Natural Criminology

An Essay On the Fiddle

JASON DITTON

Professor in Criminology

Sheffield University

PressGang

Glasgow

Jason Ditton

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First published 1996, reprinted 1999. Webbed in 2000.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Ditton, Jason

Natural Criminology: An Essay on the Fiddle

I. Title

ISBN 0 946025 01 1

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Ditton, Jason

Natural Criminology: An Essay on the Fiddle/

Jason Ditton

Includes bibliographical references

1. Criminology 2. History 3. Linguistics

I. Title

Typeset by

Samual Phillips

28 Belmont Street,

Glasgow G20

Printed and Bound in Great Britain by

University of Glasgow Printing Department, Glasgow.

Contents

Acknowledgements iv

1 The Paradox

Triviality Revealed 1

Triviality Researched 4

Triviality Recollected 8

2 Natural Criminology

Semantic Diachronics: A Model 17

Fiddle: A Natural Criminology 32

Implications: A General Approach? 63

A Chronologicall of Dictionaries 67

A Bibliography of Secondary Texts 74

Acknowledgements

My thanks especially to Kathleen Davidson for typing an initial draft from hideous handwriting, and latterly to Julie Prescott for computer generating camera-ready copy.

Chapter One: The Paradox

Triviality Revealed

“Do you feel like a criminal?”

“Don’t be fucking daft!”

“No, but it’s breaking the law, isn’t it?..... So why don’t you feel like a criminal?”

“..... nobody even thinks of it”.

Why not? Why don’t we? A problem for those who try to research (or, indeed, try to stamp-out),[1] those thefts which are called “fiddles” is that such thieves simply refuse to see their thefts as serious ones. This segment from the transcription of a tape-recorded interview I had with a taxi driver in 1976 is representative of the response I have collected from some 51 individuals (from an assortment of occupations)[2] - all of whom agreed to talk to me about their “fiddles”. In fact, I soon learned to make the question: ‘Do you feel like a criminal?’ my final one, as the interviews usually ended shortly afterwards at the request of the respondent. Typical also (yet regrettably only unsystematically recorded), were looks of incredulity, bafflement, and sometimes even anger.[3] In many cases, had I chosen to delete the expletives, I would have had, like ex-President Nixon, almost nothing on record. The taxi-driver, by the way, had just finished telling me how he worked (officially undeclared) nights in a taxi whilst on the dole, and not only regularly overcharged customers, but also systematically neglected to hand in to the boss a portion of the metered ‘take’ for each night’s work. Before he terminated the interview with me (as he did shortly afterwards), he neutralised the psychological consequences of the activities he had just described at length by apologetically citing a few justifications:

“.. there’s a fiddle wherever you go... the boss knows what you’re doing... you know, taxes... I mean, look: they pay you 30p. an hour driving a cab, would you do that? ... what would you fucking do for that wage?... work ten hours, at night, and take home £3? ... you must be fucking joking!...”[4]

I have described a fuller list of justifications, and analysed the ability that their application to theft has in neutralising the psychological consequences of infraction elsewhere.[5] But that analysis was based upon considering the effects of justification within a specific and small work group of baker’s roundsmen. Curiously, no members of my subsequently and eclectically collected ‘sample’ of respondents from a broad range of occupations have been able to suggest any justifications unknown to the roundsmen at the Wellbread Bakery. Now, this might be treated as some general validation of the original classification of justifications. Instead, I prefer to see it as presenting another research problem: if, as the evidence suggests, these justifications are generally known and widely used by the incumbents of a large number of separate and disparate occupations, where can the origins of these justifications be located? In short, where does the idea that some thefts are “trivial” come from?

One possible answer might be that such thefts are, perhaps, statistically or financially insignificant. Possibly, only a trifling proportion of, say, an industrial workforce is involved in “fiddling”. Unfortunately, available studies of “fiddling” amongst employees point to the involvement of a majority of the workforce in each case.[6] Well, perhaps merely a trivial number of occupations allow “fiddling” by their practitioners? Yet again, collected evidence supports the inverse proposition: no occupation appears systematically to disallow some form of “fiddle”.[7] Perhaps, then the notion of triviality stems from the belief that occupational theft is distinguished from other forms of theft on the grounds that its practitioners only steal trivial accounts on each occasion?

Again, unfortunately, although it may commonly be the case that “fiddlers” take small amounts on each separate occasion, it is also commonly the case that those who rob or burgle frequently only loot small amounts.[8] As well as this, sometimes quite large sums can be stolen by employees either on one occasion or on a collated collection of several, and yet the word “fiddle” is nevertheless used to describe the event.[9] Well, finally, perhaps those who “fiddle” only spend a trifling proportion of their time engaged in this activity? Again, though, the converse is true. Those who “fiddle” spend a greater proportion of their lives so doing, than those who rob banks or burgle houses spend robbing banks or burgling houses.[10] The baker’s roundsmen who I studied in some depth regularly stole from different victims up to 200 times each working day.[11]

In sum, there is a common and curious contradiction. And crucially, it is one regular enough to be reflected structurally. Burglary and robbery (both of which are commonly held to be serious forms of theft) generate losses in Britain estimated in 1974 to be around £80 millions per year. “Fiddling”, by blue-collar workers alone, was, in the same year, estimated to have cost over £600 million per year - or, over seven and a half times as much: a curious sort of “triviality”, to say the least![12]

But this simple contradiction becomes a paradox when another relevant structural dimension is considered. If we take policing costs (as some measure of official definitions of seriousness), we find that out of a total policing outlay on theft-control; burglary and robbery (an £80 million a year loss) attract over £450 million a year in control funds, whereas “fiddling” (an estimated £600 million a year loss) only has £50 million spent every year to control it.[13] To put it another way: for every pound robbed or burgled, £5.62 was spent on policing in 1974: for every found “fiddled” (blue-collar workers alone), only £0.12 was spent on policing in the same year. So, where does this idea of “triviality” come from?

Triviality Researched

I have already referred to my interviews with an eclectically collected ‘sample’ of respondents informed about fiddling, and representing a broad range of occupants. These were collected between 1975 and 1977 as part of a project[14] designed to use the methodology of analytic induction in order to build upon the base of a successful production of a specific universal definition of fiddling, generated in an earlier study,[15] to work out a general universal definition of the same phenomena. It was not easy.

A major reason why the project was not only uncompleted, but also, in principle, uncompletable, was a design flaw. I only report this sad tale here because its development is instructive and its conclusion provocative. An epistemological difficulty appeared quickly in this research project. Searching for universals within an unconstructed natural sample is one (successful) thing: looking for universals in an artificially constructed one is quite another. In fact, in the second case, analytic induction becomes enumerative induction. In other words, to quote Znaniecki:

“Induction from this point of view (i.e. enumerative) is an attempt to discover some final truths about a certain class of empirical data, circumscribed in advance, by studying a number of cases belonging to this class.”[16]

Thus, (ibid) “you can find nothing in the definition of a class that you have not already put into it”. Under these circumstances, discovery:

“will be purely illusory, will consist at best in making explicit what was already implicit in the definition... There is not a single sociological generalisation applicable to all the data of a class and only to the data of a class defined in advance that is not implied in this very definition.”[17]

Naturally, such realisations and transformations left me in something of a vacuum. More specifically, I had both a commitment to a field of substantive content (“fiddling”), and a lingering attachment to at least the principle of universality (rather than that of frequency of probability) in explanation - in other words, a dedication to what Turner calls the philosophy of analytic inducation. This is not so much to deny the problems associated with analytic induction’s as to reconsider them.[18]

So, again, what is “fiddling”? What would count as a satisfactory rough universal general definition? One avenue would be to glance at the attempts that others have made to define the concept. David Downes suggests that: “‘Fiddling’ is the adult practice of enlarging income tax-free by theft from one’s work-place.”[19] Gerald Mars uses the word to refer to the hotel “industry’s institutionalisation of pilferage”,[20] and Terence and Pauline Morris tell us that, “fiddling... may be defined as an organised illicit enterprise which attempts to supply some good or service at economic cost which is (a) not officially supplied or supplied in restricted quantities by the prison authorities, or (b) is expressly forbidden by them.”[21] Stuart Henry notes that for him, “fiddling is more appropriately the description of action taken to conceal some form of illicit money-making, from either employer, or customer, and which makes such money-making possible, or at least successful,”[22] and Mitchell has defined a fiddle as, “any benefit which accrues to an employee, with or without the explicit or implicit consent of those in higher authority, which is not shown as an obvious employee benefit in audited accounts.”[23]

It is possible to notice several common features in this clutch of definitions. They are all deductively referential for a start. Within them, “fiddle” is reified as a grammatical formulation - usually a verb, sometimes a noun - of the researcher’s meaning of a type of act spotted by him, and enacted (it would logically follow) by a researched subject "fiddler". Notice that it is a ‘thing’ rather than a ‘word’ which is the subject of the definitions.[24] Further, that each definition is operational and ad hoc: each constructed to handle a different, and temporary research situation. Downes studied working-class communities in London, Mars and Mitchell worked in hotels in the Midlands, the Morrises in Pentonville Prison, and Henry around amateur trading networks in South London. Their applicability outside those contexts of generation and use is uncertain. In fact, the definitions are, perhaps, best viewed as temporary stopping places rather than intellectually definitive graves over which little last stands should be made. It is footling to attempt to extend specific definitions to general status (although this is a common sport): better to abandon them, and start afresh.

On this footing, it must be a ‘word’ rather than a ‘thing’, to which definition attends. And further, aping Bridgman’s axiom: “the true meaning of a term is to be found by observing what a man does with it, and not by what he says about it.”[25] In addition, definition is not so much an operational preliminary as an analytic objective. As J.S. Mill put it, “the meaning of a term actually in use is not an arbitrary quantity to be fixed, but an unknown quantity to be sought.”[26] Now, Robinson was distinguished seven types of possible word definition.[27] On his terms, three definitions I have just cited emerge as principally denotative and perhaps ostensive; whereas the form sought here is preferably analytical and rule-giving. In fact, a “fiddle”, as I shall use the word here, is a non-referential concept. In other words, accepting a definition of it comes not from examining the quality of correspondence between the definition and something in the world, but through noting the grammar of its use in natural language. My general definition can be stated here.

I will use the word “fiddle” for any “theft defined as trivial”,[28] but this definition did not emerge immediately. When I began researching, my initial definition of the “fiddle” (gleaned from the earlier, specific study) didn’t seem to have much relevance in life outside the Wellbread Bakery. In fact, elsewhere, I encountered widespread and irreverent use of the word “fiddle” to describe an apparently diverse and seemingly unclassifiable set of incidents. A quick scan of daily newspapers revealed that the word “fiddle” was used in connection with: cheating in exams, pirating books, forging diplomas, faking phone calls for radio phone-in programmes, faking art works, adding lead weights to fish during a competition, inventing scientific results, fixing Union elections, casting more than one vote each in a House of Commons division, supplying arms to Arab countries in spite of an export restriction, and so on.[29] But even when restricted to theft court cases involving employees as defendants, the grounds for the application of the “fiddle” epithet were still not apparent. A few headlines taken almost at random from my files show that restricting the word “fiddle” to those working in the service industries is unfair: and an unwarranted imposition of a pre-conceived classification.[30]

“GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY BY THE BUFFET CAR FIDDLERS: Fiddles by Stewards on restaurant and buffet cars are costing British Rail thousands of pounds a year”

“FIDDLE ON THE CREDIT CARDS: Motorists were urged yesterday to be on their guard for ‘Forecourt Fiddlers’ when paying for their petrol by Credit card.”

“DOOR OPEN TO FIDDLES TRIBUNAL TOLD”

“£600 BEEF OVER A BULL FIDDLE”

“COUNCILLOR FIDDLES HIS EXPENSES”

“BETS SHOP FIDDLERS LOSE THEIR GAMBLE: Staff at a betting shop planned to make a killing”.

“SEVEN RAN B.R. DINER FIDDLE: The £66,000 dining-car “fiddle” operated by seven British Rail Stewards”

“‘FIDDLING’ DIRECTOR LOSES APPEAL”

“SCHOOLS HIT BY COAL FIDDLE: Two men operated a coal delivery racket and cheated schools out of winter fuel”.

“£200,000 MADE IN FORD SCRAP FIDDLE”

“£46 ‘FIDDLE’ RUINS CAREER OF POLICE CHIEF”

“EX-MAYOR FINED FOR FIDDLE.... XXX XXX obtained £413 of rate-payers money by fiddling loss-of-earnings claims”

“GREAT TYNE FERRY FIDDLE: The revenue from fares rocketed by 25% when police stamped out the racket”

“HOOVER ‘IN F.B.I. FUND FIDDLE'”

“SOFTLY, SOFTLY DRINKS FIDDLE IS UNCOVERED: Wholesale systematic thefts from a North Brewery clocked up massive stock losses over a two-year period”

“PAY OUT GIRL RANG UP £1,6000 FIDDLE”

“DOLE CRITIC WAS BIGGEST FIDDLER OF ALL”

“STOREMAN IN FIDDLE TO BOLSTER WAGES” [31]

Untidy reality was putting up a terrific resistance to the pleasingly neat (albeit theoretically “rough”) definition that I had prepared for it. What did usages of the word “fiddle” have in common.

Triviality Recollected

To ask what usages of a word have “in common”, is ultimately to ask what the word means. What is not clear, however, is that given the two elements of the proposed definition (“trivial” and “theft”), and that that concern rests at the moment with an analytic form of definition, which element is crucial? Consider an Aristotelian version. Here, the question emerges as: should be view the summum genus as theft, and the species as “fiddle” (with the word “fiddle” being thus defined in terms of the genus proximum, or generic, of theft; with the differential specifica of being defined as trivial)? Or, the other way round, with the summum genus as triviality, one species of which also being also theft?

A solution is offered by the way that semiotics has refashioned J.S. Mill’s terms, connotation and denotation. For Mill, the connotation of a word referred to the criteria by which any referent is judged in terms of its possible membership of the class in question, and the denotation merely to the sum of the true referents. Since then, connotation (close to definition for Mill) is now more usually held to imply association.[32] This latter elision allows the resolution of a peculiar and particular dilemma: that of how substantive “triviality” may be a formally essential and definitive element,[33] with the denotation of theft now one of a larger class (which also, for example, includes violins) which may acceptably be called “fiddles”. This latter formulation is ultimately (as the second part of this book will demonstrate) inductively true,[34] and is merely brought forward - rather than asserted here. Inevitably, an induced historiography of meaning is preferred to an imposed hierarchy. Of the latter, Volosinov has unequivocally asserted:

“Such discriminations as those between a word’s usual and occasional meanings, between its central and lateral meanings, between its denotation and connotation etc., are fundamentally unsatisfactory. The basic tendency underlying all such discriminations - the tendency to ascribe greater value to the central, usual aspect of meaning, presupposing that that aspect really does exist and is stable - is completely fallacious.”[35]

The “tendency” to which Volosinov refers, is certainly to be avoided; yet the distinction from which it does not necessarily grow is itself an essential tool. I will use the denotation/connotation distinction (sometimes as the referent/meaning pair), without implying that either is necessarily more basic, real, essential, usual, central or stable than the other. In fact, as will later be shown for the word “fiddle”, taken diachronically, the connotation of triviality threads more than one stage of the word’s life, and yet what is denoted for any synchronic view may certainly be more forceful upon any separable occasion, but changes regularly, and only in a final phase refers to theft.

Another dimension of definition should be addressed here (definitional content criteria being easily arranged)[36]: that of definitional form. Is the outcome a nominal definition, defined by Eaton, as “the declaration of intention to use a certain word or phrase as a substitute for another word or phrase”?[37] or a real one, defined by Bierstedt as “a proposition announcing the conventional intention of a concept”?[38]

Fortunately, in a sense, there is not an authentic choice. Sociological definitions are inevitably nominal, reflecting, as they do, what Gallie refers to as the “essential contestability” of social concepts.[39] The first use that we may make here of the concept of contestability may be termed the egalitarian notion. Gallie tells us:

“We find groups of people disagreeing about the proper use of the concepts.... When we examine the different uses of these terms and the characteristic arguments in which they figure we soon see that there is no one use... which can be set up as its generally accepted and therefore correct or standard use.”[40]

Since real definitions depend upon demonstrating the “conventional intention” of the concept in question, they will be inappropriate when that intention is contested. Thus, circumventing the egalitarian notion of contestability is at least empirically unlikely. With the second and stronger use of the concept of contestability (termed here the reactive notion), circumvention is positively impossible. This is because every concept in practice involves some version of itself. So, the problem of defining “fiddling” is complicated (endlessly) by the fact that every “fiddler” “fiddles” in terms of his definition of what constitutes “fiddling”. MacIntyre captures with well with the words:

“Such disagreements are of course expressed quite as much in behaviour as in utterance. Their embodiment in practice is not secondary to, nor expressed independently from, their articulation at the level of utterance, even at the level of theory.”[41]

Norman Care adds a convenient rider:

“It does not follow that the concepts which are, according to the thesis in question, essentially contestable for the social scientist are also essentially contestable for participants in such particulars.”[42]

Terms which remain inevitably open for analysts, in other words, are easily closed by practitioners. However, even most analysts ignore Znaniecki’s warning (“the way of preserving the proper plasticity of the popular terms used is not to define them at all, but to rely on the context for any shades of meaning one wishes to convey”),[43] forget that sociological definitions are inevitably nominal, and whilst they start with a definition which is genuinely operational, its epistemological status usually slides, by default, into putative “realness”.

Another problem noticeable here is a contradiction between methodology and epistemology. Analytic induction generates universalistic statements (which are real), and yet the above philosophical consideration demands nominal ones. Let me expand: Analytic induction produces “essential” characteristics (as Robinson puts it, “analytic induction leads to certainty without benefit of representative cases because it isolates the “essential” characters which determine the phenomenon under study,”)[44] and essentialist statements are primarily realist ones. Popper puts it like this. Essentialism amounts to:

“the assertion that universal objects, for instance, whiteness, ‘really’ exist, over and above single things and sets or groups of single things... [essentialists] are inclined to formulate scientific questions in such terms as ‘what is matter?’ or ‘what is force?’ or ‘what is justice?’ [or, ‘what is fiddling?’] and they believe that a penetrating answer to such questions, revealing the real or essential meaning of these terms and thereby the real or true nature of the essences denoted by them is at least a necessary prerequisite of scientific research, if not its main task.”[45]

Yet, there is a sense in which the essentialist statements produced by analytic induction have (at any rate, in this particular case) no ontological claims. The definition of fiddle that I have offered (“a theft defined as trivial”) must be nominal in a formal sense. A theft which is trivial would be a real definition (whatever its initial pretensions to nominalism or operationalism). The words “defined as” perform as a nominally regressive phrase, transforming the definition back into nominalism.

This, I think, establishes the formal credentials of the definition of fiddling as “thefts defined as trivial”.[46] An act is deviant (a theft is trivial) if others define it so.[47]

Before producing and justifying these grounds for the definition of triviality, there is a final outstanding difficulty to be dealt with: the “real” pretensions of nominal definitions. The problem is, as Bierstedt puts it, a “human tendency to transform nominal definitions into real ones,”[48] something, if you recall, I mentioned as part of the criticism of the definitions of the word “fiddle” offered by others. I might as well declare here that I am interested in the realist’s “conventional intention” of the concept “fiddle”, but not in the “real” sense that would produce statements citing the probabilistic frequency of acceptance of that definition on the population at large. Instead, my position is in line with MacIntyre’s:

“there is not a finite and determinate set of necessary and sufficient conditions which determine the application of a concept (Waismann) or a word (Putnain); but... in normal circumstances and in standard conditions we can behave as if there were such a finite and determinate set.”[49]

I wish to continue, then, “as if” I could answer the ultimately existentialist question (according to Popper) of what “fiddling” really means - that being a convenient preliminary “fiction”[50] a propos the engagement with data.

At root, then, this is now an etymological paradox. The correct way to formulate this paradox is to suggest that triviality is sometimes a meaning for theft. This may be turned round. Theft, which is a serious, mala in se offence, is on some occasions defined as trivial - in the same way as many mala prohibita offences are.[51] This paradox is further reflected as the simultaneous (and thus impossible) membership of two mutually exclusive common criminological categories. Those who are deemed to have “fiddles” are not quite (or necessarily) white-collar criminals - those who peculations are usually defined to be trivial; and yet neither are they fully stockinged-faced, nor treated as seriously as burglars or robbers.

How may this paradox be unravelled - even now it has been refashioned as an etymological one? One method of doing so is incidentally also a method of heeding the clarion call to historical arms coming from some new criminologists:

“despite the fact that we have continually stressed the need for a sense of history in the kinds of explanations offered out of crime (a sense of history that is almost totally absent in existing criminological theory), we have not had the space here to enter into historical explanations. It is obvious that our endeavours need now to be supplemented with a concrete application of the formal model, resulting from the immanent critique of existing thinkers, to empirical cases”[52]

The procedural difficulty with this appeal is that it provides no structure for its answer (and notice that no model is provided in the text that houses the call). Precisely how does one satisfy the “need for a sense of history”? One especially acute difficulty is that there is an apparently unresolvable hiatus between the archaeological deduction of the motives of those long dead (irrespective of whether or not they were the Whigs or the Hunted; those who constructed Albion’s Fatal Tree, or those who swung from it), and the contemporary phenomenological induction of the motives of those still living - particularly given the acknowledged productivity of the latter (and presumably, yet unacknowledgedly, of the former) to dissemble.[53]

The resource for discovering the motives of those who are living is their everyday conversation, or “natural language”: yet we seem debarred from exhuming the “natural” languages of the dead. This is regularly admitted, indeed, it has presumably provided the recent rationale for working from dictate and dogma rather than from the presumably extinct data and document. But is it true?

One immensely available yet conveniently ignored repository of “natural” meanings and common definitions is the dictionary. As the late Donald Ball has put it:

“dictionaries, as collections of words and their definitions, are compilations of natural sociologies.... furthermore, such definitions are constructed by lexicographers out of the stuff of social reality rather than imposed as a sociological version.”[54]

Inevitably, dictionaries (and their compilers and readers) are part of a social world whose influence they not only record, but ultimately contribute to. And yet such texts have a simple advantage over alternative historical data sources such as dramatic text, personal memorabilia, official record or published tract: the axes that dictionaries grind are those of sharpness, clarification, collation and propagation,[55] and not those of propagandisation, politicisation, proselytisation, policy-formation or pleasure.

In short, dictionaries espouse dissemination rather than dissimulation: they corner words and their meanings, rather than coin them. They contain, as Leo Spitzer delightfully has claimed, the “petrified sediment” of previous ages and their meanings.[56] For example, one defines itself as providing amongst other things, the “vocabulary in use”:[57] the current lexicon, together with their meanings. The important thing about the latter is that they are organised around the separable “conventional intention” of words, rather than upon their utility in falsifying or validating a particular imposed scheme of interpretation. In what sense is this “natural”? Edward Rose considers that we should treat the English language as:

“a body of social facts, as a registry of a vast assay of collective representations of sorts of persons, of actions, and of other social features that are indicated in the common meanings of English words. These notions of society and of persons in society are sociological comprehensions manifest to people themselves involved in society. Such understandings can be called natural if they freely occur without deliberate professional direction. Whether such collections can properly be called “sociologies” depends upon the discovery in them of ordered schemes of awareness in society... Certain stabilities and regularities in modes of recognition of society are revealed over the cause of many centuries by patterns in the development of meanings of English words. These stabilities are the principle indicators [...] of an ordered scheme of sociological awareness naturally expressed through the English language.”[58]

Now, given that one aspect of this enterprise (looking up words in dictionaries) hardly needs extensive programmatic specification, it only remains to elucidate the epistemological like between this form of criminology, and the other - contemporary phenomenological ethnography - with which I have suggested it is compatible and with which, at one time at least, it was closely allied.[59] We may first note that both contemporary fieldword,[60] and etymological exhumation,[61] have been called “natural sociology”. Division of the spoils between the two approaches (which together constitute a full natural criminology) rests upon a distinction which Volosinov has forged between theme and meaning in terms of the “linguistic significance” of any utterance.

The former refers to the “upper, actual limit of linguistic significance, in essence, only theme means something definite,”[62] whereas the latter refers to the “lower limit” of linguistic significance. Meaning, in essence, means nothing; it only possesses potentiality - the possibility of having a meaning within a concrete theme.”[63] This distinction may be held to represent, respectively, that believed to separate contemporary fieldwork from etymological exhumation. Volosinov’s distinction is useful because it illuminates the existence of (and a possible solution to) a core issue: that dictionary definitions are in principle not indexical ones. Indeed, a general problem besetting attempts to arrange a marriage between criminology and history is the unrecollectability of past indexicality.[64] Volosinov refers to theme as this precise potential of an utterance:

“The theme of an utterance is itself individual and unreproducible, just as the utterance itself is individual and unreproducible. The theme is the expression of the concrete, historical situation that engendered the utterance. The utterance, “What time is it?” has a different meaning each time it is used, and hence, in accordance with our terminology, has a different theme, depending upon the concrete historical situation (“historical” here in microscopic dimensions) during which it is enunciated and of which, in essence, it is a part.

It follows, then, that the theme of an utterance is determined not only by the linguistic forms that comprise it - words, morphological and syntactic structures, sounds, and intonation - but also by extraverbal factors of the situation. Should we miss these situational factors, we would be as little able to understand an utterance as if we were to miss its more important words....”[65]

Yet Volosinov sets up meaning precisely to avoid these difficulties. He continues:

“Together with theme or, rather, within the theme, there is also the meaning that belongs to an utterance. By meaning, as distinguished from theme, we understand all those aspects of the utterance that are reproducible and self identical in all instances of repetition.

Of course, these aspects are abstract: they have no concrete, autonomous existence in an artificially isolated form, but, at the same time, they do constitute an essential and inseparable part of the utterance. The theme of an utterance is, in essence, on the contrary does break down into a set of meanings belonging to each of the various linguistic elements of which the utterance consists.”[66]

The upshot of presenting this distinction is that the relationship between criminology and history is at most a merger: never a full marriage. The link must be forged with meaning (“the technical apparatus for the implementation of theme”,[67] and notice too that the proposed strategy for so doing concentrates upon the vehicles of words rather than upon the utterances in which they are garaged. Given this specificity of attention, an early snide comment on thematic tracing may be apposite. It was made by Horne Tooke:

“Interpreters, who seek the meaning of a word singly from the passages in which it is found usually connect it with the meaning of some other word or words in the sentence. A regard to the individual etymology of the word would save them from this error, and conduct them to the intrinsic meaning of the word, and the cause of its application.”[68]

We can revisit Volosinov to discover a procedure for plotting meaning. Conveniently, it finally coincides with a recommendation already made. He indicates that:

“Investigation of the meaning of one or another linguistic element can proceed, in terms of our definition, in one or two directions: either in the direction of the upper limit, toward theme, in which case it would be investigation of the contextual meaning of a given word within the conditions of a concrete utterance; or investigation can aim toward the lower limit, the limit of meaning, in which case it would be investigation of the meaning of a word in the system of language or, in other words, investigation of a dictionary word.”[69]

Armed with this logical framework (and recalling the proposed definition derived from the scrutiny of a “natural” sample of current of current newspaper usages of the word “fiddle”; that is, as “a theft defined as trivial”), the element of triviality may be seen as the meaning of historical and current uses of the word. Remember, there, that triviality, yet not necessarily theft, was a feature of the newspaper uses of the word “fiddle” which did not report theft court cases. The opening paradox now analytically refashioned as an historical etymological one,[70] where does the meaning of triviality, and its current (and paradoxical) coupling with the theft referent come from?

Chapter Two: Natural Criminology

“Every word has its own history”[71]

Semantic Diachronics: A Model

Let me run a short refresher course on my topic, before temporarily abandoning its substantive for its analytic side. I opened with a paradox. Some thefts of a quite serious nature are felt, for no apparent reason, to be trivial. Defined as trivial, in other words. Definition itself thus became part of the issue, and was explored along conventionally classic Aristotelian avenues. The first section edged towards the proposition that a “fiddle” is “a theft defined as trivial”. But to leave it there would be more tautology.

Yet a problem emerges when the procedure for flying off at an adequate epistemological tangent (an induced historiography) is coupled with the proposed reformulation of the paradox as an etymological one. A dictionary search (in the footsteps of Edward Rose) was proposed (and will be undertaken shortly) as a bridge, and some preliminary authority for that project was discerned in the work of Volosinov, on the basis of his special utilisation of the semiotic approach (over the Aristotelian) in decomposing the semantic structure of history.

Yet at one level, what is still absent is precisely a general epistemology for linking history with criminology. To be exact, what must be designed and elaborated, before any attempt at practical application (in this instance, to the word “fiddle”) is a model for undertaking semantic diachronics - and that, too, even more shortly. For, hors d’oeuvre, thought, a brief linguistically technical version of the word, and the paradox.

Generally, “fiddle”, as a word, is lexical rather than actual,[72] contingent rather than tied,[73] and is specialised rather than referential.[74] The currently polychrestic and polysemic quality[75] of the word fiddle is another way of putting this, although it also allows a relevant distinction to emerge. “Fiddle” is historically ambiguous (it may be used to refer to one or two or more referents),[76] currently equivocal (the referents are interchangeable), and finally, paradoxical (at least two of the referents contradict each other). But what procedure should be employed to explore these problems?

I have, thus far, cited the simple dictionary as the astounding breakthrough in the attempt to link criminology and history. Nothing is that simple. Consider some early, yet apt, remarks:

“It is this continual incorporation of circumstances originally accidental, into the permanent signification of words, which is the cause that there are so few exact synonyms. It is this also which renders the dictionary meaning of a word, by universal remark so imperfect an exponent of its real meaning. The dictionary meaning is marked out in a broad, blunt way, and probably includes all that was originally necessary for the correct employment of the term; but in process of time so many collateral associations adhere to words, that whoever should attempt to use them with no other guide than the dictionary, would confound a thousand nice distinctions and subtle shades of meaning which dictionaries take no account of;... The history of a word, by showing the causes which determined its use, is in these cases a better guide to its employment than any definition; for definitions can only show its meaning at the particular time, or at most the series of its successive meanings, but its history may show the law by which the succession produced.”[77]

So some qualification is needed, and around the key phrase in the above quotation - “no other guide than the dictionary”. Ironically (since it was he who switched linguistics almost entirely from diachronics into synchronics),[78] it was de Saussuse who outlined a brief diachronic programme. “Diachronic linguistics”, he suggested, “requires both a prospective and a retrospective method”. He continued:

“The prospective method, which corresponds to the actual cause of events, is the one we must use in developing any point concerning the history of a language or of languages. It consists simply of examining the available documents.”[79]

Simple, yet impossible. It is practically tortuous to examine all available documents, even if it were theoretically feasible to discover them. Whatever the degree of document digging, there would always be gaps. With this in mind, de Saussue adds that the diachronic linguist:

“must then discard the prospective method - direct evidence - and work in the opposite direction, using the retrospective method to retrace time. This means choosing a particular period and trying to determine, not how a form developed, but the oldest form that could have given it birth.

The prospective method amounts to simple narration, and is based entirely on textual criticisms, but the retrospective viewpoint requires a reconstructive method supported by comparison.”

Yet de Saussuse was not primarily conceived with semantics,[80] and his proposals need slight reformulation for that reason. Firstly, a dictionary is a good entré to prospective work (for reasons noted above), yet cannot be the whole of that work. (Good) dictionaries not only offer a current natural criminology of a word, but also some outdated ones; and further, dated documentary sources of new word coinings or meaning creations, and thus good start to, and a sound framework for, but not the total of, documentary search.[81]

Secondly, several (good) current dictionaries, especially if consulted in harness with many old (and possibly indifferent) ones, can provide the material for a double comparison, and thus the basis for some reconstruction.[82] Thirdly, this is not a recommendation for skating through ordinary dictionaries in search of a quarkish “proper meaning”; but rather for a serious and systematic pilgrimage which goes beyond ordinary dictionaries:

“to the historical dictionaries, and to essays in historical and contemporary semantics, [where] we are quite beyond the range of the ‘proper meaning’. We find a history and a complexity of meanings; conscious changes, or consciously different uses; innovation, obsolescence, specialisation, extension, overlap, transfer; of changes which are masked by a nominal continuity so that words which seem to have been there for centuries, with continuous general meanings, have come in fact to express radically different or radically variable, yet sometimes hardly noticed, meanings and implications of meaning.”[83]

And the first step of this (as in any other) pilgrimage is an exciting one. Raymond Williams, who has widely yet not deeply advertised the method advocated here, recalls thus his first lexicographic experience with culture:

“one day in the basement of the Public Library at Seaford, where we had gone to live, I looked up culture, almost casually, in one of the thirteen volumes of what we now usually call the OED: the Oxford New English Dictionary on Historical Principles. It was like a shock of recognition. The changes of sense I had been trying to understand had begun in English, it seemed, in the early nineteenth century. The connections I had sensed with class and art, with industry and democracy, took on, in the language, not only an intellectual but an historical shape.”[84]

Yet any serious dictionary digger will immediately unearth a chaotic and varied set of entries beside a chosen word. This is inevitably compounded if a series of entries from a pile of dictionaries is collated and compared. There is, of course, some correspondence and overlap; but this more frequently indicates the successive plagiarism which dictionaries epitomise, rather than constitute any form of proof of the validity of the entry in question. Further, the incestuous basis of compilation more regularly repeats common mistakes than eradicates them; and divergence of entry as often illuminates idiosyncratic error as it does singular accuracy. But however much of a problem this might be with an assembled pile of roughly synchronically published dictionaries, it is more of an asset if that pile is of dictionaries published periodically during previous centuries. For it is here that dictionaries reflect language itself, which as Sapir observed:

“moves down time in a current of its own making. It has drift... The drift of a language is constituted by the unconscious selection on the part of its speakers of those individual variations that are cumulative in some special direction. This direction may be inferred, in the main, from the past history of the language. In the long run any new feature of the drift becomes part and parcel of the common, accepted speech, but for a time it may exist as a mere tendency in the speech of a few, perhaps of a despised few... Nothing is perfectly static. Every word, every grammatical element, every sound and accent is a slowly changing configuration, moulded by the invisible and impersonal drift that is the life of language.”[85]

From this, and in cahoots with de Saussure’s recommended reconstruction model, it must be understood that semantic historical recovery of natural sense is inevitably a strategic compromise between, on the one hand, the reality of the ceaseless (and, sadly, mostly unentered) ebb and flow of both word-meaning and word-use; and, on the other, the necessity for an exposition of any word’s “life” which has attended both to the demands of clarity and lucidity, and to those of contemporary relevance and current utility.[86]

In short Sapir’s “drift” must be broken into crucially exemplary and illustrative stages to operate de Saussure’s retrospective method. This will introduce somewhat artificial milestones in any word’s historic passage, which in addition may be placed at points which alternative or subsequent documentary analysis may pre-date or post-date. Yet, artificial does not mean arbitrary; and the former is only even mildly misleading if the slight artificiality goes unrecognised.

From this viewpoint, the “life” of any word may be decomposed into two logically distinct but empirically overlapping dimensions. The semantic (i.e. changes in its meaning), and the cultural (i.e. changes in its use). The semantic range of a word refers to the range of applicability of a word to possible referents. The cultural range refers to the range of utilisation of a word by possible speakers.

Broadly speaking, any change in semantic range may be held to be either a specialisation (a decrease in the range of applicability of a word to possible referents), or a generalisation, which is the natural opposite process, and implies an increase in the range of applicability of a word to possible referents. Somewhat comparably, any change in cultural range may be held to be either a particularisation at one extreme (a point where the utilisation of a given word to apply to a selected referent is accepted only by a sub-set of a language community), or a universalisation at the other. A universalisation may be said to occur when the whole of a given language community uses a word to apply to a selected referent.

Taking the semantic dimension first, one or two examples may help to clarify the nature of the processes which contribute to the ebb and flow within the natural semantic history of any word. Generalisation, a term here taken from Mill,[87] refers not only to an increase in the range of applicability of a word to possible referents but also to a concomitant decrease in the extent of the logical content of that word. This latter feature only applies synchronically. From the diachronic perspective, an increase in one is an increase in the other. The process of generalisation is one which might explain features of the life of the word “knave”, which at one time meant “servant boy”, but which eventually came to be used to refer to the bigger category of “servant”.

The process involved is the subtraction of referent-characteristic “boy” as a necessary part of the referent.[88] For other words, as Sturtevant indicates, generalisation may be achieved by reversing the mechanics of the process. For example, “leg”, originally specifically reserved for the human anatomy, became later applied to tables and chairs. Here, instead of the range of applicability being increased by decreasing the logical content (subtracting the “boy” characteristic of the referent from the word “knave”), the logical content is decreased by increasing the range of applicability (adding the “table” characteristic of the referent to the word “leg”). Either way, the change is created by concentration upon a characteristic of the referent. As Stern notes,[89] this may be either because of the generality of that characteristic, or because of its essentiality or typicality.

It might be noted in passing that referent characteristics may be exchanged (“girl” might have been substituted for “boy” in the example just cited) without changing either the extent of the word’s logical content, or the span of its synchronic range of applicability (there being just about as many girls as boys). Yet this process of alteration is best viewed as a cultural rather than as a semantic matter. For example, the word “weed” may be used to refer to out-of-place (horticultural) plants, yet, alternatively, also for out-of-place (cultural) “plants”. Sutherland notices how non-subcultural persons may be referred to as “weeds in the garden” by underworld members should the former intrude upon the latter.[90]

The opposite of generalisation is specialisation.[91] Here an increase in the extent of logical content decreases the range of applicability of the word in question. For example, according to Stern,[92] a “deer” was originally “any fourfooted animal that was the object of chase”. A word later restricted to any ruminant quadruped with deciduous branching horns.[93]

But, how is this done? (The why issue is not addressed here). By what methods does semantic range move? Mill’s version is adequate as a general level. He said:

“A name is not imposed at once and by previous purpose upon a class of objects, but is first applied to one thing, and then extended by a series of transitions to another and another. By this process ..... a name not infrequently passes by successive links of resemblance from one object to another, until it becomes applied to things having nothing in common with the first things to which the name was given.”[94]

Yet, what sorts of “transitions”? Are there different types of “links of resemblance”? (And is this what has happened to the word “fiddle”?) Gustav Stern has provided the most extensive typology of what he refers to as “classes of sense change”. Other taxonomies and classifications have been provided by others, some before Stern,[95] and some more recent ones which have tried to combine the various alternative models.[96] At a general level, Stern’s model is certainly questionable here and there.[97] Nevertheless, it is adequate for purposes envisaged here, and a discussion his classes follows. Suggested general classification systems already outnumber the few detailed etymologies which have been produced, and for which a classification might be required. I do not intend to add to the classificatory burden in this book.[98]

Each class of sense-change will have a part to play in the etymological examination of the word “fiddle”, which is to be undertaken shortly. Analogy refers to those new meanings which originate outside a particular word, but which, often for reasons of morphological or phonological similarity, later shift into its semantic range. Various types can be distinguished. Analogy may have a combinative base,[99] a correlative base,[100] or one based on phonetic similarity.[101]

Shortening implies the process of either clipping (the shortening of a word)[102] or omission (the dropping of whole words),[103] leaving in each case a “stump” or “headword”, which may perform the same, or even a larger referential task, especially if it has some phonetic or other similarity with an existing word. Nomination is simply the intentional side of naming. This could be the coining of a new word,[104] non-figurative intentional transfer,[105] or transfers based on the use of figures of speech - for example, on metaphor, euphemism or irony.[106] Transfer[107] is only distinct from the first form of naming insofar as here the referential shift is as Stern puts it:

“unintentional use of a word to denote another referent than the usual one, owing to some similarity between the two referents.”[108]

These shifts in verbal and referential relations are not complex in structure.[109] There are more sophisticated taxonomies of rhetoric to be found elsewhere,[110] but the limited scope of the application of the classes here hardly warrants deeper consideration. The first four classes of sense change may be viewed as bases for sense change when the latter is viewed (as it is here) from the subject’s point of view: Criminology’s investment in the connection with history is phenomenological, and thus it is the third category of sense change, the shift of the subjective relation, which is of importance. Thus, sense-change can only emerge after the operation of one of the final two classes of change.

Aside from the criteria of intentionality and similarity (which, although unimportant here, collectively distinguish all other classes of sense-change from both permutation and adequation), the latter two classes may also be separated on the basis of their relationship to the characteristics, of the referents to which they are held to refer. Whereas the first four classes of shift were based upon, or mediated by points of similarity in two different referents, both permutations and adequation are shifts between characteristics of one referent. Permutation implies a shift in the subjective apprehension of one aspect of a phase-referent to another, generating a meaning for a word which was previously outside its range.[111] Stern comments that:

“a shift in the point of view concerning a detail of a total situation, a detail of a phrase referent, the same word being retained to denote it... A shift in the apprehension of a complex referent, denoted by a phrase, will in most cases lead only to another word being employed... But in certain circumstances, as indicated above, the new apprehension of the word referent will, by repeated use, become associated to the word expressing the earlier apprehension of it, and will itself finally become a meaning of that name.”[112]

Adequation again implies a shift in one characteristic of a referent, but this time of a word-referent. Further, whereas permutation involved a shift to a meaning outside the original referential range (and thus a change of referent); adequation involves a shift of attention to an aspect within the original referential range (and, accordingly, only a change of meaning). As Stern puts it:

“Adequation is similar to permutation in being based on a shift of the subjective apprehension of the referent, but it differs from it in various ways. Adequation is an affair of the single word and its referent, permutation can occur only when the referent is an element of a peculiar kind of total. In adequation there is primarily no change of referent, only of meaning; or rather, a shift of attention from one characteristic of the referent to another, which is equivalent to a change of predominant element of meaning; permutation is a change of apprehension involving a change of referent.”[113]

Adequation is a pure adjustment of meaning. As far as the subject is concerned, adequation follows the operation of every other class of sense-change, and inevitably follows even purely technical changes in the referent, or its use.[114] Adequation may follow analogy (‘Belfry’ originally had nothing to do with bells, but denoted a ‘tower used in attacking fortresses’. Owing to the phonetic association with ‘bell’ the word has adjusted normally now to refer to towers containing bells);[115] shortening (after adjustment, the context of original use need no longer be recalled or duplicated for us to know what ‘bus’ refers to); nomination (metaphor and irony fades[116] hyperbole degenerates and euphemism regenerates[117] after a while, and may need re-nomination); transfer (“saddle”, at first transferred only to mountains physically resembling the equine version, may now be used to refer to those slopes which share some other referent to those to which the transfer was originally made); and, even permutation (‘beads’ may now be used to refer to those strings of small balls hung around female necks, used to measure fashion rather than to count prayers).

But this discussion of the effects and methods of achieving change in semantic range cannot yet cope with one possibility. Stern reminds us of a common development wherein,

“the original predominating element does not disappear... the old meaning remains by the side of the new one, as one of several specialised meanings within the range of the word.”[118]

The word ‘horn’ for example (and see fn. (114) supra), may still be used to describe an ‘animal’s horn’ without the hearer believing such animals make music. Yet this is assuming the hearer is part of a given semantic community, rather than a member of a particular language community, (a young child might be a member of the latter, but could feasibly imagine a sheep playing the Trumpet Voluntary on its horns, thus not yet demonstrating his full membership of the former).[119] Nevertheless, within the semantic community, two sorts of “specialised meanings” may be distinguished.

On the one hand, there are those which full “natural” language speakers might be expected to know (e.g. the meanings of ‘horn’ already discussed), but on the other, there are users which stem from a word’s uncommon adoption by a sub-set of the “natural” language community. For example, ‘horn’ “means”: any of the columns of grey matter in the spinal cord (to doctors); the top if a bow (to archers); a symbol of glory (to theologians); a part of the corona of certain milkweeds (to botanists); the ends of main-mast cross-trees (to sailors); a tube of varying sectional area used in some loud-speakers (to radio-technicians); and so on.[120] What distinguishes this second sort of “specialised” meaning from the first is that they each refer to use by a specific occupationally defined sub-set of that language community (‘occupation’ taken very broadly here), rather than, as with the first, a sub-set defined merely by lack of general language-use competence.[121]

What is clearly implied here is the second dimension of a word’s life: the cultural range. One which, as promised earlier and as illustrated in the last example, overlaps empirically with the first (semantic) range. Cultural range is not a purely synchronic issue. Indeed, of importance here is its diachronic relevance. Cultural change refers to the degree to which any particular semantic change spreads into, or withdraws from currency in a given language community. Mill put the former possibility practically and clearly:

“it is natural and inevitable that in every age a certain portion of our recorded and traditional knowledge, not being continually suggested by the pursuits and inquiries with which mankind are at that time engrossed, should fall asleep, as it were, and fade from memory. It would be utterly lost, if the propositions or formulas, the results of the previous experience, did not remain, and continue to be repeated and believed, as forms of words it may be, but of words that once really conveyed, and are still supposed to convey, a meaning: which meaning, though suspended, may be historically traced, and when suggested, is recognised by minds of the necessary endowments as being still matter of fact, or truth... The tide of custom first drifts the word on the shore of a particular meaning, then retires and leaves it there.”[122]

Sturtevant calls attention to the other side of cultural change: the coining of a word (or the creation of a meaning for an existing one), and offers a preliminary analysis of the process thus:

“There may be change... in the speech of the person or persons who at the moment set the linguistic fashion. Such innovations are constantly arising in the speech of each one of us... Most of such innovations are purely momentary and have no influence upon the language... In all such cases there are two processes to be distinguished: the origin of the innovation in an individual speaker may be called a primary change; the spread of the innovation to other speakers may be called a secondary change.”[123]

Sturtevant’s “secondary changes” - constituting, as they do, of cultural as well as semantic changes, follow the myriad of “primary changes” in only a tiny proportion of cases. Bloomfield referred to this minority as “crucial extensions”. He continued:

“A semantic change, then, is a complex process. It involves favourings and disfavourings, and as its crucial point, the extension of a favoured form into practical applications which hitherto belonged to the disfavoured form. This crucial extension can be observed only if we succeed in finding the locutions in which it was made, and in finding or reconstructing the model locutions in which both forms were used alternatively.”[124]

Yet, such “crucial extensions” do not necessarily propel a meaning into universal cultural acceptance. Indeed, a very basic distinction is necessary here.[125] The cultural range of a word’s meaning may be characterised, at any one time, as being either particular or universal. Particular refers to a survival of a meaning, but one either by restriction (immediate cultural limitation after coining or creation), or degeneration (a subsequent use-limitation following a period of universal use), used only by a sub-set of the language community. A sub-set which is, incidentally, capable of being defined in a way other than its use of a word for that meaning.[126]

Universal cultural range applies when the whole of a given language community uses a word to apply to a specific referent. A universal range of acceptance and use of a meaning may follow either an extension (immediate cultural expansion after coining or creation), or regeneration (a subsequent user-expansion following a period of particular use).

Some further distinctions will be useful. The term “lingo” (jargons or argots)[127] is reserved for various particular occupational sub-sets within a linguistic community. The term “slang” (colloquialisms or vulgarisms)[128] is reserved for words which are universally usable, yet not universally used. In addition, “slang” is normally a semantic generalisation, whereas, “lingo” mostly reflects semantic specialisation.

Given such distinctions, it follows that various prototypical utilisation careers are possible for any one word. Some, after coining or creation, drift from the particular to the universal;[129] others, from the universal to the particular.[130] Alternatively, words may drift from universal use into an archaic coma;[131] or from a particular use into a redundant loss.[132]

A final difficulty lies in the selection of a model for the etymology to proceed - even given an allegiance to the several, and possibly arbitrary distinctions and definitions offered above. There exist a number of possibly comparable professional etymological studies of single words.[133] All are in principle capable of providing model analyses.[134] Yet, excessive attention paid to phonological minutiae combined with eclectic (although painstaking and scholarly) diligence generally reduces issues of semantic change to passing suggestions.[135] Indeed, Malkiel characterises the usual approach as possessing:

a zigzagging narrative, with full attention to each new conjecture, and to each fresh facet of an old conjecture newly championed as well as to the miscellaneous reactions such proposals elicit, until the problem has either been solved through a consensus, or, if the discussion grows sterile, been shelved pending the discovery of some new decisive piece of evidence.”[136]

This “annalistic” approach (“at the farthest conceivable remove from austere scientific styling”, ibid.)[137] is in sharp contrast to the “analytic” approach adopted here. Malkiel offers the following definition of this “analytic” etymology, which has:

“the material and matching ideas grouped in more abstract, analytical fashion around the major solutions... The bases advocated may, but need not, follow a strictly chronological line; if they do, that line is either a string of the exact dates of formal scholarly identifications, or a sequence of the approximate dates when assumed bases emerged in actual speech. As an alternative to historicism in either garb, the hypotheses could be arrayed on the basis of source language, word family, derivational structure, or semantic background. From this less narrative, more interpretive treatment one arrives... by deliberate trimming - omission of such conjectures as are of merely antiquarian interest or mark a step backward -at the actual ‘nucleus of the problem’, frequently a restatement of some irreducible dilemma.” [138]

As a way of explicating the currently “irreducible dilemma” of semantic choice between seriousness and triviality for the word “fiddle”, I propose to group the etymological material discoverably in terms of (Bloomfield’s) “crucial extensions” of its meaning and use, citing, where possible, a “first attestation” of the new use.[139] After a slight prologue, the natural history of the word “fiddle” will be grouped into three major approximately consecutive, empirical stages. Each stage successively marks the achievement of a qualitatively different semantic and cultural dimension from its predecessor. Each stage is composed of a primary and secondary step.

At the semantic level, each stage possesses, á la Stern, a primary referential suggestion (i.e. by analogy, shortening, nomination or transfer), followed by a secondary subjective ratification (i.e. by permutation or adequation). Somewhat similarly, but now culturally and á la Sturtevant, each stage also possesses a primary innovated proposal (with its origins in code, cant, jargon or arnot), followed by a secondary disseminated acceptance.[140] Each stage contains firstly name shifts, of the word FIDDLE to the group opened up in the previous “crucial extension”, and then, secondly, the sense extensions which lead to the next “crucial extension”.

FIDDLE: A Natural Criminology

“In attempting to rectify the use of a vague term by giving it a fixed connotation, we must take care not to discard (unless advisedly, and on the ground of a deeper knowledge of the subject) any portion of the connotation which the word, in however indistinct a manner, previously carried with it. For otherwise language loses one of its inherent and most valuable properties, that of being the conservator of ancient experience; the keeper alive of those thoughts and observations of former ages, which may be alien to the tendencies of the passing time. To be qualified to define the name, one must know all that has ever been known of the properties of the class of objects which are, or originally were, denoted by it.”[141]

Prologue

I am bound to declare that the best dictionary in the world - 1901: O.E.D.,[142] admits of the word FIDDLE that “the ultimate origin is obscure”. Yet all is not lost: and some of the speculations the obscurity allows may even constitute a gain. Indeed, early dictionaries were not as timorous. Those with an entry for FIDDLE (and many had not),[143] plumped unanimously (and probably incestuously) for the latin word fidicula as the source.[144] None gives an explanation until 1859: WORCESTER, who comments “[...L.fidicula, a dim. of fides, any stringed instrument.] A stringed instrument of music”. This became conventional for a while, with 1867; DONALD adding a possible earlier origin in the Greek sphidé; of which 1882: ANNANDALE comments, “L.L.fidicula., dim. of L.fides, fidis = Gf. sphidé gut, catgut, string of a musical instrument.”

Yet, later lexicographers were unimpressed. The dismissive comments in 1889: WHITNEY are typical: “... Another derivation, (L.fidicula, commonly pl. fidiculae, a small stringed instrument, a small lute or cythern (dim. of fides, a stringed instrument, a lute, lyre, cither), hardly agrees with the Tent. and not at all with the Rom. forms.” Instead, another latin origin was suggested. To quote 1901:O.E.D., “The Teut, word bears a singular resemblance in sound to its Med.L. synonym vitula, vidula... the supposition that the early Rom. vidula was adopted independently in more than one Teut. Lang. would account adequately for all the Teut. forms. “Many simply translate vitula, vidula as (and 1882: SKEAT is typical) “a viol, fiddle; a word presumably of low Lat. origin.” Others offer a more prosaic account. 1925: HARGRAVE, for example, states: “At first sight there seems little in common between the two words ‘fiddle’ and ‘violin’, although they denote the same instrument.

But the root from which the two words derive is the same, viz: the Latin vidula, from vitulari, skip like a calf, make merry, from vitula, a calf”. Two later specialised etymological dictionaries give even more extravagant origins. 1966: ONIONS claims, “Rom. vitula... f.L. vitulari celebrate a festival, be joyful (cf. vitula goddess of victory and celebration);”[145] and 1966; KLEIN remarks that FIDDLE, “probably derives fr. VL. vitula, name of a stringed instrument, which is of uncertain origin. It is possibly a back formation fr. L. vitulari, ‘to exult, be joyful’, which prob. stands for vi-tulari and orig. meant ‘to lift up one’s voice in joy’, fr. vi, exclamation of joy... and tulo, a secondary form of tollo, ‘I raise’.”

An alternative, adopted by only a few - such as 1862: WEDGEWOOD, and 1873: FERGUSON - but nevertheless very worthy of consideration, is a derivation of FIDDLE from the Old Norse fitla, to touch or twitch with the fingers. This verb possibly transferred uses of the word FIDDLE. Additionally, the early stringed instruments called FIDDLES were not solely played with a bow. Indeed, the earliest dictionary with an entry for FIDDLE, 1659: SOMNER, offers “a crowd” as a synonym. Of “crowd”, 1901;O.E.D. says, “an ancient Celtic musical instrument of the viol class, now obsolete, having in early times three strings, but in its later form six, four of which were played with a bow, and two by twitching with the fingers; and early form of the fiddle”.

Yet whilst the origin of FIDDLE is uncertain, and the subject of some professional dispute, there is greater agreement about its more immediate linguistic ancestors, and over phonetically similar and semantically identical words in other European languages. Whether or not FIDDLE originated in one or other of the suggested Latin sources (with thence presumably independently informed the Italian, Spanish and Portugese viola, the Provence viula, and the French viole) or in the less frequently mentioned, but otherwise perhaps more plausible Old Norse source, is indicated by the greater similarity between the original Old Norse and the Anglo-Saxon, Middle English and Standard English forms of FIDDLE. The Old Norse fitla has some alternative spellings,[146] one of which, fithla,[147] has a close formal resemblance to fithele - the Anglo-Saxon forebear of FIDDLE.

Additionally the word forms having currency in those countries which are geographically closer to Britain (than those with forms which appear to be descendants from one of the original Latin Sources) which are also those whose histories are linked with British history and from whom loan words might have been borrowed, more closely resemble the Nordic than the latin root.[148] For example, the Old Swedish fidhla,[149] the Icelandic fidla,[150] the Swedish fedla,[151] and the Danish fiddel.[152] The various Germanic or Teutonic forms - Old High German fidula,[153] the Middle High German vedel,[154] the low German fidel[155] and the German fiedel[156] all bear, as 1901; O.E.D. claims, “a singular resemblance in sound” to the alleged Latin root, vidula; as indeed does the Dutch vedel or veel.[157]

In any case, and from whatever root, the Anglo-Saxon fithele[158] mutated through various alternative spellings (fithel, fydyll, etc.)[159] before coming to rest with the contemporary FIDDLE. The noun form is held to have originated before 1150 AD, although the earliest occurrence for the written English verb cannot be dated before the period, 1150-1450 AD.[160] At this point it would be stretching the available data to make any detailed claims about the early semantic and cultural ranges of FIDDLE.

Yet, if the Nordic root is taken seriously, then the increased range of applicability of the word to small stringed instruments is a generalisation following the earlier rather specialised restriction to musical instruments with strings some of which are played with a bow and others twitched with the fingers. Similarly, but culturally, the word does not seem to have been restricted to any particular societal sub-group. Of more relevance here is when and how did a word meaning “small stringed instruments” come to mean “theft”? Three semantic “crucial extensions” are involved, so I have grouped the relevant materials into three stages which collectively constitute an “analytic” etymology.

Stage I: From Musical Instruments to Sex

To start, there was a gradual shift in the use of the name FIDDLE to cover actors, activities and artefacts already within the referential range associated with “small stringed instruments”. In fact, and giving some more slight support for a Nordic over a Latin root, the first dated use of any sort is for FIDDLER - the player of the instrument in 1100,[161] followed by FIDDLE for the instrument in 1205,[162] with the verb to FIDDLE being first dated in 1377.[163] The FIDDLESTICK appeared in the fifteenth century,[164] as did FIDDLING (playing the violin) which is first noticed in 1460.[165]

After a slight gap, FIDDLE-CASE can be dated at 1647,[166] with the FIDDLES as the band of musicians known from 1676,[167] although a FIDDLE as a single player is unknown before 1773.[168] Before then, the FIDDLEMAKER - the craftsman making the musical instruments - appears from 1680,[169] with FIDDLESTRING making an appearance in 1728.[170] The FIDDLE-BOW is unknown before 1827,[171] several centuries after FIDDLESTICK. FIDDLE-DIDDLE, the sound produced when all these artefacts and actors are put together is first dated at 1827,[172] with the FIDDLE-FATHER - or bass viol - completing this little musical family in 1878.[173]

Gradually, but from this base, the word FIDDLE shifted to senses outside the original referential range. In Elizabethan England, most people’s sole experience of FIDDLING was at the hands of wandering minstrels, all “seeking to change musicke for money.”[174] They tended to arrive unexpectedly, and hence the expression FIDDLER’S BIDDING - a last minute, or belated invitation.[175] They were, additionally, a source of information as well as music, although the news they brought was often as unreliable as it was stale: the first captured in the expression FIDDLER’S TALES,[176] the second is FIDDLER’S NEWS.[177] Yet these expressions are now archaic, and there is no evidence to suggest that they ever became semantically ratified or culturally disseminated. None has found a place in a national dictionary: and for each the first attestation is prefaced by a regional location, to which their cultural range was presumably limited.

Two other features of minstrels generated sense extensions for the word FIDDLE. In each case, a semantic ratification is complemented by cultural dissemination; yet neither sense extension is “crucial”, and both are now archaic. Both, too, relate to the remuneration given to music-makers. Sometimes they received nothing but politeness. Indeed, FIDDLER’S WAGES, datable at 1597,[178] means “thanks” (and nothing else). Slightly later, by 1608, FIDDLER’S FARE implied the more generous payment-in-king of “meat, drink and money”.[179] Alternatively, this might be reduced to FIDDLER’S PAY - “thanks and wine”[180] - or to FIDDLER’S MONEY, the seemingly most authoritative definition of which is “small change, small silver coins”.[181] The latter monetary sense seems to have predominated (at the stage of ratification and dissemination) over the former, vaguer uses. By the late eighteen century, a FIDDLER was a slang term for a farthing;[182] and fifty years later, it had become slang for sixpence, either as FIDDLER, or as FIDDLE.[183]

Pursuing perhaps another element of FIDDLER’S FARE, by the middle of the nineteenth century one could become as DRUNK AS A FIDDLER,[184] or even worse, as DRUNK AS A FIDDLER’S BITCH,[185] or in Scotland, FIDDLER-FOU.[186] This was later semantically ratified, and again through permutation (yet possibly only in America, and even there at best as slang) as FIDDLED - drunk.[187]

But it was yet another feature of the public definition of itinerant Elizabethan musicians which fueled the “crucial extensions” which both completes this stage in the development of the word FIDDLE’s life, and provides a model extension for the subsequent adequated gradual name shift at the beginning of the next stage. Aydelotte considers the following quote from Stubbes to contain a good picture of the life of the Elizabethan minstrel:

“I think that all good minstrelles, sober and chast musicians (speking of suche drunken sockets and bawye parasits as range the Cuntreyes, ryming and singing of vncleane, corrupt, and filthie songs in Tauernes, Ale-houses, Innes, and other publique assemblies,) may daunce the wild Moris thorow a needles eye. For how should thei bere chaste minds, seeing that their exercyse is the pathway to all vncleanes. There is no ship so balanced with massie matter, as their heads are fraught with all kind of bawdue songs, filthie ballads and scuruie rynes, seruing for euery purpose, and for euerie Cumpanie.”[188]

Indeed, this reputation for entertaining with “bawdy songs, filthy ballads and scurvy rhymes” led to an extension of the verb to FIDDLE to mean “to take liberties with a woman” as early as 1632.[189] The grounds for the sense extension however were probably different. Whilst some (e.g. 1925: WEEKLEY, and 1937: PARTRIDGE) consider that this sense of the verb derives directly from the Old Norse root, fitla, to touch with the fingers, and whilst there is a persuasive yet otherwise unsupported suggestion that ‘strumpet’ derives from the low and now obsolete verb ‘strum’ - to have sexual intercourse,[190] with ‘strum’ in turn deriving from a literal sense of to play a musical instrument; it is at least as plausible (and in my opinion, much more so) that it was the sheer ironic resemblance between the antiquarian symbol for woman (a ‘figure of eight’ shape, with the bottom bulge larger than the top, with or without a hole in the lower middle) and the actual shape of the violin which, as the shared referent characteristic of each, fostered the crucial transfer.

Some support for the latter interpretation is additionally available in a later noun use of FIDDLE for the female pudendum, first known in 1817,[191] and a use of both FIDDLESTICK and FIDDLE-BOW as an equivalently vulgar (and now defunct) euphemism for the penis.[192] It was with this early transfer as a model, that the name FIDDLE was subsequently and gradually shifted to an enormous range of artefacts or activities which somehow resembled either part of all of the musical instrument of the bow, or the musicians playing them.

Stage II: From Sex to Nonsense

Indeed, one of the first transfers to social activities resembling the minstrel in action retained a shadow of the model transfer to sexual activity. By the early eighteenth century, to FIDDLE had become also to mean ‘to scratch’. Initially, as early as 1700, this was known as the WELSH FIDDLE,[193] and later as the SCOTCH FIDDLE.[194] Further, 1972: PARTRIDGE claims of the expression, to PLAY THE SCOTCH FIDDLE, “To work the index finger of one hand like a fiddle stick between the index and middle finger of the other... To do this ‘provokes a Scotchman in the highest degree it implying that he is afflicted with the itch’ (Hotten).” This description is identical to the copulatory gesture more recently labelled the Forefinger Insertion gesture.[195] Slightly later the verb FIDDLE shifted also to mean, more plainly but perhaps more directly transferred from the musician (insofar as two shared referent characteristics facilitate the transfer: the action and the sound) “to saw”.[196]

This development is complemented by a slightly earlier noun use of FIDDLESTICK to mean ‘a spring saw’, a shift which, if one of several speculative etymological links are acceptable,[197] might be identical to the otherwise confusing and idiosyncratic entry in 1959: HOTTEN for FIDDLE as ‘a whip’.[198] Also resembling the rapid arm movements of the musician in action, the verb FIDDLE shifted, in America, to a pugilistic context wherein it meant either “to move the arms forward and back, as at the beginning of a round”, or, “a series of blows delivered quickly, and at a short distance.”[199] In the same period, and in the same country, FIDDLER, was extended to refer to “a prize fighter,” specifically, “one who depends more upon activity than upon strength or ‘stay’.”[200] Possessing possibly a related sense are both FIDDLE-JIGGING, moving awkwardly,[201] and FIDDLE-FOOTED, restive.[202]

A different characteristic of the musician in action, now the bent arm holding the bow, genered both the expression LIKE A FIDDLER’S ELBOW, meaning crooked;[203] and the Yorkshire child’s game, MY FATHER’S FIDDLE, a regional variation on the universally nasty things that children do to each other.[204] Related are the military slang use of FIDDLER for bugler;[205] the use of FIDDLINE and FIDDLE-BACK wood in the bookbinding trade (the rapid action of sewing book leaves together with an overcast stitch; and the wood thus used in book-covers, respectively);[206] and the use of both FIDDLE and FIDDLESTICK in agriculture, a transfer based again on similarity of movement with the musician.[207]

On the resemblance both to the actions of the musician and the subsequent sound produced, FIDDLE was also transferred to the natural world as FIDDLE-WOOD, or FIDDLE-STICKS, a plant “so called because the stems are by children stripped of their leaves and scraped across each other fiddler-fashion, when they produce a squeaking sound.”[208] In fact, the shift of meaning for the verb FIDDLE to mean ‘to scrape’ can be dated much earlier at 1672,[209] a meaning subsequently informing a highly technical use of FIDDLING in the malfunction of micrometers in the late nineteenth century,[210] and contributing to the final crucial extension of the words’ use in Stage III.

A much earlier transfer to the natural world occurred as early as 1714, but was on the basis of a resemblance with the actions of a musician rather than with the sound produced from playing. The FIDDLER is a crab with one small claw, and “one claw much enlarged, and often holds it in a position suggesting that in which a musician holds a fiddle”, according to 1941: WEBSTER.[211] Somewhat later, in 1842, the Common Sandpiper was also called a FIDDLER, again because of a physical resemblance, this time between its stance and that of the violinist.[212]

But perhaps the most extensive transferred use of members of the FIDDLE word-family was ot objects which resembled the musical instrument in some or other way. Some resembled the bow. FIDDLESTICK, in its use for broadsword, a use dating from at least 1595,[213] is a possible candidate in this category; althouhg it may (as a classic phallic symbol) alternatively have been indirectly transferred from the sexual crucial extension which is the model for name shifts in this stage of the development of the word’s meaning.

Three other shifts most obviously reflect a direct transfer from the violinist’s bow. the FIDDLE-DRILL, one turned, according to 1900: WRIGHT, “with bow and string”;[214] the Victorian wood industry’s FIDDLE, which, claims 1889: WHITNEY, “consists of a piece of emery-covered cloth stretched between two end-pieces of wood connected by a curved handle”;[215] and the nautical slang used of FIDDLED STICK for flag staff.[216] Finally, there once existed the expression FIDDLE-FLANKED which 1901: O.E.D. defines as “having hollow flanks like a fiddle”. Presumably, this has matured into the more modern phrase ‘bow legged.’[217]

Many more shifts were to senses reminiscent of the musical instrument rather than of the bow. Several objects from the naturaly world are in this category. FIDDLE-SHAPED is a standard botanical term for any leaf with a panduriform, or figure-of-eight profile;[218] and FIDDLE-LIPPED is also used for any similarly shaped lip.[219] FIDDLE-DOCK is a specific plant with panduriform leaves;[220] and the angel-fish or monk fish is called the FIDDLE-FISH for the same reason.[221]

The FIDDLE-BEETLE (Damaster blaptiodes) and the quite different FIDDLER-BEETLE (Eupoecila australasiae) both have panduriform outlines, with the latter having, in addition, green longitudinal stripes which further resemble the strings of the violin.[222] Bridging the natural and social world was, of course, FIDDLEBACK wood: the ideal type of wood for violin construction.[223] Several other uses of words from the FIDDLE word-family to name flora and fauna are traceable, although it is not clear in these remaining cases what point of co-similarity provides the fulcrum for the transfer.

Two different types of fly have been called FIDDLERS, one dating from 1750,[224] the other from 1890.[225] One duck has been called a FIDDLER,[226] as has one fish,[227] although a different one from the FIDDLER-FISH described above and from the king-crab, which is also called a FIDDLE-FISH.[228] Several plants have also been given the name, most probably because of panduriform shape. The wild carrot,[229] the marsh marigold,[230] and murrain grass[231] have all been called FIDDLE; one particular type of grass is called FIDDLE-GRASS,[232] the yellow rattle is termed FIDDLE-CASE,[233] and the leaves of the young cinnamon fern are called FIDDLE-HEADS.[234]

Also on the model of the musical instrument, by 1785 those who were “long-faced, solemn, melancholy looking” might be called FIDDLE-FACED;[235] those with a “long narrow chin” might be referred to as FIDDLE-CHIN;[236] and those with “long scraggy posteriors” could be termed FIDDLE-DOUP.[237] During the nineteenth century, the noun form was shifted to social artefacts possessing the pandurate shape with increasing frequency. In 1832, a FIDDLE was a watchman’s rattle;[238] by 1836, a use for an instrument of tortue was recorded;[239] by 1865, a FIDDLE was a contrivance on board a passenger ship used to prevent cutlery and food sliding off the dining table in bad weather;[240] by 1874, it was an eleven foot long wooden bar dragged along behind a horse to pick up loose straw or hay.[241]

By the end of the century, FIDDLE was also the term for a cleat;[242] a jam puff;[243] somewhat later, for a grand piano (amongst American furniture removal men),[244] and even for a chinaware rack.[245] Similarly shaped to the violin was the FIDDLE-BLOCK;[246] those chairs which had a FIDDLE-BACK;[247] the ecclestiastical garment called a FIDDLEBACK CHASUBLE;[248] small ancient marble shaped but undetailed statuettes called FIDDLE IDOLS;[249] and a rather fashionable American shoe with an instep coloured differently to the rest of the sole, and termed a FIDDLE-WAIST.[250] One wholly inexplicable transfer was of the word FIDDLE to mean ‘A writ to arrest’.[251]

Some transfers were merely on the basis of resemblance to any part of the musical instrument. Some ships have an ornament at their prow which, to quote 1883: SMITH, is “one finished by a scroll turning aft, in contradistinction to a scroll-head, which turns forward.” Because of this “bending in like the head of a violin” (1859: WORCESTER), this was termed a FIDDLE-HEAD.[252] Since this was somewhat plainer than an ornamental figure-head, FIDDLE-HEAD was subsequently re-transferred to mean, of people, plain or ugly.[253]

It was also generalised from ships to other social artefacts which had one end shaped like the head or scroll of the musical instrument.[254] This perhaps an apposite moment to mention a long-standing nautical preference for the word FIDDLE, which was, as 1921: WEEKLEY puts it, “a favourite word with mariners”. FIDDLER’S GREEN was a mythical paradise to which all old sailors were eventually posted. It was a place where, to quote 1894: BREWER, “there is perpetual mirth, a fiddle that never ceases to untiring dancers, plenty of grog, and unlimited tobacco.”

It also provided, as 1897: BARRERE and LEYLAND are more careful to point out, “those amenities for which Wapping, Castle Rag, and the back of Portsmouth Point were once noted.”[255] More practically, and on board ship, the FIDDLEY (sometimes the FIDDLER) was an area surrounding the stoke-hole (sometimes the capstan house) where sailors were allowed to smoke and play music.[256] Somewhat later, again in a nautical context, but actually from an entirely different root, the word FIDDLE came to be used for the instrument used by convicts to pick oakum.[257]

Another part of the musical instrument which generated a shift in the use of the name was the configuration of the strings against the frets, producing FIDDLE-PATTERN - a sort of “cross-pattern” used to decorate various artefacts;[258] and subsequently FIDDLE-FACE, of humans, implying criss-crossed with lines, or “wizened”.[259] The strings independantly produced one nomination in the natural world, where FIDDLESTRINGS referred to “the ribs of the plantain leaf when pulled out”.[260] Then the inevitably voluminous and pandurate instrument case produced FIDDLER-POUCHED (of pockets);[261] FIDDLE-CASE BOOTS;[262] and, of smock type frocks, FIDDLE-BAGS.[263]

So far all these uses in Stage II are adequated transfers to objects and activities well within the referential range newly established by the crucial extension to sex which closed Stage I. So far in this stage, I have merely indexed the gradual shifts of the name (post-as it were-coitally) to other panduriform uses. But there were several attempts to move outside this circumscribed referential range. Some were phrases fashioned in an attempt to generalise from the noise of the musical instrument, as in the DEVIL RIDES ON A FIDDLESTICK;[264] or from the absence of any sound at all, as in HANG UP THE FIDDLE;[265] or in HANG UP ONE’S FIDDLE WHEN ONE GETS HOME;[266] or the regionally based, HANG UP ONE’S FIDDLE ON THE DOOR SNECK.[267]

In either case, this was extended to the player; either positively, as in to have one’s FACE MADE OF A FIDDLE;[268] or negatively, as in to have a FACE LIKE THE FAR END OF A [FRENCH] FIDDLE;[269] or, to have a FACE AS LONG AS A FIDDLE.[270] Alternatively, but now aping the frenetic action of the musician and simultaneously exploiting two probably etymological distinct meanings of the word ‘fret’, one could, if worried, FRET ONESELF TO A FIDDLESTRING;[271] or, if wearied, one could be WORN TO A FIDDLESTRING.[272] Perhaps because it was a difficult instrument to play (or construct), one could bungle the execution of a task, or MAKE A FINE FIDDLE of it.[273]

Yet, well-tuned, it could be transferred to non-musical persons, who could be as FINE AS A [FARTHING] FIDDLE as early as 1603;[274] or slightly later, as FIT AS A FIDDLE,[275] if they were in good form. Under any circumstances, those in charge of any undertaking could PLAY FIRST FIDDLE from 1778;[276] subordinates might PLAY SECOND FIDDLE from 1809;[277] and any third party might PLAY THIRD FIDDLE after 1866.[278] Yet, while some of these expressions have survived (and many have not), none became secondarily extended in the sense that the word FIDDLE alone could call the whole expression to mind.

Yet one did. And it, almost be mistake, fostered the “crucial extension” in sense from this to the next Stage in FIDDLE’s development. The curious expressed TO FIND A FIDDLE, which originally “applied to the finding of a child dropped by gypsies”;[279] became later generalised and universalised as “to come upon something very amusing.”[280] In turn, this change (the apparently paradoxical movement from ‘abandoned child’ to ‘something amusing’, or mildly diverting) was facilitated by the fortuitous intercession of the extraordinary homonym, “bosh”.

To trim another etymological story, “bosh” had for long meant, in particularised and specialised gypsy cant, a violin or FIDDLE;[281] yet it also did duty in a very generalised sense as a universal colloquialism meaning ‘nonsense’.[282] It was with this transfer as a base, that the name FIDDLE was subsequently and gradually shifted to a wide range of forms and expressions all implying, in some or other way, ‘nonsense’.

Stage III: From Nonsense to Theft

The earliest transferred formulations had an identical interjectional quality to the “bosh” intermediary. A use in this sense (ie as ‘nonsense’) can be traced as early as 1600 for FIDDLESTICK;[283] a century later for FIDDLESTICKS;[284] and sometime later, in 1796, for FIDDLESTICKS END.[285] Derived from this is the subsequently datable expression, NOT TO CARE A FIDDLESTICK, meaning not to care at all.[286] The expressive symbolism available in the word FIDDLE may well have assisted this sense extension. Indeed, as Marchand comments:

“..... Initial /F/, /P/, less so /B/, often express, scorn, contempt, disapproval, disgust; pish, pooh, ph, fie, foh, faugh (cf. the exclamation fiddlesticks, I don’t care a fig, contemptous words such as fiddle-faddle, fingle-fangle, Gp, pah, puh, F fi, L fu). Only certain sounds lend themselves to being used as emotionally expressive symbols....”[287]

Thus the reduplication, FIDDLE-FADDLE,[288] an “argumentative or emphatic repetition,”[289] with no previous history or other meaning, had emerged in the sense of “meer silly stuff, or nonsense; idle, vain discourse” as early as in 1690: B.E.; and the slightly later contraction to FID-FAD was used identically.[290] FIDDLE-FADDLE was a founder member of a large and phonetically similar family of common reduplications, which possessed the same semantic threat of nonsensical, foolish triviality.[291] In turn, and again with the same syntactical function as an interjection, FIDDLE! took on this meaning at least by 1695;[292] as did the echo repetitions FIDDLEDEDEE;[293] and the less common FIDDLEDEE![294]

The reduplication shifted, by adequation, through FIDDLECOME,[295] from emphasis on the interjectional form and function of the word, to attention instead to the product of the activity thus described, to FIDDLE-COME-FADDLE, which meant ‘a trifle’.[296] So, FIDDLE-FADDLE, as an adjective, meant ‘trifling’;[297] and as a verb, slightly later, to ‘to trifle’.[298] Somewhat earlier, whole persons could be called FIDDLE-FADDLES,[299] or later FIDDLE-FADDLERS,[300] or some regional variant.[301]

This sense of ‘trifle’ (nonsense) for FIDDLE - one produced through the crucial extension provided by the bridge, “bosh”; elided with an earlier iconic transfer based upon a resemblance between the movement of the hands in violin playing, to similar hand movements elsewhere, producing for FIDDLE the other sense of ‘trifle’ (to toy with). Indeed, this is one of the earliest transferred senses for FIDDLE, recorded first in 1735: JOHNSON, but traced in this sense to at leat 1530.[302] Thus, and similarly, but now exploiting the polysemy in the noun ‘fool’, FIDDLER became ‘a jester’;[303] and ‘a trifler’.[304] FIDDLING[305] rapidly, and later FIDDLE,[306] took on the meaning of (with persons) ‘acting triflingly’, and later, of the state of being ‘busy about trifles’,[307] before being applied to the objects of such attention themselves.[308]

This idea of nonsensical triviality was thence extended to various expressions, some of which had been used differently before. By 1762, a foolish person might be described as having a HEAD AS EMPTY AS A FIDDLE-CASE;[309] with FIDDLE-HEADED,[310] FIDDLE-HEAD,[311] and even later FIDDLE-BRAINED,[312] gaining currency as apt description of empty-headed people, who possessed an over-convern with idle, trivial pursuits.

This rapid and extensive adequation generated inevitable semantic rivalry with the word TRIFLE itself, with FIDDLE gradually assuming responsibility for some of the semantic range originally reserved for TRIFLE. Early examples are FIDDLE, ‘to play upon’ (in the sense of trifling with another’s affections or patience),[313] and ‘to fritter away’ (passing time in a trifling manner).[314]

Now whilst synonyms may harmoniously and fruitfully coexist without necessary redundancy, elision between words possessing multiple meanings inevitably generates individual ambiguity exascerbated by conjoint undeterminancy.[315] This “overload”, (Ullmann’s term),[316] produces obsolescence which is usually, and in this case, resolved as “the popular use gradually constricts the more learned”, and “old senses are imperiled by the new.”[317]

Assisting the partial abridgement of the semantic range of TRIFLE, and the complementary sense extension of FIDDLE, was the phonetic-expressive pull of what might be termed the “-IDDLE” group.[318] Marchand comments:

“The initial symbols sometimes overlap as do other morphemes. This is especially so when the final symbol is particularly strong. For the concept ‘trifle’ we have fiddle, twiddle, piddle (with their variants peddle and paddle), and quiddle, all recorded in the 16th century. The basis may be fiddle which attracted the otherwise unexplainable variants. It will be noted, anyhow, that the final symbols, as containing the vowel, are the real ‘roots’ while the initial symbols have the modifying character which prefixes have with radicals.... -IDDLE: is found in several words denoting ‘trifle’ of which the basis may be FIDDLE which in this particular sense development is first recorded 1530. Other words coined after it are piddle 1545, tiddle 1560, twiddle 1540, quiddle 1567, diddle ‘sing without distinct utterance of words’ 1706, diddle (away) ‘trifle (away), waste’ 1826.”[319]

Much of the semantic range of FIDDLE and TRIFLE may be conveyed by the use of either word, particularly the cluster of senses inferring nonsensical, frivolous, idle, time-wasting.[320] But during critical semantic hostilities - which took place during the latter part of the seventeenth century - TRIFLE “lost”, and FIDDLE “won” the critical meaning which crucially extended the word FIDDLE to complete this stage of its development.

For TRIFLE, allegedly derived from the It. Truffa, ‘a cozening, cheating, conicatching’, at one time referred specifically to, amongst other things, “a false or idle tale told to deceive, cheat or befool”, or, as a verb, “to cheat, delude, befool.”[321] What is most significant is that this sense attributed to TRIFLE both predates any similar sense attribution for FIDDLE by (at least four, and in my opinion) five centuries, and is considered by 1901: O.E.D. to be an obsolete sense for TRIFLE after the middle of the seventeenth century - marginally before it becomes a datable new sense for FIDDLE.

The arena for this sense-exchange was the London Stock Exchange, and the earliest surviving use of the word FIDDLE in this newly transferred sense is in a bitter tract criticising “stock-jobbers” written by Daniel Defoe in the early years of the eighteenth century. In it, he said:

“But these people can run Men silently, undermine and impoverish by a sort of impeneterable Artifice, like Poison that works at Distance, can wheedle Men to ruin themselves, and Fiddle them out of their Money, by the strange unheard of Engines of Interests, Discounts, Transfers, Tallies, Debentures, Shares, Projects, and the Devil and all of Figures and hard Names.”[322]

In the late seventeenth century, a stock-jobber was a middle-man, working on his own account, living through, “the buying of goods or stock from one person and selling to another in order to profit.”[323] “Jobbing”, more generally, then referred to various forms of securing private gain through corruptness;[324] with the application to the stock-market being a pejorative particularised specialisation, specifically denoting the practice of making a fast profit by buying cheap and speedily selling high; together with, as 1901: O.E.D. adds, “often with unfavourable implication of rash or dishonest speculation; esp. with reference to the abuses of the early 18th century, which led to condemnation by Act of Parliament.”[325]

Somewhat later, from this verb use of FIDDLE to mean ‘buy cheap, sell dear’, emerged a noun use of FIDDLE to mean, according to 1891: FARMER and HENLEY, “one sixteenth part of a pound”, a use again restricted to the London Stock Exchange.[326] This rather curious amount of 1s 3d (yet not quite so arcane when it is remembered that pounds sterling were then commonly divided into “crowns” worth 5s., and “half-crowns”, worth 2s 6d) may have recalled the much older FIDDLER’S MONEY (“small change, small silver coins”),[327] now applied to the profits from crafty speculation rather than to the earnings from providing a night’s music.[328]

This final particularised and specialised path-breaking “crucial extension” was relatively rapidly universalised to the stage at which, by 1850, the new (yet still specialised sense) had currency on London’s street markets as well as on its stockmarket. 1891: FARMER and HENLEY, for example, quote this meaning for FIDDLING (and note the new demoted use of ‘trifle’):

“1850. Lloyd’s Weekly, 3 Feb. ‘low lodging houses of London.’ I live on 2s a week from thieving, because I understand FIDDLING - that means, buying a thing for a mere trifle, and selling it for double, or for more, if you’re not taken in yourself.”[329]

But this cultural universalisation was speedily accompanied by a semantic specialisation. One use recorded by Henry Mayhew was contained in a description given him by an informant of a racket in which the “leading mob” were “gypsies”. An early form of crystal ball was a “small glass globe filled full of water”. Armed with one, “the way the globe man does is to go among the old women and fiddle (humbug) them”, chiefly, it would appear, by pretending to see recipient-designed tall dark strangers in the watery depths.[330]

But this, too, is a specialised use (albeit another one), although it is apparently universal. The first proper basis for eventual generalised and universalised use is found in Volume III of London Labour and the London Poor, and is taken from another informants’ description of the hopefully equal sharing by the owner’s wife of the takings from the audience to a day’s street entertainment provided by a small troupe of clowns:

“‘The scene of sharing at the drum-head is usually this, - while the last performance is going on the missus counts up the money; and she is supposed to bring in all the money she has taken, but that we don’t know, and we are generally fiddled most tremendous.’”[331]

Note here how the use of the word has moved from covering specific speculations to general commercial peculations.[332] In reaching this last major milestone in the word’s life - FIDDLE, ‘to cheat, within some other legitimate activity’[333] - the path there may well have been smoothed by possible connections with previous crucial extensions of the word’s sense.[334] Yet more important is the use of the word FIDDLE, rather than any other new or existing word to refer to these activities, was the unique stability which flowed from the combination of its idiosyncratic semantic trajectory (in particular, the heavy connotations with ‘triviality’; and the connections with the original sense of ‘trifle’) and the uniquely novel activities it was co-opted to refer to.

Minor embezzlement a “novel activity”? In a very special, yet unusually wholly neglected sense, that is precisely what embezzlement became during the latter part of the eighteenth, and first half of the nineteenth century. This is an unconventional view. More commonly, it is asserted that FIDDLING (in this sense) has a much longer history that I would allow, one stretching back almost, as a “custom from time immemorial”.[335] Indeed, evidence apparently in support of this is mustered ably by Henry:

“the hidden economy is not new. Its history can be traced back to the thirteenth century, when it appears to have been much the same as it is today. According to Jerome Hall, fiddles of ‘office’ are probably the oldest crimes in history.”[336]

Yet while Henry extends the adequate list provided by Hall, he neglects to include the sentence with which Hall concluded his own little potted history, and which I find most crucial. It was:

“But while the idea of embezzlement is ancient, and instances of its incidence continuous in the Criminal Law, legal control of the type of criminal behaviour which has become a commonplace in modern times - the violation of private financial trust - dates definitely from the eighteenth century.”[337]

In essence, Hall’s point was (and he makes it himself) that while “violation of public trust is probably one of the oldest notions in history”, it was the “false report rather than conversion” which was “the gist of the crime”.[338] Thus, the element of the action of embezzlement which was punishable was that of perjury, and not that of theft. This represents a crucial criminological distinction: that between an act, which may be seen as “a succession of biophysical events”; and an action, which is “an act considered in the perspective in which it has meaning for the actor.”[339]

Whilst an act, such as one of embezzlement, may apparently be identified adequately by the recognition of the presence of observable characteristics, this is in itself (and criminologically) utterly meaningless. So, allow another distinction. this time between act meaning - “the meaning of the act to the actor”, and action meaning - “its meaning to us as scientists, taking the action as subject matter.”[340] Kaplan, who makes the distinction, then continues:

“a particular act may have a variety of act meanings, and so constitute correspondingly different actions... On the other hand, a variety of acts may have the same meaning and so constitute the same action.”

To employ this, it is only necessary to recognise here that the act of embezzlement may well have had a consistent and long behavioural history, but that this itself does not permit observers to give instances, isolated by centuries of societal upheaval and separated by cultures chasms apart, a similar name. Yet this occurs. As Kaplan put it:

“it is often tacitly assumed that as soon as we understand the act, we have thereby arrived at an understanding of the action.”[341]

And this is precisely the achilles’ heel of the “custom from time immemorial” view of FIDDLING. The alternative, and the one espoused here, is that the action meaning of embezzlement (whatever its act meaning) changed dramatically and rapidly during the period latterly under review, 1703-1861. From possessing the action meaning of perjury, as it had for some time; it took on instead, and would possess thereafter, the action meaning of theft. In the interim, as Hall puts it:

“For, during this period, as we have seen, except for the emerging rule regarding theft by a servant (based upon his having mere custody), the common law recognised no criminality in a person who came legally into possession of property and later converted it. Apparently, it was thought that the owner should have protected himself by selecting a trustworthy person. Since, presumably, this could readily be done, the owner must have been negligent if he delivered his property to a person who absconded with it... In the absence of any other even remotely relevant sanction in the criminal law, the only choice was - guilty of larceny or not guilty of any offense.”[342]

“The only choice” supplied by the law had been adequate until novel property control problems began to present themselves during the enormous burgeoning of commerce which accompanied the demise of feudalism and the rise of capitalism. In particular, Hall singles out the demand for new law which came with, “the familiar concomitants of business enterprise - the use of large amounts of capital and of credit facilities, the appearance of numerous middlemen, a division of labour, the employment of hundreds of persons by single firms, and the growth of industrial urban areas which penetrated into the rural districts.” Hall then concludes, “the need for regulation and for raising the standards of honesty resulted from the increasing necessity of the merchants to rely upon professional carriers rather than upon their own servants.”[343]

The metaphoric growth of commerce to the point where middlemen became a vital link in the chain of profit, and the literal expansion of commerce on the highways, produced two sorts of problems. Attacks on middlemen and “attacks” by middlemen (on the merchandise). The extraordinary success of a succession of ever-more draconian vagrancy statutes introduced particularly between 1530 and 1571 yet remaining in force until 1743, is well documented elsewhere,[344] and testifies to an adequate solution to the first problem. The second problem was not as easily dealt with.

Admittedly, the law supplied some relief here in the judgement which concluded the ancient Carrier’s Case of 1473, (before which someone in legal possession of goods - as a servant might be - could not be guilty of theft even if the goods were converted), and which founded the critical distinction between custody and possession;[345] a ruling slightly extended, albeit with exceptions, in an Act of 1529.[346] Yet, overall, the supply of law was increasingly inadequate; and even when its invocation might be appropriate, it was inevitably accompanied either by punishments of bloody and counter-productive severity (such as death), or by automatic defeat through the invocation of Benefit of Clergy which was, by 1706, widely extended.[347]

It was thus a combination of the ineffectiveness and inappropriateness of existing law, which drove the control of embezzlement from the public to the private sphere.[348] Granted, the law eventually returned to this problem of control: but it is fair to conclude that control was never fully returned (by employers) to the law. Indeed, the law turned its attention to this increasingly recognised problem initially with three piecemeal, minor and special embezzlement statutes in 1742, 1751 and 1765; which were restricted in scope to the control of Bank of England employees, South Sea Company employees and Post Office employees, respectively.[349]

It was not until 1799 that a general embezzlement statute was passed, but even that only applied to servants and clerks.[350] In fact, after 1812 when a stockbroker, acting as an agent converted a large sum,[351] it took several additional statutes to extend adequately the scope of embezzlement.[352] And complementing this increased effectiveness of the law were several successful attempts to mitigate the awesome severity of the customary punishments of death, or, at best, transportation. Hall summarises, “by 1860 over one hundred and ninety capital penalties had been eliminated,” and, at last, the law returned to synchrony with the demands of business.[353]

So, the period which witnessed the cultural spread of FIDDLING from Defoe’s stockmarket of 1703 to Mayhew’s streetmarket of 1861, and which egged on the semantic extension from one specialised type of cheating to other, more generalised forms, was also the period in which a third formal “choice” presented itself. Now lying between “guilty of larceny or not guilty of any offense” were a clutch of fresh statutes, and an almost infinite variety of highly flexible and relatively trivial imprisonment options which could discipline wayward employees without despatching them; discourage others rather than drive them from the labour market; and ultimately (and suarely in Capital’s best interests) patrol trade’s boundaries without impeding its progress. Thus, between outright serious theft, and outright trivial innocence, grew the curious, paradoxical category of trivial theft. This is were fiddling comes from.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Epilogue

Others tell a different tale. From alternative accounts, one may choose either a much earlier development of the sense “to cheat” for FIDDLE, or a much later borrowing from America. Neither stands up very well to extended scrutiny, yet the first is rather more difficult to despatch than the second.

Indeed, supporting the idea that FIDDLE developed the key sense nearly a century earlier than I would allow (by at least 1604 rather than 1703) is its use in Thomas Dekker’s play, The Honest Whore:

“Duke. Did any hand work in this theft but yours?

Mat. O, yes, my Lord, yes: - the Hangman has neuer one Soone at a birth, his Children alwaies come by couples: Tho I cannot giue the old dog, my Father, a bone to gnaw, the daughter shall bee sure of a Choke-peare. -- Yes, my Lord, there was one more than fiddled my fine Pedlars, and that was my wife.”[354]

This would appear to use FIDDLE for theft, and indeed that is 1901: O.E.D.’s opinion. Yet without going too deeply into this play, it should be acknowledged that whilst a robbery is being discussed, the speaker, Matheo, was also accusing his wife, Bellafront, of being Hippolito’s mistress. Since the latter is the key theme of the play, it is equally likely that the word is being used as an oblique sexual referent, and thus in a sense well established for the period.

Offering indirect support for this interpretation is the fact the prolific Dekker does not use the word FIDDLE for theft in any other of his works (although he uses the word);[355] and when he discusses theft, in three extracts devoted to a detailed account of urban and rural villainy in the Elizabethan period,[356] even by “Jinglers”, or horsedealers who artfully repaint tastelessly coloured horses for resale and, in dealing with whom, the buyer must take care that “he be not cozened with an overprice for a bad pennyworth,”[357] nowhere does he use the word FIDDLE in this sense.

In this reluctance, Dekker joined the other serious pamphleteers of his time. Walker, in a mid-sixteenth century discussion of gambling, refers to the fact that “sleight and crafty deceit was practised in play”,[358] but does not refer to it as FIDDLING. Greene, in a series of pamphlets,[359] similarly shies from the word. Even when discussing coal-dealers, notorious for defrauding their customers,[360] to the extent that “they got an intolerable gains by their false measure,”[361] the word FIDDLE never appears. And neither does it in Rid, Fennor (who recalls “a trick to worm me out of my money”), Harman or Awdeley.[362]

This resistance to the word also extended into the most notable tracts of the eighteenth century, where it is not to be found either.[363] In addition it is plausible to suggest that the modern claims assenting that sixteenth century minstrels FIDDLED their audiences in a criminal as well as a musical way are merely erroneous.[364] Yet the strongest argument against an earlier development of the sense, “to cheat”, is that such a meaning appears in no dictionary until 1860.

Unfortunately, and now turning to the second alternative account, even that entry is suspect, as is its ultimate source. For it appears in 1860: HOTTEN, yet not in 1859: HOTTEN. The “it” is the entry, “FIDDLER, a sharper, cheat”.[365] This was not particularly contentious. It was the addition, in 1925 [HOTTEN] of the words, “a sharper, ‘a street mugger’. In America, a swindle or an imposture”, that creates difficulties. The use of the word “mugger” provides its own problems,[366] but I am only concerned with the idea that FIDDLE in this sense is a loan-word from America.

And such a passage is most unlikely as USUK borrowings are rare before 1870,[367] a time at which FIDDLE was already established in Britain in the cricial sense that interests me. Additionally, it should be recognised that HOTTEN is not considered to be an accurate compilation, with Aydelottle, for one, claiming that it is “full of mistakes”.[368] Perhaps the most likely explanation is that Hotten confused one of the small-con games (in which a cheap and nasty violin plays a cheap and nasty role), wherein a FIDDLE is a musical instrument and not a deception;[369] and thus, the claim that we inhereit FIDDLE in this sense from one of the colonies should be treated with great suspicion.

Implications: A General Approach?

“we cannot begin to decide the past meanings until we develop some of the skills of the ethnographer as well as the historian, and combine these in a coherent method.”[370]

History and Criminology have always flirted with each other. More recently, each has begun again to snuffle excitedly around the other’s qualifications. Whilst the eternal hope is for “some painless form of symbiosis”,[371] the endless reality more closely resembles hurtful and mutually barbaric penetration, and an ultimately “unhealthy relationship”.[372] Perhaps this is because, in the attempts to put something together, the least attractive elements of each have been on show. The shotgun marriage has ignored the phenomenal essence of criminology, and allowed the disreputable end of history (its “criminological” deductions) to be elevated to nauseous pre-eminence.[373]

The careful merger proposed here attempts to select the best rather than the worst features of each to guarantee the survival of the unity. A new form, if you like, of “natural” selection, taking criminology’s induced meanings and history’s documentary precision. The ultimate validity of the attempt I leave for others to judge. It may help, however, if I briefly and finally point to some features of the procedure which hint at a utility wider than the parochial and personal use of it made here.

Firstly, modern etymology is at least a record. If only of the results and timing of historical and societal change, rather than of the forces responsible. Indeed, modern etymological uniquely provides this record, in the sense that it represents, as Malkiel has claimed:

“a scrupulously calculated, elastic approach, an effort cautiously to fill a gap in our information starting from facts solidly established, to reconstruct the blurred part of an uninterrupted line by examing with utmost care the segments preserved. The etymologist tentatively projects into the remote past the antecedants of an accessible record of the observable behaviour of a word throughout a historical.... stretch of time.... no amount of inferences can quite replace the steady record of a word, within the same speech community, over a period of several centuries.”[374]

Secondly, etymology-based criminology provides a check. A check on the sometimes apparently boundless analytic enthusiasm to ignore (as Strang said of language) the, “variation and change observable at the present time as being evidence of the ceaselessly, oceanically, heaving, swelling, flowing, ungraspable mass that historians corset into manageable chunks onto which quasi-scientific labels can be stuck.”[375] Natural criminology, in this sense, checks the use of concepts to understand the actions of those living in periods which preceeded the origin of the concept. For example, the use of “class” before the late eighteenth century,[376] or of “labour aristocracy” before the middle of the nineteenth.[377]

Gross errors such as this, referred to as “the semantic trap of presuming a constant reality because of a constant word” by Sidney Pollard,[378] may easily be avoided if a dictionary is present. Additionally, whilst the check natural criminology provies is in some senses a negative one[379] - it tells us when not why; and that whilst a sense (or a word) has currency after a dateable point not whether or not it had an unnoticed one earlier than that - it may well add what Williams refers to as an “extra edge of consciousness”. Here are his words in full:

“the variations and confusions of meaning are not just faults in a system, or errors of feedback, or deficiencies of education. They are in many cases, in my terms, historical and contemporary substance. Indeed, they have often, as variations, to be insisted upon, just because they embody different experiences and readings of experience, and this will continue to be true, in active relationships and conflicts, over and above the clarifying exercises of scholars or committees. What can really be contributed is not resolution but perhaps, at times, just that extra edge of consciousness.”[380]

Thirdly, finally, and most importantly, natural criminology offers a model capable of satisfying the “need for a sense of history” which has been called for.[381] Careful inductive plotting of the trajectories of key words,[382] paying particular attention to the perjorative or ameliorative profiles they represent over the shoulder of the present,[383] can reveal the actual, rather than merely supposed, linkage between class and crime. Why, for example, is crime a criminological perogative of the working class. At one level, the answer lies in:

“the word villain, or villein. This term, as everybody knows, had in the middle ages, a connotation as strictly defined as a word could, being the proper legal designation for those persons who were the subjects of the less onerous forms of feudal bondage. The scorn of the semibarbarous military aristocracy for these their abject dependents, rendered the act of likening any person to this class of men a mark of the greatest contumely: the same scorn led them to ascribe to the same people of all manner of hateful qualities, which doubtless also, in the degrading situation in which they were held, were often not unjustly imputed to them. These circumstances, combined to attach to the term villain, ideas of crime and guilt, in so forcible a manner, that the application of the epithet even to those whom it legally belonged became an affront was intended. From that time guilt was part of the connotation; and soon became the whole of it, since mankind were not prompted by any urgent motive to continue making a distinction in their language between bad men of servile station and bad men of any othe rank in life.”[384]

Other semantic members of the working class family have suffered a similar self-validating fate. A clown was once an honourable rural man; a blackguard once a kitchen servant with special responsibility for keeping the hearth spotlessly black; a knave, merely a youth; a scavenger, an inspector, a cadger, a dairy products transporter; a cheater, a legal clerk; a brigand, a foot soldier, and so on.[385]

Our history is locked up right here. In the words we use now. It is in this way that natural criminology holds the key to unlock those meanings life had in the past. The data for an acceptable history lies in the language we use today. Yet natural language cannot lie to the extent that the collections of highly selectively preserved and possibly fraudulently produced conventional “records” do. Rather than wring arbitrary theoretical constructions from the latter - as do historians of every shade - better to rely upon the more limited inductive knowledge hanging from those little planted histories potted in words.

Natural criminology may not produce an analysis which is most persuasive or effective, or which is either aesthetically or pedagogically most convenient or satisfactory. But it is an accurate, if limited one. Its denial of dogmatism consequently restores what Rock calls the “soverignty of the phenomenal world” to the past.[386] By giving the data active and full, rather than passive and partial status, it allows the world a determining role in its own analysis, rather than merely an exemplary one in the seemingly endless reduplication and republication of a tired, deductive, self-professed “marxist” position. It is in this way that the etymologist is the desk-bound partner of the stree-wise ethnographer. Malkiel has thus described the etymologist.:

“though sophisticated in his approach to language, he should, ideally, preserve a high degree of naivete in his vision of the outside world which, like a versatile actor, he must view alternately with the eyes of hunters, fishermen, tillers, herdsmen, soldiers, waiters, vendors, and other humble professions.”[387]

Both are natural criminologists. Both pursue common meanings. Both are open to their creative analytic potential. Neither must go native: both must remain naive. Thus the worlds of the past and the present open themselves to the analyses of those prepared to view each, and constantly, as strange.

A ChronologicalL of Dictionaries

1604: CAWDREY A Table Alphabetical of Hard Usual English Words, J. Cawdrey; London; E. Weaver; 1604.

1616: BULLOKAR An English Expositor, J. Bullokar; London; J. Legatt; 1616.

1623: COCKERAM The English Dictionary: Or, an Interpreter of Hard English Words, [12th Edn.; 1658] H. Cockeram; London; A.M.; 1623.

1656: BLOUT Glossographia, T. Blout; London; T. Newcomb; 1656.

1658: PHILLIPS The New World of English Words, E. Phillips; London; N. Brooke; 1658

1659: SOMNER Dictionarium Saxonico-Latino-Anglicum, W. Somner; London; D. White; 1659.

1676: COLES An English Dictionary, E. Coles; London; S. Crouch; 1676.

1689: Anon. Gazophylacium Anglicanum: Containing the Derivation of English Words, Proper and Common, Anon.; London; E.H. and W.H.; 1689.

1690: B.E. A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew, B.E. (Gent); London; W. Hawes; 1690.

1704: COCKER Cocker’s English Dictionary, E. Cocker; London; J. Hawkins; 1704.

1707: Anon. Glossographia Anglicana Nova: Or a Dictionary Interpreting Such Hard Words of Whatever Language as are at present Used in the English Tongue, Anon.; London; D. Brown; 1707.

1708: KERSEY Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum, J. Kersey; London; J. Wile; 1708.

1721: BAILEY A Universal Etymological English Dictionary, N. Bailey; London; J. Darby; 1721.

1730: BAILEY Dictionarium Britannicum: Or a more Compleat Universal Etymological English Dictionary, N. Bailey et al; London; T. Cox; 1730.

1735: DYCHE & PARDON A New General English Dictionary, T. Dyche and W. Pardon; London; R. Wave; 1735.

1753: Anon. A Pocket Dictionary; or, Complete English Expositor, Anon; London; T. Carman and F. Newberry; 1735.

1755: JOHNSON A Dictionary of the English Language, S. Johnson; London; Strachan; 1755.

1783: LEMON English Etymology; Or, a Derivative Dictionary of the English Language, G.W. Lemon; London; G. Robinson, 1783.

1785: GROSE A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, F. Grose; London; S. Hooper; 1785.

1797: SHERIDAN Dictionary of the English Language, T. Sheridan; London; C. Dilly; 1797.

1801: MASON A Supplement to Johnson’s English Dictionary, G. Mason; London; C. Roworth; 1801.

1802: WALKER A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language, [1791: 1st Edn.] J. Walker; London; Wilson and Co.; 1802.

1819: WALKER A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, J. Walker; London; A. Wilson; 1819.

1820: JODRELL Philology on the English Language, R.P. Jodrell; London; Cox and Baylis; 1820.

1822: NARES A Glossary; or, Collection of Words, Phrases, Names, and Allusions to Customs, Proverbs, etc. which have been thought to require illustration in the works of English Authors, Particularly Shakespeare, and his Contemporaries, R. Nares; London; R. Triphook; 1822.

1822: OFFER A Dictionary of the English Language, G. Offer and J. Offer et al.; London; Samuel Johnson; 1822.

1826: THOMPSON Etymons of English Words, J. Thompson; Edinburgh; Oliver and Boyd; 1826.

1828: JOHNSON & WALKER Dictionary of the English Language, S. Johnson and J. Walker; London; W. Pickering; 1828.

1832: TOONE A Glossary and Etymological Dictionary of Obsolete and Uncommon Words, W. Toone; London; W. Pickering; 1832.

1835: KNOWLES A Pronouncing and Explanatory Dictionary of the English Language, J. Knowles; London; de Porquet and Cooper; 1835.

1836: RICHARDSON A New Dictionary of the English Language, C. Richardson; London; W. Pickering; 1836.

1836: SMART A New Critical Pronouncing Dictionary of the English Language, B.H. Smart; London; T. Cadell; 1836.

1844: OGILVIE The Comprehensive English Dictionary: Explanatory, Pronouncing and Etymological, J. Ogilvie; London; Blackie and Son; 1844.

1847: CRAIG A New Universal Etymological and Pronouncing Dictionary, of the English Language, J. Craig; London; J. Gilbert, 1847.

1848: HALLIWELL A Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, J.C. Halliwell; London; J. Russell Smith; 1848.

1857: WRIGHT Dictionary of Obsolete and Provincial English, T. Wright; London; H.G. Bolin; 1857.

1859: BARTLETT Dictionary of Americanisms, J.R. Bartlett; Boston; Little, Brown; 1859.

1859: WORCESTER A Dictionary of the English Language, J.E. Worcester; London; Sampson Low; 1852.

1859: HOTTEN A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words, J.C. Hotten; London; Hotten; 1859.

1860: HOTTEN A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulger Words, [2nd Edn.; Revised with 2,000 Additional words] J.C. Hotten; London; Hotten; 1860.

1862: WEDGEWOOD A Dictionary of English Etymology, H. Wedgewood; London; Trubner and Co; 1862.

1866: LATHAM A Dictionary of the English Language, R.G. Latham; London; Longmans Green; 1866.

1866: WHEATLEY A Dictionary of Reduplicated Words in the English Language, H.B. Wheatley; London; Asher & Co.; 1866.

1867: DONALD Chamber’s Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, J. Donald; London; W. & R. Chambers; 1867.

1873: FERGUSON The Dialect of Cumberland, R. Ferguson; London; Williams and Norgate; 1873.

1874: HALLIWELL A Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, [Vol.I] J.O. Halliwell; London; J. Russell Smith; 1874.

1877: MACKAY The Gaelic Etymology of the English Language, C. Mackay; London; N. Trubner and Co.; 1877.

1882: ANNANDALE The Imperial Dictionary of the English Language, C. Annandale; London; Blackie & Son; 1882.

1882: SKEAT An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, Walter W. Skeat; Oxford; Clarendon Press, 1882.

1882: SMYTHE PALMER Folk Etymology: A Dictionary, A. Smythe Palmer; London; G. Bell & Sons; 1882.

1883: SMITH Glossary of Terms and Phrases, H.P. Smith; London; Kegan, Paul, Trench & Co.; 1883.

1885: LONGMUIR Jamieson’s Dictionary of the Scottish Language, J. Longmuir; London; W.P. Nimmo; 1885.

1889: CASSELL The Encyclopaedic Dictionary, _______; London; Cassell & Co.; 1889.

1889: FARMER Americanisms Old and New, J.S. Farmer; London; T. Poulter; 1889.

1889: WHITNEY The Century Dictionary: An Encyclopedic Lexicon of the English Language, W.O. Whitney; London; T. Fisher Unwin; 1889.

1891: FARMER & HENLEY Slang and its Analogues: Past and Present, J.S. Farmer and W.E. Henley; ___; [Privately Published]; 1891.

1894: BREWER The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, E. Cobham Brewer; London; Cassel, Petter and Galpin; 1894.

1897: BARRÉRE & LEYLAND A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon and Cant, A. Barrére and C.G. Leyland; London; Bell; 1897.

1899: FUNK A Standard Dictionary of the English Language, I.K. Funk; London; Funk and Wagnalls; 1899.

1900: WRIGHT The English Dialect Dictionary, [Vol. II]; J. Wright; London; H. Frowde; 1900.

1901: O.E.D. Oxford English Dictionary, ___; Oxford; Clarendon Press; 1933. [Vol. IV, published 1901; Section ‘F’ prepared, 1895].

1910: SKEAT An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, [4th Edn.]; W.W. Skeat; Oxford; Clarendon Press; 1910.

1912: KIRKPATRICK Handbook of Idiomatic English: As Now Written and Spoken, Containing Idioms, Phrases and Locutions, J. Kirkpatrick; Paris; Boyvean and Chevillet; 1912.

1912: THORNTON An American Glossary, R.H. Thornton; London; Francis & Co.; 1912.

1914: SKEAT AND MAYHEW A Glossary of Tudor and Stuart Words, W.W. Skeat and A.L. Mayhew; Oxford; Clarendon; 1914.

1921: WEEKLEY An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, E. Weekley; London; J. Murray; 1921.

1925: HARGRAVE Origins and Meanings of Popular Phrases and Names, [Revised Edn.] B. Hargrave; London; T.W. Laurie; 1925.

1925: [HOTTEN] The Slang Dictionary: Etymological, Historical and Anecdotal, [J.C. Hotten] London; Chatto and Windus; 1925.

1930: MENCKEN The American Language, [3rd Edn.] H.L. Mencken; New York; A. Knopf; 1930.

1931: IRWIN American Tramp and Underworld Slang, G. Irwin; London; Scholartis Press; 1931.

1934: WESEEN A Dictionary of American Slang, M.H. Weseen; London; G.G. Harrap & Co; 1934.

1937: PARTRIDGE A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, E. Partridge; London; Routledge; 1937.

1941: WEBSTER Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language, N. Webster; London; G. Bell and Sons; 1941.

1942: BERRY & VAN DEN BARK The American Thesaurus of Slang, L.V. Berry and M. Van Den Bark; London; Constable; 1942.

1944: WENTWORTH American Dialect Dictionary, H. Wentworth; New York; T. Crowell; 1944.

1945: RADFORD Crowther's Encyclopedia of Phrases and Origins, E. Radford; London; J. Crowther; 1945.

1946: SMITH & O’LOUGHLIN Odhams Dictionary of the English Language, A.H. Smith and J.L.N. O’Loughlin; London; Odhams; 1946.

1948: MENCKEN The American Language, [Supplement II] H.L. Mencken; London; R.K.P.; 1948.

1948: PARTRIDGE A Dictionary of Forces’ Slang, 1939-1945, E. Partridge et al.; London; Secker and Warburg; 1948.

1949: PARTRIDGE A Dictionary of the Underworld, E. Partridge; London; Routledge; 1949.

1950: SCOTT Swan’s Anglo-American Dictionary, G.R. Scott; London; G.G. Swan; 1950.

1952: KURATH & KUHN Middle English Dictionary, H. Kurath and S.M. Kuhn; Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press; 1952.

1956: GRANT & MURISON The Scottish National Dictionary [Vol. IV] W. Grant and D.D. Murison; Edinburgh; Scottish National Dictionary Association; 1956.

1957: ZANDVOORT Wartime English: Materials for a Linguistic History of World War II, R.W. Zandroovt; J.B. Wolters; Groningen; 1957.

1958: PARTRIDGE Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, E. Partridge; London; R.K.P.; 1958.

1965: FOWLER A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, H.W. Fowler; Oxford; Clarendon Press; 1965.

1966: KLEIN A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, E. Klein; Amsterdam, Elsevier; 1966.

1966: ONIONS The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, C.T. Onions; Oxford, Clarendon; 1966.

1970: FINKENSTAEDT, et.al. A Chronological English Dictionary, T. Finkenstaedt, E. Leisi, and D. Wolff; Heidelberg; Carl Winter; 1970.

1970: FRANKLYN A Dictionary of Rhyming Slang, J. Franklyn; London; R.K.P.; 1970.

1972: O.E.D. Oxford English Dictionary, [Supplement] [Vol. I] ___; Oxford, Clarendon Press; 1972.

1972: PARTRIDGE The Penguin Dictionary of Historical Slang, E. Partridge; Hammondsworth; Penguin; 1972.

1972: ZVIADADZE A Dictionary of Modern American and British English, G. Zviadedze; Georgia (USSR); Tbilisi State University Press; 1972.

1978: WEBSTER Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary of the English Language [ 2nd Edn.] N. Webster; U.S.A.; Collins World; 1978.

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[1] See, in particular, Cameron (1964: pp. 154, 159-170) who, in her pioneering study of American department store “shoplifting” (yet another category of amateurish theft indulged by people whose unwillingness to define themselves as part of the criminal underworld is regularly revealed in their horrified astonishment at floorwalkers' attempts to so classify them) show how store personnel use the offender’s temporary refusal to forego the private psychological support such illusion usually provides, to extract and record remarks which will count as confessions in later court appearances. Related to employee pilferers, see Ditton (1977, p. 181), Altheide et al., (1978, pp. 119-122), and Robin (1967, p. 667). Detailed studies of the processing of apprehended employee thieves can be found in Robin (1965), Horning (1963) and Franklin (1975).

[2] See: fn. (7), below.

[3] Those who courageously interview self-confessed “real” thieves come up against this problem too, albeit in a more exaggerated form. Consider the response of one particular “bad, bad bastard” being interviewed by the intrepid Tony Parker (Parker, 1970, p. 121): “...I’m sitting here talking to you today but that doesn’t mean tomorrow if I see you I won’t take a swing at you if I feel like it. And if we was to meet again outside ever, you couldn’t rely on the fact I knew you to hold me back: I’d come in your home with a hatchet, steal your money, wreck the place up and split your head open before leaving as well. You needn’t bleeding well sit there laughing about it either, mate; I’d really fucking well do it, I’m telling you straight I would. And I’d enjoy it; it’s me that’d be laughing about it, not you. All right? OK then, what in fuck’s name do you want to talk to me about?...”

[4] A similar description of fiddling by taxi-drivers may be found in Shirecore (1977).

[5] Ditton, 1977, ch. 6.

[6] Estimates of workforce involvement vary hugely. Horning (1963), p. 27) has collated a number of estimates from different sources which collectively estimate employee theft as involving anything between 5-100% of individual workforces. Employer estimates are usually considerably lower than employee estimates; and both are usually lower than either employee confessions, or employee entrapment rates. Hair, Bush and Busch’s questionnaire survey of 254 Mississippi retailers revealed that over 83% of employers believed that less than 2% of their employees steal from them, (1976, p. 26). Yet, Hollinger’s sample of retail employees revealed employee theft rates between 2.7% and 27.2% (Hollinger, 1979, p. 47, table 4.0). Higher still, in Horning’s sample of employee estimates of their own theft rates (1963, p. 105), it was believed that 43.8% of office workers, 47.1% of supervisors, and 48.3% of factory workers steal at work. Confessions to theft are even higher. Horning (1963, p. 111; 1970, p. 60) found 90.8% of his sample admitting pilfering, and Tatham (1974, p. 50) found 68% of a sample of 98 admitting to theft. Attempts to catch employee thieves suggest rates even higher than this last case. Curtis (1963, pp. 19, 34), using a polygraph, reports rates of 95% in a jewellery shop, 81% in a bank, 86% amongst postmen; and 76% of a cross-section of 1400 employees of a drug-store chain who admitted stealing goods or cash worth more than $100 in the previous 6 months. As a working estimate, it has become conventional to accept the estimate made by the influential consultant Hillel Black that 75% of employees are dishonest (Black, 1957, p. 26).

[7] The 51 interviews I have already cited include members of the following occupations: bus-conductor, car mechanic, supermarket cashier, shop-assistant, greyhound trainer, gas meter reader, taxi-driver, cinema usher, doctor, milkman, shipping agent, petrol pump attendant, lifeguard, tyre factory employee, soft-drinks salesman, Royal Navy rating, accountant, building site worker, lorry driver’s mate, postal sorter, warehouseman, skill centre employee, bottling-plant operative, short-order chef, journalist, hotel worker, passenger-liner steward. Published accounts of ‘fiddling’ in these and other jobs include (and the following list is brief indeed): general, Maiken (1979); general, white-collar, Jaspan and Black (1960), Dalton (1964); general, blue-collar, Henry (1978), Martin (1962); doctors, Chen (1977); estate agents, Balk (1962: landlords, Ball (1960); dockers, Mars (1974); Scientists, Zirkle (1954); lawyers, Joseph (1976); social workers, Bogdanoff and Glass (1954); soldiers, Hamilton-Paterson (1971); Police, Manning (1977); fairground attendants, Tatro (1974); bakery workers, Turner (1977); appliance shop repair agents, Riis and Patric (1942); shop assistants, Liebow (1967); appliance repair operatives, Vaughan and Carlo (1976); lorry drivers, Farr (1975); postmen, Harper and Emmert (1963); waiters, Mars (1973); chemists, Quinney (1963); academics, Roth (1966); construction workers, Riemer (1979); and bus conducters, Johnston (1979).

[8] For example, taking the value of property stolen in offences of burglary, robbery and theft recorded as known to the police in 1974; of 473,407 burglaries, 391,334 (or, 82.7%) were of amounts of £99 or less; of 8,666 robberies, 7. 168 (again, coincidentally, 82.7%) were of amounts of £99 or less. Yet of 30,980 thefts by an employee, in fact the slightly lower proportion of 24,780 (80.0%) were of amounts of £99 or less. (Criminal Statistics, England and Wales, 1974, London, H.M.S.O., Cmnd. 6168, Table 3, p. 17).

[9] For example, when 7 British Rail Stewards were prosecuted for stealing a presumed total of £66,704 over a period of 14 months from British Rail and passengers, the case was described as a “fiddle” by The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph (10.1.76). Occupational thieves benefit from the structural constraints of security which (however exasperating for them at the time: increasing the possibility of entrapment by multiplying the frequency of theft, as it does), later persuade victims to define the loss of money or merchandise as one generated by a more easily digested and apparently less frightening multitude of small thefts (immortalised by Johnny Cash in the song, “One Piece at a Time”), rather than as the result of one big socially indigestible and thus very disturbing blag.

[10] See Mack, 1964, p. 39; the slight discussion of the difference between ‘full-time’ and ‘part-time’ theft in Ditton, 1977, p. 91; and, in detail, on the former, Mack, 1981.

[11] For detail, see Ditton, 1977, ch. 4.

[12] These figures are taken from The Times (Europa Section), 2.12.75. I stick to this now probably out-dated estimate, as I merely wish to make a point about proportions rather than here hazard a guess at real extent. 1974 is a convenient year as other costs for that year (which I shall introduce shortly) are both available and comparable. Estimates of real extent in this field vary enormously, there existing no nationally aggregated census or survey data to rely upon. Consequently, most estimates derive from individual extrapolations either from victim-loss estimates (e.g. ‘down’ from inventory shrinkage levels), or from offender-gain estimates (e.g. ‘up’ from small scale research studies). Correspondence between estimates is further bedevilled by lack of agreement on levels of workforce involvement (see fn. 6) supra), on size of average thefts, and ultimately, upon what counts as theft. What correspondence between estimates that does exist, appears to result most frequently from plagiarism of anothers estimate; with changes in estimates often merely resulting from an earlier estimate being inflation-adjusted, or increased merely to take G.N.P. increases into account. American estimates (purely because more of them exist) better exemplify these difficulties than do British ones. Barrett (1895, p. 196) claims than the losses to banks alone was $9 millions in 1893, rising to $19 million and $25 millions in 1893 and 1894. Smith (1920, p. 14) reported a total annual defalcation loss of $40 millions for 1912, increasing the total cost of employee pilferage in America in 1946 produced a figure of $400 millions per year (Paterson, 1946, p. 45), again in 1954 (Factory Maintenance and Management, 1954, p. 84), and finally in 1956 (Packard, 1956, p. 98). In 1957, Davis (1957, p. 221) added $1 billion, now making it $600 million per year and two years later, it had tripled to $1,5000 millions per year (Cort, 1959, p. 339). Yet it fell back to a mere $1,000 millions per year 2 years after that (Ross 1961, p. 140 and Gregory, 1962, p. 68); until 1963 (Wahl, 1963, p. 71) then steadily climbing to $1,460 millions per year in 1968 (Business Management, 1968, p. 12). The next year, 1969, was a bad year for employees with one American analyst suggesting the low figure of $381 millions per year (Cash, 1969, p. 11). Business soon recovered, through, with 1971 seeing a new crop of estimates, but this time indicating wide disagreement. Tatham (1974, p. 49) and Dickinson (1972, p. 48) hit the low end of the scale, with $3,000 millions per year, and $3,150 millions per year, respectively. Norman Jaspan weighed in again, this time with $3,650 millions per year (Jaspan, 1971, p. 78) - some two and a half times his estimate of 7 years before. Seitlin (1971, p. 22) beat them all with an estimate of $8,500 - $10,000 millions per year. Jones (1972, p. 59) replied a year later with a cautious estimate of $1,000 - $4,000 millions per year; but two years later the American Government semi-officially hit back with the colossal estimate of £7,000 millions per year (Chamber of Commerce, 1974, p. 6). Since then, there has again been a cautious retreat with Hair, Bush and Busch (1976, p. 25) suggesting $3,000 millions per year. Although less frequent, British estimates follow the same pattern. Palmer (1973, p. 20) suggested £248 million per year as an estimate of employee theft losses, and this was doubled by the Home Secretary, 3 years later, to £496 million per year (The Times, 28.3.77). In the same year, I was responsible for an estimate of £1,305 millions per year (Ditton, 1977, p. 86): one repeated by the outer circle policy group (OCUU, 1977, p. 11), but later challenged by two of its members (Henry and Mars, 1978, p. 245).

[13] Figures from N. Fowler, 1973, p. 17; and R.L. Carter, 1974, p. 28, et passim.

[14] SSRC Grant No.: HR 3603/1. An alternative elaboration of some of the remarks made in this section may be found in Ditton and Williams, 1981.

[15] Reported in Ditton, 1977.

[16] Znaniecki. 1934, p. 222, (emphasis added).

[17] Now the difference between analytic and enumerative induction are plain. Znaniecki, op cit, pp. 249-250-1, continues: “While in enumerative induction ... a certain logical class is defined, and the problem is to find characters common to and distinctive of the particular objects belonging within this class which were not explicitly or implicitly included in the definition, in analytic ... induction certain particular objects are determined by intensive study, and the problem is to define the logical classes which they represent. No definition of the class precedes in analytic induction the selection of data to be studied as representative of this class ... While both forms of induction tend to reach general and abstract truths concerning particular and concrete data, enumerative induction abstracts by generalising, whereas analytic induction generalises by abstracting. The former (enumerative induction) looks in many cases for characters that are similar and abstracts them conceptually because of their generality, presuming that they must be essential to each particular case; the latter (analytic induction) abstracts from the given concrete case characters that are essential to it and generalises them, presuming that in so far as essential, they must be similar in many cases.”

[18] Turner, 1953, pp. 208-9, notes that firstly, there is no basis for determining beforehand whether the conditions specified as necessary will exist in a particular instance; and secondly, the alleged preconditions or essential causes of the phenomenon under examination cannot be specified apart from observation of the condition they are supposed to produce. As well as this, there is the difficulty of limiting the universal. I have referred to this elsewhere (Ditton, 1977, p. 13) as the MacIntyre Dilemma: the procedural difficulty of deciding whether or not an instance which does not exactly fit the proposed definition is not an example of the phenomena at all, or whether it is a counter-example. With a representative example of what passes for humour amongst philosophers, MacIntyre asks what we do if we encounter a Christmas pudding that talks. Do we say that this is not a Christmas pudding (because it is speaking), or are we to conclude that we were originally mistaken about the properties of Christmas puddings (the rash assumption that they are dumb)?

[19] Downes, 1966, p. 204.

[20] Mars, 1973, p. 202.

[21] Morris and Morris, 1963, p. 237.

[22] Henry, 1976, p. 115.

[23] Mitchell, 1977, p. 1.

[24] See: Ogden and Richards, 1923, p. 110.

[25] Bridgman; quoted in Ullmann, 1964, p. 24.

[26] J.S. Mill, 1846, Vol. II, p. 246.

[27] They are: (i) synonymous (offering a synonym, or a list of near synonyms); (ii) analytical (naming a class into which the referents denoted by the word will fall, and further specifying their distinguishing characteristics); (iii) synthetic (indicating the relationship of denoted referents to other referents); (iv) implicative (where the word is exhibited in use in an example sentence); (v) denotative (to cite an example of the class of referents denoted); (vi) ostensive (an operational or physical example of the last type); and (vii) rule-giving (wherein when a word has no obvious referential function, a grammatical or logical rule is given for its use): See Waldron (1967, pp. 55-6); and for an alternative version, Weinreich (1962, p. 2-8). (Borsodi, 1967, pp. 24ff. offers twenty-four types).

[28] Naturally, this competes with the definitions that I have given elsewhere. However, with the rubric of analytic induction, changing the definition does not constitute a doubt of the validity or the veracity of the former definition. As Znaniecki 1934, p. 250 puts it: “in such a case the new knowledge does not by the investigation of similar concrete instances merely supplement pre-existing knowledge about the class previously defined: it is supposed to be knowledge about some new class somehow related to the class already known.”

[29] The Times, 12.8.76; The Times, 12.1.76; Guardian, 12.5.76; Financial Times, 27.2.76; The Times, 11.8.76; The Sunday Times, 20.10.76; The Sunday Times, 26.10.76; The Times; 12.11.74; The Times, 27.7.75; The Times, 24.11.74.

[30] Various studies (such as Willis, 1976, p. 408; Downes, 1966, p. 106, 203-4, 209, 254; and Willmott, 1966, pp. 147-8, 158-9, 161) have shown that “fiddling” - somehow defined - is not a specific activity restricted to a class of occupational setting, but is instead a widespread cultural phenomenon.

[31] News of the World, 29.8.76; Daily Telegraph, 3.4.76; Northern Echo, 15.3.77; Daily Express, 18.9.76; Daily Mirror, 18.6.76; Daily Mail, 10.6.76; Daily Mail, 8.5.76; Guardian, 9.1.76; Guardian, 11.6.75; Newcastle Journal, 2.6.77; Guardian, 19.9.73; The Times, 22.10.74; Daily Mail, 14.10.75; Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 3.3.77; Daily Telegraph, 22.7.76; Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 15.10.76; Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 2.2.77; Daily Mirror, 25.1.77; Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 17.2.77.

[32] See: Waldron (1967, pp. 78, 99).

[33] In a substantive sense, one cannot essentially be a fiddler. Existentially, one cannot be a fiddler at all: one can only do a fiddle. At most, one can only “be” a fiddler peripherally: fiddling being, as I have suggested elsewhere (Ditton, 1977) a “part-time” identity only.

[34] Stern (1931), p. 37) offers this model for the synchronic semantic decomposition of a word. (I have added my topic in round brackets). [Ogden and Richard’s (1923) p. 11) version is in square brackets].

[Thought or Reference]

(Triviality)

MEANING

[Symbolises] expresses is subjective

apprehension of [Refers to]

(Fiddle) WORD REFERENT (Theft)

[Symbol] Denotes [Referent]

[Stands for]

Linguists will notice how archaic this formulation is. Meaning is more fashionable held as a relationship between [Symbol] and [Though or Reference]. Nevertheless, I find the Ogden and Richard’s more useful. On the former, newer version, see Ullmann, 1951, pp. 18-19; and Ullmann, 1957, pp. 69. ff. Generally, on the triangle, see Baldinger, 1970.

[35] Volosinov, 1930, p. 102.

[36] Stebbins (1943:119) suggests that definitions: (i) must be equivalent, but the definiens must not be wider than the definiendum; (ii) the definiens must not include any expression occurring in the definiendum; (iii) the definiens must not be obscure or figurative; and (iv) the definiens must not be negative (unless the definiendum is). Bierstedt (1959:132) has a longer list. He suggests that definitions (i) should be per genus et differentia; (ii) should be convertible simpliciter (i.e., should be commensurate with that defined); (iii) should not be circular; (iv) should not be negative; and (v) should not be obscure or figurative. Borsodi (1967, pp. 32-3) offers four canons of definition: (i) Adequacy (to avoid confusing the referent intended with other referents); (ii) Differentation (the definition must include sufficient referential characteristics to avoid confusing it with any other); (iii) Impartiality (no referential characteristics should be mentioned without mentioning others of the same category of significance); and (iv) Completeness (definitions should be complete enough to allow recognition and cognition of the referent).

[37] Quoted in Bierstedt, 1959, p. 126.

[38] Bierstedt, op cit., p. 126. The nominal/real distinction is only relevant to a concern with the type of definition. Other distinctions are possible though. Firstly, in terms of the definition’s content, attempts may be substantive (or, ostensive: “any process by which a person is taught to understand a word otherwise than by the use of other words” - Russell, 1908, p. 63), or functional (or, formal). In terms of range, any definition will vary somewhere on a continuum between being inclusive (or, broad) on the other. Finally, the scope of its application may be either minimum (small) or maximum (large).

[39] Gallie, 1964, ch. 8.

[40] Gallie, op cit., p. 157. He adds (pp. 187-8): “Recognition of a given concept as essentially contested implies recognition of rival uses of it (such as oneself repudiates) as not only logically possible and humanly ‘likely’ but as of permanent potential critical value to one’s own use or interpretation of the concept in question; whereas to regard any rival use as anathema, perverse, bestial or lunatic means, in many cases, to submit oneself to the chronic human peril of under-estimating, or of completely ignoring, the value of one’s opponent’s positions.”

[41] MacIntyre, 1973, p. 4.

[42] Care, 1973, p. 12.

[43] Znaniecki, op cit., pp. 240-1.

[44] Robinson, 1951, p. 203.

[45] Popper, 1957, pp. 28, 29.

[46] However, there are still some outstanding problems, the main one of which is that, as an inference, this definition is merely a logical truth. To say that a “fiddle” is a-theft-defined-as-trivial is to propose a non-amplitative truth-preserving inference. This is because, as Salmon, 1966, p. 8, puts it: “The conclusion cannot be false if the premises are true because the conclusion says nothing that was not already stated in the premises. The conclusion is a mere reformulation of all or part of the content of the premises”.

[47] Walker, 1977, p. 26, refers to this as a formally causal statement. In other words, for Becker (1963) it is the criminal law which is the formal cause of crime. Here, this would emerge as defining as a “fiddle” is the formal cause of “fiddling”.

[48] Bierstedt, 1959, p. 128.

[49] MacIntyre, 1973, p. 2.

[50] On the ramifications of “as if”, see Valinger, 1924; on “fictions”, Cohen, 1931.

[51] This paradoxical attribution is normally made from a single source, although this needn’t be the case. Terence and Pauline Morris, 1963, p. 232, show that the paradox can be produced jointly by two parties in competition for scarce resources: “Fiddling is regarded by prisoners as a wholly legitimate activity, the Prison Rules notwithstanding. Nevertheless, although transactions which occur in relation to ‘fiddles’ may be wholly concordant, the authorities view certain ‘fiddles’ as serious, especially those which involve the theft of food.”

[52] Taylor, Walton, and Young, 1973, p. 269.

[53] See: Pearson 1976; and cf. his pp. 49 and 80.

[54] Ball, 1970, pp. 330, 331.

[55] There are problems, thought. If I look up the word ‘define’ in the dictionary, for a definition of it, I am involved in a tautology. To paraphrase Silverman, 1975, p. 13: After all, what does a dictionary do, if not to provide ‘definitions’? So, to understand any dictionary definition (including that of define) it is always necessary to know already what it is to define. On the latter, see Borsodi, 1967, p. 18ff. Silverman’s problem has been recognised by lexicographic critics. Here, Weinreich, 1962, p. 29 that, “a natural language, being articulated, is not an adequate metalanguage for the analysis of its semantic gestalten, and no more suitable metalanguage has been devised.” The lexical structure of dictionaries is not an issue here. On those problems consult Weinreich, 1964, and Bollinger, 1965. The latter comments, p. 567: “A dictionary is a frozen pantomime. Our problem is only beginning when we consider the pale flowers of that ‘nosegay of faded metaphors’ that it presses between its pages. It is characteristic of natural language that no word is ever limited to its ennumerable senses but carries within it the qualification of ‘something like’”.

[56] Spitzer, 1942, p. 1.

[57] 1941: WEBSTER, p. 724. Early dictionaries, for example those of Natham Bailey (1721: BAILEY) or Ephriam Chambers (1728) merely provided lists of words, and were sometimes called Alphabeticalls. Samual Johnson’s (1755: JOHNSON) was the first to add definitions, meanings, syntax, pronunciation, etymology, etc.: and modern attempts are merely updatings and extensions of his pioneering model. Here, see Collins (1974); and for more detail, Starnes and Noyes (1946), Wheatley (1865), Noyes (1941), Weekley (1931), and Alston (1966).

[58] Rose, 1960, pp. 193-4, 194.

[59] Aarsleff (1967, p. 208) notes the nineteenth century connection between (the then) philology and ethnography established by Pritchard and Latham.

[60] Schatzman and Strauss, 1973.

[61] Rose, op. cit.

[62] Volosinov, op cit., p. 101.

[63] Ibid.

[64] Volosinov adds, ibid., p. 103: “Those who ignore theme (which is accessible only to active, responsive understanding) and who, in attempting to define the meaning of a word, approach its lower, stable, self-identical limit, want, in effect, to turn on a light bulb after having switched off the current.” Analogies are slippery things to argue with rationally. They can only be countered with like. Accordingly, it should be remembered that one should not attempt to change a light with (or, indeed, to take the light fitting apart to see how it was constructed and how functions) without turning of the current.

[65] Ibid., pp. 99-100. To demonstrate the value of indexical elements in deciphering the meaning of even a ‘simple’ question like ‘Do you have the time?’, See: Goffman, 1976, pp. 306-8.

[66] Volosinov, 1930, p. 100.

[67] Ibid., p. 100.

[68] In Aarsleff, 1967, p. 250.

[69] Volosinov, ibid., pp. 101-2, (my emphasis).

[70] Etymology is not here conceived simply as a study of a word’s origin (sometimes enoneously seen as its “real” meaning). Rather to quote Wartburg (in Ullman, 1964, p. 40, fn. 3) “Etymology today must regard as its essential task to obscure and describe all the transformations of a word, in order to understand them and explain them. It must no longer be satisfied with the uninteresting line connecting the starting-point with the terminal point”. To remember Rose, concern is with the whole ‘life’ of the word. As Malkiel, 1957, p. 1, has suggested, the complete trajectory - a sort of diachronic lexicography.

[71] Bloomfield, 1933, p. 328.

[72] i.e., it has a range of meaning, and lacks a definite objective referent (Stern, 1931, p. 68, et passim).

[73] i.e., it’s use depends upon circumstances, and may apply to different referents on different occasions (Stern, ibid.).

[74] i.e., it may apply to a limited number of the characteristics of the referent on any occasion (Stern, ibid.).

[75] The line between homonym (two or more words with the same written and spoken form, but with different meaning) and polysemy (one word with two or more meanings) is a different one to draw, according to Leech, 1974, pp. 228-9. Waldron, 1967, p. 64, comments: “Whether a given form is in fact one word in several senses or two words of the same form may not always be discernible unless the etymological history of the word in question is investigated”. Two sorts of historically-ignorant error are possible (although the error, for any synchronic analysis, may not be too important): polysemy may be mistaken for homonymy, for example, the word ‘fast’ used to mean ‘firm’ or ‘quickly’ comes in both cases from M.E. ‘faste’, Stern, 1931, pp. 186-7, and Stern, 1921, Ch. IV; and homonymy may be mistaken for polysemy, for example, ‘ear’ when intended to refer to organ of hearing, comes from O.E. eare, and was intended for head of corn, from O.E. ear; Leech, 1974, p. 229. Waldron, 1967, p. 68, summarises: “In many cases the various meanings have diverged so far that connections between them are not immediately apparent, and may even be inaccessible to the speaker without special historical linguistic knowledge”. Or, as Menner, 1945, p. 59-60 puts it: “Speakers who are not etymologists have no means of knowing that mad ‘crazy’ and mad ‘angry’ were historically one word, while light ‘levis’ and light ‘lucidus’ were historically two. Only the literate conscious of spelling realise that the two senses of [stret] ‘direct’ and ‘narrow’ represent two historically different words straight (OE streht) and strait (OF estreit), while the several senses of fair, ‘beautiful’, ‘just’ and ‘mediocre’ are all meanings of one word.” Although the homonym/polysemy distinction is technically interesting, it may produce (because of its synchronic irrelevance) little formal variation when the diachronic cultural trajectory of the word is considered. Indeed, as Menner, ibid., has shown, the likelihood of partial cultural obsolescence for words with multiple current semantic ranges is as applicable in cases of polysemy as with those of homonymy. In fact, an example of the process which Breal (1900, p. 146) called ‘abridgement’ is immanent below: “law” as used by Greene, 1591, and others to describe various criminal activities, was a particularised cant word which was never universalised presumably because of the semantic conflict this would have posed with the universal meaning of the same word (and from the same root) for its semantic antithesis - the control of such activities. Lengthy support for Menner’s argument can be found in Rudskoger, 1951, where a more sophisticated taxonomy may also be found. Rudskoger distinguishes true homonyms (distinct origin, but identical in both sight and sound, as with the ‘light’ example), from both homophones (only identical audibly as with ‘foul’ and ‘fowl’), and homographs (only identically visually as with ‘lead’ - the metal, and ‘lead’ to conduct). Palmer, 1976, p. 68, adds that some homonyms and homophones are also very nearly antonyms (e.g. ‘cleave’ - part asunder, ‘cleave’ - unite; and ‘raise’ and ‘raze’).

[76] De Saussuse, 1916, pp. 183-4, puts this (with his usual eloquence) as follows: “The word is like a house in which the arrangement and function of different rooms has been changed several times. Objective analysis [“which is based on history”] adds up and schematises the successive arrangements, but for those who live in the house there is always but one arrangement.” Within the general field of ‘vagueness’, Waldron, 1967, pp. 146-8, distinguishes ambiguity (two or more meanings); from generality (the agreement to use a word generally); variation (involved when speakers contest over a word’s use and meaning); and, indeterminacy (unsureness over the precise boundary of a word’s application).

[77] Mill, op cit., Vol. II, p. 269.

[78] See: Fries, 1954, p. 57, et passim.

[79] All de Saussure quotations from de Saussure, 1916, p. 212.

[80] Indeed, neither is most historical (comparative, or diachronic) philology. The main concern, where it exists at all, is with the phonological rather than the semantic elements of change, as indicated, inter alia, by Menner, 1945, p. 59, and Rudskoger, 1952.

[81] As Strang, 1970, p. 95, points out: “The introduction of new words can often be given a semblance of dating, however well we may realise that the first recorded instance may not be the first use, and the first use may be far removed from the first time at which a word has any significant standing in a language”. Yet, such criticism is not solely reserved for dictionary search. Williams, 1976, p. 17, adds: “the real developments of meaning, at each stage, must have occurred in everyday speech well before they entered the written record. This is a limitation which has to be recognised, not only in the Dictionary, but in any historical account. A certain foreshortening or bias in some areas, is, in effect, inevitable. Period indications for origin and change have always to be read with this qualification and reservation.” Dictionary dating thus neatly offers at least the chance of an average coining date, and forestalls the necessity of choosing which theoretical point should in any case be selected as the ‘true’ origin. A similar difficulty is experienced with humans themselves, although there the political and religious vie with the medical; with catholic anti-abortionists opting for conception, and non-catholic pro-abortionists opting for delivery, as the point at which ‘birth’ is held to occur. Nevertheless (and now back to words) Menner’s warning should not be forgotten. He said, 1945, p. 62, pp. 74-5: “The experience we have all had of discovering that a word has three or four meanings of which we have never heard ought to warn us against assuming that INDIVIDUALS in the 14th or 16th century were familiar with all the dictionary meanings recorded... Our own familiarity as scholars and readers with the many meanings of the same phonetic forms must not blind us to the restrictions on polysemy that arise from the cultural limitations of the uneducated.” And nor should Stern’s, 1944, p. 35: “it is a fairly common practice to assume, without proof, that all meanings of a word, say an Old English word, which to our mind are logically possible and suitable, were also potentially present to the mind of an Anglo-Saxon speaker.”

[82] In an early work, Stern has wisely counselled against a simple use of a single dictionary, but overstates the case. Nevertheless, I shall quote him in full, 1921, p. 4: “It might be thought that... the material afforded by NED and other dictionaries would furnish a satisfactory basis for conclusions regarding the semantic history of the words to be treated. For a detailed analysis, however, it is quite insufficient. There are several reasons for this. A dictionary always tries to find and to describe such sgns and shades of sgn as may be defined clearly enough to prevent confusion, although the definitions must be made as short and concise as possible. Of the material at its disposal, a dictionary prints chiefly the instances that prove and elucidate the definitions given. But if we collect a sufficient number of quotes. of a word we shall find groups of intermediate or transitional sgns, which cannot be so clearly or unequivocally defined, but which oscillate between two sgns of more pronounced character. Such intermediate senses are not systematically reproduced in the dictionaries, though they are of course more or less to be found, especially in the larger ones. They are, however, of the greatest importance not only because they are often very common, but because they serve as links in the development; and they must therefore be made the object of special attention... Further, a research concentrated on a limited number of words often succeeds in discovering important facts not noticed by the dictionaries.”

[83] Williams, 1976, p. 15.

[84] Ibid., p. 11.

[85] Sapir, 1921, pp. 150, 155, 171. Strang, 1970, p. 25 adds, “it is certainly the case that the history of the language is not a steady stream flowing in one direction, picking up new resources as it goes; there are many false starts and minor eddies which never come to be incorporated in the main current.”

[86] Edward Rose, 1960, p. 210, et seq., offers a broad and rather empiricist breakdown of a semantic “life” (although it is unclear whether or not he consistently uses the notion for a word or a meaning) into: proposals, which refer to the “earliest recovered usage” of a particular meaning; acceptances, which are “more permanent meanings”; survivals, which persisted, but only just so; and, finally, losses, or meanings which did not.

[87] Mill, 1846, Vol. II, p. 273, comments thus on the category Generalisation: “words are perpetually losing portions of their connotation, and becoming of less meaning and more general acceptation.” Mill tends, rather simplistically, to see the problem of change as purely one of the rise and fall of numbers of connotations. He refers this, ibid., p. 273, as the “natural history” of a language. Elsewhere this basic process has been referred to as widening, extension, or change species pro genere Waldron, 1967, p. 115; Ullmann, 1951, p. 204; or expansion, Breal, 1900, ch. XI.

[88] Sturtevant, 1917, pp. 89, 90.

[89] Stern, 1931, pp. 405, et pass.

[90] Sutherland, 1937, pp. 16-17, 207. Whatever other analysis may be offered of ‘argot’ (and one will be shortly) it has at least, on occasions, this use as a secret code (although Sutherland denies it). Codes like Morse and semaphore may be obviously codes even for those who cannot break them. Yet there regularity arise situations wherein the fact that secrets are being kept needs to be as well kept as the secrets themselves (on the former, see: Goffman, 1953, Ch. III, and for the latter, Goffman 1959, p. 175). There is, in fact, a structural necessity for all those who contain others in frame re-worked fabrications to use minor communicative tracks, or back channels, for collusive/exclusive conversation. Success at this usually involves change of meaning rather than of utterance (as the latter would not so much give the game away, as give away the information that a game is being played). So, Harlem merchants code both their prices (Caplovitz, 1965, p. 242) and their talk (Caplovitz 1963, p. 27), but in a way that only a knowledge of the code would indicate that those utterances are coded. Similarly, according to Geller, 1934, p. 283, the American shoe salesman, “frequently finds himself in a situation that demands a language somewhat unintelligible to those to whom he sells,” (and the way he does this is cited in Goffman, 1959, pp. 176-7). The extent to which secrecy is involved is the extent to which such codes may be called ‘cants’. This allows a further distinction, now functioning as a sub-division of ‘code’: first of all, specialised utterances used in a normal way (e.g. semaphore, Morse; something which Goffman, 1953, p. 47, after Sapir, calls ‘language transfers); and secondly, ‘cants’ which are normal utterances used in a specialised way. The etymology of the word ‘cant’ is itself instructive. It is held (1901: O.E.D., Menken, 1936, pp. 556, 578; Philipson, 1941, p. 10) to derive from the Latin, cantus, a song; and various mutations (chant, descant) still possess currency for singers. In the early seventeenth century, it was transferred to describe, “a whining manner of speaking, especially of beggars” (1901: O.E.D.), although slightly earlier, cant meant simply to speak or talk; Partridge, 1948, p. 97. This specific transfer to beggars elided subsequently with the view that the beggars were about secret business; adding connotations both of secrecy and contempt, and becoming thus, (1901: O.E.D.) “The secret language or jargon used by gypsies, thieves, professional beggars, etc.; transf. any jargon used for the purpose of secrecy”. Yet to call ‘cant’ (indeed, this applies as well to argot, jargon, lingo, etc.) a language is to overstate the case. As Partridge, 1948, p. 98, puts it, “cant, it must never be forgotten, is a vocabulary, a glossary; not a language with a syntax of its own”. A related vocabulary is “parlyaree”, the vocabulary of showmen (see Partridge, 1950b; Maurer, 1931), which is based on Italian. Showmen use parlyaree to communicate between themselves in front of customers. This illustrates the difficulty cant has in sticking to its own definition (a normal utterance used in a specialised way). The pure age of cant, coupled to the relative infrequency with which it inseminates standard language, now leaves it beached conspicuously in the ears of the hearer. What originally passed as a normal utterance is now specialised. Users of cants may be determined on secrecy (and may achieve it). The chances of keeping the fact of so doing also a secret diminishes.

[91] Mill, 1846, Vol. II, p. 275, attributes to specialisation that process, “by which other, or even these same words, are continually taking on fresh connotations; acquiring additional meaning, by being restricted in their employment to a part only of the occasions on which they might properly be used before”. Generalisation and specialisation are processes which can happen to the same word. According to Schreuder, 1929, pp. 45, et passim, “time” and “tide” were synonymous in Anglo-Saxon English, yet tima has been generalised, and tid subject to specialisation. Elsewhere, specialisation has been referred to as narrowing, restriction, or change genus pro specia; Waldron, 1967, p. 115; Ullmann, 1951, p. 204.

[92] Stern, 1931, p. 416.

[93] It is likely here, too, that the process may be reversed. For the “deer” example, horns (etc.,) were added. For the word “undertaker”, on the other hand, (Stern, 1931, p. 417-8), a term originally for, “one who undertakes to carry out work or business for another”, yet now reserved just for those undertaking funerals: the other tasks have been subtracted as aspects of the referent.

[94] Mill, 1846, Vol. I, p. 207.

[95] For example, Wundt’s early scheme, first published in 1900. It was based on sound-change, and divides semantic change into singular change (unique, sudden and intentional, and reflects the history of a word); and regular change (regular, gradual and unconscious, reflecting the history of a concept); see, Ullmann, 1951, pp. 173-4, and fn. 1, p. 214.

[96] For example, Ullmann, 1951, p. 220 et passim, produces a functional scheme, wherein the basic possibilities are re-ordered into two main categories: A linguistic conservation (Stern’s SUBSTITUTION, not considered here, but see Stern, 1931, ch. VIII), and B linguistic inumeration. The latter category is subdivided into I Transfer of Names (through similarity or contiguity between senses); II Transfer of Senses (through similarity or contiguity between names); and III Composite Changes. Waldron, 1967, chs. 7, 8 and 9, classifies the possibilities into Transfer (Metaphoric or Metonymic: here reflecting Ullmann’s distinction between similarity and contiguity); and Shift (Stern’s ADEQUATION).

[97] Waldron, 1967, points out, for example, that TRANSFER is difficult to distinguish from certain types of NOMINATION (p. 132); NOMINATION itself is “a very mixed bag indeed” (p. 134); SHORTENING is a purely formal category (ibid.); SUBSTITUTION never takes place without ADEQUATION, which itself appears to be a category of a different order to the others (ibid.).

[98] An extensive looking classification of classifications is to be found in Ullmann, 1951, pp. 202, 249. He divides contributors into the (i) logico-rhetorical (Darnmester, Breal, Paul, Carnoy and Stern); (ii) Generic (Ullmann himself, after Meillet, Sperber, Wellandar, de Saussure, Wundt, Schuchardt, Roudet and Gombocz); (iii) Eclectic (Carnoy); and, (iv) Empirical (Stern).

[99] The adjective ‘fast’ has two, contradictory meanings: ‘immovable’ and ‘quickly’. The adjective here borrows from the development of the M.E. adverb ‘faste’ (which does show a development from one meaning to another) on the basis of an analogical resemblance, Stern, pp. 166-7; 216-7.

[100] At one time the French ‘arriver’ and the English ‘arrive’ could be distinguished in that the French verb also meant ‘to attain success’. More recently, semantic correspondence on this point has been achieved, Stern, p. 218.

[101] To ‘pester’ originally meant to ‘dog, entangle, or embarrass’. The phonetic similarity this had with the word ‘pest’ generated a later meaning of ‘to trouble, annoy or plague’ (Stern, 1931, p. 236; and Waldron, 1967, p. 124). Stern refers to this more properly as ‘phonetic associative interference’; Kroesch, 1926, p. 35, more logically as ‘syntactical analogy’; both are better known nowadays as ‘folk etymology’, or ‘popular etymology’ (i.e., incorrect etymology), which is a category larger than mere phonetic similarity. The howlers here are ‘sirloin’ (felt by some to be derived from what Greenhough and Kittredge, 1900, p. 331, refer to as a ‘ludicrous anecdote’ of an English King knighting a loin of beef - Skeat claims that it was supposed to be James I or Charles II-) and Welsh Rabbit, misspelt by the whimsically pretentious as ‘Rarebit’. One we all indulge in is ‘hiccough’ for ‘hickup’ - an originally onomatopoeic tag (Weekley, 1912, p. 125). Such etymologies are only incorrect from the standpoint of the etymologist. Once popularised, they are obviously valid from a synchronic point of view, with ‘humble-pie’, for example, having no original connection with humility, although it obviously has a contemporary albeit metaphoric, one (Weekley, 1912, p. 113). On the other hand, consulting origins can reveal absurdities. ‘Pocket handkerchief’, decomposed, emerges as ‘pocket hand-cover-head’ (Weekley, 1912, p. 98); ‘greyhound’ is ‘hound-hound’; and ‘Buckhurst Hold Wood’, similarly broken down is, ‘beech wood-wood-wood’ (Weekley, 1912, p. 135).

[102] Abbreviations hardly need examples, yet everything else has been given one, so ‘bus’ is clipped from ‘omnibus’ (Stern, 1931, p. 258). When the first syllable is retained (e.g. ‘specs’ from ‘spectacles’) the process is more specifically one called apocope (Burgess, 1964, p. 109)

[103] ‘Fall’ for Autumn actually refers to, yet actually omits ‘Fall [of the leaf]’, (Stern, 1931, p. 259)

[104] E.g. for a new substance. ‘Gas’ by B. Van Helmet, c.1600, Stern, 1931, p. 291; or the selection from 250 proposals, by the Du Pot company of the word ‘nylon’ which is easily remembered, redolent of both Greek and the earlier invented ‘rayon’, but which “has no etymology”, according to Strang, 1970, p. 25. Yet the proliferation of synthetic fibres established a family of (equally synthetic) words. Strang continues: “... Once these two [‘rayon’ and ‘nylon’] existed, they created a precedent for the virtual morpheme -on = (variety of) synthetic fibre/fabric, as in orlon, perlon; cf. the pattern - (vowel) +n echoed in terylene, acrilan.

[105] E.g. ‘Ohm’ used subsequently to name whatever it was the discoverer discovered (Stern, 1931, p. 295)

[106] If this is intentional, it would be a PERMUTATION (see below). The similarity base for metaphor may be: appearance; quality, action or function; or, perceptual or emotive effect.

[107] Some physically small persons are ‘enormous eaters’, Stern, 1931, p. 349, and vice versa.

[108] Stern, 1931, p. 340.

[109] Indeed, they are quite lackadaisacally and unparsimoniously assembled by Stern, which generates trickiness in application rather than difficulty in understanding.

[110] See e.g. Bain’s superb work, (Bain, 1887, 1888), which has extensively influenced those more modern classifications of Ullmann and Waldron. A case can certainly be made for making more both of metaphor (similarity change) - here a NOMINATION if intentional and a TRANSFER if not. After Richards, we may distinguish between vehicle (the original referent) and tenor (the new one); and, after Miller, between Radical (old term for new category), and Poetic (old term to different old category). See: Waldron, 1967, pp. 162-174; and of Metonymy (contiguity change, or, for Stern, “other relations”), here a NOMINATION if intentional, and PERMUTATION if not.

[111] A simple example (amongst others, sometimes sub-classified into metonymy and synecdoche) is “factory hands”, where a useful part of a person has been used to refer to the whole. Stern, p. 352-4, provides an interesting example which reveals the processes which may be involved. Originally, M.E. ‘bede’ signified a prayer. Prayers, when said in repetition, were counted on the balls of a rosary (to avoid saying too many). Subsequently, ‘bedes’ and ‘balls’ were phonetically indistinguishable because of the intercession of the word “bead”. Permutation occurs when “beads” as ‘prayers as being reckoned by the balls of a rosary’, becomes ‘balls of a rosary as being used to reckon prayer’. ‘Prayers’ become ‘balls’. (See also, Schurender, 1929, p. 34)

[112] Stern, 1931, pp. 251, 353.

[113] Ibid., p. 381.

[114] The word ‘horn’ used to be subjectively apprehended merely as denoting an ‘animal’s horn’ [a]; later, it was used to produce music (b), and thus the word began to denote ‘an animal’s horn used for music’ [a(b)]; the adequation occurs in the next phrase; where ‘horn’ means: ‘a musical instrument made from animal’s horn’ [(a)b]; at an even later stage (musical) ‘horns’ were fashioned from other materials, allowing ‘horn’ to mean [b]. These technical changes (occurring between the 1st and 2nd, and 3rd and 4th phases here) are called SUBSTITUTIONS by Stern (see Stern, 1931, ch. VIII, and on ‘horns’, pp. 381-2). This does preclude other transitions or uses from the same base, for example, the horns of a dilemma, the horns of cuckoldry (and even our ‘horny’). Here, see Jerperson, 1941, p. 62.

[115] Stern, 1931, p. 235; Waldron, 1967, pp. 137-8.

[116] Although, in particular cases, empirical etymological care should be exercised. Apparent metaphors may, in fact, not be metaphors at all. To claim that, ‘a man is divorced from his work and his wife’, is to use a device called syllepsis (not zengma) wherein both uses of ‘divorce’ are grammatically correct, with the first more historically valid than the second (Schreuder, 1929, pp. 122-3). Waldron, 1967, pp. 175-6, comments that, nevertheless, there is frequently, “no sharp dividing line between literal and metaphoric usage and we are hard put to it in many cases to say whether a particular usage is one or the other”. Waldron, ibid., p. 178, also introduces another relevant distinction: that between living metaphors; sleeping (or faded) ones; and dead (or fossil) ones.

[117] For example, ‘penis’ was originally a euphemism but is currently a word which may not pass for such in (at least British, working-class) decent company. Although in cases like that, new euphemisms will have to be discovered to recover faded ones; the reverse may occur, and unfaded euphemisms may be currently abandoned when temporary utility becomes transparent absurdity. In either case, euphemisms are doomed from birth, with what was originally euphemised usually struggling through. A fine example of this process is offered by the cultural history of the disgusting word “trousers”, (see: Schreuder, 1929, p. 10; Ullmann, 1951a, p. 78). Partridge, 1933a, pp. 99-100, comments: “The male trousers, indeed had generated a droll synonymy. Irrepressibles is the earliest of the genteel euphemisms for breeches (properly coming to just below the knee) or trousers (full length): it dates from 1790. It was shortly followed by indescribables, 1794; thirty years later came ineffables. In the thirties [1830s] arose unmentionables, used in America before being brought back to England by Dickens, who in the same year (1836) coined inexplicables; and a year later, unwhisperables. During 1830-4 three other euphemisms were coined: innominables, indispensables and unutterables. On euphemism more generally, see Greenhough and Kittredge, 1900, Ch. XXI; Weekley, 1912, p. 98, suggests the attraction of euphemism appeals chiefly to “the delicacy of the partially educated”, whose members hang precariously between calling a spade a spade and a decorated shovel; and who will gag at the idea of eating chicken breast, but not at chicken bosom. Notice how this allows us to recognise that feminist liberation may be politically, yet not also linguistically on the march. The apparent new candour available in the now common use of non-euphemisms (dysphemisms) for parts of the female anatomy (breasts or tits) this is a form of up-frontness which conceals a new coyness about using the old euphemisms (bosoms).

[118] Stern, 1931, p. 384.

[119] Yet the child has merely erroneously isolated a composite of form and meaning, which distinguishes him in his role as language-user from the parrot who copies the form even when it is wholly semantically inappropriate, Strang, 1970, p. 14. The problem of indexicality again rises here. Precisely which ‘meaning’ of the speakers use of the word ‘horn’ is intended on any occasion will not be discoverable without recourse to context. Yet the range of possibilities of meaning can be pinpointed independently of that. Consider the phrase to “put to sleep”. As an instruction to a vet handling a dog this will (hopefully) be heard differently to when the same words are offered an anaesthetist handling a person. (Mistakes may be made in both cases, but these are likely to be practitioner’s ones rather than hearer’s ones). The issue is given the instruction “put to sleep”, we cannot tell what is required without a sight of the patient or the practitioner. Similarly, the words “they’re off”, will provoke one kind of reaction in the betting shop, and quite another in the fish shop, Waldron, 1967, p. 28. However, that I am able to suggest these possibilities without having to cite an occasion of their use as an utterance, should demonstrate that some work on meaning as feasible without any indexical consultation. What the (sociological) issue of indexicality points is a solution to that problem (of handling a particular utterance on a particular occasion), and does not constitute an analysis of it. Unfortunately, whilst the indexicality of an utterance is an essential resource for its understanding, those properties are in principle unreproducible. Attempts even at increasingly sophisticated replaying of those properties can ultimately only replay what is replayable - and thus not indexical.

[120] These applications of the word ‘horn’ may be analysed by the methods outlined above. (Examples from Webster Vol. I, p. 1200). For further attention, see Brook, 1973, ch. 4, on Registers; and fn. 127 on jargon.

[121] Linguistic competence refers to “the mental apparatus a person must possess if he is to ‘know’ a given language”, and semantic competence is “‘intuitive grasp’ of meaning”, Leech, 1974, pp. 6, 7.

[122] Mill, 1863, Vol. II, pp. 263, 270.

[123] Sturtevant, 1917, pp. 29, 30.

[124] Bloomfield, 1933, p. 441. Ullmann, 1951, pp. 178-9, points out that the primary-to-secondary change is, in fact, equivalent to a ‘parole’ to ‘langue’ distinction. Elsewhere, Ullmann, 1951a, p. 66, introduces the here relevant separation of innovation from dissemination of a word coining or meaning creation.

[125] One which is based upon Rose’s distinction between acceptances and survivals. See: fn. (86) supra.

[126] This use of the word ‘particular’ is to be distinguished from Stern’s use of the same word, 1930, p. 415, to refer to specialisation within the semantic range.

[127] This is ad-hocing at its worst: yet it might (together with fn. (90) supra) clarify the woolly ends of the argot literature, although the analytical glove knitted from these scraps is only designed to fit the word “fiddle”. Jargon is non-stigmatised sub-set talk, such as doctors use (vide: “A small Richardson please’”, in Goffman, 1961a, p. 71); whereas argot is a term for the language of stigmatised sub-sets as pickpockets (vide: “‘turn him in for a pit’”, in Maurer, 1955, p. 53). No lingo is used for secrecy (that is the role of cant; here, see: Maurer, 1931 and Polsky, 1967, p. 106, fn. (62)), but both are varieties of “specialised language”, Maurer, 1955, p. 4, or “artificial language”, Maurer, 1940, p. 269-272. Neither is spoken all the time: all sub-set members are being “natural” language users as well. An extended case has been made for viewing argot (but not jargon) as: “an expression of group loyalty and group membership”, Sykes, 1958, p. 85: “evidence of this isolation of the underworld and also a means of identification”, Sutherland, 1937, p. 17; and as a “method of defence against outside interference”, Becker, 1963, p. 82. These statements appear to stem from viewing argot (but not jargon) as a part of a subculture, rather than as a part of language. Finally, Polsky 1967, pp. 105-114 et pass., argues fiercely against the use of etymology in understanding deviant action. But his arguments are directed mostly as the attempt to use ‘folk’ or ‘false’ etymologies to explain the ‘psychic state’ of deviants: something which is not, in fact, a problem with linguists like Maurer, although unsubstantiated etymology (e.g. Sutherland 1937, p. 44; Conant, 1936, p. 169) is of dubious utility. The distinction employed here (non-stigmatised v stigmatised sub-set talk) overrides the conventional, yet inextricably tangled one of ‘trade’ v. ‘class’ talk. Tangled; as it is a non-parsimonious distinction employed by different commentators in ways collectively contradictory. Inextricably: as the word ‘class’ is used from and of centuries in one modern sense despite colossal semantic shifts in its historic use, (see, Briggs, 1967). The O.E.D. treats all three terms (lingo, jargon and argot) as implicitly synonyms. In terms of the categorisation adopted here, some glossaries of lingo (e.g. Yenne, 1927, Maurer, 1933) would be of argot; and some others (e.g. Geller, 1934) more usefully referred to as jargon. Further, at least one referred to as jargon (Millburn, 1931); and one other as ‘parlance’ (Kuethe, 1934), are more properly descriptive of argot. Some glossaries (Smith, 1928; Maurer, 1931a) concur with the categorisation adopted here.

[128] The distinction between vulgarisms and colloquialisms is one of indecency and decency. Vulgarisms being constituted, according to Partridge, 1944, p. 52, of illiteracy’s (“words and phrases used incorrectly”) and low language (“expressions avoided by the polite and decent, at least in polite or decent company”). Time softens much, here as elsewhere, with vulgarisms often ageing into more socially acceptable colloquialisms, the stock of which is consequently on average, older. Both vulgarisms and colloquialisms should be distinguished from barbarisms (importations); and neologisms (constructions), although the latter may play the same role for speakers; and also from marginal languages (called “makeshift languages” by Reinecke, 1938) because of the local universality of the latter. The etymology of the word ‘slang’ is currently held as obscure by 1901: O.E.D., although a cant origin is presumed, and later canting uses are noticed for the word to refer to: a beggar’s or hawker’s licence, a travelling show, a performance, a showman, a watch-chain, leg-irons, and a short-weight in London street markets. The current O.E.D. summary definition is: “language of a highly colloquial type, considered as below the level of standard educated speech, and consisting either of new words or of current words employed in some special sense”. Partridge, 1944, pp. 51-2, has laid out the hierarchy of “dignity and respectability”, with Brook, 1973, p. 128, adding that slang is mostly new senses to added old words, with the latter frequently in new phrase compounds. Mencken, 1948, p. 643, has indicated how the definitions of slang, cant, argot, etc., have changed over time, and Reeves, 1926, has pursued this in some detail for slang. Taking successively published dictionary definitions, Reeves shows how slang meant, in 1828, “low, vulgar, unmeaning”, with additional definitive elements of: transience added in 1863, colloquial in 1864, metaphoric base in 1885, and some occupational source in 1913. Slang is thus deliberate, novel and informal; being more transient that dialect and more figurative than cant. The potential universality of slang has bred several easily distinguishable sub-types. Rhyming slang (where the standard English word is replaced by the utterance of the first word or part of an existing phrase - commonly a pair of words - whose last word rhymes homophonously to dialect speakers with the unspoken word. Hence in Cockney rhyming slang, for example, Charing = horse, on the (phonetic) basis: Charing Cross (Crorse: horse) is possibly the best known, with the Cockney basic version fathering, via penal transportation, a strain which grew strongly in Australia, although it never took proper hold on the American imagination (see Partridge, 1931a; and 1970: FRANKLYN). Other acknowledged varieties are; back (or terminal slang), formed on anagrammatical principles of word reversal via exchange of opening and closing consonants (‘look’ becomes ‘cool’). Here, various ad hoc rules deal with difficult words (see Partridge, 1931a) allowing, for London costemongers, ‘look at the old woman’ to emerge as ‘cool the delo nammow’. Another variety is centre (or medial) slang, where the central vowel is moved to the front, and other consonants and vowels added at will. Thus, here, ‘fool’ becomes ‘oolerfer’. Further varieties are ziph (the repetition of every vowel or dipthong, together with the insertion of a ‘g’ between any two vowelled elements) wherein “shall we go?” becomes “shagall wege gogo?”, Partridge, 1931a, p. 40; and gibberish (terminal consonant addition) wherein “How do you do?” becomes “Howg dog your dog?”, Brook, 1973, p. 133. These rather obscure forms of slang appear to border on, if not positively invade the territory of ‘cant’, especially given their specialised use by semi-villanious street traders. Yet, identity of function for speakers may conceal a different in cultural role for the word in question. At this level, slang may not only be an independent “first feeder of language” (1934: WESEEN, p. viii), but may also function as a channel for the generalisation of cant. The attractiveness of the latter possibility is illustrated by the adherence by some linguists to one folk-etymology of the word ‘slang’ as a derivative fore- and back-dipping of ‘thieve[s lang]uage’; e.g. Maurer, 1940, p. 269.

[129] The word “shoplifting” was apparently first coined in 1673, Walsh, 1978, p. 23; this was a nomination, in Stern’s terminology, and one marking the developing of shops, and their troubles. The word was originally hyphenated, illustrating this change. Its use appears to have been restricted to those concerned with the (then rudimentary) criminal justice system of the nineteenth century, Mayhew, 1862, Vol. IV, p. 25. Currently the word is in regenerated universal use, possibly reflecting an increase in the practice of the act itself.

[130] Consider the word “bunny”: a term now in vogue in English homosexual parlare for young male homosexuals. Here, an originally universally used word has recently degenerated through being taken over and used in a specialised sense by a particular group. In this case, “bunny” may in the future retain its universal utilisation (for little rabbits), or it may not. The word “gay” appears to be demonstrating the latter career. Created in its specialised sense by American homosexuals, it is not maintaining its erstwhile general applicability by other speakers (although its specialised applicability is growing in universal utilisation: this latter example shows closely semantic and cultural changes in range may be linked).

[131] An example of a word, at one time in extended use, but now in archaic coma, is quoted by Mackay, 1852, p. 96. He offers the word “quoz”, and of it recounts: “This odd word took the fancy of the multitude in an extraordinary degree, and very soon acquired an almost boundless meaning. When vulgar wit wished to mark its incredulity, and raise a laugh at the same time, there was no resource so sure as this popular piece of slang. When a man was asked a favour which he did not choose to grant, he marked his sense of the suitor’s unparalleled presumption by exclaiming Quoz! When a mischievous urchin wished to annoy a passenger, and create mirth for his comrades, he looked him in the face, and cried out Quoz! and the exclamation never failed in its object. When a disputant was desirous of throwing a doubt upon the veracity of his opponent, and getting summarily rid of an argument which he could not overturn, he uttered the word Quoz! with a contemptuous curl of his lip and an impatient shrug of his shoulders.” Notice how Mackay attributes the current coma to generalisation of applicability, but distinguishes it from normal universal use of referring to it as ‘slang’. Mencken, 1948, p. 644-5, suggests appropriately: “When a novelty is obvious it seldom lasts very long... moreover, its longenity seems to run in obverse proportion to its first success, so that overnight crazes.... are soon done for, whereas novelties of slower growth... last a long, long time. The same autointoxication seems to cut short the silly phrases that have little if any precise meaning but simply delight the moron by letting him show that he knows the latest.” In an earlier edition of American Language, Mencken, 1936, fn.1, p. 566, points to lack of logical content at the death-knell for such utterances. Of the forms of ‘slang’ (see fn. (128) supra), “quoz” is clearly a ‘colloquialism’ rather than a ‘vulgarism’. Colloquialisms seems to have a much shorter life-span than vulgarisms - which persist even if their range of applicability has increased to such an extent that their logical content (i.e. their non-indexically recoverable meaning) is proportionately decreased to the level at which, in that sense, they become semantically empty. Fuck and cunt are good examples of such vulgarisms. Of (presumably) fuck, Wyld, 1920, p. 387, comments: “There is a certain adjective most offensive to polite ears, which plays apparently the chief role in the vocabulary of large sections of the community. It seems to argue a certain poverty of linguistic resource when we find that this word is used by the same speakers both to mean absolutely nothing - being placed before every noun, and often adverbially before all adjectives - and also to mean a great deal - everything indeed that is unpleasant in the highest degree.” (Of (again, presumably) cunt, see the range of expression and meaning manageable by the word as exampled by Dostoevskij in Diary of a Writer (quoted in Volosinov, 1930, pp. 103-4). A range of meaning in the latter case, however, which is dependent upon the use of various syntactic devices. Strictly speaking, both fuck and cunt are only true vulgarisms when used for ‘sexual intercourse’ and ‘vagina’: two euphemisms most usually currently seen as the correct terms, although within any historic perspective are almost certainly recent politenesses (see 1972: PARTRIDGE). Various terms for different forms of word-overuse have been suggested. Ogden and Richards, 1923, pp. 136-8, mention spoilt words (from Sidgwick, those ambiguous beyond remedy); degenerates (those with a multiplicity of associated referents); mendicants (from Arnold, those which stray from their referential path, yet finally return to is); and, nomads (those who stray never to return). At this level, fuck and cunt appear to be vagrants: words occasionally in the right place, but more often not; and in either case, disliked by others.

[132] The enchanting name “dead lurker” was always a restricted term (for those who stole coats and umbrellas from passages at dusk or on Sunday afternoons; see: Mayhew, 1862, Vol. IV, p. 25), was subsequently and speedily made redundant and is now a loss - possibly due to the decline in the second-hand “hot” brolly trade. Leach (1964) has described other losses (e.g. “quean”), although in the cases discussed by him, because of taboo associations in the phonemic vicinity, rather than material reasons, (i.e. homophones rather than homonyms). Complete “death” of a meaning is a theoretical possibility, although it is theoretically, (and thus practically) impossible to provide an example. “Naturally”, most archaic and redundant uses are confined to an etymological limbo called a dictionary.

[133] For example, see: Kroesch, 1929; Dobson, 1940; Tedesco, 1945; Kahane and Kahane, 1950-51; Haas, 1951; Bulatkin, 1954; Austin, 1939; Malone, 1944; Sperber, 1952, 1955.

[134] Properly conducted comparative philology is a specialised and professional task. It is only with some trepidation and temerity that I shall have an amateurish go at it at all. Even then, I shall only tackle its semantic side, leaving the phonological dimension almost wholly untouched. This would normally be unforgivable, yet some redemption is provided in the kind heart of Yakov Malkiel who comments, 1954, p. 311: “in etymological research inexperience in theoretical reconstruction is occasionally offset by familiarity with the objects involved.”

[135] Sperber, 1955, is an interesting exception.

[136] Malkiel, 1962, p. 207.

[137] For example, see: Malkiel, 1946; 1949; and 1954.

[138] For example, see: Malkiel, 1946a; 1954a.

[139] See, Bulatkin, 1954, p. 498; and Malkiel, 1954, p. 88.

[140] It would be overfortuitously tidy if the primary step of each stage was, respectively, a semantic specialisation and a cultural particularisation; and if the secondary step was a semantic generalisation and a cultural universalisation. Strictly speaking the nature of the semantic step is a purely empirical issue. Any referential suggestion may be a specialisation or a generalisation, whichever it is being dependent entirely upon the semantic culmination of the previous stage. The subsequent subjective ratification would not alter the nature of the referential suggestion. In terms of the cultural range of any stage, the first step of innovated proposal is inevitably one more particular than the second step of disseminated acceptance which is, by definition, universal.

[141] Mill, 1863, Vol. II, pp. 259-60, 267.

[142] Each dictionary will be referenced in the text as ‘date: AUTHOR’. Each is properly referenced, in chronological sequence by date of publication, at the end. The O.E.D. is normally referenced as having been published in 1933. However, Volumn IV, the volume containing FIDDLE, was prepared in 1895, and published in 1901.

[143] Of thos consulted, the following dictionaries contained no entry for FIDDLE at all - 1604: CAWDREY; 1616: BULLOKAR; 1623: COCERAM; 1656: BLOUT; 1658: PHILLIPS; 1676: COLES; 1704: COCKER; 1707: Anon.; 1787: GROSE; 1801: MASON; 1822: NARES; 1832: TOONER: 1914: SKEAT and MAYHEW; 1957: ZANDVOORT; and, 1972: ZVIADADZE. Thus, six out of nine seventeenth century dictionaries consulted, and three of twelve eighteenth century ones make no reference to the word.

[144] Those citing fidicula are - 1659: SOMNER; 1689: Anon.; 1708: KERSEY; 1721: BAILEY; 1735: JOHNSON; 1822: OFFER; 1826: THOMPSON; 1836: RICHARDSON; 1859: WORCESTER; and, 1866: LATHAM.

[145] Of this possibility, 1958: PARTRIDGE rather sniffily comments, “ingenious but far less prob.” (i.e. than a simple derivation from vitula, a violin).

[146] Which are: fitla (1901: O.E.D.), and fiola (1966: KLEIN, and 1966: ONIONS.

[147] From 1921: WEEKLEY and 1941: WEBSTER.

[148] As Jesperson comments on loan-words, 1939, p. 27 (and see also Strang, 1970, pp. 31-5 on this issue): “Loan-words have been called the milestones of philology, because in a great many instances they permit us to fix approximately the dates of linguistic changes. But they might with just as much right be termed some of the milestones of general history, because they show us the course of civilisation and the wanderings of inventions and institutions, and in many cases give us valuable information as to the inner life of nations when dry annals tell us nothing but the dates of the deaths of kings and bishops.”

[149] 1889: WHITNEY

[150] 1836: RICHARDSON; alternatively 1822: ANNANDALE suggests fithla; 1882: SKEAT and 1889: CASSELL both fidla; and 1889: WHITNEY, like the old Swedish, fidhla

[151] 1826: THOMPSON

[152] Given by 1882: ANNANDALE; 1882: SKEAT; 1889: CASSELL; 1889: WHITNEY, and 1901: O.E.D.

[153] Given by several dictionaries, firstly by 1862: WEDGEWOOD, and sanctified by 1901: O.E.D.

[154] From 1889: WHITNEY, who also (as do others) offers the alternative spelling videle.

[155] Only appearing in 1882; ANNANDALE as low German. Yet 1689: Anon. and 1721: BAILEY gave fidel as “teutonic”; and 1735: JOHNSON; 1882: OFFER and 1836: RICHARDSON gave the same word as “German”.

[156] First given by 1847; CRAIG, after which few dictionaries missed it out.

[157] The earliest reference is in 1721: BAILEY. After 1889: WHITNEY, may also give veel as an alternative, with 1966: KLEIN indicating that the spelling vedele (given by 1836: RICHARDSON) is old Dutch.

[158] Cited as early as 1659: SOMNER, although with the alternative spelling fidele; and subsequently by most other dictionaries.

[159] First mentioned by 1882: SKEAT. A full list may be found in 1901: O.E.D.

[160] From 1970: FINKENSTAEDT et al.

[161] The first dictionary in which the word appeared was 1659: SOMNER. The first dated use in 1901: O.E.D., (and is with Anglo-Saxon spelling): “a 1100 Ags. Voc. in Wr.-Wülcker 311 Fidicen, fidelere”. The first use cited there with modern spelling is: “1721: BOLINGBROKE in Swift’s Lett. (1766) II.20. As fiddlers flourish carelessly, before they play a fine air.”

[162] Again, 1659; SOMNER has the first entry, with the instrument defined as “a crowd. item, pandura. a viole.” A pandura is defined by 1901: O.E.D. as a “stringed instrument of the cither type”; those of this type (lute, cythern, later banjo, mandoline) are played with the fingers, with or without a plectrum, and not with a bow. The first dated use is again found in 1901: O.E.D., much earlier in Anglo-Saxon (“c 1205 LAY. 7002 of harpe of Salterium of fidele and of corium”) than in Standard English: “1589 Pappe w. Hatchet Eiijb, I must tune my fiddle and fetch some more rozen.” See fn. (364) below.

[163] The verb form was first recognised in 1689: Anon; Later, 1735: DYCHE and PARDON qualify the simple definition by adding “to play ordinarily or indifferently”. Later, again 1901: O.E.D. adds “now only in familiar or contemptous use”, i.e. as applied to professional violinists. 1965; FOWLER claims that it is only the verb form which has suffered with perjorative decline (of which more below), the noun having in some uses escaped the contemptuous taint: “So a violinist will speak of his instrument as a fiddle, but not of his playing as fiddling or of himself of a fiddler.” As a first attestation, 1901: O.E.D. again gives an Anglo-Saxonism: “1377 LANGL. P.PL.B. XIII 231 For I can neither tabre ne trompe... ne fythelen at festes, ne harpen;” with the first given there in the modern spelling at 1836.

[164] The first citation date here is in 1735; JOHNSON. As a first attestation, 1901: O.E.D. gives (minus the two crucial digits): “14. Nom. Ms.Reg. 17 Wr.-Wülcker 693 hic arculus, fydylstyk”; and in modern spelling, “1653 WALTON Angler 106, I lent you indeed my fiddle, but not my fiddlestick”.

[165] 1901: O.E.D. gives the Old English, “c1460 Emare 390 Bothe Harpe and Fydylling”; and the conventionally spelt, “a 1680 BUTLER Rem. (1739) I.7. Th’ Arcadians... whom nothing in the World could bring to civil Life, but fiddling.”

[166] First cited by 1889; CASSELL. 1901: O.E.D. gives “1647 WARD Simp. Cobler 27 To spend their lives in making fiddle-cases for futulous womens phansies”; or alternatively, later, and in modern spelling, “1837 LOCKHART Scott (1839) V.iii.71 Half a dozen tall footmen each bearing a fiddle case.”

[167] A permutation (instrument for agents) in Stern’s terms, this use is first cited by 1901: O.E.D., and in the context, “1676 MARVELL Mr. Smirke 71 Envy began to dance among the Bishops first, the good Constantine brought them the Fiddles.”

[168] Again a permutation, and again 1901: O.E.D., where the first attestation given is “1773: BRYDONE Sicily; (1809) 7 Barbella, the sweetest fiddle in Italy, leads our little band.”

[169] First entered in 1820: JODRELL; 1901: O.E.D. gives as a first attestation “a 1680 BUTLER Rem. 1759 II.181 A good Fiddle-Maker.”

[170] First cited in 1735: JOHNSON; first attested in 1901: O.E.D. as follows: “1728 YOUNG Love Fame iii, (1757) 108 Fix’d is the fate of whores, and fiddle-strings”.

[171] First cited in 1882; ANNANDALE. 1901: O.E.D. again provides the first attestation, “1827 W. HERSEE in Gentl.Mag. Dec. 484 Thine elbow instinctively moving to the fiddle-bow even after sleep had settled upon they weary eyelids.”

[172] First cited in 1900: WRIGHT, who gives this context: “Fif. Pipe and Fiddle, That garr’d resound maist a’ the widdle, Skrieghin’, and screedin’ fiddle-diddle, TENNANT. Papistry (1827). “Thus (1963, p. 60) adds, “diddle-diddle (O.E.D. 1523) Used to denote the sound of the fiddle...

[173] Again from 1900:WRIGHT, who gives (dial) “w.Yks. A fiddle fayther withaght strings, Yksman. Comic Ann. (1878) 31”.

[174] Quoted in Aydelotte, 1913, p. 48. For alternative discussion of the Elizabethan Underworld of which early minstrels were fringe members (although Aydelotte’s text is superior), see also: Salgado, 1972, and 1977; Judges, 1930; Beier, 1974 and 1976; Pound, 1976; and Slack, 1974.

[175] Defined by 1956: GRANT and MURISON; who give as a first attestation, “Abd. 1891 Bon-Accord (14 March) 18: A young masher is up to the neck in despair at not getting an invitation in time to allow him to attend the ceremony. Fiddler’s biddin’s are very uncommon on the Hillock.”

[176] Again by 1956: GRANT and MURISON; who give, “Sc. 1847 R. Chambers Pop.Rhymes 222: I dinna wish to hear piper’s news and fiddler’s tales.”

[177] First cited in 1894: BREWER. 1900: WRIGHT contains the following use in context, “Slg. I hear ane crying, ‘Fiddler’s News!’ Fiddler’s! or piper’s if ye choose! TOWERS Poems (1885) 69”.

[178] 1972: PARTRIDGE limits this use to ‘C16 - early 17’; and 1901: O.E.D. provides what is clearly a use in similar yet transferred context, “1597 1st pt. Return fr. Parnass. I, I, 380 He... gave me fiddler’s wages, and dismiste me.”

[179] First cited in 1848: HALLIWELL. 1972: PARTRIDGE limits the use to the period, ‘coll: ca 1780-1850’, but 1901: O.E.D. has discovered the following earlier use, “1608 MARKHAM Dumb Knight III, let the world know you have had more than fiddler’s fare, for you have meat, money and cloth.”

[180] First cited in 1690: B.E. 1972: PARTRIDGE considers that its currency extended from “ca 1660-1750”.

[181] The first citation is in 1785: GROSE, where the following definition is given: “all sixpences, sixpence being the usual sum paid by each couple for musick at country wakes and hops.” As an alternative 1894: BREWER instead says “a silver penny. The fee given is a fiddler at a wake by each dancer.” 1900: WRIGHT is quite specific: “Elderly persons restrict it to sixpences, whilst those who are younger make it include all silver coins from sixpence downward. My own belief is that it originated, at least in East Cornwall, in the fact that a sixpence was the time-honoured coin and amount for a party of dancers to give a fiddler for playing a three-handed or four-handed reel at village fairs.”

[182] This is a permutation (agent for reward). This meaning is normally attributed to 1859: HOTTEN, where one meaning of FIDDLE is “or FADGE, or farthing”. Although 1949: PARTRIDGE doubts this sense (“it is almost certainly erroneous”); 1901: O.E.D. is convinced, and gives, under FADGE, “slang. A farthing. 1789. G. PARKER Life’s Painter. XV 161.” The later expression FINE AS A FARTHING FIDDLE (see fn (274) below) gives added support to this sense.

[183] 1972: PARTRIDGE claims the first form was operative until 1853, and 1901: O.E.D. adds. “1846 Swell’s Night Guide 119/1 Fiddler, a sixpence.” 1972: PARTRIDGE dates the use of FIDDLE for sixpence as “from ca 1850”.

[184] This first appears in 1866: LATHAM, where the expression is defined as “common measure for the degree of intoxication”. Here, two undated attestations are also given: “O the musicians! I prithee, Master Edmond, call ‘em in, and liquor ‘em a little - that I will, sweet captain father-in-law, and make each of them as drunk as a common fiddler. Puritan, act. v. (Ord MS).” And from Swift:

“My passion is as mustard strong,

I still all sober sad,

Drunk as a fiddler all day long,

Or like a March hare mad.”

[185] First cited in 1900: WRIGHT. 1972: PARTRIDGE adds “lower-class coll: Mid-C.19-20”.

[186] First cited in 1956: GRANT and MURISON; who add, “edb. 1864 W. Fergusson Poems 20: An’ she was dancin’ fiddler-fou.”

[187] Only cited in 1942: BERRY and VAN DEN BARK. The rather extraordinary connection with FUDDLE is explored in fn. (334) below.

[188] Aydelotte op.cit. pp. 43-4. The Stubbes tract dates from the early seventeenth century, although Aydelotte gives no precise date.

[189] First cited in 1891: FARMER and HENLEY, and as “(common)”. 1901: O.E.D. adds this first attestation, “1632 CHAPMAN and SHIRLEY Ball II, iii, Fiddling ladies, yon molecatcher.”

[190] The suggestion comes from 1972: PARTRIDGE, who says of strum’: “To have intercourse (with a woman: low: from ca 1780; ob. semantically, to play a rough tune (on her)...”. ‘Strum’ has a connection with stringed musical instruments, of course; but not those played with a bow.

[191] First cited in 1891: FARMER and HENLEY, this use is a permutation (sexual organ for agent). 1956: GRANT and MURISON offer the rather bemusing first attestation: “Edb. 1817 C.L. Ramsay MS. Poems 94: Aiblins jumping around their fiddle, Biting whaur folk darena middle.”

[192] Again first cited in 1891: FARMER and HENLEY, although no dictionary provides a locational quotation. 1972: PARTRIDGE claims that use in this sense for FIDDLESTICK dates ‘C19-20, ob’; and for FIDDLE-BOW, ‘from ca 1830; ob’.

[193] First mentioned by 1848: HALLIWELL; 1901: O.E.D. quotes “c.1700 B.E. Dict. Cant. Crew, Welsh Fiddle, the itch”. 1972: PARTRIDGE claims this use dates “late C.17-early 19”.

[194] 1882: ANNANDALE defines “Scotch Fiddle, the itch, so called from the action of the arm in scratching”. 1894: BREWER adds, “The Scotch Fiddle or Caledonian Cremona. The itch. As fiddlers scratch with a bow the strings of a fiddle, so persons suffering from skin irritation keep scratching the part irritated.” 1972: PARTRIDGE suggests an earlier use in this sense, dated “Coll. 1675”; yet 1901: O.E.D. has not discovered a first attestation earlier than “1826 J. RANDOLPH Let, 20 Feb. in Life J. Quincy, I have not catched the literary “Scotch fiddle’.” The latter is, however, a second transfer and would thus occur later than the first.

[195] See: Morris, 1978, p. 203.

[196] Given in 1949: PARTRIDGE who says “cf. the Standard English of a bad violinist’s sawing away”. He quotes, “‘The argonsins made regular rounds, to assure themselves that no one was engaged in fiddling (sawing their fetters),’ Wm. Magiun, Memoirs of Vidoq, I, 1928”.

[197] First given in 1891: FARMER and HENLEY. 1956: GRANT and MURISON offer the following first attestation, “sc. 1821 D. Haggert Life 31: I... remained there a day, during which I was occupied in obtaining a fiddlestick for Barney [who was in prison]”; cf. fn. (196) supra. 1949: PARTRIDGE adds, “vague resemblance in shape”; this seems to be one of Partridge’s vaguely hopeful speculations, and no authority for the remark is cited.

[198] This possibility is enabled by an interesting, and possibly over-lapping definition given in 1948: MENCKEN for FIDDLESTICK as “Swedish fiddle, briar or misery whip. A crosscut saw”. For 1859: HOTTEN’s entry, 1949: PARTRIDGE adds another one of his speculative reasons, thus “perhaps because one can ‘tune up’ a person with a whip”. Yet see fn. (250) below. Of 1948: MENCKEN’s entry; 1941: WEBSTER defines a “briar” as ‘a crosscut saw’. However, crosscut saws do have spring-set teeth: a lumbering term for teeth set alternatively left and right, as in a crosscut saw. ‘Whip’, itself derives from the Du. wippen (ME whippen), ‘to move up and down’, and thus its semantic transfer to FIDDLE is not iconically unlikely. Whip, independently and as a head word, has a hugh semantic and cultural spread, of which two uses in particular have some possible bearing on the semantic development of FIDDLE. Firstly, a ‘whipstitch’ is defined in 1941: WEBSTER as an ‘overcast stitch’, see fn. (206) below. Secondly, and perhaps much more importantly, 1941: WEBSTER says of ‘whipsaw’: “To saw with a whipsaw; hence, to defeat in, or cause to lose, two different bets at the same turn or in one play as at faro; hence, to worst in two ways at once; esp. in speculation, to cause to buy high and sell low, or vice versa;” see fn. (322) below.

[199] This use is first noticed in 1891: FARMER and HENLEY. The first quotation is from 1941: WEBSTER; the second from 1925: HOTTEN, where it is to be found under the word FIBBING: which may indicate a quite different etymology for this use. Alternatively, see fn. (275) below.

[200] Again, given first in 1891: FARMER and HENLEY. Here, cf. fn. (211) below.

[201] Given in 1900: WRIGHT; who cites, “a.Yks. What’s ta fiddlejiging that way for, frame then (W.H.).”

[202] Supplied only in 1944: WENTWORTH, who quotes, “1941. Suddenly he got fiddle-footed again and wary as a creased buck. C. Farrell ‘Fiddle-footed’.”

[203] 1900: WRIGHT defines this expression as, “going in and out; crooked”; and offers as an example of its use,” W. Yks. chs. Any very crooked job or thing is said to be ‘like a fiddler’s elbow’, Sheaf, I, 83.”

[204] 1956: GRANT and MURISON describe MY FATHER’S FIDDLE with the following quitation, “Mry., Buff. 1894 A.W. Gomme Trad. Games I, 120: One boy says to another, “Div ye ken about my father’s fiddle?” On replying that he does not, the questioner takes hold of the other’s right hand with his left, and stretches out the arm. With his right hand he touches the arm gently above the elbow and says, “My father had a fiddle, an’ he brook it here, and’ he brook it here” (touching it below the elbow), “an’ he brook it throu’ the middle”, and comes down with a sharp stroke on the elbow joint.”

[205] Given only in 1972: PARTRIDGE.

[206] Cf. fn. (198) supra. 1941: WEBSTER gives the following entry for this sense of FIDDLING, “Bookbinding. The process of sewing book sections together by hand with cross-stitch or overcast stitch from one section or group of leaves to the next, alternating.” An alternative interpretation of this transfer is that the completed stitch has a figure-of-eight shape, and thus resembles the violin. FIDDLE-BACK wood is only given in 1901: O.E.D.

[207] A FIDDLE is given in 1956: GRANT and MURISON as, “hand-machine for sowing grain, worked by drawing a rod to and fro over a slotted opening in the seed-container with a motion similar to that of a violin bow.” FIDDLESTICK in this use is only found in 1941: WEBSTER, where it defined as “a stick by which a seeding machine is operated.”

[208] The plant is Scrophularia Aquatica. It is called FIDDLE-WOOD in 1989: CASSELL; and FIDDLE-STICKS in 1900: WRIGHT.

[209] 1901: O.E.D. offers the following first attestation, “a 1672 WOOD life (O.H.S.) I. 189 Like County fiddlers [to] scrape for our livings”; yet 1889: WHITNEY defines the use rather mysteriously (yet see fn. (210) below) as “to scrape, as one stretched string upon another.”

[210] This use first cited in 1899: FUNK. 1901: O.E.D. includes the following quotation, “1883 GILL in Encyd. Brit. (ed. 9) XVI 244 s.r. Micrometer, each movable webb must pass the other without coming into contact with it or the fixed wire and without rubbing on any part of the brasswork. Should either fault occur (technically called ‘fiddling’) it is fatal to accurate measurement.”

[211] First dictionary citation is in 1859: WORCESTER. The crab is the Gelasimus Vocans although 1899: FUNK calls it the Gelasimus Pugilator (cf. fn. (200) above). It is a species only found in the salt marshes along the Atlantic coast of the USA. 1901: O.E.D. says, “1714 J. LAWSON Carolina 162, Fidlars are a sort of small Crabs, that lie in Holes in the Marshes.”

[212] First cited in 1889: WHITNEY. 1956: GRANT and MURISON quote, “The sandpiper, Tringa Hypoleucos (Sc. 1842 W. Margillivray Brit. Ornith. II. 97), “from the manner in which it continually vibrates its body, as if on a pivot.”

[213] First cited in 1891: FARMER and HENLEY, who quote, “1595: SHAKESPEARE, Romeo and Juliet, iii., I. Here’s my FIDDLESTOCK: Here’s that shall make you dance”. The sense is not unequivocal from that quotation, but 1894: BREWER says, “In the Great Germany epic called The Nibelungen-Lied, this word is used six or eight times for a broadsword. ‘His fiddlestick he grasped, ‘twas massy, broad, and long. As sharp as any razor.’ Stanza 1,841. ‘My fiddlestick’s no feather; on whom I let it fall, If he has friends that love him, ‘twill set them weeping all.’ Stanza 1,880. ‘His fiddlestick, sharp-cutting, can hardest steel divide, And at a stroke can shiver the morion’s beamy pride.’ Stanza 2,078.”

[214] First cited in 1900: WRIGHT. 1972: O.E.D. adds, “1888 Lockwood’s Dict. Mech. Engin., Bow drill, a fiddle drill.”

[215] This FIDDLE is used in wood-carding, specifically “for smoothing the points of card-clothing and dislodging dirt from amongst the teeth,” 1889: WHITNEY.

[216] Only given by 1972: PARTRIDGE, who dates the use as “ca 1805-60”.

[217] 1901: O.E.D. cites as a first attestation, “c 1785 John Thompson’s Man 15 Foul-breeked, rep-shanked, fiddle-flanked.”

[218] First cited in 1844: OGILVIE. 1901: O.E.D. gives, “1819 REES cycl. XIV.s.v., Fiddle-shaped leaf.... is oblong, broad at the two extremities and contracted in the middle, like a fiddle or some sort of guitar.

[219] Again first cited in 1844: OGILVIE; WITH 1901: O.E.D. adding, “1829 LOUDON Encyl. Plants 4 Zingiber Panduratum, fiddle-lipped.”

[220] First cited in 1844: OGILVIE, with 1901: O.E.D adding, “1823 CRABB Technol. Dict., Fiddle-dock (Bot.), the Rumex pulcher of Linnaeus.”

[221] First cited in 1844: OGILVIE. This fish is the Squatina Vulgaris, or Squatina Angelus. 1978: WEBSTER adds, “so called from its body being shaped like a fiddle.”

[222] The first beetle, the FIDDLE-BEETLE, is not mentioned in the O.E.D., although 1978: WEBSTER extends the first citation of 1899: FUNK by adding, “a Japanese Beetle, damaster blaptiodes, having a fiddle-shaped body.” Of the FIDDLER-BEETLE, 1972: O.E.D. gives as first attestation, “1907 W.W. FROGGATT Austral. Insects 161 The Fiddler, Eupoecila australasiae,... is black and reddish brown, marked upon the thorax and elytra with green stripes.”

[223] According to 1972: O.E.D. FIDDLEBACK wood is that suitable for violin-construction because of its wavy grain. The following first attestation is there cited, “1908 P. MACQUOID Hist. Eng. Furnit. IV. ii. 62 Harewood or hairwood is the same cutting of sycamore as that used in the manufacture of violins, and consequently termed fiddleback”. The much earlier FIDDLEWOOD, first cited in 1820: JODRELL (where “Lee, On Botany, p. 273 and 331, ed. 1776” is quoted as an authority), is a completely false etymological link. 1889: CASSELL comments of this plant, the Citharexylon, “From the fact that the fr. fiddle has become completed into Eng. fiddle, has arisen the erroneous notion that the word of this genus is suitable for making violins. The error has been perpetrated also in the Latin name, which means harp-wood.” 1889: WHITNEY adds, “the E. Name (as the NL. generic name Citharexylum, which is translation of fiddlewood) existed before 1692, and appar. originated in Barbados or Jamaica. The wood was said at that time to be used in making fiddles. The notion that the name is a half-translation, half-perversion of F. bois fidèle, ‘stanch or faithful wood’, in allusion to its durability, finds record in Miller’s “Gardener’s Dict.” (1759) (where the “French” name is given as “fidelle wood”), but lacks evidence. The F. fidèle does not mean ‘stanch’ except as a synonym of faithful, a subjective term, not applicable to inert objects. Its orig. L. fidelis, faithful, etc., has, however, the objective sense stanch, strong, durable, etc.... The wood is heavy, hard, and strong, and is used in building.”

[224] First given in 1901: O.E.D. from, “1750 G. HUGHES Barbadoes 82 Fiddlers. This fly..... much resembles a cockroach.”

[225] Given in 1956: GRANT and MURISON, where it is defined, “The Crane-fly, daddy-long-legs (Ags.c.1890 per Abd.; Inv.1920 per Cai.). Comb. blind fiddler, the water-strider, Hygrotrechus conformis (Per. 1894 Trans. Per.Soc. Nat. Science 7).”

[226] Only found in 1941: WEBSTER, who says “The black-bellied tree duck (Dendrocygna Autumnalis) of Mexico and the extreme southern United States.”

[227] First found in 1899: FUNK. 1941: WEBSTER classifies it as, “any of several rays of the family Rhinobatidae, as Trygonorrhina fasciata of Australia.

[228] 1901: O.E.D. defines it as from, “1867 SMYTH Sailor’s Word-BK., Fiddle-fish, a name of the king-crab (Limulus polyphemus).”

[229] From 1900: WRIGHT. The wild carrot, or Daucus Carota.

[230] From 1900: WRIGHT. The marsh marigold, or Caltha Palustris.

[231] From 1900: WRIGHT. Murrain grass, or Scrophularia nodosa.

[232] From 1889: CASSELL. The grass, Epilobrium hirsutum.

[233] From 1900: WRIGHT. The yellow rattle, or Rhinanthus Crista-galla.

[234] In 1901: O.E.D. where it is quoted, “1882 J. HARDY in Proc. Berw. Nat. Club IX. 563 Young fern frouds - ‘fiddle-heads’, as they are named - are greedily devoured as substitutes for green vegetables.”

[235] First cited in 1900: WRIGHT. 1901: O.E.D. gives this first attestation, “1785 John Thompson’s Man (1829) 17 Fiddle faced, wagtailed fellows.”

[236] From 1956: GRANT and MURISON, who quote, “Dumf. 1822 Scots Mag. (Sept.) 306: Tibby Affleck’s lucken brows, whaap-nose fiddle-chin, and projecting teeth, solemnly declared that Mungo Baxter was no judge of beuty.”

[237] The definition is from 1956: GRANT and MURISON. It is first cited in 1900: WRIGHT (as “a term of contempt”), where the following quotation is also given, “Bwk. Ill-canker’t fiddle-doup, leaving any her trail, and slubbery o’ filthy stuff, like a black snail, HENDERSON, Pop. Rhymes (1856) 98.”

[238] First cited in 1891: FARMER and HENLEY, where the following quotation is given (1901: O.E.D. incidentally, gives 1823 for a shortened version of the same extract), “1832 W.T. MONCRIEFF, Tom and Jerry, Act II., Sc. 2. There’s one! go it, Jerry! - Come, Green. Log. Aye, come, Jerry, there’s the Charlies’ FIDDLES going. Jerry. Charlies’ FIDDLES? - I’m not fly, Doctor. Log. Rattles, Jerry, Rattles! You’re fly now, I see. Come along, Tom! Go it Jerry!” Such a rattle had a partially squared spindle which rotated against one or more strips of wood, producing a clicking sound. When the police were overhauled in the nineteenth centry, whistles replaced rattles (which were subsequently purchased by football fans who still use them to indicate their excitement on British football stadium terraces). The wooden frame housing the strips of wood which rotate against the spindle is fashionably square nowadays. Yet, they used to have a panduriform shape (see eg exhibit HH 577/10, Huntly House Museum, Edinburgh).

[239] But only in 1836: RICHARDSON, wherein the full explanation is as follows: “The Lat. fidicula and Ger. Fidel are both also applied to an instrument (ex nervis) of torture. Irhe thinks that this instrument and the name of it were both of northern origin; and suggests the Goth. and Island. word Fidra, also written Fidla, and Fitla, as the parent root.” It is possible that this is a reference to a type of humiliation collar, versions of which were used in Germany at one time to shame and punish various petty offenders. Indeed, the collection of torture instruments, at one time held in the Royal Castle of Nuremberg, but wholly purchased by the Earl of Shrewsbury and Talbot in 1890, containing at least one such collar which was a perfect imitation violin, save that it possessed not strings, and had instread three holes - one for the head, and the other two for the offender’s wrists. (The collection was exhibited in Britain and America, before being, eventually, broken up and sold. I quote from the 1893 catalogue of that exhibition, some items of which, including the fiddle-shaped humiliation collar referred to above, are illustrated in the catalogue produced by Peter Dale Ltd. of London in 1967, who disposed of some of the items.) See also fn. (364) below.

[240] First cited in 1882: ANNANDALE, together with the definition “so called from its resemblance to a fiddle, being made of small cords passed through wooden bridges and hauled very taut.” 1901: O.E.D. adds this apparent first mention, “1865 Daily Tel. 21 Aug. 5/2. A heavy sea, which... caused the production of ‘fiddles’ on the saloon tables at lunch time.”

[241] First cited in 1889: CASSELL; 1901: O.E.D. adds, “1874 KNIGHT Dict. Mech., Fiddle... a wooden bar about 11 feet long, attached by ropes at its ends to the traces of a horse, and used to drag loose straw or hay on the ground, [etc].”

[242] Only cited in 1899: FUNK; and there described as, “a piece of wood five or six inches long, having a hole at each end and used for keeping guy-ropes taught, as in a tent or tennis net.”

[243] Only cited in 1900: WRIGHT; where the definition is accompanied by, “s.w.Lin. The ‘pastries’ which children bring to school for their dinner. ‘Have you got your fiddle?’ ‘Mother, do make me a fiddle today.’”

[244] Cited in 1948: MENCKEN, who quotes the, “New York Evening Journal, Sept. 29, 1936. ‘MOVING WORDS... the lingo of the furniture pushers.....: Fiddle - a grand piano.”

[245] Only cited in 1941: WEBSTER.

[246] First cited in 1859: WORCESTER; and noticed in 1882: ANNANDALE to also go under the name, “long-tackle block”. 1901: O.E.D. gives this first attestation, and simultaneous definition, “1858 SIMMONDS Dict. Trade, Fiddle-block, a block with two sheaves, one over the other; the lower one smaller than the other.”

[247] 1901: O.E.D., who go on to quote, “1890 Longm. Mag. Jan 312. A tall, old chppendale armchair, with a quaintly-carved ‘fiddle’-back.”

[248] This appears to be ecclesiastical slang; indeed it is dated in 1972: PARTRIDGE as “coll. late C19-20”. It is first found in 1941: WEBSTER where it is distinguished from the more usual Gothic Chasuble, and defined as “the modern form, the fiddleback Chasuble, has a broad backpiece ornamented with orphreys and designs, and a narrower frontpiece similarly adorned.” 1972: O.E.D. gives this earlier use in context, “1899 P. DEARMER Parson’s Handbk.iii.91. There is no need in an English vestment for the pieces of ribbon without which it seems impossible to keep a ‘fiddle-back’ in position.

[249] Only cited in 1972: O.E.D., followed by, “1839 V.G. CHILDE Dawn Europ Civilisation (ed.3) iv.51 The cists..... contain several skeletons together with vases and ‘fiddle idols’.”

[250] From 1941: WEBSTER. A term restricted to participants in shoe manufacture.

[251] This is only given any authority in 1690: B.E., where no further explanation is proffered. Partridge has a couple of hopeful stabs at an explanation. One is in 1937: PARTRIDGE where he adds, “Cf. face the music”; the other in 1972: PARTRIDGE where that is exchanged for, “+[obsolete] by 1860, with the threat it imports, one plays a pretty tune (on, eg a debtor).” See the reference to Burford in fn. 364, below.

[252] First cited in 1844: OGILVIE. 1901: O.E.D. references “1799 Naval Chron. I., App. State of Navy, Neptune, the fiddle-head.. had.. a bad effect.”

[253] First cited in 1891: FARMER and HENLEY. 1972: PARTRIDGE adds “from ca 1840”; and 1901: O.E.D. quotes, “1883 G. STABLES Our Friend the Dog vii, 60 Fiddle-headed, a long, gaunt, wolfish head, like what one sees in some mastiffs.” See also, fn. (311) below.

[254] First cited in 1889: CASSELL. Normally applied to cutlery, 1901: O.E.D. adds, “1840 HOOD Kilmansegg, First Step iii, In short a kind of fork that is fiddle-headed.”

[255] First mentioned in 1883: SMITH. 1900: WRIGHT adds that the phrase was “used as an expletive”; and 1925: HOTTEN comments, “It is a place of fiddling, dancing, rum and tobacco, and is undoubtedly the ‘land of cocaigne’, mentioned in medieval manuscrips.” 1972: PARTRIDGE dates it “from ca 1790”; and 1901: O.E.D. cites a later and rather more generalised use from “1825 Sporting Mag. XVI, 404. My grannan... used to tell me that animals, when they departed this life, were destined to be fixed in Fidler’s Green.”

[256] 1901: O.E.D. defines the FIDDLEY as “the iron framework round the deck opening that leads to the stoke-hole of a steamer; normally covered by a grating of iron bars; the space below this,” and dates the use from 1881. 1925: HOTTEN adds, “on board some ocean steamers the FIDDLER is the capstan-house, the only place on board where passengers are permitted to smoke. The term FIDDLER is easily traceable to the fact that, while seamen are working on the capstan-bars, a man sometimes plays on the fiddle to cheer them at their toil.”

[257] The ‘instrument’ consisted of a “long crooked nail” (1891: FARMER and HENLEY) which convicts, on board transportation vessels en route for the Australian penal settlements, used to pick reusuable oakum from old, tarred naval ropes, (see, for example, the description in Roberts, 1971, p. 61). Yet this word FIDDLE most probably comes from the quite different word FID. A FID is, according to 1901: O.E.D., “a conical pin of hard wood from 9 to 30 in. long, used to open the strands of a rope in splicing.” Splicing, of course, is another sort of whipping (of a rope), and this different derivation may account for 1859: HOTTEN entry ‘a whip’ (cf. fn. (198) supra). However, as demonstrated in the following quotation from 1891: FARMER and HENLEY, this distinct root is unacknowledged, and this use of FIDDLE is clearly homonymous: “1877 Five Year’s Penal Servitude, Ch.i., p. 44. The taskmaster warder came in, bringing with him the FIDDLE on which I was to play a tune called ‘Four pounds of oakum a day’. It consisted of nothing else but a piece of rope and a long crooked nail.”

[258] First cited in 1889: CASSELL, where it is defined as, “a plain pattern formerly much in vogue in the manufacture of plate for table use, but which has of late given way to others of more ornate character.” 1901: O.E.D. gives as a first attestation, “1881 GREENER Gun The value of a stock is greatly enhanced by a species of cross patterns, or ‘fiddle’.”

[259] First given in 1891: FARMER and HENLEY; although 1972: PARTRIDGE adds, “dial. and coll: ca 1850-1900”. 1901: O.E.D. attests, “1885 W. WESTALL Larry Lohengrin I.v., White-chokered, strait-laced, and fiddle-faced.”

[260] Only cited in 1900: WRIGHT.

[261] Cited in 1956: GRANT and MURISON, and defined as, “with deep, bulging pockets”. They quote, “Dmf. 1822 Scots Mag. (may) 634: I ken by his fiddler-pouched coat, and the neuk o’ his mither’s silk napkin fluttering atween the tails o’t.”

[262] Cited in 1901: O.E.D., where they are defined as “boots as big as a fiddle-case.” The following quotation is given, “1852 R.S. SURTREES Sponge’s Sp.Tour lxvi.536 Tweed trousers thrust into fiddle-case boots.”

[263] Only given in 1900: WRIGHT.

[264] Cited in 1901: O.E.D.; where the quotation, “1596 SHAKS. I Hen.IV, II, iv.535. The Devill rides upon a Fiddle-sticke,” is provided.

[265] From 1891: FARMER and HENLEY, defined as “to abandon an undertaking.” 1972: PARTRIDGE dates this expression, “coll. from ca 1870”; but 1972: O.E.D. has traced the earlier “1833 S. SMITH Life and Writings J. Downing 90 (Weingarten), You’ll have to hang up your fiddle till another year.”

[266] First cited in 1900: WRIGHT, and there meaning “to be good company abroad but bad company at home”. 1972: PARTRIDGE dates this expression, “coll C.19-20”; and 1972: O.E.D. offers, “1836 W. DUNLAP Mem. Water Drinker II.6 He does not hang his fiddle up behind the street door when he comes home.”

[267] Again first cited in 1900: WRIGHT where it is defined as “to be in bad temper,” and the quotation, “n.Lin. He’s hing’d his fiddle up o’ th’ door-sneck”. 1972: PARTRIDGE dates the expression, “C18-20”.

[268] Meaning, 1901: O.E.D., “to be irresistably charming”, a use which 1972: PARTRIDGE dates as “coll. from ca 1660”. 1901: O.E.D. gives this first attestation, “1762 SMOLLETT Sir L. Greaves (1780) I viii. 84 Your honour’s face is made of a fiddle; every one that looks on you loves you.”

[269] From 1956: GRANT and MURISON, where the expression is defined as, “of a facial expression, long, sour(ly), disdainful(ly).” They locate the French version earlier, from, “sc. 1721 J. Kelly, Proverbs, 173: He look’d to me like the far end of a French Fiddle;” later becoming, “Sc. 1847 R. Chambers Popl. Rhymes 224: ‘The deil’s in the daft jad,’ quo’ the fairy looking like the far-end o’ a fiddle”.

[270] 1901: O.E.D. merely defines as, “to look dismal”, with 1972: PARTRIDGE adding, “coll. C.18-20”.

[271] ‘Fret’ v. means to worry; ‘Fret’n means trellis-work (such as that on a musical instrument). The expression is given in 1901: O.E.D., where “1835 MRS. CARLYLE Lett. I, 43, I do but... fret myself to fiddlesttrings”, is quoted.

[272] The expression is first cited in 1866: LATHAM, there meaning, “thoroughly wearied and worn out”. 1889: CASSELL gives FIDDLE v. as “to worry”, and quotes, “‘The devil fiddle them! I am glad they’re going.’ Shakesp. Henry VIII., I.3.” This play was published in 1623.

[273] From 1956: GRANT and MURISON, who quote, “abd. 1880 G. Webster Crim. Officer 42: Hooever that makesna; he had made a fine fiddle o’ ‘t, an’ aifter bidein’ awa’a file hed gart the fiscal believe ‘t they war in London an’ wud never be gotten.”

[274] FINE AS A FARTHING FIDDLE is first cited in 1972: O.E.D. The following quotation is attested, “1603 DEKKER tr. La Sale’s Batchelar Banquet iii. Then comes downe mistresse Nurse as fine as a farthing fiddle, in her petticoats and kertle,” (cf. fn. (182) supra). FINE AS A FIDDLE is cited earlier in 1889: WHITNEY; and 1972: O.E.D. quotes, “1616 W. HAUGHTON English-Men for my Money sig. K3v, This is excellent, this is as fine as a Fiddle.” 1972: PARTRIDGE adds, “coll. since ca 1590”.

[275] 1972: O.E.D. and 1972: PARTRIDGE treat this as synonymous with FINE AS A FIDDLE. 1945: RADFORD offers a quite different (and less probable) version; “the usual origin given is fit as a fiddle tuned to concert pitch. We have never regarded this as a good origin, since a fiddle is, of itself, an inanimate object. In old pugilistic days the name Fiddler, was given to a boxer who depended more on his activity than upon his strength to win. Thus, to wear down his opponent, he had to be exceptionally fit. Again, the fiddle who usually supplied the only music at Irish dances, played increasingly from dusk till dawn - a feat of endurance which could only come from fitness. The author suggests that the original phrase was ‘fit as a fiddler’.”

[276] First cited in 1866: LATHAM, where the expression is defined as to “act as head man in any undertaking, like the leader of a band in music.” 1901: O.E.D. provides this first attestation, “1778 Learning at Loss II. 79 Our Friends.... returned, with Jack Solecisim the first fiddle as usual.”

[277] First cited in 1882: ANNANDALE. 1891: FARMER and HENLEY add “among tailors... and unpleasant task;” with 1972: O.E.D. dating the earliest known occurrence as, “1809 B.H. MALKIN tr. Lesage’s Gil Blas. (1866) x.xi.378, I am quite at your service to play second fiddle in all your laudable enterprises.”

[278] Only in 1972: O.E.D., where the following use is offered, “1866 ‘MARK TWAIN’ Lett. Sandwich Islands 9 America... is out in the cold now, and does not even play third fiddle to this European element.”

[279] The definition and first mention from 1885: LONGMUIR. 1900: WRIGHT offers this use, “Abd. And Dick thought that now he had found a fiddle, Wha never brak his skins upon the cradle, Ross Helenore (1768) 139, ed. 1812.”

[280] The definition and first use from 1900: WRIGHT. 1956: GRANT and MURISON offer, “Abd. 1824 G. Smith Douglas 39: I’m as light’s gif I had fun’ a fiddle.”

[281] 1972: O.E.D. cites 1859: HOTTEN in this sense. No earlier date is given, but a quote from 1865 refers to the use as “old”.

[282] 1901: O.E.D. cites a number of other uses as well as that for ‘nonsense’, to which it ascribes a Turkish origin (1859: HOTTEN had suggested Persian). Here, the universalisation of the term is dated after 1834, although it may well have been considerably earlier; particularly given the presence of both Turks and Egyptians (gypsies) on the Elizabethan highways as documented, eg in Salgado, 1977.

[283] First recorded in 1889: CASSELL; with 1891: FARMER and HENLEY quoting, “1600 NASHE, Summer’s Last Will, in wks. (Grossart) VI., 130. A FIDDLESTICKE! ne’re tell me I am full of words.”

[284] The plural form is more common, and is cited earlier, by 1860: HOTTEN. 1866: LATHAM adds, “(colloquial and contemptous)”; and 1882: SMYTHE PALMER suggests that the word is a “corruption of the Italian expletive Fediddio! (‘God’s Faith!)”, but see fn. (293) below. 1894: BREWER offers the rather hopeful origin of this sense, “a fiddlestick is the instrument used in fiddling, hence the fiddlestick is even less than the fiddle.” 1901: O.E.D. dates the first use as, “1701: FARQUHAR Sir H. Wildair IV, ii, Golden pleasures! golden fiddlesticks!”

[285] Cited first in 1857: WRIGHT; with 1972: PARTRIDGE adding, “late C.18-early 19”. 1901: O.E.D. cites nothing before, “1796 GROSE Dict. Vulg. Tongue (ed.3), Fiddlestick’s End, Nothing.”

[286] 1972: PARTRIDGE suggests, “coll. from ca 1800”; and 1901: O.E.D. offers this first use, “1807-8 W. IRVING Salmag (1824) 140 We do not care a fiddlestick.... for either public opinion or private ill-will.”

[287] Marchand, 1969, p. 397.

[288] 1793: LEMON suggests that FADDLE comes from L. Fatuus, Futilis, Fadem; 1826: THOMPSON alternatively from (German) Fadela; (Saxon) Feadaelan; from fa, little; and dela, to deal; [to play the fool]. 1877: MACKAY claims it is a reduplication of (Gaelic) Fadal (length, prolixity), fadalach (tedious, prolix), fadalachd (tediousness, prolixity); yet this is seriously doubted to Weekley, 1931. In this noun use, 1901: O.E.D. offers the use, “1671 SHADWELL Humorists v, Fiddle Faddle on your Travelling and University.”

[289] From 1836: RICHARDSON.

[290] First cited in 1783: LEMON; with 1836: SMART claiming that it is a contraction from FIDDLE-FADDLE. 1901: O.E.D. gives “1754 World No. 95 The youngest... is, in everything she does, an absolute fidfad.”

[291] Long lists of these are to be found in Thum (1963) and in 1866: WHEATLEY. Those meaning ‘nonsense’ (from 1866: WHEATLEY) are: FEEDLE-FADDLE, FIBLE-FABLE, FIGGLE-FAGGLE, FINGLE-FANGLE, FREELI-FRAILY; and (as a selection from the enormous list in Thun, 1963): DIDDLE-DADDLE, FRIBBLE-FRABBLE, DRIBBLE-DRABBLE, PIBBLE-PABBLE, TWIDDLE-TWADDLE, and BIDDLE-BADDLE. Marchand, 1969, p. 439 notices that reduplication (or, ablaut gemination) was grealy in favour during the sixteenth century, although decreased from 1650 onwards. He adds, (p. 431), that the very form of the construction contributes to its meaning: “The symbolism underlying ablaut variation is that of polarity which may assume various semantic aspects... [This] same basic concept may lead to the variant of ambivalence, double-faced character, implying the dubious or suprious value of the referent. FLIMFLAM, jimjam, trimtram, whimwham all have the originaly meaning of ‘trash, trifle’; the word knick-knack also belongs here. Many words have the basic meaning ‘idle talk’, as bibble-babble, CHIT-CHAT, fiddle-faddle, prittle-prattle, ribble-rabble.”

[292] First cited in 1901: O.E.D., there backed with this quotation from, “1695 CONGREVE Love for L. v.vi, Fore. Hussy, you shall have a Rod. Miss. A Fiddle of a Rod, I’ll have a husband.”

[293] First cited in 1857: WRIGHT, and defined as ‘Nonsense’. 1882: SMYTHE PALMER again suggests (see fn. (284) supra) that, “it seems likely that the interjection fiddle-de-dee! instead of being derived from the popular name of the violin, is a naturalised form of the Italian expletive Fediddio! (fede and Iddio) “God’s Faith!”; Yet 1889: WHITNEY doubts it. In an enterprising but speculative way, 1894: BREWER comments, “Fiddle-de-dee is meant to express the sound of a fiddle-string vocalised. Hence ‘sound signifying nothing’.” 1901: O.E.D. dates this interjection no earlier than, “a 1784 JOHNSON in Boswell’s Life (1848) Appndx. 837/1 All he [Johnson] said was, ‘Fiddle-de-dee, my dear’.”

[294] Only in 1844: OGILVIE.

[295] First cited in 1889: CASSELL, meaning ‘nonsensical’. 1901: O.E.D. quotes, “1697 VANBRUGH Relapse IV. I. 103 A Fiddlecome tale of a draggle-tailed girl.”

[296] First cited in 1889: WHITNEY. 1901: O.E.D. quotes, “1663 COWLEY Cutter of Coleman St. III, viii, They have their Simpathies and Fiddle-come faddles in their Brain.”

[297] First cited in 1735: JOHNSON. 1901: O.E.D. cites as a first use, “1577 fr. Bullinger’s Decades 102. This more than neding fiddle faddle smacks somewhat of ambition.”

[298] First cited in 1882: ANNANDALE. 1901: O.E.D. quotes, “1633 FORD Broken H., I, iii, Ye may as easily outrun acloud driven by the northern blast as fiddle faddle so.”

[299] 1901: O.E.D. Dates the sense of, “an idler, trifler”, from, “1602 BRETON Merry Wonders, Maid Marion in a Morrice-daunce would put her down for a Fiddle-faddle.”

[300] Not cited before 1859: WORCESTER; which entry 1901: O.E.D. quotes in support.

[301] For example, a FIDDLE-FYKE or a FIDDLE-MA-FYKE quoted in 1885: LONGMUIR; of which 1956: GRANT and MURISON comment, “‘A troublesome peculiarity of conduct’ (Per. 1825 Jam.).”

[302] 1735: JOHNSON defines in this sense as, “to trifle, to shift the hands often, and do nothing, like a fellow who plays upon a fiddle.” 1901: O.E.D. quotes, “1530 PALSAR. 549/1 Loke you fydell nat with your handes whan your maister speketh to you.”

[303] Frist cited in 1901: O.E.D. where it is defined as “transf., one to whose music others dance; hance, a mirth-maker, jester.” In support the following quotation is there provided, “1600 BRETON Pasquil’s Madcappe 64 Wks. (Grossart) 9. He may be a foole, and she a fiddle.”

[304] First cited in 1735: DYCHE and PARDON as a, “trifling, foolish or impertinent person”. 1901: O.E.D. provides, “1591 R. CECIL in Unton’s Corr. (Roxb.)197 This discourse growes by many fidlers in your cause.” 1948: MENCKEN refers to the Americanism, FIDDLE-A-DING as possessing the same sense; with 1972: O.E.D. now updating the descendants in this sense as “meddlesome or interfering person(s)”; as in the quote supplied there, “1952 A. GRIMBLE Pattern of Islands vii, 143 interfering with the customs of simple peoples... can end by leaving them bereft of their national will to live. The fiddler is a killer on a grand scale.”

[305] First cited in 1730: BAILEY as, “also doing or acting triflingly”, with 1859: HOTTEN later claiming that this sense only exists “among the middle classes”. 1901: O.E.D. provides this use dated, “1622 MASSINGER Virg. Mart. IV, I, Hell on your fiddling!”

[306] 1901: O.E.D. (where this sense of FIDDLE first appears) is unable to trace an example earlier than in “1874 BLACKIE Self-Crit. 89 The eternal whirl and fiddle of life so characteristic of our... neighbours across the Channel.”

[307] Again 1901: O.E.D., and from “1660 S. FISHER Rusticks Alarm Wks. (1679) 374 The fruit of their fidling minds.”

[308] 1901: O.E.D., where the following is quoted, “1652 SIR E. NICHOLAS in N. Papers (Camden) 301 Putting himself into every fidling business.” The sense of ‘trifle’ (small) and ‘trifle’ (move the hands) informed the much later noun FIDDLE, “an exasperating task or job” 1937: PARTRIDGE; and the current adjective, FIDDLY, a job, “requiring time or dexterity, pernickety,” given in 1972: O.E.D., and accompanied by, “1926 Black w. Mag. Sept. 403/1 A fiddly sort of way of translating into action the Political’s broad exhortation.”

[309] From 1901: O.E.D., where the following use is given, “1762 GOLDSM. Cit.W., xli, Heads... as empty as a fiddle-case.”

[310] From 1901: O.E.D., with this quotation, “1854 WHYTE MELVILLE Gen.Bounce v. (1855) 104 ‘You’ve broke it, you fiddle-headed brute.’

[311] Cited in 1901: O.E.D., as “a head as empty as a fiddle”, but the supporting quotation, “1887 W.F. ANSTEY in Macm. Mag. Feb. 262/2 He hasn’t two ideas in his great fiddle-head,” does not appear sufficiently distinct from the sense given in fn. (253) supra.

[312] Cited in 1901: O.E.D., with no quotation.

[313] First cited in 1889: WHITNEY, where the following quotation (dated by 1901: O.E.D. as 1628) is given in support, “What dost [thou] think I am, that thou shouldst fiddle so much upon my patience? Ford, Lover’s Melancholy, v.I.”

[314] 1901: O.E.D., who cite, “1667 H. MORE Div. Dial. II xiv (1713) 132 [They] fiddle away their time as idely as those that pill straws.”

[315] See Waldron, 1967, pp. 146-8; and fn. (76) supra.

[316] Ullmann, 1951a, p. 50.

[317] See Menner, 1945; both quotations from p. 75. Kroesch, 1926, p. 45, adds: “The possibilities of semantic change are, theoretically, limitless; but thanks to the workings of analogy, they are in reality decidedly limited, for just as the action of analogy in the phonetic form tends towards the unification of the grammatical system and the simplification of the mechanics of speech, so a similar tendency of group association of meanings through analogy makes for a simplification of the infinite number of possible semantic changes.”

[318] Kroesch, 1926, p. 36, adds: Here the meaning of any word may be arbitrarily attached to some sound element, most commonly a suffix, contained in the word, and this element then becomes the center of a congeneric group of words.”

[319] Marchand, 1969, pp. 404, 420-1. On p. 406, he adds: “The sound /P/ is emotionally expressive in piddle ‘trifle’ 1545. The word is probably a variant of fiddle which is recorded with the same sense in 1530. Ablaut variations are paddle (in the now obsolete sense ‘trifle’) and peddle ‘trifle, dally’ 1545.”

[320] FIDDLE retains most of the musical sense cluster (although 1901: O.E.D. gives as one meaning of TRIFLE, “A literary work, piece of music, etc., light or trivial in style; a slight or facetious composition, a bagatelle.” No first attestation date prior to 1579 is given for this sense however - the first apparently specifically for music rather than a literary work being at 1857 - thus, it is conceivable that this sense was borrowed from FIDDLE during the period of cross-fertilisation); and TRIFLE retains some of its own also: particularly the very specialised, recent and particularised uses, eg for stale cake doused with cheap sherry and immersed in custard, for a type of medium hard pewter, and so on.

[321] 1901: O.E.D.

[322] Defoe, 1703, p. 268, (emphasises, and initial capitalisation in original) - these emphases themselves pointing to the use as a “first attestation” of the sense, apart from the wealth of description which accompanies the use of the word. As Rudskoger, 1952, p. 475, comments: “by using different signs of punctuation, as note of exclamation or question marks, or by putting the word in italics, the producer may give a special sense to it.” Part of the Defoe article is cited as this verb use of FIDDLE in 1901: O.E.D. See, here, fn. (198) supra; and on “stock-jobbing” more generally, see Hall, 1935, pp. 67-69.

[323] 1901: O.E.D.

[324] See, Philipson, 1941, esp. pp. 241-4.

[325] 1901: O.E.D. Several sources are cited in support: none dating before 1692. One is of interest. It is, “a 1700 B.E. Dict.Cant.Crew, Stock-Jobbing, a sharp, cunning, cheating Trade of Buying and Selling Shares of Stock in East-India, Guinea and other Companies...”.

[326] 1891: FARMER and HENLEY carries the first mention of this amount. 1901: O.E.D. adds, “1825 C.M. WESTMACOTT Eng.Spy II, 138 To do business with me at a fiddle.”

[327] See, fn. (181) supra. A rather mathematically attractive alternative is to suggest a link between two fractions, one musical, one mathematical. 1735: JOHNSON claims that, “A fiddlestring, moistened with water, will sink a note in a little time, and consequently must be relaxed or lengthened one sixteenth”; 1901: O.E.D. cites and dates this as, “1733, ARBUTHNOT, Air, iii,§20.”

[328] Although TRIFLE has this sense of (1901: O.E.D.) “a small sum of money, or a sum treated as of no moment; a slight ‘consideration’, FIDDLE has applied to specific sums more frequently culminating, perhaps, in the more recent Australian rhyming slang FIDDLEY for £1 (on the intermediate rhyme of FIDDLEY-DID=QUID=£1), 1949: PARTRIDGE; see, 1972: O.E.D., “1941 BAKER Dict. Austral. Slang 28 Fiddley.” Another piece of Australian rhyming slang is also given in 1949: PARTRIDGE, of FIDDLE for suit of clothes (on the intermediate basis of FIDDLE and FLUTE=SUIT).

[329] First cited in 1891: FARMER and HENLEY. 1972: PARTRIDGE adds, “low coll. (-1851)”. Earlier in the same article, Farmer had said, “If I get anything cheap where I lodge, and have the money, and can sell it dear, that’s the chance”, Farmer, 1850, p. 5, Cf. fn. (325) supra.

[330] From Mayhew, 1862; Vol. I (1851), p. 424. 1949: PARTRIDGE cites this extract together with a definition of FIDDLE as to “humbug, wheedle.” 1901: O.E.D. gives as a meaning of “humbug”, to “cheat deceive”; and incidentally, gives “to humbug” as a meaning of to “bosh”! Also on cheating fortune-tellers, see Colquohoun, 1800, p. 128. Earlier in the same volume (Vol.I, p. 199) Mayhew had again used the word in the following, frequently quoted, sentence: “”a lad, that had been lucky ‘fiddling’” (holding horses or picking up money anyhow).” This is sometimes cited, by 1891: FARMER and HENLEY et seq., as showing that the word FIDDLE meant “(common) - To earn a livelihood by doing small jobs on the street.” Whilst this may be an attractive interpretation, at least insofar as it links up, in a secondarily transferred sense, to the previous verb uses: “to scrape” (a living), or “to scratch” (an existence); most quotations of it omit the original speaker’s quotation marks around the word ‘fiddling’, and neglect to indicate that the explanation in subsequent parentheses was provided by Mayhew and not by the speaker. Two further observations cast additional doubt on the usual translation. Firstly, Mayhew offers a different definition elsewhere (in my view, the more likely “humbug”) - the fact alone that more than one is given testifying to the novelty of the extention of this sense to that word. And, secondly, the speaker in question (a cake seller) uttered this sentence immediately after describing a practice alled “tossing”: the players of which toss coins on a speculative double-or-nothing basis - which seems considerably closer to the sense described at fn. (329) supra, than that usually given.

[331] From Mayhew; Vol. III (1862), p. 130. Note that the word is not hedged by quotation marks, nor followed by a bracketed explanation or definition.

[332] Peculations are embezzlements, originally and specifically for embezzlements by those in public office, and from the crown or state.

[333] Of all the dictionaries consulted, those having no entry for FIDDLE at all have already been listed at fn. (143) supra. Of the many that do have an entry, only the following few make any reference to theft, or related activities: 1860: HOTTEN; 1981: FARMER and HENLEY; 1897: BARRERE and LELLAND; 1899: FUNK; 1901: O.E.D.; 1925: PARTRIDGE; 1925: HOTTEN; 1931: IRWIN; 1937: PARTRIDGE; 1934: WESEEN; 1941: WEBSTER; 1942: BERRY and VAN DEN BARK; 1948: PARTRIDGE; 1949: PARTRIDGE; 1950: SCOTT; 1972: O.E.D.; and, 1972: PARTRIDGE. The first three are cant or slang dictionaries, but Hotten is particularly dubious and will be discussed below (see, fn. (365) below). Most dictionaries (regretably) cite 1860: HOTTEN as a source. Yet, more independently, 1891: FARMER and HENLEY offer for FIDDLE, “a sharper, sometimes OLD FIDDLE”, with 1937: PARTRIDGE adding the (now obsolete) phrase GET AT THE FIDDLE, meaning “to cheat”. 1972: PARTRIDGE reassuringly suggests “cheat” as a synonym for “sharper” “from coll. 1797”; with 1972: O.E.D. offering this example of non-low use (yet still in the sense of “cheating”) from, “1884 J. GREENWOOD Little Ragamuffins xxxii, 300 so sure as a boy of mine takes to fiddling, I’d manoeuvre him into quod before he sleeps that night.”

[334] There is, first of all, the connection with FIDDLE, provisionally explored in fn. (187) supra. Indeed, 1937: PARTRIDGE (although he is alone) gives “to drug (liquor)” a meaning for FIDDLE. He later, in 1949: PARTRIDGE refines the definition as, “to hocus (liquor); to drug”; with “hocus” being a back-clipping of the earlier reduplication “hocus-pocus”, (whence, hoax?) meaning literally, “to drug”; and figuratively, “to cheat”. In support (yet more, I suggest, of a specific use of a general sense, rather than of an ordinary use of a special one) 1949: PARTRIDGE quotes “1899 C. Rook, The Hooligan Nights, ‘“one of ‘em ‘e tasted ‘himself, so’s to show me it wasn’t fiddled, I s’pose’”; ibid., p. 179, ‘“if you come across Lizzie an’ she offered you a rose, he said, “an’ arst you to smell it, it wouldn’t be worf your while.” - “why not?” I asked. - “Fiddled”, said young Alf - “You mean--------” - “Drugged, your unnerstand”’;”. Starnes and Noyes 1946, pp. 253-4, indicate under their entry for FUDDLE, “Ger. dial. fuddeln to swindle”. This meaning may or may not have been transported. Further, FIDDLE-FUDDLE is an acknowledged ablant gemination, with Thun, 1963, p. 128, defining it as “hesitation, trifling... muddle, confuse”, as in, “she was intelligent and knew how to make a decision without fiddle-fuddle;” in 1901: O.E.D., another, and early, connection is established,” 1665 J. WEBB Stone-Henge (1725). His other Fables, of Electing, Feating, Fudling, Fidling, they are beneath us.” The rime variations, particularly DIDDLE, and DIDDLE’s connection with sex, may well have made a contribution (see fns. (190) et seq., supra), especially given its simultaneous connection with the sound of violin music (as in fn. (172) supra). Indeed both DIDDLE-DIDDLE (from 1972: PARTRIDGE, who gives “1703”) and DIDDLE (1901: O.E.D., as in, “1806 J. TRAIN Poet Reveries (Jam), In their ears it is a diddle, like the sounding of a fiddle”), have been used to refer to the sound of violin music. Indeed, DIDDLE, from its earliest recorded sense of “to move from side to side by jerks”, 1901: O.E.D.; from there to mean, c.1700, “gin”; and thence to, “to waste time in the merest trifling”, has a semantic trajectory very similar to that of FIDDLE, on which it was presumably modelled. DIDDLE meaning (n.) “penis”; and later (v.) “to copulate” (1972: PARTRIDGE) may well have done service as a euphemism after the fading of FIDDLE in that role (see fn. (117) supra). The connection between this and cheating is recalled by Mencken, 1948, fn. 4, p. 646, who comments that, “the slang words for to cheat, swindle are often identical to those for to have sexual intercourse.” Thus some double contendre may reside in the popular song quoted in 1897: BARRERE and LAYLAND:

“O That Tommy Riddle,

What played upon the fiddle,

Has managed to diddle me,

Of my true love.”

And also in a very recent use (Daily Telegraph, 27.3.81). Here a British businessman on a visit to Moscow found himself unable to resist a KGB honey-trap. He claimed that “I diddled her”; but so that he couldn’t be identified on the inevitable photographic record, wore a pillow-case with eyeholes throughout. Thus, also, as he put it “I diddled them” too. Indeed, in the sense of “to cheat” DIDDLE became almost synonymous with FIDDLE from the early nineteenth century onwards, after the publication in 1803 of J. Kenny’s novel, Raising Wind. 1901: O.E.D. thus describes the central character, Jerry Diddler as someone who is, “continualling borrowing small sums of money which he does not pay back, and otherwise sponging upon people.” No use of the word in this sense of “to cheat” can be dated before the appearance of this book, although it became universalised very rapidly thereafter. 1970: FRANKLYN gives “Jerry Diddle. Fiddle” as rhyming slang, which unless it was the intention of Kenny, rather than the more simple nomination, is incorrect.

[335] From this position, Archimedes’ shout of “Eureka” referred to the discovery of a method of entrapping merchants who were “fiddling” their gold by adding lead to them, rather than to the more conventionally acknowledged discovery of specific gravity. Stedman Jones, 1977, p. 167, has offered this rather useful cautionary tale, “the legal historian, T.F.T. Plucknett, once showed that the medieval term, ‘custom from time immemorial’, need only mean 21 years.”

[336] Henry, 1978, p. 6.

[337] Hall, 1935, p. 37. And this was no casual aside from Hall. In fact he opened the chapter (ibid., p. 34) with the sentence, “Except for Carrier’s case, which will be described shortly, practically the entire modern law of theft has been a product of the eighteenth century.”

[338] Ibid., p. 36. My emphasis.

[339] Both definitions from Kaplan, 1964, p. 139.

[340] Ibid., p. 32. Kaplan elsewhere (p. 359) distinguishes these two as “semantic” as opposed to “scientific” meaning.

[341] Ibid., pp. 359-60.

[342] Hall, op.cit., pp. 31-2, emphasis added. Hall adds (p. 37): “The rule that a servant who converted goods or money received from a third person for his master committed merely a civil breach of trust, provided a constantly recruing problem until 1799.” Before then, Hall adds (on p. 70): “the rule caveat emptor was invoked, and buyers were required to safeguard their own interests, lest trade be smothered by claims raised after sale. Yet the combination of large-scale marketing and the purchase of goods at a distance in reliance on representations of the seller, produced conditions which in due course could be seen to make safeguards against fraud necessary. Again, the transition from a system of cash on delivery transactions to a credit economy made the sale of goods on time a vital factor. Accordingly, it became necessary to safeguard merchants against an extension of credit upon misrepresentations. Finally, the breakdown of primary groups by a succession of enclosure movements concomitant with greatly increased mobility in population and the rise of cities produced new alignments of persons unknown to one another - a condition of affairs which lent itself to fraud quite apart from commercial transactions.”

[343] Hall, op.cit., pp. 30-31, 30.

[344] See, in particular, Chambliss, 1964; and Aydelottle, op.cit., esp. Ch. III, and p. 103, where he comments, “The history of the sixteenth century legislation against vagabondage and begging is the story of a great legislative triumph.”

[345] On which, see Hall, op.cit., pp. 3-33.

[346] 21 Hen. VIII, c. 7, 1529. Two other acts relating to embezzlement were passed in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, yet both the 1589 Act (31 Eliz. c. 4) directed against “persons who embezzled munitions of war... which had been entrusted to them,” and the 1610 Act (7 Jac. 1.7) which made it criminal for anybody in the wool industry to “imbezil any Wool or Yarn delivered to him to be wrought”, were highly specific exceptions, and only in the latter case could be applied to private property. The only other relevant Acts were (33 Hen. VIII, c. 1), one of 1541, which enlarged the law on cheating by false weights marginally to also include cheating with the aid of other counterfeit objective devices; and another, over two centuries later (30 Geo. 2, c. 24) in 1757.

[347] Hall, op.cit., particularly Ch. 4. Clergy was not finally abolished until 1827.

[348] See Ignatieff, 1978, exp. circa, p. 108.

[349] These were: 15 Geo. II, C. 13; 24 Geo. II, c. 11, s.3; and, 5 Geo. II, c. 25.

[350] 39 Geo. III, c. 85.

[351] Rex v. Walsh, 168 ER 624.

[352] 52 Geo. III, c. 63 (1812); 6 Geo. IV, c. 94 (1825); and, 31 and 32 Vict. c. 116 (1868). Larceny by a Trick was prohibited following a specific case in 1779 (the Pear’s Case); wherein, by removing the necessity for “breaking bulk” (the Carriers Case), the definition of Larceny was extended considerably. Yet it was not until 1857 (20 and 21 Vict. c. 54) that general larceny by Bailee became a criminal offence.

[353] Hall, op.cit. p. 139. On the downfall of the “bloody code”, see Hall, op.cit., Ignatieff, op.cit., and Hay, 1975.

[354] Quotation from Act V, Scene ii, p. 207 of the earliest surviving edition of Dekker, 1604; which was the 1630 edition fascimilie reproduction in Bowers (1955). 1972: PARTRIDGE, to his credit, does not push the case for this use, and instead states it with (for him) unusual reticence as “C. 17-20; S.E. until ca. 1800, revived by the underworld ca. 1840 Mayhew.” Such a cultural career is unlikely, hence his (and my) reluctance.

[355] In his dramatic work, Dekker, used “Fidler” or “Fiddler” straightforwardly for musician in The Seven Deadly Sinnes, 1606, p. 42; and in Newes from Hell, 1606, p. 121. Both quotes from The None-Dramatic works of Thomas Dekker, Vol. II, The Huth Library, London, 1855.

[356] Dekker, 1608, 1618a, and 1612.

[357] Dekker, 1608a, p. 351.

[358] Walker, 1552, p. 34.

[359] Greene, 1591, 1591a, 1592, 1592b, and 1592a.

[360] On which, see also, Anon., 1747, and Willmer, 1976.

[361] Green, 1591, pp. 143-4.

[362] Rid, 1610; Fennor, 1617; Harmon, 1566; Awdeley, 1561. Awdeley’s twenty-five orders of knaves (quoted admiringly in Henry, op.cit., pp. 7-8) is, in the Judges collection, “ommitted because it departs altogether from reality, there are short descriptions under fanciful names of the knaves of the twenty-five orders mentioned on the title page. The treatment is artificial”; Judges, 1930, p. 494.

[363] Thompson, 1732; Fielding, 1751; and Colquhoun, 1800. 1901: O.E.D. also cites a small segment from Chesterfield in support of the claim that FIDDLE developed the meaning ‘to cheat’ by 1738. Yet the article in question (taken from Common Sense, 14th October, 1738, pp. 210-216) is conceived with the “effects of musick in general”, and the full passage from which 1901: O.E.D. takes a small slice, is about music and is: “However, tho’ Musick does not know cause those surprising Effects which it did formerly, it still retains Power enough over Mens Passions, to make it worth our care: And I heard some Persons, equally skilled in Musick and Politics, assert that King James was sung and fiddled out of this Kingdom by the Protestant Tune of Lillybullero; - and that somebody else would have been fiddled into it again, if a certain treasonable, Popish, Jacobite Tune had not been timely silenced by the unwearied Pains and Diligence of the Administration.”

[364] It has been asserted, e.g. by Salgado, 1977, p. 142, that, “one of the purposes for which they [mistrels] served was of course to engage the attention of the listeners while the cutpurse or pick-pocket went about his business.” The course of this claim is unknown, yet it has become a piece of criminological “lore”; being repeated, eg., in Inciardi, 1974, p. 302. Whilst it is common for pickpockets to work crowds (Maurer, 1955), they normally work those arranged by others, rather than go to the trouble of arranging their own. Perhaps here, to “work a crowed” (instrument) has been misinterpreted as to “work a crowd” (audience). On the former, refer to fn. (162) supra. Burford, 1977, has offered more stable evidence for an earlier use of FIDDLE for “petty swindling” (p. 86). He has discovered early prints of the Clink Prison in Southwark. One is of the exterior, and shows a swing-sign of a fiddle (musical instrument) hanging outside. This is probably explained by an earlier use of the site as a tavern: indeed, he mentions one inn called “le Catifethel” (the Cat and Fiddle) which was known in the City since 1361. Bowford has also traced a document containing four sets of doggerel, “each portraying the theme of the unlawful activities of fiddlers”. Further, it, “contains one picture of two men suspended in a pillory, each with his fiddle dangling from his legs... The last three were depicted as three men hanging, two of them with their fiddles clutched under their arms and the third with his fiddle suspended from his legs,” (p. 86). Burford suggests, “this is possibly the first use of the word ‘fiddling’ as petty swindling.” I am unconvinced. Equally plausible is either that the minstrels were bing hung or pilloried for more henious crimes, such as the singing of seditious songs; or, that the “fiddles” referred to were the “instruments of torture” mentioned by 1836: RICHARDSON, and discussed in fn. (239) supra. Salgado, 1977, p. 142, has republished a print of a man with a violin sitting in some stocks; alongside it, Salgado adds, “A fiddler in the stocks, perhaps because he entertained his listeners while his accomplice cut their purses.” Of the same print, Aydelottle, 1913, p. 45, had earlier appended the more cautious description, “A minstrel in the Stocks. (From one of the Roxburghe Ballads). BEGGARS they are with one consent, and ROGUES by act of Parliament.”

[365] Cf. fn. (333) supra. The early connection that 1859: HOTTEN makes for FIDDLING; viz.: “amongst sharpers, it means gambling”, seems to have been almost reversed to mean, ‘amongst gamblers it means sharping’ (ie cheating); and no explanation is given for the change.

[366] It is difficult to know what 1925: HOTTEN intends by the use of “mugger” in this passage. The contemporary use of the term to refer to street robberies on persons is a considerably later development. One possible connection lies in one meaning for “mug” as “duffer”, 1901: O.E.D.: see fn. (369) below.

[367] See Mencken 1936, p. 576: and Partridge, 1948, pp. 99-101.

[368] Aydelottle, op.cit., p. 119.

[369] See fn. (366) supra. According to Chesney, 1970, pp. 268-9: “The fiddle-duffer visited saloons and bar-parlours at night, playing the part of a drunken musician. Grasping his violin case he would stagger about the room, bumping into furniture, full of tipsy conviviality. He would order drinks and then, discovering that he had spent his money and his pockets were empty, show himself recklessly set on keeping up the spree. ‘Here, I must have money... For’ .... breaking into song - ‘I won’t go home till morning, till morning, I won’t go home till morning, till daylight doth appear.’ And starting round he would take out the violin and swear to sell his valuable Cremona rather than go short. Whoever took him up on the offer and bought the violin for a sovereign or two soon found that he had got hold of an instrument that was useless for any purpose except fiddle-duffing.” And Sutherland, 1937, p. 69, refers to this (I think) as “dropping the fiddle”.

[370] Melling, 1979, pp. 16-17.

[371] Stedman Jones, 1976, p. 295.

[372] Moorhouse, 1979, p. 483.

[373] A remark made by Mills, 1959, p. 95, seems particularly relevant again today, “some historians seem eager to rewrite the past in order to serve what can only be recognised as ideological purposes of the present.”

[374] Malkiel, 1954, p. 80. This is also Williams’ view. In his discussion of the semantic career of “class”, he says that its semantic history, “indicates, quite clearly, a change in the character of these divisions, and it records, equally clearly a change in attitudes.” 1958, p. 15. Later (ibid.), of “art”, “these changes form a record of a remarkable change in ideas”. On p. 285, he says of “culture”, “the history of the idea of culture is a record of our reactions, in thought and feeling, to the changed conditions of our common life... the history of the idea of culture is a record of our meanings and our definitions.

[375] Strang, 1970, p. xv.

[376] See the seminal article by Asa Briggs, 1967; and the curious and uncharacteristically muddled position, adopted by E.P. Thompson; 1974, p. 395; and 1978, esp. pp. 148-151.

[377] See Shepherd, 1978; and the excellent reply in Melling, 1979.

[378] In his review of, Otto Bruner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck (eds.), Geschechtliche Grundbeguffe: Historisches Lexikon Zur Politischosozialen Sprache en Deutschland, Vol. 1, 1972, Vol. 2, 1975, E. Klett, Stuttgart; in Social History, Vol. 4, No. 2, May, 1979, p. 371.

[379] As Weekley, 1912, p. 17 put it, “No nautical terms have reached us from the coast of Bohemia (Winter’s Tale, iii, 3), nor is the vocabulary of the wine trade enriched by Icelandic terms.” Note also that no direct technical justification is made. The check is a rough one. To quote Hoijer, 1948, p. 339:“periods of significant change in culture are roughly coincident with marked shifts in linguistic structure... Note, however, that no direct connection between a specific linguistic type and a given level of cultural development is here proposed. We are not suggesting, for example, that the rise of mercantilism in England led specifically to the loss of endings in the English verb or to the formation of a relatively analytic linguistic structure from one that was relatively synthetic. We mean only to say that the rapid and far-reaching changes in other features of culture that took place in England between 900 and 1900 stimulated an equally wide spread change in the linguistic features of that culture.”

[380] Williams, 1978, p. 21.

[381] Taylor, Walton and Young, 1973, p. 269.

[382] Trajectory plotting is something of an art, and various examples and models may be consulted. Examples may be viewed in Menner, 1945; or in Kroesch, 1929. See also those references cited in fn. (133) supra. Models include: the tree-diagram (Palmer, 1976, p. 90); the overlapping senses diagram (Rudskoger, 1952, p. 24); and semasiological field mapping (Baldinger, 1970, p. 306).

[383] This simply means whether a word has lost negative and gained positive connotations (an ameliorative profile); or vice versa (a perjorative one). Here see, Bloomfield, 1933, p. 427, referred to there as elevation and degeneration, Ullmann, 1962, pp. 231-35; Waldron, 1967, pp. 156-161; and, Greenhough and Kittredge, 1900, Ch. XX. Both Schreuder 1929, pp. 57 et passim and Rudskoger, 1952, pp. 413-487 contain an enormous number of examples of each; with both McLachlan, n.d., pp. 9-16, and Dobson, 1940, being a good and relevant examples of a single detailed case study.

[384] Mill, 1846, Vol. II, p. 272. On villain, see also: Lewis, 1967, pp. 117-123; Greenhough and Kittredge, 1900, pp. 284-5; Bellany, 1873, p. 102; and Waldron, 1967, pp. 129-30.

[385] All examples from Schrender, op.cit.

[386] Rock, 1979, p. 71.

[387] Malkiel, 1954, p. 84.