Under weigh? Right away!

(Some observations on language in Charles Dickens’ American Notes.)

Shortly after landing at Boston, and installing himself at a “very excellent” hotel, the author encounters an unfamiliar turn of phrase:

“Dinner, if you please,” said I to the waiter.

“When?” said the waiter.

“As quick as possible,” said I.

“Right away?” said the waiter.

After a moment’s hesitation, I answered “No,” at hazard.

“Not right away?” cried the waiter, with an amount of surprise that made me start.

I looked at him doubtfully, and returned, “No; I would rather have it in this private room. I like it very much.”

At this, I really thought the waiter must have gone out of his mind: as I believe he would have done, but for the interposition of another man, who whispered in his ear, “Directly.”

“Well! and that’s a fact!” said the waiter, looking helplessly at me: “Right away.”

The expression right away is now so ubiquitous that it’s practically un-Googlable, like the or and. Answers.com asserts that,

This idiom uses right as an intensifier and away in the sense of “at once,” the latter usage dating from the 1500s and surviving only in such phrases as this one and fire away. It was first recorded in 1818.

No citation is given for the 1818 appearance. I assumed, from Dickens’ confusion, that right away originated in the States and took a while to spread overseas. But the correspondents of the journal Notes and Queries – “devoted principally to English language and literature, lexicography, history, and scholarly antiquarianism” – in 1880 investigated the phrase in response to an enquiry by an English reader named “Hermentrude”:

This expression is so familiar to me that until this moment I was not aware there was anything peculiar about it. If Hermentrude lived in these parts she might hear it every hour of the day. “Now, then, children, run off right away to school”; “She has been crying right away”; “It rained right away till tea-time”; “He has been working right away.” Even now I do not see much wrong about it. I should say it means not so much immediately as earnestly, directly. I think many of these forms of expression are very old.
– R.R., Boston, Lincolnshire

This is good North Lincolnshire. “It’s taken root and it’ll grow right away”; “I’m mending [recovering] right away, thank you.” It does not mean immediately. The young lady behind the counter meant that the boy was going straight past and along the road.
– J.T.F., Winterton, Brigg

This expression is a very common one in Liverpool, and always means immediately. I have never heard it used in the sense of a long distance, which Hermentrude seems to think the correct meaning.
– J.Y.W. MacAllister

This expression has for generations been used all over the south-west of Ireland in the way in which the Yorkshire shop girl applied it. “Right away” in Munster = immediately.
– Mary Agnes Hickson

Although there seems to be some vagueness about its precise meaning, these testimonies suggest that the phrase originated in Ireland or the north of England and spread via emigration to the United States, where Dickens mistook it for an Americanism and introduced it to the wider British reading public.

***

Note this weird spelling in Dickens’ description of a voyage by steamer on the Potomac River:

I wake, of course, when we get under weigh, for there is a good deal of noise.

Of course, I leaped to the assumption that Dickens, being nearer the wellspring of “pure” English, must have known what he was talking about, and that our word underway had derived from this extinct sailor’s term. But like right away, this is another example of a phrase that doubled back on itself: under weigh, it turns out, evolved from underway via the convolutions of folk etymology.

From Michael Quinion’s terrific website World Wide Words (the Notes and Queries of our time):

What happened was that the Dutch, who were European masters of the sea in the seventeenth century, gave us – among many other nautical expressions – the term onderweg, meaning “on the way”. This became naturalised as under way and is first recorded in English around 1740, specifically as a maritime term (its broader meanings didn’t appear until the following century). Some over-clever individuals connected with the sea almost immediately linked it erroneously with the phrase to weigh anchor. [...]

It’s easy to find a myriad of examples of under weigh from the best English authors in the following two centuries, such as William Makepeace Thackeray, Captain Marryat, Washington Irving, Thomas Carlyle, Herman Melville, Lord Byron, and Charles Dickens [...]

It was still common as recently as the 1930s … but weigh has dropped off almost to nothing now. This paralleled another change, starting around the same time, in which the two words began to be combined into a single adverb, underway (though many style manuals still recommend it be written as two words). It may be that the influence of other words ending in -way, especially anyway, encouraged the shift in spelling back to the original and in the process killed off a persistent misunderstanding.

M.

My favourite scene in Flaubert’s “Sentimental Education”…

…is the final chapter, where our hero, Frédéric, and his lifelong best friend / occasional enemy Deslauriers, middle-aged and disillusioned now, sit in Frédéric’s parlour recollecting their youthful misadventures.

My second-favourite scene comes midway through the novel. Frédéric, after a lot of fumbling, misdirected effort, and scrupulous hesitations, has finally taken a lover – the beautiful and impetuous Rosanette, former mistress to various wealthy older men including his friend Arnoux. Frédéric carefully avoids wondering where Rosanette gets her money and who she sees when he’s not around. One morning, emerging from Rosanette’s flat after spending the night, he meets someone coming up the stairs:

Where was he going? Frédéric waited. The man kept on climbing, with his head slightly bowed. He looked up. It was Arnoux. The situation was obvious. They both blushed at the same time, feeling the same embarrassment.

Arnoux was the first to find a way out.

“She’s getting better, isn’t she?” he said, as if Rosanette were ill and he had come to ask how she was.

Frédéric took advantage of this opening.

“Yes, indeed! At least, that’s what her maid told me,” he replied, in order to give the impression that he had not been admitted.

Then they stood there, face to face, both irresolute, watching one another. Which of the two was going to stay? Once again, Arnoux solved the problem.

“Oh, well, I’ll come back another time! Where were you going? I’ll come along with you.”

And the two friends wander out into the Paris streets, each fully aware of what the other is up to with their shared mistress, but unwilling to make a scene about it.

Flaubert wrote Sentimental Education between 1864 and ’69. It’s helpful to be reminded that, in the world outside Queen Victoria’s England, popular novelists could openly discuss extramarital sex, childbirth, and illegitimacy without the evasions and circumlocutions necessary to their British counterparts. One strains to imagine Pip or David Copperfield knocking up his mistress as Frédéric does Rosanette; and even if such a plot twist were introduced, imagine Dickens revealing it in the middle of a vicious lover’s spat like this:

“That was a nice thing you did just now, and no mistake!”

She planted herself proudly in front of him.

“Well, and what of it? Where’s the harm in it?”

“What! You were spying on me, weren’t you?”

“Is that my fault? Why should you go and amuse yourself with respectable women?”

“That’s beside the point. I won’t have you insulting them.”

“How did I insult her?”

He could not think of a reply; and with a spiteful edge to his voice, he said:

“But that other time, at the Champ de Mars…”

“Oh, I’m sick and tired of your old flames!”

“You bitch!”

He raised his fist.

“Don’t kill me! I’m pregnant!”

Aside from the fact that they were near-contemporaries, the comparison with Dickens isn’t really apt: Flaubert is very unlike him in his unfancy style, his uncolourful dialogue, and his unschmaltzy temperament. The lack of schmaltz is appreciated; when Flaubert kills off an infant boy, he dispatches the kid in a few matter-of-fact lines, rather than making us sit through a protracted deathbed tear-soaking like those for which Dickens is justly reviled. But when Frédéric fights a duel with a flighty aristocrat, or attends a ludicruous meeting of a radical political club, or serves an evening on duty with the National Guard, one wishes for a bit of Dickens’ comic expansiveness, his eagerness to digress, his concern to endow every character, no matter how minor, with a quirk or a verbal tic or, at the very least, a funny name. The fleas that harass Frédéric while he huddles in the guardhouse would have been good for a couple paragraphs in Dickens; Flaubert mentions them and moves on. The setpieces in Flaubert, though fascinating, tend to rush by in a page or two, and too quickly we find ourselves back in some sitting-room or boudoir or café where our characters are obsessing over their hapless love affairs or, depressingly, their finances.

So I’ll take Dickens, thanks. But that final chapter – in which Frédéric and Deslauriers recall a particularly humiliating hijink from their schoolboy days and agree that it was “the best time of their lives” – really is beautiful.

M.