Two Curious Words

The comment 'unrecorded in dictionaries accessible to me' accompanied the inquiry. Whitman's unfamiliar noun with -ain two syllables remains mostly unrecorded, it is true, but unmistakably it was the form current in his region, and known to the poet, of the now pretty standard curlicue, curlycue, curleycue, and so forth, meaning a twist or flourish, often fantastic. It is used of handwriting, of ornaments in architecture, of figures made in ice skating, and the like. In my juvenile days our neighborhood used it oftenest of carpenters' shavings. Etymologies suggested for it are curly+cue or queue (cue the last line or tail of a preceding speech, French queue) or perhaps curly+ Q in its script form. J. W. Carr listed curleycu(l)e from Northwestern Arkansas in Dialect Notes,' and later in the same volume, L. W. Payne noted the form with intrusive as occasional in east Alabama.2 All dictionaries now enter curlicue and without a dialect or colloquial label. As for Whitman's variant, the Oxford English Dictionary did not have it in Volume II (1893). For curlicue it had citations from I858, 1872, 1891, these from English works. The OED Supplement (1930), the corrections in which were added in the reissue of the dictionary, supplies citations for curlicue earlier than those of the older Oxford. It quotes from A. Stephens's 'Jon Slick' in High Life in New York (1844): 'A kind of picket fence with curlycues on the side' and 'Then her arms went curlycuing over her head.' Under separate entry and in its alphabetical place the Supplement has carlicue followed by the earliest citation brought to light thus far for either form of the word, this from C. F. Hoffman's Greyslaer (1840). It reads: 'I soon saw, by the way in which the white man's track doubled and doubled again ... that the fellow could not be cutting such carlicues for nothing.' A citation from 1898 reads: 'In Canada . . the English-speaking country people ... often use the word to signify a trifle or thing of little value, I don't care a carlicue, Not worth a carlicue.' The OED Supplement was not, however, the earliest work to chronicle

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