{"id":7734,"date":"2014-01-16T08:52:45","date_gmt":"2014-01-16T13:52:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/?p=7734"},"modified":"2014-01-16T08:52:45","modified_gmt":"2014-01-16T13:52:45","slug":"saving-fubsy-from-lexicographical-caliginosity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ianchadwick.com\/blog\/saving-fubsy-from-lexicographical-caliginosity\/","title":{"rendered":"Saving Fubsy from Lexicographical Caliginosity"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Old<\/a>Cousin Stephen, you will never be a saint. Isle of saints.<\/strong> You were awfully holy, weren’t you? You prayed to the Blessed Virgin that you might not have a red nose. You prayed to the devil in Serpentine avenue that the fubsy widow in front might lift her clothes still more from the wet street. O si, certo! Sell your soul for that, do, dyed rags pinned round a squaw. More tell me, more still!! On the top of the Howth tram alone crying to the rain: Naked women! naked women! What about that, eh?<\/p>\n

A fubsy<\/em> window? A short and stocky window.<\/p>\n

You will likely have recognized the quote from James Joyce’s novel, Ulysses<\/a>. Joyce coined a few words<\/a> – monomyth and quark for example – but fubsy wasn’t among them. Oxford Dictionary<\/a> tells us it comes from the:<\/p>\n

…late 18th century: from dialect fubs ‘small fat person’, perhaps a blend of fat and chub<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Which sounds a bit like a Johnsonian guess for its etymology rather than a precise statement.<\/p>\n

Merriam Webster<\/a> says the first recorded use is 1780, and that it means, “chubby and somewhat squat.” Collins Dictionary<\/a> tells us it comes from “obsolete fubs plump person.”<\/p>\n

Or, as the Concise Oxford Dictionary, 12th (printed) edition, defines it, “fat and squat.”<\/p>\n

Fub shows up in Samuel Johnson’s dictionary of 1755 as “a plump, chubby boy.” Somewhere between that and 1597, the definition changed. In 1 Henry IV, Shakespeare had Falstaff using fub in a line to Prince Hal, meaning “fob off, cheat, rob”.\u00a0And in 2 Henry IV, “fub off” is to used to mean “fob off, put off.” (according to\u00a0Shakespeare’s Words<\/em>\u00a0by David & Ben Crystal) English poet John Marston (1576 \u2013 \u00a01634) first used “fubbery” to mean cheating.<\/p>\n

Somehow fub seems to have evolved from cheat to fat. Maybe they were just homonyms. Or maybe Shakespeare was just playing his usual word games.<\/p>\n

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Fubsy seems an appropriate adjectival form of fub, like cutesy is to cute, and hotsy (as in hotsy totsy in that rather peripatetic journey slang often takes) comes from hot and thus to hottie. However, fub also spawned the adjective fubby, which also means fat and chubby, plump, or short and stuffy. And I would expect is equally at risk of being expurgated.<\/p>\n

Many of the online dictionaries repeat the same usage of a “fubsy sofa.”<\/p>\n

Never heard that when I was walking around the local Leons or The Brick stores looking for furniture; customers trying to tell the salespeople, “We’re looking for a fubsy little sofa, not anything in leather, maybe something dark…”<\/p>\n

None of those flaccid online dictionaries (that copy from each other without editorial control or ovesight) provide a literary source for such usage. With a little help from Google, I found one in an 1837 book called,\u00a0The dog fiend, or Snarleyyow<\/a>, written by\u00a0Frederick Marryat<\/a>, a contemporary of Charles Dickens:<\/p>\n

Mr Vanslyperken had arrived, paid his humble devoirs to the widow, more humble, because he was evidently pleased with his own person, and had been followed by Smallbones, who laid the biscuit by the scraper at the door, watching it as in duty bound. \u00a0The lieutenant imagined that he was more graciously received than usual. \u00a0Perhaps he was, for the widow had not had so much custom lately, and was glad the crew of the cutter were arrived to spend their money. \u00a0Already had Vanslyperken removed his sword and belt, and laid them with his three-cornered laced hat on the side-table; he was already cosily, as of wont, seated upon the widow\u2019s little fubsy sofa<\/strong>, with the lady by his side, and he had just taken her hand and was about to renew his suit, to pour forth the impromptu effusions of his heart, concocted on the quarter-deck of the Yungfrau, when who should bolt into the parlour but the unwelcome Snarleyyow.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The phrase also appears in a 1957 poem by Sylvia Plath, The Disquieting Muses<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The roses in the toby jug
\nGave up the ghost last night. High time.
\nTheir yellow corsets were ready to split.
\nYou snored, and I heard the petals unlatch,
\nTapping and ticking like nervous fingers.
\nYou should have junked them before they died.
\nDaybreak discovered the bureau lid
\nLittered with Chinese hands. Now I’m stared at
\nBy chrysanthemums the size
\nOf Holofernes’ head, dipped in the same
\nMagenta as this fubsy sofa<\/strong>.
\nIn the mirror their doubles back them up.
\nListen: your tenant mice
\nAre rattling the cracker packets. Fine flour
\nMuffles their bird-feet: they whistle for joy.
\nAnd you doze on, nose to the wall.
\nThis mizzle fits me like a sad jacket.
\nHow did we make it up to your attic?
\nYou handed me gin in a glass bud vase.
\nWe slept like stones. Lady, what am I doing
\nWith a lung full of dust and a tongue of wood,
\nKnee-deep in the cold and swamped by flowers?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Collins inadvertently made the word into a cause, even a minor celebrity, when it decided to drop fubsy from its printed dictionary. In 2008, to make room for a growing list of new entries, the Collins’ editors announced a short list of words they deemed obsolete, and to be removed from the paper version. That sparked an online furor among lexophiles, and an online petition by the Times of London to save readers’ favourite words from the list of those soon-to-be expunged.<\/p>\n

Time Magazine<\/a> wrote that,<\/p>\n

The lexicographers behind Britain’s Collins English Dictionary have decided to exuviate (shed) rarely used and archaic words as part of an abstergent (cleansing) process to make room for up to 2,000 new entries. “We want the dictionary to be a reflection of English as it is currently spoken,” says Ian Brookes, managing editor of Collins, “rather than a fossilized version of the language.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Which is ironic. The announcement by Collins actually put those words into more online posts, articles and blogs within a week than in any books\u00a0they’d appeared in for the previous century. So the announcement they were obsolete breathed new life into them.<\/p>\n

Blogger Ben Zimmer<\/a> wrote that many of these words, “have the whiff of quaint museum pieces.” Which, for someone involved in words (the Visual Thesaurus), is a terribly subjective approach. After all, what may seem quaint to one person may be part of a healthy, vibrant local dialect only a few furlongs away.<\/p>\n

While the petition is long since gone offline, Zimmer provides the entire list of words Collins proposed to remove. The numbers after them are the number of results for that word I got from Google this morning:<\/p>\n