Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2018 April 1

= April 1 =

Thin air
I ask my neighbour if he can borrow me a bicycle and he say "Sorry, I can not just pull one out of thin air." What is this thin air? Is there also sometimes some fat air? Thanking you for this curiosity. 86.187.164.191 (talk) 08:38, 1 April 2018 (UTC)


 * It's a colloquial semi-sarcastic expression which approximates the old philosophical concept of creation Ex nihilo. AnonMoos (talk) 09:45, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Note that the opposite of thin air is thick air, not fat air. Abductive  (reasoning) 05:01, 3 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Really? Do you have a source for that? 86.187.169.207 (talk) 07:53, 3 April 2018 (UTC)
 * April 1 is past. Have you heard the expression "Through thick and thin"? Then there's this one, by Doodles Weaver: "A guy came up to me and said, 'Doodles, your hair is getting thin.' I said, 'Well, who wants fat hair?'" ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 10:47, 3 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Also, "thick" means "dense" or "abundant" and "thin" means "scanty" or "not dense". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 10:51, 3 April 2018 (UTC)
 * I don't think anyone would dispute that the opposite of "thin" is usually "thick". But I must admit, I've never heard the expression "thick air". What does that mean? Is it also "a colloquial semi-sarcastic expression which approximates an old philosophical concept of creation"? Martinevans123 (talk) 11:09, 3 April 2018 (UTC)
 * You'd be more apt to say heavy air, as in high humidity. The problem might be that the OP is trying to invent an opposite for an expression that doesn't really have an opposite. It's used to mean that you can't produce something in a flash. A cousin to the old axiom that money doesn't grow on trees. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 20:55, 3 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Never mind being "apt" - does "thick air" actually have any meaning in English? I can't find any examples. Thanks. Martinevans123 (talk) 21:01, 3 April 2018 (UTC)
 * The only thing that comes to mind is "the air was thick with..." where it could be most anything, such as mosquitoes. Or tension. Or smoke. Or any number of examples on Google. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 22:15, 3 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Yes fine, I can understand that. Stuff causing thickness. But air that is thick just on its own? without any help from things like unpleasantries, accusations or anal vapours?? At least we seem to have ruled out phlogiston. User:Abductive needs to enlighten us, I feel. Martinevans123 (talk) 22:29, 3 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Keep in mind the OP was a one-shot drive-by who posted on April Fool's Day. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 22:38, 3 April 2018 (UTC)
 * I'm gutted. Martinevans123 (talk) 22:44, 3 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Off Topic: the person who has the item loans it to the person who requested it. The person who receives it borrows it. Therefore, the question as posted should read "I ask my neighbour if he can loan me a bicycle". The owner is the lender and the one who receives it is the borrower. Akld guy (talk) 21:35, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
 * It's odd the OP knows the colloquialism "borrow me" but has never heard "out of thin air". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 22:00, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Not so odd, really, especially in light of the fact that in many languages the words for "borrow" and "lend" are the same or based on nearly the same root. --216.15.48.37 (talk) 01:54, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
 * I'd be surprised if that expression is unknown in England. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 02:12, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
 * It's not unknown, but is generally regarded as an uneducated solicism, except in certain working-class dialects such as Glaswegian. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 2.218.14.51 (talk) 07:17, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
 * However, "borrow me a bicycle" is perfectly fine, if the request is for the listener to borrow it from a third party, on behalf of the speaker. ---Trovatore (talk) 21:14, 3 April 2018 (UTC)
 * @ User:Akld guy: To use "loan" as a verb, rather than "lend", is akin to using "gift" as a verb instead of "give". Or "transition" as a verb rather than a multitude of better choices.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  21:34, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
 * You're probably right. Lend would have been better, but at that stage I was pointing out a grossly wrong choice of word. Maybe I fell into the colloquial trap too. Akld guy (talk) 21:47, 2 April 2018 (UTC)


 * "Thin Air is British singer-songwriter Peter Hammill's 32nd solo album, released on his own Fie! Records label in June 2009." I'm sorry if this is not the answer you were expecting. But it's a very good album. You don't really need a bicycle to enjoy it. I'd link to "The Top of the World Club", posted on YouTube by karma63Au, if I could. But of course, it's much too risky. Martinevans123 (talk) 21:52, 2 April 2018 (UTC) ... and I certainly wouldn't even mention that other stuff ...


 * I have similarly wondered why airplanes only seem to collide in mid-air. What makes mid-air so much more dangerous than the parts of air near the boundaries? —Tamfang (talk) 07:31, 4 April 2018 (UTC)
 * You are right. Mid-air collision etc., doesn't really explain, does it? Martinevans123 (talk) 07:46, 4 April 2018 (UTC)
 * I assume that a minimum requirement for a mid-air collision is that both planes have to be off the ground (otherwise it would be a "runway incursion", as stated in the See also section)... AnonMoos (talk) 09:23, 4 April 2018 (UTC)

Newfound halliday
Detinue quotes a fifteenth-century judicial opinion deeming a certain kind of plea a "newfound halliday". What is a halliday? OED redirects it to their "holiday" entry, which has no senses that appear to be relevant here. I doubt that this is a matter of following fifteenth-century orthography, both because of the "w" in "newfound" (in seventeenth-century documents, one still encounters "vv" in situations where today we'd use "w") and because the phrase otherwise looks like Modern, not Middle, English. Google results for "halliday" are skewed by the existence of people whose last name is Halliday, and the few results for "newfound halliday" are all related to our article. This is cited to "Year Book 33 Henry VI", but apparently this is a shorthand legal citation; the book was held by the University of Cambridge in 1900, but I don't really find other references to this precise phrase. I have access to EEBO, but I got no results when I searched for "Year Book 33 Henry VI" and for "Year Book" "33 Henry VI". Nyttend (talk) 22:46, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
 * "Haliday" an earlier variant on "holiday" which comes from Old English haligdæg. From the same root as "hallow", which might explain the regional pronunciation Hollow-een. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 23:03, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
 * As I noted, OED already pointed me there, but saying that a plea of "per interventionem (sur trover) was a newfound halliday" doesn't make sense with any meaning of "holiday". Nyttend (talk) 23:07, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
 * The editor who posted that comment nine years ago is still sporadically active, so maybe you could ask him. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 23:15, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
 * No edits in the last three months, and eight edits in the last year? I think I have a better chance of getting an answer here.  Nyttend (talk) 23:20, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
 * You could try the user's email. If the user posted that comment without understanding it, then he shouldn't have posted it. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 23:21, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
 * It probably refers to a precedent in law. Important cases heard before the law are usually referred to by the name of the defendant, the plaintiff, or the judge. Here, the reference is probably to an earlier case involving a person called Halliday. Akld guy (talk) 23:42, 1 April 2018 (UTC)
 * That's as wild a guess as any. The editor who posted it can be reached by email, theoretically. That would be the better way to find out. And if there's no response, then delete the reference as making no sense. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 00:21, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
 * It's not a wild guess. It's an attempt to help steer online searchers in the right direction. If they can eliminate anything that doesn't involve a court case, they may find the answer. Akld guy (talk) 04:30, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
 * I'm not emailing someone who's quite unlikely to read it. However, don't remove it — you and I not understanding it is not the same as it making no sense.  Nyttend (talk) 00:37, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
 * If the source material could be checked it might make more sense. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 01:53, 2 April 2018 (UTC)

I've tagged the line in Detinue to request clarification.

Meanwhile, I tried a Google Books search on "newfound halliday" or "new-found halliday". I got dozens of hits, many of them referring to the same original sentence. But nothing I found led me to understand what the phrase meant. Often I was limited to a snippet view or none at all. I did find one article in a public-domain source, the Harvard Law Review, the bound Volume XI from 1897–98, which is available from Google Books as a free ebook ([or here in PDF). This includes a 2-part article by one J.B. Ames, "The History of Trover", in issues 5 (December 25, 1897) and 6 (January 26, 1898) of the volume. Here is Ames's paragraph where he quotes the phrase, on pages 381–382 of the bound volume.  It means nothing to me, but perhaps it will be meaningful to someone who would be reading about detinue.  (Yes, this is all one paragraph in the original.  The 5 "references" shown below the quotation are footnotes in the original, where they are numbered starting from 1 on each page.)
 * This count points rather to damages than to the recovery of the horse. It is worthy of note, also, that its place in the "Novae Narrationes" is not with the precedents in detinue, but with those in trespass. There seems to be no evidence of an action of chose adirr&eacute;e in the royal courts. Nor has any instance been found in these courts of detinue by a loser against a finder prior to 1371. In that year a plaintiff brought detinue for an ass, alleging that it had strayed from him to the seignory of the defendant, and that he one month afterwards offered the defendant reasonable satisfaction (for the keep). Issue was joined upon the reasonableness of the tender. Detinue by a loser against a finder would probably have come into use much earlier but for the fact, pointed out in the first part of this paper, that the loser might bring trespass against a finder who refused to restore the chattel on request. Indeed, in 1455, where a bailiff alleged simply his possession, and that the charters came to the defendant by finding, Prisot, C. J., while admitting that a bailor might have detinue against any possessor of goods lost by the bailee, expressed the opinion that where there was no bailment the loser should not bring detinue, but trespass, if, on demand, the finder refused to give up the goods. Littleton insisted that detinue would lie, and his view afterwards prevailed. It was in this case that Littleton, in an aside, said: "This declaration per inventionem is a new-found Halliday; for the ancient declaration and entry has always been that the charters ad manus et possessionem devenerunt generally without showing how." Littleton was quite right on this point. But the new fashion persisted, and detinue sur trover came to be the common mode of declaring wherever the plaintiff did not found the action upon a bailment to the defendant. In the first edition of "Liber Intrationum" (1510), f. 22, there is a count alleging that the plaintiff was possessed of a box of charters ; that he casually lost it, so that it came to the hands and possession of the defendant by finding, and that he refused to give it up on request. The close resemblance between this precedent and the earlier one from " Novae Narrationes " will have occurred to the learned reader. But there is one difference. In the count for a chose adirr&eacute;e, it is the plaintiff who finds the chattel in the defendant's possession. In detinue sur trover the finding alleged is by the defendant. And until we have further evidence that the action in the popular courts was for the recovery of the chattel and not for damages only, it seems reasonable to believe that detinue sur trover in the king's courts was not borrowed from the action of chose adirr&eacute;e, but was developed independently out of detinue upon a general devenerunt ad manus. But whatever question there may be on this point, no one can doubt that detinue sur trover was the parent of the modern action of trover.

Hope this helps somehow. --69.159.62.113 (talk) 07:15, 2 April 2018 (UTC)


 * Littleton is Thomas de Littleton who was writing in French in 1455. All these medieval yearbooks should be available...somewhere. I'm not sure if they're online. There are more results with the spelling "Haliday", and S. F. C. Milsom in Studies in the History of the Common Law suggests that he was referring to a case that was heard a hundred years earlier in 1355 during the reign of Edward III, where the plaintiff was named Alice Halyday - so Akld guy's "wild guess" is completely the right direction. (See also this footnote in A Natural History of the Common Law.) Looks like it then became an idiom for any sort of legal innovation, with the original meaning long-forgotten - for example, Thomas A. Street in The Theory and Development of Common-Law Actions thought it meant "a newly discovered boon". Adam Bishop (talk) 11:44, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Thank you for the assistance. [Judging by Littleton's article, he wasn't writing in French but in semi-gibberish.]  I've removed the clarify and added an explanatory note based on Natural history of the common law.  Does the first Milsom citation make any references to your guess about it being an idiom?  As soon as I try to load that link, I'm told that I can't view it.  Nyttend (talk) 12:32, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Thank you for cleaning it up! --69.159.62.113 (talk) 18:05, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Yeah, it was Anglo-Norma legal French. Pollock and Maitland, as noted above, also seem to have understood it as an idiom for a legal innovation. In "Jottings from a Yearbook Editor's Notebook", Yale Law Journal, Volume 35, Issue 7 (1926), William C. Bolland writes "Littleton then said 'secrettement que cest declaracion per inventionem est un newfound Haliday'. Here we have again something that was said secrettement retailed to us by the reporters." That is, the case was being heard in French (or the strange legal French, as you said), and Littleton remarked that it was a "newfound Haliday" in English. And they were tossing around Latin in there too. Interesting! But then Bolland also has no idea what it means: "What was a newfound Haliday", or Holiday? The fact that the words are given in English and not in the usual Anglo-Norman of the reports justifies us, I think, in supposing that it was a proverbial expression in general use at the time to express something or other. I cannot find it in any of the old dictionaries or glossaries and so I am driven to suggest a probable meaning for it myself; and the most plausible interpretation which occurs to me is that Littleton meat to say that such a defence to an action for trespass was a newly invented fad." But as noted above, that's not it at all! Littleton must have meant the similar case from 1355, and he evidently thought that everyone else in 1455 would have known what he was talking about too, since he felt no need to explain it further.
 * Here is the the actual text of the hearingm with Littleton's notes (and notes from the other judges). Adam Bishop (talk) 12:42, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Hm, the actual text of the hearing is different from what I was expecting; apparently the quality of Law French degenerated a bit between 1455 and the 1688 ject un brickbat a le dit justice quote in the Law French article. And thank you for the further discussion, which again is helpful.  Now I'm no longer wondering why I couldn't find this in EEBO, since it's not an English book.  Any idea what the formal title would be?  I'd like to find it in Worldcat, but I don't know where to start, since it doesn't recognise the abbreviation used in the article.  Nyttend (talk) 13:26, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Yeah I'm having trouble finding the actual titles too - everything is full of legal jargon, it's kind of impenetrable. I think these citations are referring the "Vulgate" edition of the Year Books printed in 1679-1680. Adam Bishop (talk) 13:36, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Adam Bishop, it just occurs to me to check the Cambridge library catalogue. "33 Henry VI" found this record, and while for some reason I can't find the item in WorldCat with a search for "33 Henry VI", a search for the alternate title given in the MARC, hillarii anno henrici sexti, found me OCLC 712135519.  Nyttend (talk) 14:24, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
 * That looks like an earlier edition of the Hilary term from 1455. This case was from the Trinity term. (Those articles about the Oxford school year but they also applied to the legal calendar.) Also I'm not sure which specific court was involved, there was a bunch of them and they all might be in different books... Adam Bishop (talk) 15:31, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Oh. Well, if you go to the WorldCat record and select the subject link for "Law reports, digests, etc. -- England -- Early works to 1800", you'll get other books of the sort; let me know if you're curious enough to want them but time-strapped enough you don't have the opportunity to look yourself.  Nyttend (talk) 15:35, 2 April 2018 (UTC)
 * Just wanted to add that there's a fuller/better discussion of this in another work by S. F. C. Milsom, Historical Foundations of the Common Law. It would be interesting if someone had written about how this phrase became an idiom for newfangled law, but I don't see anything like that...it just seems to be that modern legal writers all somehow know the phrase and they all learned it as an idiom, at least before Milsom discovered what it meant. Another example is "A New-Found Haliday: The Eighteenth Report of the Law Reform Committee (Conversion and Detinue)" by D. J. Bentley, in The Modern Law Review, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Mar., 1972). M.P. Furmston writes that a modern legal concept "is no new-found haliday" in "The Analysis of Illegal Contracts" (The University of Toronto Law Journal, Vol. 16, No. 2 (1966)). So I'm not sure how useful it is to even use this phrase in our article, since we're using it in the idiomatic way which is ultimately not an idiom. Might as well try to ping to see if they're still around and possibly explain what they thought it meant. Adam Bishop (talk) 20:28, 2 April 2018 (UTC)