This week’s theme
Dickensian eponyms

This week’s words
Podsnap
Turveydrop
Stiggins
pecksniff
Artful Dodger

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A.Word.A.Day

PRONUNCIATION:

(TUHR-vee-drop)

MEANING:

noun: One who poses as a model of deportment: the way in which one conducts oneself.

ETYMOLOGY:

After Mr. Turveydrop, a character overly concerned with deportment, in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House (1852). Earliest documented use: 1876. The adjectival form is Turveydropian.

NOTES:

Mr. Turveydrop owns a dance school where he forces his son to do all the work while he parades around taking all the credit. As Dickens describes Turveydrop: “He was a fat old gentleman with a false complexion, false teeth, false whiskers, and a wig. ... He had everything but any touch of nature; he was not like youth, he was not like age, he was not like anything in the world but a model of deportment.”

In short, he was deportment without depth, a walking, talking showroom dummy for etiquette.

The word deport here means to behave or conduct oneself, especially in a dignified manner. The other sense of deport, to evict from a country, is a later development. Both are from Latin portare (to carry).

USAGE:

“Rose: ‘But gentlemen don’t catch up ladies like bags of meal, and poke them into carriages in this way. It is evident that you need looking after, and it is high time I undertook your society manners.
Mac: ‘I’ll behave like a Turveydrop: see if I don’t.’”
Louisa May Alcott; Rose in Bloom; Roberts Brothers; 1876.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: