Since you'll all be drunk today

I figured it was time to investigate the word "hooch". And there's nowhere better to look than "A Browser's Dictionary: A Compendium of Curious Expressions and Intriguing Facts" by John Ciardi. The words you see below are all his.

Hooch. 1. Rotgut. 2. Any hard liquor. [Hoochino, the American rendering of the name of a Tlingit tribe of Eskimos of southern Alaska, the name in its unpronounceable original meaning "the people of the strait of the grizzly bear."]

HISTORIC. No Amerinds had developed fermented or distilled drinks before the coming of the white man, though many then developed a disastrous taste for firewater. Under the Russian occupation, the Alaskan Indians seem to have acquired no knowledge of alcohol. With the arrival of the Americans in the mid nineteenth century, however, the Alaskan Indians became riotous drunkards.

The Americans ate sourdough bread. A bucket of sourdough starter, if left for a few days, exudes a slightly fermented liquid, a sort of noxious flat beer for which the Tlingits developed a taste; but "hooch" was yet to come.

Regulations forbade hard liquor on the military post, and a still would be too fragrant to conceal. An American army sergeant, therefore, scrounged the parts for a still, rigged up a cooker and coils in the Hoochino village, and showed the natives how to distill.

With access to sugar and molasses from the American trading post, and with a natural talent for throwing into the mash anything else they could find, the Hoochinos soon became manufacturers of a perilous rotgut which they not only drank in binges that involved the whole village and all nearby white men, but took to distributing through most of southern Alaska. In a memoir of Alaskan travels in 1880, John Muir tells of meeting a party of Chilcat Indians on a 200-mile trek to a Hoochino village to demand blood money for a Chilcat woman who had diet of drinking their rotgut.

More word derivation stories

I haven't been doing this as often lately. Sorry. But I found some excellent derivation stories recently and it's past time to share them. These come from Robert Hendrickson's "The Facts on File: Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins." The following words are Hendrickson's:

Xmas. Xmas is neither an abbreviation nor a "vulgar commercial invention" of recent vintage. X has been used to symbolize the syllable "Christ" in English since at least 1100, when it was recorded in Xianity, for "Christianity". The Old English word for Christian recorded in the 12th-century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle begins with an X, and the word Xmas itself was used as early as 1551. The Greek word that gives us the English word Christ begins with the letter chi, or X, leading some writers to believe that the X in Xmas symbolized the cross.

Rub out. To rub someone out, "to kill him," isn't gangster talk from the Prohibition era, as is so often assumed. The term dates back to the early 19th-century American Far West and has its origins in Plains Indian sign language, which expresses to kill with a rubbing motion. The term is first recorded in George Ruxton's Life in the Far West (1848) and it is he who gives the sign language source.

Cooties. Our slang word cooties, for "body lice", derives from the Malayan-Polynesian kutu, "louse", which British sailors became familiar with (both word and nit) in the early years of this century.

To decimate. After any mutiny in the Roman army, or any cowardice, the standard punishment was to take one man by lot out of each of the ten-man squads and have his fellow squad members kill him. From this disciplinary measure came the word decimare (from the Latin decem, ten, meaning "to kill one in ten") that became the English decimate. Decimate strictly means to reduce a military force by one-tenth, but through careless usage has come to mean to destroy a large part of any population, even to obliterate it.

[Back to Keith. So my book title (Xmas Carol) isn't nasty or blasphemous after all. Moo ha ha ha ha!. See? I was just being sweet and historically accurate when I gave the book this title. Oh, and I'm never going to use the word decimate again.]

Phrase origins: off the cuff

I hear the phrase "off the cuff" comes from olden days when debts were literally written on the cuff of the man who provided a service or goods. Kind of a credit system for the pre-credit card era. These days we just mean something was handled in a breezy manner, quickly and without formal preparation -- off the cuff.

What I'd like to do today is investigate a few phrases without benefit of looking anything up. You know, like we used to do it -- off the cuff. So let's begin. And remember: no peeking at the Intertubes. This is just about what you think the phrase indicates, what connections it has for you. I think we have rich repositories of word meanings in our minds and I want to tap only that today. Perhaps next Thursday we can check with the Intertubes and see how we did.

Something to fall back on. This is one of those phrases that just makes sense. It seems both human and basic: it's what we do -- we lean back for support, we fall back onto beds and couches and chairs. And the image of someone falling back, thinking there's someone to catch him when there isn't, makes us very uncomfortable. There is comfort in knowing you have something to fall back on. It seems almost primal. I like when expressions readily indicate their meaning. In other words, you don't need someone to explain this to you when you hear it for the first time. It makes sense. Since it's such a nice, direct phrase I'm not surprised it sees such wide use (or used to, anyway when people had, you know, language). But if it has a specific origin, tied to events or persons or institutions, I have no idea what that might be. The phrase just seems natural.

Well-heeled. I think this phrase belongs with the one above. In a sense, when you're well-heeled you literally have something to fall back on: your own supportive heels. I like that. Fresh heels make a fellow stand up sturdy and tall. Of course, the phrase origins are obvious: well-to-do people had the money to keep their shoes well-heeled. So to say one is well-heeled means well off. Shoemakers used to be a big deal, by the way, for those of you who were impertinent enough to have been born after 1980 or so. Cobblers, as they were called, were on every other corner. And jeez, did it smell strange in there. I always wondered how their lungs fared, these cobblers who spent decades working in that environment. In any case, I like the phrase well-heeled but it, like cobblers, has seen better days. I can't remember the last time I heard someone use it.

Hunker down. I really wonder about the origin of this one. I have no clue. Moving to images, somehow this phrase brings the upper back and shoulder area to mind, though I can't say why. It's as if you have to get that area down below the wall, car, or whatever else you're ducking behind. Hunker down. I like the sound of it. Perhaps the "hunk" part of hunker influences me, too. In my mind, I see soldiers or other largish men and someone is literally pushing down on their upper backs and shoulders, to get them to squat, and he's saying, "Hunker down!" I have no idea why this phrase evokes these images in my brain. Of course, the phrase also means "do nothing". When a large group wants to go in six different directions, sometimes the best thing to do is to hunker down -- in other words,  sit tight and do nothing. (Sit tight, eh? I wonder what that one's about.) But for me, you hunker down to remain safe. That's the primary thing I get from it.

Don't upset the apple-cart. This phrase popped into my mind the other day and I wondered if apple-carts were particularly rickety affairs. I don't think I've actually seen someone selling apples from a cart. That's something that was before even my time. I picture a wooden cart that has two large wheels, though this image is probably from old movies. The cart I see in my mind has handles, like a shopping cart. Perhaps when you lifted the handles, the surface would tilt and things would fall off. Is that what it's all about? On the other hand, from my very earliest days I do recall poor people selling all sorts of shoddy whatnot on stands they cobbled (there's that word again!) together with spit and rubber bands. In other words, their goods did indeed stand on a rickety house of cards. Maybe the phrase just comes from a class of vendors who, due to poverty, had to rely on substandard display carts to sell their goods -- carts that apparently tipped all the time.

That's my bunch for today. I will revisit them at a later date and at that time I'll consult the Intertube gods to see what they have to say. What I want to elicit today are your impressions and perhaps any images that these phrases bring to mind, even if the images don't seem constructively related. Sometimes there are gems in the side-knowledge and perhaps when we look these phrases up, we'll see some of our thoughts echoed in the official explanations. No cheating! Look nothing up.

Please chime in by leaving a comment. (Commenting is fun, by the way, not scary. Give it a try. I won't bite. Come out, come out, wherever you are.)

It's that fabulous day of the week

It's time for words and phrases. Today's material comes from John Ciardi's "A Browser's Dictionary: A Compendium of Curious Expressions & Intriguing Facts". You should buy one. It's great for browsing. I've pulled a few interesting terms out of Ciardi's hat for you today. Have a look.

Influence. n. An affective power; v. To affect. [Root sense: "a flowing in, to flow in upon." From the Latin in- in; fluere, to flow. Whenever this word is encountered in writing prior to circa 1800, it is reasonable to ssume an astrological reference to the influence of the stars.]
NOTE: One of the most graceful effects of poetry (or of any precise writing) occurs when the author sets a word in a context that allows a counterpoint of the root sense and the extended sense. Assume the poet to be standing on an eastward-facing beach just at dawn with the surf running high. Then assume him to have written, "And dawn is all one rosy influence." The surf, tinged red by the level rays of the new sun, flows in (root sense) rosily; and it has (extended sense) an affective power upon the beholder. Language is rarely used at this depth, but the rareness of excellence should not be made into an excuse for the failure to recognize it. In the days when the school system still taught languages (and sometimes even English), the recognition of root senses was as common as it is now rare. This book is in part an effort to reawaken an awareness of the root depths of words.

[Note from Keith: Don't you love Ciardi even more after that?]

Midwife. A woman who attends another at childbirth. (Because hospital birth has become standard in the U.S., it may be well to say that until very recently almost all births occurred at home with only a midwife in attendance. Midwife delivery is still standard in most of the world.) [Root sense: "with-wife: a woman who is with another (at childbirth)." Old English mid, with, wif, woman. Note: Latin obstetrix, midwife; from stare, to stand, prefixed ob-, before, and with agential suffix -ix: literally "she who stands before (another woman at childbirth)."]

Keep one's powder dry. Be prepared to fight. [With reference to muzzle-loading guns into which loose gunpowder was poured from a powder horn and tamped in. If the powder was allowed to become wet, it would not be fired by the spark of the flint.]

Take a powder. 1. To clear out fast. 2. As a command. Get out of here! Scram! [In the days before modern methods of pill-making and encapsulation, powder was a standard usage for "medical dosage," and medical powders were commonly folded into small paper packets to be dissolved in water or mixed with it. So a headache powder. The powder at the root of this idiom is a laxative, and by intention, a strong one, the root sense being a crude joke: "Take a (laxative) powder and clear (yourself) out."

Spitting image. An exact likeness. He is the spitting image of his father. [A corruption of spit and image, spit 'n' image, which were formulas of the most ancient practices of black magic and the casting of spells by hex dolls, in which any harm done to the doll is transferred ot the hexed person. The two basic principles of such hexing were: 1. Anything that was once part of a person, or that was intimately associated with him, retains a power over him. Hex dolls, therefore, were made as symbolic resemblances (power 2), and bits of his or her hair, spit, feces, nail parings, clothing, etc., were incorporated into the material of which the doll was made (power 1). Spit, therefore, on the first principle; image, on the second. See Rosetti's "Sister Helen" for a late hex poem; Sister Helen, in melting the wax doll she made on these principles, causes her victim to waste away.]

Spoof. A mild hoax or good-natured satire. [Spoof, name of a half-nonsensical, bluffing card game invented and popularized by English comedian Arthur Roberts (1852-1933), the name being his coinage. Give Roberts credit for an excellent ear: his coinage somehow manages to sound like what it means, and in being so accepted, it has survived to become a standard word in British and American English.

It's National Word Origins Day (i.e., Thursday). Woot!

Today's words come from Robert Hendrickson's excellent volume, "The Facts on File: Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins." Pick up a copy -- you'll be glad you did. Everything below comes from the pen of Mr. Hendrickson.

Knock! Knock! First recorded in about 1936, this appears to have originally been an American catchphrase used by someone about to tell a dirty story. Then it came into use by someone entering a room without knocking. Perhaps it is from the old schoolboy joke "Knock! Knock! Who's there? Grandpa. Whaddya want . . ." But one writer claims it may come from the Porter's scene in Macbeth (Act II. Scene iii): "Knock, knock, knock! Who's there . . . Knock, knock! Who's there, in the other devil's name . . . Knock, knock, knock! Who's there? Knock, Knock! Never at quiet! . . ."

Straight from the shoulder. The expression means honestly, frankly, and to the point and derives from a boxing term of the mid-19th century. A punch straight from the shoulder was once made by bringing the fist to the shoulder and sending it forward straight and fast. Such undeceptive blows are quick, effective, and often to the point of the chin.

Figurehead. Ship figureheads are carved figures or busts attached below the bowsprit directly over the cutwater. They have great ornamental value, but no function whatsoever and the ships would sail just as well without them. The carvings do inspire pride and confidence among seamen, however, and lend prestige to ships. Thus, figurehead has been used for at least a century to describe "a person who normally heads an organization, who lends his good name to it, but has no real duties in it."

Give a damn. The above was originally "I don't give a dam," the expression probably brought back to England from India by military men in the mid-18th century. A dam was an Indian coin of little value. I don't give a damn is first recorded in America in the 1890s. Its most famous use was in Gone with the Wind (1939) when Rhett Butler tells Scarlett O'Hara: "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

Divan. Divan has an involved but logical history. Originating as a Persian word meaning "a brochure," it came to mean, in order: "a collection of poems"; "a register"; "a military pay book"; "an account book"; "a room in which an account book was kept"; "an account office or custom house"; "a court"; "a great hall"; and finally, by 1597, "the chief piece of furniture in a great hall"!

Fun batch of words and phrases today

Today I'm jumping back to Robert Hendrickson's book, "The Facts on File: Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins". The following are Hendrickson's words

Fey. Fey usually means "being in unnaturally high spirits, or unreal, enchanted," as in "elves and other fey creatures." In times past someone who suddenly acted so lighthearted was thought to be on the point of death, fey deriving from the Anglo-Saxon faege, "on the verge of death."

Fifth wheel. Looking at the fifth wheel of wagons and carriages, many people thought it had no function, but this wheel, or circular plate, which was attached to the upper side of the front axle and never touched the ground, supported the vehicle's body when it made a turn. Ignorance prevailed, however, and the expression fifth wheel came to mean "a useless or needless person or thing in any enterprise."

To get a rise out of someone. These words first applied to fish rising to the bait. Writers on the art of angling popularized the word rise in this sense three hundred years ago, and the metaphor from fly-fishing became standard English. Just as the fish rises to the bait and is caught, the person who rises to the lure of a practical joke becomes the butt of it. From its original meaning of raising a laugh at someone's expense, the expression has been extended to include the idea of attracting attention in general -- getting a rise out of a sales prospect, etc.

Penthouse. Over the years folk etymology made penthouse out of pentice, the former word sounding more familiar to English ears even if pentice was correct. The pentice was a kind of "lean-to" attached to another building, usually a church, the word akin to "appendix." It took several centuries for penthouse, first recorded in early 1500s, to become the luxurious separate apartment or dwelling on a roof of a building that it generally is today.

Round robin. The round robin was originally a petition, its signatures arranged in a circular form to disguise the order of signing. Most probably it takes its name from the ruban rond, "round ribbon," in 17th-century France, where government officials devised a method of signing their petitions of grievances on ribbons that were attached to the documents in a circular form. In that way, no signer could be accused of signing the document first and risk having his head chopped off for instigating trouble. Ruban rond later became round robin in English and the custom continued in the British navy, where petitions of grievances were signed as if the signatures were spokes of a wheel radiating form it's hub. Today a round robin usually means a sports tournament where all of the contestants play each other at least once and losing a match doesn't result in immediate elimination.

It's word and phrase day. Woot!

Today's entries come from "A Browser's Dictionary: A Compendium of Curious Expressions & Intriguing Facts" by John Ciardi.

Feisty. Root sense: "Farty," but see below. Born in New England, I first heard this word when my Missouri-born wife described someone as "fat and feisty." I have since heard it in Oregon, Colorado, Michigan, Pennsylvania and the South . . . OED lists it only in the Supplement and then as a variant of fist, to fart; which is Intermediate English peiz-, to blow, to pass wind. Suffixed -d from Latin, pedere, to fart . . . Old English, fistan, Middle English, fisten, to fart, which became obsolete in standard British circa 1650. But in some Germanic variant form . . . feist, curiously defined by Jamieson, Dictionary of the Scottish Language, as, "The act of breaking wind in a suppressed manner from behind . . . also akin to Scottish fissle, a sustained low sound."

Hair of the dog (that bit one). Now, a morning-after drink as a cure for a hangover. But earlier based on a received medical principle that like cures like; in Latin, similia similibus curantur; and traceable to the earliest practice of witch doctors. So in the Middle Ages a common cure for dogbite was to place a hair of the dog in the wound (which would then infallibly heal), or to burn the hair of the dog, put the ash in water, and drink it. (Even today nothing is more effective than a witch doctor or two in treating a hangover.)

Meticulous. Exactingly careful in the handling of details. (Most dictionaries give as a second sense "excessively precise, overcareful," but though this derogatory sense is justified by the root, I must say that I have never felt it to function in modern American, meticulousness labeling an honored quality of accountants, lawyers, surgeons, etc., the pejorative occurring only when qualified, as in "overmeticulous, excessively meticulous.") [Root sense: "in dread; as if one's life depended on it." Latin, metis, fear; (per)iculosus, fearful, perilous, going to meticulosus, fearful, in dread.]

Vaudeville. Theatrical variety performances. (Vaudeville is supposed to have died in the Great Depression of the thirties, but it has in fact only moved to TV, though there one misses the acrobats and the animal acts.) [French chansons du Vau de Vire, songs of the Valley of the Vire, after the many ditties written in the fifteenth century by Olivier Basselin and named by him after his birthplace in the Vire Valley. Immensely popular as theatrical music, the songs gave their name to the variety entertainments performed to their strains.]

Stay tuned. More next Thursday.

Let's talk about words

Today's words are taken from John Ciardi's "A Browser's Dictionary: A Compendium of Curious Expressions and Intriguing Facts". By the way, this book seems to be out of print and I've discovered there is a "Second Browser's Dictionary" and a third and a fourth! But you can only get the first one for a decent price. The others are available used, for exorbitant sums. I also bumped into the fact that Ciardi died in the 80s. Sad, that. I'd love to see the other versions. Okay, enough from me. Here are today's words. 

Bikini. The minimal two-string, three-cup (all demitasses) bathing suit. [After Bikini, the atoll in the Marshall Islands used as the site of the 1956 A-bomb tests.] Historic. The next-to-nothing bathing suit was introduced in France at about the time of the tests and in the U.S. soon after them. The take is told that in the slick chic of ad-agency jargon they were called bikinis, first, to suggest the state of nature, and second, because they would have the impact of an atomic bomb (bum?). The language, in its often easy tolerance of the absurd and even of the disastrous, accepted the term at once, and with no sense of indignation at this coupling of the poisoned islands and these little swishes of chic.

Dodgers. The National League baseball team, once central to the mythology of Brooklyn and Miss Marianne Moore, which broke Miss Moore's heart by moving to Los Angeles, where the earthquake is already coiled to swallow the team into the pit for its perfidy. [In the late nineteenth century, when Brooklyn was still an independent municipality, Brooklynites were commonly called Trolley Dodgers because of the unusually large number of horse-drawn trolley cars that clanged through its crowded streets before the extension of the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit subway. The baseball team was first known by the full municipal nickname, later shortened to Dodgers. Not -- as fanciful persons have asserted -- because a streetcar line ran through the outfield of the team's first playing field, forcing outfielders to dodge a trolley when fielding a ball.]

Long in the tooth. Getting on in years, Roger Fredland used to be a bit of a heller, but he's getting to be short of breath and long in the tooth. [There being no truth in horse traders, the potential buyer checks the horse's age by examining its teeth. Constant grinding of fodder causes the horse's gums to recede, whereby the teeth of old horses seem to grow long. Dating unknown. Probably of remote folk origin.]

Nines: dressed to the nines. Dressed to perfection. [Probably not, as often suggested, from Middle English to then eynes, to the eyes (in which then is the dative of the), later nonced to to the neynes; the form is unattested. It is not possible to be certain, but the form is likely based on numerology, once a "science" as seriously regarded as alchemy and astrology. Numerologically, 9 (a trinity of trinities) stood for perfection. The use of plural nines would imply "the sum of all perfections."] (Note from Keith: I like the original suggestion that he casts off. "To then eynes" sounds perfectly logical as the derivation of this phrase.)

Scholar. One who studies. [Nor would a modern reader sense any contradiction in "hard-working scholar"; yet the root sense is "leisure". 1. leisure; 2. a work of leisure; 3, a gathering place (an informal school) where men of leisure met for discussion. So the phrase:] a gentleman and a scholar. A man of leisure and of learning. [The phrase being a pure survival of the root sense.] Historic. The root sense offers a fair glimpse into one aspect of Greek society, in which the labor of slaves permitted the cultivation of philosophy and the arts by men of leisure.

PS: What is "nonced"? I know you're wondering. Here goes:

Nonce: for the nonce. For this one time. For the time being. Middle English for then anes, for that one time; the form then nonced, the n shifting from then to anes: for the nanes, which was modified to for the nonce.]

So in the history of the phrase to the nines, Ciardi used nonce to indicate the change from "to then eynes" to "to the neynes". He said it nonced from one phrase to the other. Got it now?

Fun baseball language post coming up this weekend. Stay tuned!

A few words from Ciardi

The following is from John Ciardi's "A Browser's Dictionary: A Compendium of Curious Expressions & Intriguing Facts". 

Gossip. Originally, either of the two godparents who served as baptismal sponsors. In late Old English godsibb, godsibbe (sibling). Middle English forms: godsip, gossyp. The sense shift from god-parent to tittle-tattler took place late in the sixteenth century. Historic: A man and a woman sponsored an infant at its baptism, taking a vow to oversee its religious development. So sacred was this vow that godsibbes were forbidden to marry, they being already joined in a sacramental obligation. That vow, when conscientiously fulfilled, would require regular intimate discussions between the godparents, whence the sense shift to "people often seen with their heads together in intimate conversation about someone else."

Jerkwater town. The most primitive of small towns. Originally, a town on the railroad line, but too backward to have even a water tower. Early steam engines had an insatiable appetite for water. When they ran out at a town without a water tower, the train crew had to "jerk" water in buckets from the local wells and haul it laboriously to the locomotive. Needless to say, jerking water was not their most popular sport, whence the contempt with which they labeled the place a jerkwater town.

Mutual admiration society. A company of friends in which every member praises every other. . . [F]rom Society of Mutual Admiration, coined by Oliver Wendell Holmes in Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, two chapters of which were written for the New England Magazine in 1731-1832; the rest for the Atlantic Monthly starting in 1857. After the 25-year interim, Holmes began again with the calmly underplayed, "I was just going to say when I was interrupted . . ."]

Pipsqueak. An insignificant runt. Echoic. In World War I, a name given to a small German shell, because it exploded with a pip after giving off a squeak in flight -- or so rendered by British and American troops by comparison with the shrill whistle and boom of heavy artillery. Then, by extension, any insignificant thing; and then the original reference fading from memory.

Rascal. A scamp. Certainly something less than a villain. No one, for example, has ever thought to call Hitler a rascal. And in fact, the term is often used affectionately for one who has misbehaved in an endearing way. But at root: "one of the cruddy rabble," and specifically "one with a filthy skin disease" (a crud-scratcher), possibly with reference to the lesions of advanced syphilis, assumed by aristocrats to be the price the rabble paid for its depraved life-style (but ask Henry VII, who died of the royal form of the same crud). [red, rad, to scrape, scratch, gnaw . . . Latin, radere, with same senses; Provencal: rasca, rash, crud; and finally to Middle English: rascaille, the cruddy rabble.]

Words, words, words. Hooray!

Welcome to word and phrase origins Thursday. Up today, a few facts from John Ciardi's "A Browser's Dictionary: A Compendium of Curious Expressions and Intriguing Facts." Here are today's words.

Sweep (slip) under the carpet. Though it now suggests a lazy housemaid hiding her sweepings under and edge of the carpet, it originally meant "to remove from official consideration" by slipping papers under the cloth covering of the desk; in French, mettre sous le tapis.

Ham, ham actor. A strutting, bellowing emoter. Heavily blackfaced clowns of the minstrel show are said to have removed their make-up with lard, which they slanged as hamfat. Or hamfat may have been their slang for the face cream they used. In any case, the term emerged c. 1900 in a popular minstrel show song, "The Hamfat Man" . . . Minstrels were, of course, clowns, and the shift to ham, ham actor is an easy adaptation.

Limerick. A popular five-line form of light verse rhymed AABA, the A lines trimeters, the B lines dimeters. [Note the following are all Ciardi's words, and he is a master of the limerick.] I have been a passionate limericker in my time and there is no way to stop me from quoting myself by way of example, if only to prove that the limerick can be innocent:

There once was a lady named Wright

Who simply could not sleep at night

Because of the ping-
Ping-ping of her spring,

And the glare of her little red light.

Though the limerick is a recent form, its name and origin remain a bit obscure . . . yet the name is from Limerick, Ireland.

Werewolf. Count Dracula's dog. In spook legend, a man who changes at night into a ravenous wolf that eats men, usually under compulsion of the full moon, resuming human form by day. Probably a semi-mythological figure personifying rabies. Based on vir (man) and the German vulf (wolf).

Halo. In religious art, an aura or nimbus around the head of a saint. Based on the Greek halos, threshing floor, because the dust of the threshing diffused the sun's rays.

Now, wasn't that refreshing? I know I'm going to think of threshing floors every time I see a halo. Word derivations expand your feel for language. Here's hoping you enjoyed today's entries.

It's that time of the week again

The following is taken from "The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins" by Robert Hendrickson. My copy of "A Browser's Dictionary" still hasn't arrived. Tune in next Thursday for words and phrases from the new book. Here are today's selections.

Desultory. Circus riders in ancient Rome jumped from one horse to another during their acts, which led to their being called desultors, or leapers, from the Latin salire, "to leap." They were soon compared to people who fitfully jump from one idea to another in conversation, which resulted in the word desultorious, "to be inconsistent, aside from the point," the ancestor of our English word desultory.

Fata Morgana. Mirages of houses, ships and mirror images, often seen in the water as well as in the air, and often doubled -- inverted above each other -- have frequently been reported in the Strait of Messina and other places. They are named Fata Morgana after Morgan le Fey, a sorceress in Arthurian legend, the words Fata Morgana being an Italian translation of Morgan le Fey.

Paeans; peony. The gods wounded in the Trojan War were cured by the physician Paean, according to Greek mythology. Thus many plants once prized for their curative powers were named for Paean, including the flower called the peony. Because they believed their god Apollo often disguised himself as Paean, the Greeks sang hymns of thanks and tribute to him that came to be called paeans, these the source for our paeons of praise.

To buttonhole. "Barricade your doors against the button-holding world!" a British magazine warned its readers over a century ago. Button-holding, "grabbing a man by the top button of his coat and holding on with all the strength of the boring until you sell him one thing or another," was so common in the 19th century that button-holder was defined in many dictionaries as "one who takes hold of a man's coat by the button so as to detain him in conversation." People must have been button-holding and wearying people in France, too . . . for the French had a similar phrase. In those days men's coats had buttons all the way up to the neck, including one on the lapel that could be buttoned in cold weather. When fashion decreed that upper buttons be eliminated, button-holders didn't suddenly reform. Instead, they began grabbing people by the buttonholes designers (for no good reason) left on the lapels, and the phrase became to buttonhole.

Every Thursday you'll find word and phrase derivation stories here. If you're just discovering the blog, click on "phrase origins" in the tags below to see other derivation posts. I haven't been doing them for long, but they'll pile up soon enough -- because I don't intend to stop.

It's Phrase Origins Thursday!

Word afficionados, rejoice! You held your breath, you waited and hoped and finally it's here -- Phrase Origins Thursday! But I digress. Here they are:

Coney Island; coney. The Coney in Coney Island should really be pronounced to rhyme with honey or money. The word derives from cony (or coney or cuny), meaning the adult long-eared rabbit (Lepus cunicula) after which the Brooklyn, New York community was named. However, cony, pronounced cunny, became a term for the female genitals in British slang, and proper Victorians stopped using the word, substituting rabbit, which previously had meant only the young of the coney species. The only trouble remaining was that cony (pronounced cunny) appeared throughout the King James Bible, which had to be read aloud during church services. Proper Victorians solved this problem by changing the pronunciation of cony (cunny) to coney (rhymes with boney), which it remains to this day in Coney Island as well as the Bible.

Cook your goose. The Mad King of Sweden, Eric XIV, was supposedly so enraged because residents of a medieval town he had attacked hung out a goose, a symbol of stupidity, to "slyghte his forces" that he told the residents "[I will] cook your goose" and proceeded to burn the town to the ground. This story is generally disregarded . . . Attempts have been made to relate the phrase to the old Greek fable of the goose that laid the golden eggs. The peasant couple to whom that goose belonged, you'll remember, killed it (and perhaps cooked it later) because they were eager to get at the golden eggs within its body, which turned out to be undeveloped in any case. The first recorded use of the phrase cook your goose is in a London street ballad condemning "Papal Aggression" when Pope Pius IX tried to strengthen the power of the Catholic Church in England with his appointment of Nicholas Wiseman as English Cardinal:

"If they come here we'll cook their goose,
The Pope and Cardinal Wiseman."

It's a naive domestic burgundy without any breeding but I think you'll be amused by its presumptions. This originated as the caption under a James Thurber drawing of a pretentious oenologist offering a glass to a friend. It is an expression that has been used jokingly by many a host pretending to be a "wine expert" while dispensing a $3.99 special.

The above is excerpted from an excellent volume called "The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins" by Robert Hendrickson. I'll be branching out soon -- I just sent for a new copy of my long-lost "A Browser's Dictionary: a Compendium of Curious Expressions and Intriguing Facts", by John Ciardi. Stay tuned.

OMD! It's Word Derivation Day!

Today, three lovely word derivation mysteries will be solved. As usual, the text you read below comes from The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, by Robert Hendrickson.

Intestinal fortitude.

OMD! It's Word and Phrase Derivation Day!

Oh, my dog! We're gonna have fun. Here's a fine selection of word and phrase origins. Enjoy! 

To beat the living daylights out of someone. To say "I'll let daylight into you!" to an enemy in day's past was to threaten that you'd open him up, make a hole in him with a sword, knife, or gun. The expression, in the form of its variant "I'll make daylight shine through you" is recorded in America as early as 1774 and is probably much older. Sayings like "I'll fill him full of holes" replaced the older expression when modern weapons like machine guns made wholesale ventilation easier, but it lived on in the form of "I'll beat the living daylights out of you." Unlike the old swordsman's words, this makes no sense literally. It is merely the ghost of an imaginative phrase. 

Echo. The Greek nymph Echo talked so much that Zeus and his wife Hera couldn't hear what any of the other nymphs were saying. Hera punished this nymph by depriving her of all speech save the ability to repeat the words of others, giving her heartaches -- she lost her love, Narcissus -- but giving us the word "echo". 

Left-handed compliment. The expression left-handed compliment, "a thinly disguised insult that poses as praise", apparently has its origins in the practice of morganatic marriage, widely prevalent among German royalty in the Middle Ages and even practiced in modern times -- Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, who were both killed in the assassination that set off World War I, were married morganatically. These were usually marriages between royalty and commoners, the commoner agreeing that she would have no claim to her royal husband's title or property, nor would any children of the marriage -- all she received was a morning gift (from the Latin morganaticum) on the morning after the marriage was consummated. In the special wedding ceremony held for these marriages, common up to the 17th century, the groom gave the bride his left hand instead of his right, and thus morganatic marriages came to be known as left-handed marriages. Since they were a thinly disguised insult, it is possible that they later lent their name to the deceptive left-handed compliment.

As usual, the above is taken from "The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins" by Robert Hendrickson.

Yay, it's word derivation time!

As usual, I've taken the following from "The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins" by Robert Hendrickson. Here are two derivation stories to brighten your day: 

Catchword.  Catchwords are expressions caught up and repeated for effect. Because catchwords are often used by political parties, the term has become a contemptuous one, applied to insincere, misleading statements. Catchword, however, has an honorable history. Books were once printed with the word that began the first line on the next page directly under the last line of the preceding page. Such words, designed to catch the reader's attention and make him turn to the next page, were called catchwords. Then the term began to be applied to the last word, or cue, in an actor's speech, and finally to any expression that catches the attention.

To give short shrift to someone. To treat someone curtly, swiftly, and unsympathetically. Short shrift was originally, in the 16th century, the few minutes given a condemned man to make his confession to a priest before he was executed, shrift meaning "a confession".

Isn't that last one evil? Short shrift will have added weight the next time I use the phrase.

Speaking of word and phrase origins . . .

The information below comes from "The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins" by Robert Hendrickson. Here are two word/phrase origins that I enjoyed learning.

The "naked truth". According to an old Roman fable, when Truth went swimming in a river, Falsehood stole Truth's clothes -- and Truth went naked rather than put on the clothes that Falsehood had left behind. The story makes the naked truth sound rather virtuous, which gives the phrase added meaning for me.

One of my ultra-favorite word origins concerns the word "nasty", a term which has been in use since at least the 15th century. It comes from the Aryan "niz'd" for "bird's nest". Both "nasty" and "nest" probably worked their way into our language through this route. According to this theory, early Teutons noticed that birds fouled their nests and called anything foul and stinking nesty or nasty. Now, doesn't this information make the word "nasty" much nastier for you? The postscript to this entry in the encyclopedia says, "The O.E.D. notes that 'the original force of the word has been greatly . . . toned down." Indeed. Nasty!

I find that knowing the deeper meaning of words and phrases gives them added life. It's more fun to refer to the naked truth when you know what you're saying. The same goes for nasty. I'll bet that the next time you use the word, it will seem even nastier.