Saturday, October 22, 2005
‘Myself’ as non-reflexive, and the etymology of ‘cockpit’
From Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words newsletter this week:
MYSELF, ME AND I
Heavens, what trouble I got into last week when I wrote “You can hear an item with Adam Jacot de Boinod and myself”. The chorus of condemnation was loud and sustained. The trouble is that the “rule” about not using “myself” in this situation has been
drummed into generations of school children without much to justify
it except a vague feeling on the part of grammarians and educators
that it seemed somehow wrong. Modern style guides point to the body
of historical use of the construction as a justification for using
it. In the Third Edition of Fowler, Robert Burchfield remarks that
such forms are “beyond reproach” and quotes a sentence parallel to
mine from a booklet of his own. But Bryan Garner, in his Modern
American Usage, is against it, marking a stylistic difference that
seems to exist between American and British English.
Earlier:
Q. If I don’t find out where the air force term ‘cockpit’ came
from, I’m going to go mad. What do you think? [Rick Loiacono,
Florida]
A. When you stop and think about it, the term for the pilot’s cabin
on an aircraft - and other spaces such as the driver’s compartment
in a racing car or a helmsman in a small yacht - is curious, isn’t
it? Its origin is exotic and disquieting to modern minds.The experts are sure that it does come, as its name might suggest,
from a place where #### fights were held. The word is recorded from
the latter part of the sixteenth century, during the reign of the
first Elizabeth. It came about because the fighting area for cocks
(one of the favourite recreations of the time, together with bull-
and bear-baiting) was often thought of as a pit. It was a roughly
circular enclosure with a barrier around so that the birds couldn’t
escape, fitted up with rows of seats like a small theatre so that
the spectators could look down on the action. The first recorded
mention is in Thomas Churchard’s The Worthiness of Wales of 1587:
“The mountains stand in roundness such as it a #### pit were”.
Shakespeare uses it as an allusion to the round shape and noisy
crowdedness of a theatre when the Chorus in Henry V laments its
inadequacy to portray tumultuous events: “Can this cockpit hold /
The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram / Within this wooden O
the very casques / That did affright the air at Agincourt?”More than a century earlier, Elizabeth’s father, King Henry VIII,
had bowling alleys, tennis courts and a ####-pit built on a site
opposite the royal palace of Whitehall. A block of buildings later
erected on the site were taken over in the seventeenth century for
government offices such as the Treasury and the Privy Council. That
explains the entry in Samuel Pepys’s Diary for 20 February 1659:
“In the evening Simons and I to the Coffee Club, where nothing to
do only I heard Mr. Harrington, and my Lord of Dorset and another
Lord, talking of getting another place at the Cockpit, and they did
believe it would come to something.”A little later, the term came to be applied to the rear part of the
lowest deck, the orlop, of a fighting ship (“orlop” is from Dutch
“overloop”, a covering). During a battle it became the station for
the ship’s surgeon and his mates because it was relatively safe and
least subject to disturbance by the movements of the ship. Like all
lower-deck spaces, it was confined, crowded, and badly lit. During
a battle, it was also noisy, stinking and bloody. All this reminded
people of a real ####-pit, hence the name. Almost exactly 200 years
ago, on 21 October 1805, Admiral Lord Nelson died in the cockpit of
HMS Victory during the battle of Trafalgar.The move to today’s sense came through its use for the steering pit
or well of a sailing yacht, which also started to be called the
cockpit in the nineteenth century. This was presumably borrowed
from the older term because it was a small enclosed sunken area in
which a coxswain was stationed. (The word was “cockswain” to start
with, he being the swain, or serving man, who was in charge of a
####, a type of ship’s boat.) From here, it moved in the early
twentieth century to the steering area of an aircraft, and later
still to other related senses.