(s) -- but I don't see any shirring on that coat. I think the lower section is actually sheared, i.e., cut shorter than the fur on top.

The author, Cathy Horyn, certainly knows the difference, but she probably never saw the photo. Whoever provided the caption probably heard "shear"; the editor who wrote the caption was similarly clueless; and shirred is fine with spellcheck. It's just not correct.

I don't think this can be an eggcorn, because I doubt that the people who put it into print gave a thought to what shirred might be referring to. Which reminds me of another tidbit of wisdom from the Old Editor: "If there's a word in the text you don't understand, and you let the text go, you haven't edited it."

I'm still curious, though, about the original mishearing. Sheared and shirred aren't homonyms for me -- shirr sounds like "sure," not "sheer." Is there any dialect in which the two sound the same?

 AP photo / Antonio Calanni

The language of "Parade's End"

"Downton Abbey" is hibernating for now, but anachronism-seekers can divert themselves, starting tonight, with the BBC-HBO production  of "Parade's End," the WWI tetralogy by Ford Madox Ford. I'm guessing there will be far fewer goofs per hour in this visit to Edwardian England: Julian Fellowes, after all, has to make up "DA" as he goes, while Tom Stoppard, the scriptwriter for "Parade's End," had 800-some pages of genuine 1920s literature to draw on. Besides, if the series is anything like as complex as the books, we'll have our heads full just following the plot.

Coincidentally, I was rereading "Parade's End" last fall, before news of the TV series reached my ears,  and I flagged a few words in the text that stood out. Not words that are especially likely to show up in a script -- just usages or terms that, 90 or so years later, were puzzling or surprising. I'm sure there are more coming our way; in the meantime, consider these:

Viewy. 

If a fellow chooses to justify his seductions of uninteresting and viewy young females along the lines of freedom and the rights of man, it’s relatively respectable. 

It's tempting to read this as meaning  "showy" or "eye-catching" -- one of the senses the OED provides -- but the context makes it clear that viewy here (and commonly, in Ford's circle) means "having views," politically opinionated in one slightly disparaged way or another. In both senses, the word dates to the mid-1800s, and it attracted some unfavorable notice from the language watchers of the era. Ford's "viewy young females" are probably would-be emancipated women like the suffragette his hero falls for.

Yellow-ammer.

Each knew the names of birds that piped and grasses that bowed; chaffinch, greenfinch, yellow-ammer (not, my dear, hammer! ammer from the Middle High German for "finch"), garden warbler, Dartford warbler, pied-wagtail, known as "dishwasher." 

It's true that the hammer in yellowhammer is not related to hammer "tool for pounding nails." But that doesn't mean the h in yellowhammer is a mistake, according to the OED (as of 1921). Though the source isn't certain, "connection with or assimilation to Old English -hama, Old High German -hamo covering, skin, feathers ... seems probable, and the form yellow-ham n., which may go back to an Old English type *geolo-hamathe yellow-feathered bird, gives support to the hypothesis." Thus, "both forms -hammer and -ammer are historically justifiable; Yarrell's proposed rejection of -hammer (see British Birds, 1843, I. 446) is based on insufficient evidence."

Cooshy. 

As Man of Intellect, Campion was convinced, Tietjens was dissatisfied with his lowly job of draft-forwarding officer, and wanted a place of an extravagantly cooshy kind in the general's own entourage. 

Cooshy, more commonly spelled cushy, was recent slang when Ford wrote; the OED's earliest citation is dated 1915, and like most of the examples, is in the context of military service: "The billets here are very good ... and we have rooms to ourselves ...  It's all very cushey and nice." Cushy (from the Hindi ḳhūsh, "pleasant," says the OED, or maybe Romany kushto, "good," says slangmeister Jonathon Green) also described a not-serious injury: "All our men who have had the luck to get a 'cushie wound'" (1917).

Comestibles.

The duchess had delivered, apparently, a vindictive, cold, calm and uninterruptible oration on the wickedness of her country's allies as people who [had] allowed France to be devastated, and the flower of her youth slain in order that they might put up the price of a comestible that was absolutely needed in her life.

The odd thing here is that the comestible in question is coal. And though it's easy enough to metaphorically equate food and fuel, I've never heard comestible (from the Latin for "eat up") used of anything except edibles. Did Ford simply misunderstand the word?

Jannock.

They say you ought to give a lover a chance of a final scene before leaving him or her for good. Still more your mother. That was jannock.

Jannock is "a modern dialect word," says the OED, meaning "fair, straightforward, genuine." It may be connected with jannock, a Northern English oat bread or oatcake, and in the 1860s, contributors to Notes & Queries enthusiastically embraced the connection. From the bread, one wrote, "the word 'jannock' comes to be used in Lancashire as meaning 'without deceit, no cringer, sincere, straightforward, independent, &c.,' and it well expresses the character of Lancashire men, who for the most part are blunt and homely, like their jannock, if you like, but straightforward, sincere, and independent."

Another 1860s writer asserts that jannock was brought to America by the Puritans, where it morphed into johnnycake. This claim is repeated in recent food writing, including the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, but I haven't seen any supporting evidence. And a scholarly doubter points out that "this explanation does not take account of the fact that ... 'oat cake' had not been part of the diet of the 'southern lowland' emigrants to New England." OED, please put johnnycake on your priority list!

Stuff the Old Editor says

Some people watched the Oscars last night, I hear. I curled up with a good book instead: John McIntyre's collection of newsroom wisdom, "The Old Editor Says: Maxims for Writing and Editing." It's not a long book, but for me it was a concentrated dose of nostalgia (for the copy desk days) with a chaser of relief (that I no longer work at a daily newspaper).

As the subtitle suggests, this is not a usage guide, though some language reminders punctuate the larger journalistic truths. These range from the time-tested ("The reader doesn't care how hard you worked on that story") to the thoroughly modern ("The people kvetching about the new editing software never mastered the old editing software either"). One of my favorites:

You can't fatten poor stock.  

Or, as Anthony Trollope wrote, "One cannot pour out of a jug more than is in it."  

In editing, you can't make any text better than its inherent worth. Much routine editing involves taking texts that are defective -- sloppy, unclear, unfocused -- and rendering them merely mediocre. 

This may sound cynical, but it isn't really. The fact is, newspapers publish lots of stories that not only aren't wonderfully written, but don't even aspire to wonderfulness. It's more important to be clear and accurate, and that standard is not always easy to meet. (Ben Yagoda's latest book, "How to Not Write Bad," sensibly recommends the same standard -- basic, not-wrong competence -- as a goal for student writers.)

No more spoilers: For the rest, check out the links at You Don't Say or proceed directly to Amazon.

Taboo avoidance at the Wall Street Journal

Today's WSJ piece on the controversial anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon includes a baffling bit of terminology:

The Yanomamö, like anthropology subjects everywhere, regarded the note-scribbling scholar as a choice target for practical jokes. Only after months of effort did Mr. Chagnon learn that his informants had been deliberately feeding him bogus names. Naturally, he found out in the most humiliating way possible: Telling a group of men something about a headman's wife, he unknowingly referred to her by a capillo-vaginal epithet.

Even if you knew the meaning of capillo- ("hair"), the intended epithet might not be immediately apparent. (Me, I was led astray by thinking first of capillaries.) Luckily Google Books will show you the page with Chagnon's actual words:

Apparently the WSJ's rules for taboo avoidance allow for a cuteness factor; I don't think the New York times would find "capillo-vaginal" amusing enough (or, perhaps, obscure enough) to pass muster as printable euphemism.