Category: Phrase origin

Q: I frequently hear the expression “I’m good” in the South when a server offers a refill on coffee, iced tea, water, etc. Is this use of “I’m good” to mean “No, thank you” a regionalism or is it common now?

A: You hear the expression in the South, we hear it in New England, and we’ve seen comments about it online from people in other parts of the US as well as in the UK and Australia.

It’s definitely out there, but we wouldn’t say it’s common. The usage isn’t in the Oxford English Dictionary or the standard dictionaries we usually check. And we couldn’t find comments about it, pro or con, in usage guides.

The use of “I’m good” to mean “no, thanks” or “no more” is relatively new. As far as we can tell, it first showed up in the mid-1950s among poker players.

The earliest example we’ve found is from a game of five-card draw played in “The Reforming of Parlor Davis,” a short story by Peerce Platt in the May 13, 1955, issue of Collier’s magazine:

“ ‘I’m good,’ Parlor said.

“ ‘I’ll take one,’ Ed said. He took the card, put it with his other four, and shuffled them nervously. ‘Three hundred,’ Ed said, pushing in the remainder of his chips.

“ ‘I raise you one thousand dollars,’ Parlor said.”

The next example we’ve found, from Slaughter Island, a 1991 novel by Herb Fisher, uses the expression in the drinking sense:

“ ‘Nah, I’m good, Terry,’ said Manny, waving the bottle of beer as the houseboy moved toward him along the deck of the pool.”

In this more recent example, from Close Knit Killer, a 2013 mystery by Maggie Sefton, the phrase “I’m good” is used in the restaurant sense you’ve asked about:

“ ‘I bet you want a refill,’ Julie said, walking up to Hal. ‘You need any more, Kelly?’

“ ‘No, thanks, I’m good.’ Kelly held up her hand.”

Is this colloquial use of “I’m good” legit? We see nothing wrong with it in casual speech or informal writing.

And as we’ve written before on the blog, there’s nothing wrong with responding “I’m good” when someone asks you how you are or how you’re feeling.

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Q: The reference to the “habitus of the gluteus” in your “booty camp” article caught my eye. My girlfriend, a professor of radiology, notes that radiologists must not tell patients they are fat. The politically correct term for obesity is “increased body habitus.” Since none of the radiologists worry about  “decreased body habitus,” the phrase is often shortened to “body habitus.”

A: The expression “increased body habitus” is new to us. In fact, it appears to be a relatively new usage even among radiologists—at least in published writing.

The earliest example of the phrase we’ve found is from a June 20, 2013, opinion in the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court.

In ruling that a plaintiff wasn’t seriously injured in a motor-vehicle accident, the court cited “reports of a radiologist who found that the MRIs revealed injuries that were degenerative in nature, consistent with her age and increased body habitus.”

The slimmed-down phrase “body habitus” has been around since the early 1900s, though it usually refers to just a physique or body type, not necessarily an obese physique.

For example, an April 24, 1915, article in the Medical Record, a weekly journal, says life insurance medicine deals with clinically important subjects “such as body habitus in its relationship with heredity.”

The word “habitus” was occasionally used in the late 1800s to mean a bodily condition or constitution, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Here’s an example from the Jan. 22, 1886, issue of the journal Science: “The disposition to the disease—the consumptive habitus.”

The Latin noun habitus (a condition or state) also gave English the more common noun “habit,” which etymologically means “what one has,” according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins.

As Ayto explains, habitus was originally the past participle of the verb habere, which meant “to have” but came to be used reflexively for “to be.”

The past participle habitus, he says, “came to be used as a noun for ‘how one is’—one’s ‘state’ or ‘condition.’ ”

As habitus evolved in Latin, Ayto adds, it could refer to either an outward condition (such as clothing) or an inner condition (one’s character or way of behaving).

Those Latin senses, he says, were “taken over lock, stock, and barrel  by English, although the clothing sense now survives only in relation to monks, nuns, and horseriders.”

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Q: You might be able to save me from a Google failure to find a linguistic reason for the expression “brought back from the dead.” Why does it have a definite article? Wondering about this is making my arm twitch.

A: Since Anglo-Saxon times, the definite article has been used before an adjective to create a noun phrase with a plural sense, as in “the poor,” “the rich,” “the lame,” “the sick,” “the naked,” and “the dead.”

In such phrases, “the poor” means “the people who are poor” or “those who are poor,” while “the rich” means “the people who are rich” or “those who are rich.”

The earliest example of this usage in the Oxford English Dictionary is a reference to ð worold-wisan (the worldly wise) from Pastoral Care (c. 897), King Aelfred’s Old English translation of a Latin treatise by Pope Gregory I.

Here’s a modern English example from Shelley’s 1819 poem Rosalind and Helen: “He was a coward to the strong: / He was a tyrant to the weak.”

The OED’s earliest example for “the dead,” the specific phrase you’ve asked about, is a reference to þe deade (the dead) in a document from around 1175 in the Lambeth Manuscript, a collection of late Old English sermons.

Finally, here’s an Oxford example from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (c. 1599): “I will not do them wrong; I rather choose / To wrong the dead, to wrong myself and you.” (We’ve expanded Antony’s lines.)

If you’d like to read more, we had a post six years ago about the idiomatic use of “the” with the names of things that wouldn’t appear to need an article (or that could use the article “a” instead).

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Q: Here’s a construction that’s widely used by radio hosts, though it’s not yet epidemic: “the (insert plural name of a singular individual) of the world.” For example, “the Babe Ruths of the world.” My complaint is that there are no multiple Babe Ruths. I get the intention, but it bugs me to hear a big internal contradiction in such a little phrase.

A: Like many idiomatic usages, this one isn’t meant to be taken literally. We’d never make our beds if we actually had to build them from scratch.

You seem to think the idiom you’ve heard on talk radio is a relatively new phenomenon, but the construction first showed up in the mid-1800s, well before Marconi got his first patent for transmitting radio waves.

The Oxford English Dictionary describes the usage as colloquial (that is, more common in speech than written English), and defines it this way:

“With a personal name, in the plural. the — — of this world: people considered to represent or be like the type specified. Also in extended use with other proper names. Freq. somewhat derogatory.”

The earliest example of the usage in the OED is from the September 1897 issue of the North American Review: “The Mrs. Siddons’ or Rachels of the world have gained a fame to which even Garrick and Booth cannot approach.”

(The references are to British and American actors: Sarah Siddons, Elisabeth Rachel Félix, David Garrick, and Edwin Booth.)

We’ve found several earlier examples dating from the 1850s.

An article in the January 1854 issue of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, for example, calls for “bringing prominently forward the peaceful heroes of art and meditation, the Newtons, the Shakespeares, the Miltons of the world.”

The most recent citation in the OED is from Do You Remember the First Time, a 2004 novel by Jenny Colgan: “Why should fashion belong only to the Britneys of this world, goddamit?”

As you’ve noticed, the usage is still around. We got more than 50,000 hits when we googled “the Kardashians of the world,” including this one from the May 17, 2013, issue of the Washington Times:

“These days, tabloid sales are fueled by persistent paparazzi and their photos of the Kardashians of the world in compromising situations.”

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Q: I noticed a new usage this week—three times, thus far—that strikes me as peculiar. A radio ad: “Are you ready to change up your furniture?” Isn’t it redundant to use “change up” where simply “change” would suffice?

A: The verbal phrases “change up” and “change down” have been around for more than a century, but with another meaning—to change gears in a motor vehicle. (In a moment, we’ll get to the usage you noticed.)

The online Oxford Dictionaries describes the vehicular usage as British and gives this example: “what you notice with a diesel is the need to change up slightly earlier than in a petrol car.”

The big Oxford English Dictionary has examples going back to 1902. This more recent one is from Life at the Top, a 1962 novel by John Braine: “I changed down into second; then changed up again.”

Americans are of course familiar with the noun “changeup,” which the Dickson Baseball Dictionary (3rd ed.) defines as either “a slow ball thrown after one or more fastballs, or a letup pitch to look like a fastball to upset the batter’s timing.”

The earliest example of the baseball usage in the OED is from J. G. Taylor Spink’s Baseball Guide and Record Book 1943: “Change-up, change of pace, slow ball.”

But we prefer this example, which also appears in Dickson, from the May 7, 1948, issue of the Birmingham News: “He’s got everything—speed, curve, change-up and plenty of heart.”

This brings us back to your question. The verb phrase “change up” in the sense you ask about (to upgrade) is a relative newcomer that doesn’t have an entry yet in the OED or the eight standard dictionaries we regularly check.

It first showed up in the 1970s, according to a search of Google Books, but it was rarely used until the turn of the new century.

The first example we could find is from the 1973 Summer Manual of the American Football Coaches Association:

“You must change up your option defense to both attack and finesse the quarterback.”

A recent example is this Jan. 3., 2014, headline from Runner’s World: “Change Up Your Running Routine / Tweaking your schedule magically produces fast results.”

Is the usage redundant? Well, we’ve found some examples that use “change up” simply to mean “change,” but most people use the phrase in the sense of “change for the better.”

We think that’s how “change up” is being used in that example of yours. The radio ad is appealing to potential customers who are ready to “change up” their furniture (that is, replace it with something better).

Here’s another example, from a May 20, 2013, post on the Shop Smart website: “Change Up Your Furniture, Change Up Your Life.”

If changing your furniture doesn’t improve your life enough, you can change your routine, as a Feb. 19, 2014, article in Elite Daily, a website for generation Y, recommends: “Change Up Your Daily Routine And Change Your Life For The Better.”

In blog posts in 2007 and 2012, we discussed a similar expression, “change out,” which is used in the sense of replacing a broken or outdated part—in a car, a computer, a house, and so on.

We’ll end with a cautionary tale for fellow googlers. In searching for “change up,” we found the phrase in Judge and Jury: The Life and Times of Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, a 1998 book by David Pietrusza.

A footnote in the book describes an incident that reportedly took place when Landis, the first baseball commissioner, shared a box at the 1934 World Series with Will Rogers and J. G. Taylor Spink, publisher of the Sporting News:

“At one point Spink, a big tipper, gave a vendor a $20 bill for a hot dog. When the boy said he’d be back with Spink’s change, Spink cheerfully yelled out, ‘Stick the change up your behind,’ meaning the lad should keep it.”

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Q: I have always read, and heard, that you “set foot” when you enter a place. Now I seem to hear “step foot” very often. Are both correct?

A: The usual expression is “set foot,” but “step foot” is very popular, and it’s not all that new. In fact, both phrases have been around for centuries.

The Oxford English Dictionary has examples of foot-setting going back to the 1400s and of foot-stepping dating from the 1500s.

However, a search with Google’s Ngram Viewer indicates a sharp rise in the use of “step foot in” since 1980, which may explain why you’ve been noticing the usage.

Are both expressions correct? Well, we don’t use “step foot,” and you won’t find it in standard dictionaries or idiom references.

But we wouldn’t say it’s incorrect—not when the usage has been around for hundreds of years and now has millions of users.

Here’s the result of Google searches for the two expressions: “set foot in,” 35.5 million hits, vs. “step foot in,” nearly 6.7 million.

The older of these two usages—“set foot” in, into, on, at, and so on—showed up in the late 15th century, according to citations in the OED.

The earliest example in the dictionary is from The Foure Sonnes of Aymon, William Caxton’s 1490 translation of a French romance of chivalry: “I shall never sette foote there.”

The first example with a preposition comes from Nicolas Udall’s translation of the Apophthegmes of Erasmus (1542): “It was a foule shame for a phylosophier to sette his foote into any hous where bawderie wer kepte.”

As for “step foot,” the OED has examples going back to the mid-16th century of the phrase used with various prepositions.

The earliest is from John Palsgrave’s 1540 translation of The Comedye of Acolastus, by Gulielmus Gnapheus: “Steppe not one foote forth of this place.”

The first Oxford example of the phrase with the preposition “in” is from a poem, written sometime before 1547, by the Earl of Surrey: “Stepp in your foote, come take a place, and mourne with me awhyle.”

Here’s a 19th-century example, from Richard Burleigh Kimball’s novel Was He Successful? (1864): “When Hiram stepped foot in the metropolis.”

Although nearly all of the OED’s “step foot” citations are from British sources, the dictionary says the usage now shows up only in US English.

If you’d like to see another take on the subject, you might look at our friend Merrill Perlman’s Language Corner column in the Columbia Journalism Review.

We’ll end with an example of the usage from Chronicles (2004), the first volume in Bob Dylan’s planned three-part memoir:

“I had stopped going down to the Café Wha? in the afternoons. Never stepped foot in there again.”

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Q: Have you weighed in on “skill set”? It strikes me as corporate jargon, but it showed up in a recent review of Peniel E. Joseph’s Stokely in the New York Times.

A: Our guess is that “skill set” originated not in the corporate world but in academia, another wellspring of jargon.

The earliest examples we’ve found, dating from the late 1960s and early ’70s, are from books about education and psychology.

The first example we’ve came across is from Peter James Arnold’s Education, Physical Education, and Personality Development (1968):

“For example, the phrase ‘being careful’ meant various things to the participants and this in turn affected their approach in tackling the skill set.” Arnold’s field was kinesiology, the study of human movement.

The next is from a psychology text, Wayne Lee’s Decision Theory and Human Behavior (1971): “Perhaps the skill set was critical here.”

The noun phrase becomes more common in the mid-1970s (it appears twice in the reports of the National Computer Conference and Exposition, published in 1974).

And by the mid-1980s it has become almost routine in many fields—academia, business, computing, aviation, law, and others. 

You won’t have much luck finding “skill set” in standard dictionaries.  Perhaps that’s because lexicographers feel the parts explain the whole—a “skill set” is simply a set of skills, just as a “tool set” is a set of tools.

One of the few sources that includes the phrase is Oxford Dictionaries online, which defines “skill set” as “a person’s range of skills or abilities.”

Examples given include “The jobs are out there; you just need the skill sets,” and “Typically, forces deployed to peace operations use different skill sets to execute required missions.”

By the way, the word “skill” once had very different meanings than it does today.

It came into Middle English in the 1100s from an Old Norse word (skil) meaning distinction or difference, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

In the 12th through 14th centuries, the OED says, “skill” had such meanings as these:

(1) “that which is reasonable, proper, right, or just”; (2) “reason as a faculty of the mind”; (3) “discrimination or discretion”;  (4) “a sense of what is right or fitting”; (5) “cause, reason, or ground”; and even (6) “a statement made by way of argument or reasoning.”

All those senses are long dead. Only one early meaning has survived—a 13th-century usage defined by the OED this way:

“Capability of accomplishing something with precision and certainty; practical knowledge in combination with ability; cleverness, expertness. Also, an ability to perform a function, acquired or learnt with practice.”

That sense of the word, you might say, has survival in its skill set.

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Q: I recently served on a jury and one of the attorneys explained that jury selection is called “voir dire.” He said the term comes from French and means to look inside and speak up. This didn’t sound accurate to me, so I looked it up and learned it’s a false etymology. So what is the true etymology?

A: The Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary defines “voir dire” (pronounced vwahr deer) as “a preliminary examination to determine the competency of a witness or juror.”

The dictionary describes it as an Anglo-French expression derived from Old French, the French spoken in the Middle Ages. The ultimate source of the usage is the Latin verus (truth) and decire (to speak).

So etymologically the phrase doesn’t mean “look and speak,” but “speak the truth.”  

The earliest example of the phrase in the Oxford English Dictionary is a 1676 record from the Office of Clerk of Assize: “Such person so produced for a witness, may be examined upon a Voire Dire.”

An OED citation from White Kennett’s 1701 revision of Cowell’s Interpreter, a 1607 law dictionary written by John Cowell, explains the expression this way:

“When it is pray’d upon a Trial at Law, that a Witness may be sworn upon a Voir dire; the meaning is, he shall upon his Oath speak or declare the truth.”

The online version of Black’s Law Dictionary offers the following definition:

“This phrase denotes the preliminary examination which the court may make of one presented as a witness or juror, where his competency, interest, etc., is objected to.”

We’ll end with an example of voir dire from the 1992 film My Cousin Vinny:

District Attorney Jim Trotter III: “Ms. Vito, what is your current profession?”

Mona Lisa Vito: “I’m an out-of-work hairdresser.”

DA: “An out-of-work hairdresser. In what way does that qualify you as an expert in automobiles?”

Lisa: “It doesn’t.”

DA: “Well in what way are you qualified?”

Lisa: “Well my father was a mechanic. His father was a mechanic. My mother’s father was a mechanic. My three brothers are mechanics. Four uncles on my father’s side are mechanics …”

DA: “Miss Vito, your family is obviously qualified. But have you ever worked as a mechanic?”

Lisa: “Yeah, in my father’s garage, yeah.”

DA: “As a mechanic. What did you do in your father’s garage?”

Lisa: “Tune-ups, oil changes, brake relining, engine rebuilds; rebuilt some trannies, rear end …”

DA: “OK, OK.”

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Q: What in God’s name is “mogo on the gogo”? I heard it the other day while watching Spellbound. Did Hitchcock (or, rather, his screenwriter) coin the phrase?

A: The expression “mogo on the gogo” didn’t originate with Alfred Hitchcock or with Ben Hecht, the main screenwriter on the 1945 film Spellbound.

It was apparently a catchphrase in certain Hollywood circles in the 1930s and ’40s, though it had much earlier show-biz origins in vaudeville, burlesque, and minstrel shows.

The expression is hard to define since it isn’t in any of our slang dictionaries. But it’s generally used as a comic phrase for a mental or physical malady, like lovesickness or an exotic fictional disease.

The expression crops up several times in the works of Hecht, who wrote the screenplay along with Angus MacPhail.

In the script, the man posing as Dr. Edwardes (actually an amnesia patient played by Gregory Peck), delivers the “mogo on the gogo” line to a psychologist, Dr. Petersen (played by Ingrid Bergman).

The two are discussing the psychological aspects of love, and Dr. Petersen is tossing around psychoanalytic theories on the subject. Below the surface, a mild flirtation is developing. 

So when Edwardes says, “Professor, you’re suffering from mogo on the gogo,” the line can be read in two ways: (1) he’s poking fun at all the psychobabble, or (2) Dr. Petersen has sex on the brain.

In his other works, Hecht seems to have regarded “mogo on the gogo” as meaning infatuation of one kind or another.

The expression apparently means lovesickness in The Great Magoo (1933), a play Hecht wrote with Gene Fowler.

In one scene, a character says: “You meet some guy—get mogo-on-the-gogo. Finis! Listen, Julie, this is just a friendly tip. Lay off that stumblebum if you wanna get somewhere. He’s just a lot of dog-meat.”

Hecht used the phrase again in his novel I Hate Actors! (1944): “You’re just a typical half-baked artistic goop—with nothing but mogo on the gogo. You’re a sweet kid in many ways but as an artist you’re still wet behind the ears.”

It appears yet again in Hecht’s memoir A Child of the Century (1954). Here Hecht recalls a dinner conversation with John Barrymore near the end of the actor’s life:

“ ‘In my early years,’ said Barrymore, ‘when I was still callow and confused, and still a-suckle on moonlight—I used to prefer Romeo and Juliet to all the other plays. But, as my ears dried, I began to detest the fellow, Romeo. A sickly, mawkish amateur, suffering from Mogo on the Gogo. He should be played only by a boy of fifteen with pimples and a piping voice. The truth about him is he grew up and became Hamlet.’ ”

Where did the expression come from? As we said, it probably came from the touring burlesque and minstrel shows of the previous century.

For example, Al Jolson, who played the minstrel circuit early in his career, was known to use the phrase.

“Al had a vocabulary all his own,” Herbert G. Goldman writes in his book Jolson: The Legend Comes to Life (1988). “Anything bad was ‘mogo on the gogo.’ ”

And W. C. Fields used variations on the phrase too. Fields got his start at the turn of the century as a vaudeville juggler on the Keith and Orpheum circuits, both of which booked minstrel acts at the time.

Later, in his films, Fields used “mogo on the gogogo” to mean a fictitious disease.

In The Bank Dick (1940), where he plays the immortal Egbert Sousè, Fields warns another character about “Malta fever, beriberi and that dreaded of all diseases—mogo on the gogogo.”

Fields himself wrote the screenplay for The Bank Dick, under the alias Mahatma Kane Jeeves—as in “My hat, my cane, Jeeves.”

He probably got “mogo on the gogogo” from the stage musical that gave him his Broadway debut, The Ham Tree (1905).

The three-act show, which ran on Broadway for two seasons, is about the adventures of a touring vaudeville troupe and contains a minstrel act as a sort of show within the show. 

In Man on the Flying Trapeze: The Life and Times of W.C. Fields (1997), Simon Louvish writes that the minstrel routine included this passage:

“If we come across a ham tree don’t touch a ham without it’s got the cover [wrapper] on. If you do you’ll get that disease called more-go on the go-go.”

The lines, Louvish writes, came directly from the 19th-century minstrel sketch that was the basis for the musical. 

He goes on to explain that the original sketch, also called  “The Ham Tree,” was developed around 1874 by a famous 19th-century vaudeville partnership, James McIntyre and Tom Heath.

The pair, portraying tramps in blackface, performed their act on the minstrel circuit for more than 50 years, touring virtually every part of the country until well into the early 1900s.  

It’s possible that a phrase sounding like “more-go on the go-go” was an African-American expression. McIntyre and Heath, according to Louvish, claimed that “their stories and dances were taken from genuine black sources.”

But as historians have written, many white minstrel performers made similar claims. Until further evidence crops up, a black origin for this phrase can only be conjectured.

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Q: I breed Golden Retrievers and have a question about the proper use of a word in a puppy’s name. Should it be “Ripple Affect (or Effect) of Kindness”? I have had so much input on this that I am no longer sure. HELP please!

A: The usual phrase is “ripple effect,” and it refers to the spreading influence of an action or event—in this case, the spreading (or rippling) influence of kindness.

The noun “effect” refers to a result, while the less-common noun “affect” is a psychological term that refers to feeling or emotion.

So the traditional way of referring to the puppy would be “Ripple Effect of Kindness.” However, people often take liberties in the use of language when naming dogs.

We suppose that “Ripple Affect of Kindness” could be seen as a creative play on words that refers to the rippling or spreading feeling of kindness.

But the use of “ripple affect” in this sense would undoubtedly raise a few eyebrows among sticklers. They would assume it was a mistake.

Another negative is that “affect” is often used in an unfavorable sense, as in “The psychiatrist says the suspect displays a lack of affect.”

And don’t forget that the two nouns are pronounced differently: “affect” is AFF-ect, while “effect” is ih-FECT (the “i” sounds like the one in “pit”).

When the term “ripple effect” first showed up in the late 1800s, it referred to physical rippling, such as the effect of moonlight on water or the movement of a skirt.

The earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary of the phrase used in the usual modern sense is from the Feb. 14, 1966, issue of the Wall Street Journal:

“Price-boosting already is producing a ‘ripple effect’ in which companies pass on increased costs in higher price tags on their own products.”

In case you’d like to read more, we ran a post on our blog a few years ago about the use of the words “affect” and “effect.”

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Q: In Jane Smiley’s novel Duplicate Keys, Alice muses about the “fewness” of the friends in her social circle. I drew a blank when I looked up “fewness” in my dictionary. Did this “Pulitzer Prize-winning author” have a copy editor who was asleep at the switch, or is my dictionary inferior?

A: “Fewness” is a very old noun that dates back to Anglo-Saxon times, but you have to search a bit to find it in many modern dictionaries.

The two dictionaries we consult the most, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) list “fewness” as a noun form under their entries for the adjective “few.”

Only a handful of standard dictionaries—Merriam-Webster Unabridged, Random House Unabridged, and Collins—have separate entries for “fewness,” which they define as the state of being small or few in quantity.

The Oxford English Dictionary, which describes “fewness” as “the quality or fact of being few,” dates it from the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People (circa 900), where the word is feanis in Old English.

The word “few” is even older, first recorded in the Vespasian Psalter (c. 825), an Anglo-Saxon illuminated manuscript, where it’s fea in Old English.

Similar words are found in other Germanic languages, but the original source of “few” is believed to be the Indo-European root pau-, denoting smallness of quantity or number, according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins.

Although “few” is spelled with an “f” in English and other Germanic languages, Ayto notes, the p of pau survives in French (peu), Spanish (poco), and Italian (poco).

In fact, Ayto adds, the Indo-European root can still be seen in the English words “paucity,” “pauper,” “poor,” and “poverty.”

The expression “few and far between,” meaning few in number and seldom found, showed up in the mid-1600s.

The OED’s earliest citation is from a July 13, 1668, letter by Sir Ralph Verney: “Hedges are few and far between.” The letter is cited in Margaret M. Verney’s Memoirs of the Verney Family During the Civil War, published in 1899.

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Q: Years ago, I read somewhere that the Cockney “ta” actually stood for “thanks awfully.” It then evolved into “ta-ta” as an exit term because humans love to play around with (and repeat) sounds. Just wanted to offer that theory.

A: No, “ta” is not an acronym for “thanks awfully,” it’s not Cockney, and it didn’t beget “ta-ta” (more on this later). However, it does have a connection with “thank you.”

The interjection “ta,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, originated as “an infantile form of ‘thank-you’ ” that was first recorded in the late 18th century.

We expect that since the word was used as intimate nursery babble, it was around for many years before it was recorded for posterity in writing.

It got its start in British usage and is still more common in the UK than in the US.

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) identifies “ta” as a British expression. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) labels it “chiefly British,” and describes it as a “baby-talk alteration of thank you.”  

The OED’s earliest example is from a letter written in 1772 by Mary Granville, better known as Mrs. Delany: “You would not say ‘Ta’ to me for my congratulation.” (It appears in her memoir, Life & Correspondence, which wasn’t published until 1861.)

Mrs. Delany’s note was written to her one-year-old great-niece on the occasion of her first birthday, so the “ta” here was intended to echo a babyish version of “thank you.”

Here’s another childish example, from Israel Zangwill’s novel Children of the Ghetto 1892): “Give it me. I’ll say ‘ta’ so nicely.” (In this party scene, adults use baby-talk jokingly while a man teases his lover with an engagement ring.)

As the OED says, this infantile “ta” has passed into colloquial use among adults. Oxford gives a few modern examples, including these:

“ ‘Ta,’ he said, slipping the card into the back pocket of his jeans.” (From Richard Gordon’s novel Doctor on the Boil, 1970.)

“ ‘You know your way, don’t you?’ ‘Ta, love.’ ” (From Douglas Clark’s mystery The Longest Pleasure, 1981.)

So while “ta” isn’t an acronym for “thanks awfully,” it’s close in meaning.

As for “ta-ta,” the other expression you’ve asked about, it’s another adult usage to graduate from nursery school. 

As we’ve written before on our blog, “ta-ta” originated as an infantile form of “goodbye.” It was first recorded in the 1820s, and soon passed into colloquial (that is, spoken) adult usage.

An expanded version, “ta-ta for now,” became a popular British catchphrase in the 1940s, and was shortened in the later ’40s to the initialism “TTFN.”

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Q: How old are women of “a certain age”? Are only French women of that age? Can men be of “a certain age” too?

A: The expression “a certain age” is generally used now (often tongue in cheek) as a euphemism to avoid saying a woman is middle-aged or older.

However, masculine and unisex versions are not all that unusual. In fact, the earliest example we’ve found refers to “men of a certain age.”

The Oxford English Dictionary describes “a certain age” as a time “when one is no longer young, but which politeness forbids to be specified too minutely: usually, referring to some age between forty and sixty (mostly said of women).”

The OED’s earliest example of the usage is from a 1754 issue of the Connoisseur, a short-lived satirical weekly in London, edited by the essayists George Colman and Bonnell Thornton:

“I could not help wishing on this occasion that some middle term was invented between Miss and Mrs. to be adopted, at a certain age, by all females not inclined to matrimony.”

The expression is used there to describe an older, unmarried woman, similar to the terms “maiden lady” (1700), “spinster” (1617), and “old maid” (1530). “Spinster,” which dates from the 1300s, originally referred to someone who spins thread or yarn.

The phrase “a certain age” was a work in progress during the 1700s and 1800s, sometimes positive, sometimes negative, sometimes referring to women, sometimes men, and sometimes children, animals, or things.

A search of literary databases indicates that the usage first showed up in English in the early 1700s and in French (as d’un certain âge) in the late 1600s.

The earliest English example we could find, from a 1709 book written by a London midwife, refers to “men of a certain age.”

In A Treatise on the Art of Midwifery, Elizabeth Nihell argues against “the utter impropriety” of men, especially young men, examining the “sexual parts” of women:

“It may perhaps be granted that men of a certain age, men past the slippery season of youth, may claim the benefit of exemption from impressions of sensuality, by objects to which custom has familiarized them.”

In the 1700s and 1800s, the expression was generally positive when used to describe men. The Earl of Chesterfield, for example, used it in a June 13, 1751, letter to his son, Philip Stanhope, to refer to men of substance and refinement:

“You would not talk of your pleasures to men of a certain age, gravity, and dignity; they justly expect, from young people, a degree of deference and regard.”

The phrase was sometimes used positively and sometimes negatively to describe women.

In Amatory Tales (1810), Honoria Scott uses it positively: “Mrs. Cleveland was a woman of a certain age, and handsome person; her understanding intelligent and cultivated; she had moved much in the circles of fashionable life.”

But in The Lady of the Manor (1831), Mary Martha Sherwood uses the term to describe “a vain woman who cannot condescend to grow old” and who needs a lot of help to keep up appearances:

“The Comtesse de V was a woman of a certain age, and she therefore owed to her perruquier, her perfumer (who supplied the various washes for her complexion), her milliner, and her femme de chambre, that juvenile appearance which she still had in the eyes of those who beheld her only for the first time.”

In Barnaby Rudge (1841), Dickens does a riff on the expression to describe a house: “A very old house, perhaps as old as it claimed to be, and perhaps older, which will sometimes happen with houses of an uncertain, as with ladies of a certain age.”

The Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms, edited by John Ayto, says “of a certain age” may have been inspired by the French expression d’un certain âge.

We suspect that Ayto is less than definitive here because the French expression showed up only a few decades before the English version.

Ayto offers this contemporary unisex example of the usage from a 2003 issue of Architectural Review: “Text … is in readable white sans-serif type … and happily for clients of a certain age, it’s adjustable with the browser’s View/Text Size command.”

William Safire suggests in his July 2, 1995, language column in the New York Times Magazine that the phrase was “repopularized” for modern readers by Women of a Certain Age, a 1979 book by the psychotherapist Lillian B. Rubin.

“When I wrote the book in 1979,” she told Safire, “the ‘women of a certain age’ were in their late 30’s and early 40’s. I think that has changed with the baby boomers and the lengthening of the life span. I’d say the ‘certain age’ has now moved to the age of 50 or 55.”

Safire’s column was prompted by a reader who’d been surprised by this headline in the paper: “3 Explorers of a Certain Age, Scaling Mountains and More.” The explorers were three men in their 80s.

It’s comforting to think that we may still be of a certain age when we’re in our 80s.

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Q: What’s the origin of the use of “afraid” in sentences like “I’m afraid I can’t help you” or  “I’m afraid that is the case”? Is this apologetic sense considered old-fashioned today?

A: When the adjective “afraid” showed up in the 1300s (as affred or afreyd in Middle English), it meant alarmed or frightened.

But by the early 1600s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the expression “I am afraid” (or “I’m afraid”) was being used in the apologetic sense you’re asking about.

The OED says “I’m afraid” here means “I regret to say,” “I apologetically report,” “I suspect,” “I am inclined to think,” and so on.

Oxford’s earliest example is from Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (circa 1590): “I am affraid sir, doe what you can / Yours will not be entreated.”

In this citation from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), Miss Bingley’s offer of help is rebuffed by Darcy:

“I am afraid you do not like your pen. Let me mend it for you. I mend pens remarkably well.”

“Thank you—but I always mend my own.”

(We’ve expanded on the OED citation to savor Miss Bingley’s comeuppance.)

The most recent Oxford example is from Bloodless Shadow, a 2003 detective novel by Victoria Blake: “I’m afraid I can’t discuss my cases.”

You ask if this apologetic sense of “I’m afraid” is now considered old-fashioned. Not as far as we can tell.

It seems as contemporary today as when Shakespeare put those words into the mouth of Petruchio’s friend Hortensio.

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Q: When did “ask” become a noun? I first heard “a big ask” used at work for a difficult request. I considered it another annoying bit of industrialese, but I just heard a TV commentator use “a tough ask” this way. Is the usage now an acceptable idiom?

A: You’d better sit down. The word “ask” has been used as both a verb and a noun since Anglo-Saxon days.

The verb, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, first showed up in Old English in Beowulf, which is believed to date from the early 700s.

The noun appeared a couple of hundred years later in the dooms, or laws, of Athelstan, who was King of the Anglo Saxons (924-27) and the King of the English (927-39).

Since it first showed up in Old English, the noun has meant asking, an inquiry, a thing asked, or a request, according to Oxford.

Here’s an OED example in modern English from a Dec. 8, 1781, letter by the scholar Thomas Twining (whose grandfather founded the Twinings tea empire):

“I am not so unreasonable as to desire you to take notice of all the stuff I scribble, or answer all my asks.” (We’ve expanded on the citation.)

And here’s an example from The Laws and Principles of Whist, an 1886 book written by “Cavendish” (the pen name of Henry Jones): “When your three comes down in the next round, it is not an ask for trumps.”

The particular usage you ask about (in expressions like “a big ask” and “a tough ask”) isn’t quite as new as you seem to think—it’s been around since the 1980s.

The OED describes the usage as colloquial (more common in spoken than written English), and says it originated in Australia.

The dictionary defines this “ask” as meaning “something which is a lot to ask of someone; something difficult to achieve or surmount.”

Oxford’s earliest citation is from a May 6, 1987, issue of the Sydney Morning Herald: “Four measly pounds is what the critics say. But according to his trainer, Johnny Lewis, that four pounds is ‘a big ask.’ ”

In a 2005 draft addition to its entry for the noun “ask,” the OED says the usage is chiefly heard in sports. But as you’ve observed, the expression has traveled far afield since then, geographically as well as linguistically.

A Jan. 30, 2014, editorial in the Guardian, for example, wonders whether Ukrainians will get a chance to “to make a free choice about their own government and national direction.”

“It is a big ask,” the paper says, “and none of the steps will be easy.”

And, according to the latest reports from Eastern Europe, it’s still a big ask.

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Q: Regardless of which Starbucks I go to, employees taking orders say, “May I help who’s next?” This may not be technically wrong, but it sounds awful! I’d say “May I help the next customer?” or “May I take your order?” or “Are you ready to order?”

A:You aren’t the first person who’s been startled to hear “May [or “Can”] I help who’s next?”

People waiting in line at a coffee shops, bakeries, bookstores, banks, and ice cream parlors are hearing this query across the United States and in parts of England, according to linguists.

But strictly speaking, this construction isn’t incorrect. As the linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum has written on the Language Log, it’s merely outdated and no longer common in English usage.

That is, it’s no longer common except at Starbucks and other places where people wait in line. 

Pullum points out that what you’re hearing is “an isolated survival of an extinct construction type” that hasn’t been in common use for the last 50 to 100 years.

What’s happening is that “who” is being used as what linguists call a “fused relative.”

In this construction, the single word “who” represents (or is fused into) the relative noun phrase “the person that.”

In modern usage, though, the pronoun of choice here is “whoever,” not “who.” 

This particular use of “who,” Pullum speculates, “seems to have survived in one very limited contextual environment”—and you heard an example of it at Starbuck’s.

Pullum says he began hearing reports about this usage around 1990, especially from the Upper Midwest. But now, he says, it’s being heard all across the continent (presumably wherever people wait in line to be helped).

And it’s not just American. The linguist Lynne Murphy, who teaches at the University of Sussex, reports on her blog that she’s heard “Can I help who’s next?” from clerks and shop assistants in the south of England. 

Pullum admits that this use of “who” is odd. He calls it “something that is almost grammatical and used to be fully grammatical.”

The use of “who” in this manner “has mostly been extinct for some fifty to a hundred years,” he says. The construction “survived down to the 19th century. But it did not survive down to the present day.”

On the other hand, he says, “whoever” is “freely used” this way in contemporary English.

The Oxford English Dictionary says the relative use of “who” to mean “any one that” or “whoever” is now considered “archaic” or “literary.” The OED’s examples of the usage date from the 1200s to the late 1890s.

The dictionary includes two examples from Shakespeare, probably written about 1600: “Let it be who it is” (Julius Caesar), and “Who steales my purse, steals trash” (Othello). 

Later citations include this line from Robert Browning’s poem Balaustion’s Adventure (1871): “I passionately cried to who would hear.”

And this one is from Rudyard Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads (1892): “Who rides at the tail of a Border thief, he sits not long at his meat.”

So why are we hearing this old construction again? This is a legitimate question, but there’s no simple answer.

No one’s suggesting that baristas and bank tellers revived the construction after reading Shakespeare or Kipling. But, as Pullum says, this isn’t a matter of ignorance, either:

“It’s about the grammatical possibility of human-referring fused relatives,” he says, “and the complexity of the picture we face when a single language is in use by a billion people with dates of birth spread over about a century.”

It’s also, he adds, “about the odd survivals and exceptions that can lurk in the syntactic patterns found in everyday use.”

By the way, we once wrote a post about a similar, commonly heard expression, “May I help the following customer?”

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Q: My wife and I wonder where “last of the big-time spenders” comes from. Our parents (who were born in the 1910s and 1920s) used the expression for someone living high on the hog. Can you enlighten us?

A: In a literal sense, the catch phrase “last of the big (or big-time) spenders” means someone who spends lavish amounts of money. But it’s often used humorously or ironically to describe someone who’s stingy.

The Macmillan Dictionary defines “the last of the big spenders” as meaning “someone who spends a lot of money, often in a way that is designed to impress people.”

But, the dictionary adds, “This expression is often used in a humorous way about someone who spends a very small amount of money.”

Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of Catch Phrases (1992) describes “last of the big-time spenders” as a “playfully ironic” expression that “has flourished, in UK, since c. 1945.”

The reference book, edited by Paul Beale, further speculates that it was “very prob. adopted from US servicemen c. 1944 and has almost certainly arisen in US during the early 1930s—during the Great Depression.”

However, no citations are given that would back this up. While the expression may indeed date from World War II or before, the earliest published examples we’ve been able to find are from the late 1950s.

This one, for example, appeared in a profile of the actress Joy Lafleur that ran in a 1957 issue of the Canadian magazine Saturday Night: “If you offer to buy Joy a coffee, she’ll wisecrack, ‘No, I’m the last of the big-time spenders.’ ”

The expression has also been used as a song title. 

In late 1960, a comic song entitled “Last of the Big-Time Spenders,” by Cornbread and the Biscuits, appeared on Billboard magazine’s “Hot Hundred” chart.

More recently, the title was given to a poignant ballad written by Billy Joel and recorded on his album Streetlife Serenade (1974).

The shorter expression “big-time spender” is probably a conflation of two others—the adjective “big-time” and the noun phrase “big spender,” both of which appeared in the early 20th century.

The adjective “big-time,” meaning significant or impressive, may be a coinage from vaudeville days, when the major theater circuits were referred to as “the big time.”

The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation for the adjectival usage is from 1914: “They buy and sell for all ‘big time’ acts and all ‘big time’ theaters.”

The show-biz newspaper Variety is often credited with this usage. A 1927 article in Vanity Fair, for example, said:

“For the vaudeville branch of the show business Variety coined such famous colloquialisms as ‘Big Time’ and ‘Small Time,’ differentiating the first rate circuits from the second rate.”

As for “big spender,” the earliest example we’ve found is from an article about the gambling industry that ran in the December 1907 issue of the journal the Scrap Book:

“With the typical big spender and plunger, it is either his way of taking his fun or he is well able to take care of himself. The real problem is the poor little piker.”

After this, uses of “big spender” became extremely common.

In 1909, for example, Moody’s Magazine said of the financier Henry Keep: “He was never a big spender according to the Wall Street interpretation of the term, and when he died in 1869, he left his family a fortune of over four million dollars.”

And in June 1910, according to Congressional records, an Illinois cattle farmer named Daniel L. Keleher testified before  a Senate committee on wages and commodities prices:

“I am not what might be called a big spender and have always made it a point to have something, thank God, for a rainy day.”

Today, many people associate the noun phrase “big spender” with the song of that title, in the 1966 musical Sweet Charity, by Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields.

Here are a couple of stanzas from the song, which was a hit record for Peggy Lee in 1966 and for Shirley Bassey in 1967:

The minute you walked in the joint
I could see you were a man of distinction,
a real big spender.
Good looking, so refined,
Say, wouldn’t you like to know what’s going on in my mind?

So let me get right to the point.
I don’t pop my cork for every guy I see.
Hey, big spender, spend
A little time with me.

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Q: I watch the PBS series Midsomer Murders. In a recent episode, a character appears who sometimes exclaims, “Steady, the Buffs” and “Stiffen the Prussian Guard.” I tried to find their source, with little luck. They sound like something in a novel about the Napoleonic Wars, or a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. What do you know about them?

A: The first of those expressions originated in the British military and the second probably did, though its origins are a lot more obscure.

Later, as you’ve discovered, they found their way into civilian usage, minus their military flavor.  

We’ll examine the less obscure one first. “Steady, the Buffs!” means “Keep calm!” or “Steady on, boys!” and can be traced to the late 19th century.  

The “Buffs” in the phrase is a reference to a famous British Army unit, the Third Regiment of Foot. The regiment, founded in 1572, was nicknamed “the Buffs” in the early 18th century because of the colors of its uniforms.

“The Buffs” was officially made part of the regiment’s name by royal warrant in the 1750s, according to several histories we consulted. (It’s now the East Kent Regiment.)

The earliest published use of “Steady, the Buffs!” we’ve found is from a history of the regiment that appeared in the journal Notes and Queries in 1876.

First, the writer quotes an earlier history, published in 1836, which says: “The men’s coats were lined and faced with buff; they also wore buff waistcoats, buff breeches, and buff stockings, and were emphatically styled ‘The Buffs.’ ”

The writer then goes on to add: “ ‘Steady, The Buffs,’ a not unfamiliar caution to many an English soldier.”

The source of that “not unfamiliar caution” is hard to pin down.

By some accounts, an adjutant shouted the expression to a battalion of the Buffs while it was on parade in Malta in 1858.

By other accounts, an officer cried, “Steady, The Buffs!” as the regiment was going into battle abroad. We haven’t been able to confirm either story.

Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Catch Phrases calls it an expression “of self admonition or self-adjuration or self-encouragement” that originated in the military. Its origin? Partridge says only that it comes “from an incident in the history of the East Kent Regiment.”

The Oxford English Dictionary says the expression is a reference to the army regiment and means “hold on! keep calm! be careful!” No origin is given.

However it originated, the expression followed the regiment back home to Britain and became a popular catchphrase.

Oxford’s earliest example is from Rudyard Kipling’s The Story of the Gadsbys (1888), but we’ve found a civilian usage that’s at least two years older.

An angler named Samuel Harwood used it in his “Thames Reminiscences,” which appeared in an April 1886 issue of Fishing, a journal published in London:

“He turned off to the left, and I followed him as well as I could. Squish—squash! This was a sort of exercise in which I did not excel. Oh, why had I not brought my goloshes? But steady, the Buffs, what had become of my leg! Down a drain, or something, by all that was ludricrous. I pulled it out as fast as I could, but only to find I was minus a shoe.”

We also found this example, from an October 1899 issue of the Sketch: “ ‘Good the Guards!’ is becoming a military catchword, just as ‘Steady the Buffs’ and half-a-dozen other short sentences of the kind are.”

A similar but unrelated expression, “stand buff,” means “to stand firm, not to flinch; to endure,” according to the OED.

Oxford’s earliest published example of “stand buff” comes from Samuel Butler’s poem Hudibras’s Epitaph, written sometime before 1679: “For the good old cause stood buff  / ’Gainst many a bitter kick and cuff.”

The “buff” in this phrase is an old noun, dating back to the 1400s, meaning “a blow, stroke, buffet,” the OED says. “Buff” and “counterbuff,” the dictionary adds, “seem to have been technical terms in fencing or pugilism.”

Now, let’s look at the more obscure of the two expressions you asked about—“Stiffen the Prussian Guard (or Guards).”

Other than a brief mention here or there on an Internet discussion group, sightings of this expression are rare.

We found an example in White City (2007), a memoir by the British writer Donald James Wheal of his childhood in World War II-era London.

In this passage, Wheal’s father is speaking: “ ‘Stiffen the Prussian Guards!’ he exploded—his invariable comment at moments of high drama. ‘They’ve given you a scholarship!’ ”

A British review of Wheal’s book, from a 2007 issue of the Telegraph, says that “he writes affectionately of both his background and his parents, particularly his plumber-cum-bookie dad whose only two weaknesses were shouting ‘Stiffen the Prussian Guards!’ at every opportunity and wanting the best for his son.”

What does the phrase mean? Our best guess is that Wheal’s father was using an expression from an earlier era, World War I, and that it originally meant something like “Kill the Germans!”

In turn-of-the-century slang, to “stiffen” was to kill or murder—that is, to make a corpse of—according to the OED and Green’s Dictionary of Slang.

Green’s has examples of this use of “stiffen” (as in “Stiffen the brute!”) dating from the 1890s. The OED has a single example, from an 1888 issue of the Daily News in London: “Mr. Burgess threatened to blow my brains out and to ‘stiffen’ me.”

The rest of the phrase is probably a reference to an elite military unit in Prussia and later Germany from the mid-1700s to the early 1900s.

So in the mouth of a British soldier, “Stiffen the Prussian Guard (or Guards)!” would have been a rousing call to arms.

Donald James Wheal’s parents courted in the 1920s and married in the ’30s, so his father would have remembered World War I and the slang that was in the air back then.

However, he was probably using the expression loosely as an expression of surprise or amazement, much like “I’ll be damned!” or “Blow me down!”  or “I’ll be a son of a gun!”

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Q: What does “taking candy from a baby” mean? It seems to me that it would be hard to take candy from a baby, but I hear people using the expression to mean something that’s very easy to do.

 A: The Cambridge Dictionary of American Idioms says “like taking candy from a baby” means “extremely easy.” The dictionary gives this example: “Selling my mother something I made is like taking candy from a baby—she can’t say no.”

The McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs describes the usage as a cliché meaning very easy, and gives this example: “Getting to the airport was easy. It was like taking candy from a baby.”

However, we’ve often seen the expression used to suggest disreputable as well as easy. Here’s an example from The Con: How Scams Work, Why You’re Vulnerable, and How to Protect Yourself (2011), by James Munton and Jelita McLeod:

“An enterprising criminal, Darius discovered that a small investment on his part could reap treat rewards. ‘It’s like taking candy from a baby. I don’t even have to write the code myself. I just go online and buy it.’ ”

In fact, many early examples use the expression this way, suggesting that the idiom may have originally referred to something both easy and shameful.

The idiom, which showed up in the US in the early 20th century, is often seen with “stealing” instead of “taking,” and “child” instead of a “baby.”

The earliest example we’ve found (with “child” in place of “baby”) is from Taking Chances (1900), a collection of short stories about gambling, by Clarence Louis Cullen.

In a story entitled “Experiences of a Verdant Bookmaker,” a grocer-turned-bookie tries to pull a fast one at the race track: “Now, this looked like a pretty good thing to the groceryman. It looked like taking candy from a child.”

The earliest example we’ve found of the expression used just in the easy sense is from the January 1904 issue of the Photo Critic magazine:

“After a photographer has made one or two dozen prints and becomes familiar with the general workings of these papers, he actually laughs at himself, it is so easy; like taking candy from a baby.”

An article in the October 1905 issue of Munsey’s Magazine, about a crackdown against corruption, uses the expression in both the easy and disreputable sense: “Taking money from St. Louis was for years easier than taking candy from a baby.”

Jack London uses it primarily in the derogatory sense in The Road, a 1907 memoir about his days as a hobo. One of the chapters, “The Pen,” describes the 30 days he spent for vagrancy at the Erie County Penitentiary at Buffalo, NY.

London writes that he and his fellow trustees used to steal rations of bread from the other prisoners and then trade the bread for plugs of chewing tobacco:

“Two or three rations of bread for a plug was the way we exchanged, and they traded, not because they loved tobacco less, but because they loved bread more. Oh, I know, it was like taking candy from a baby, but what would you? We had to live.”

Getting back to your question, we haven’t tried to take candy from a baby, but we suspect that it would be a lot easier than stealing bread from a prisoner at the Erie County Pen.

Easy or not, the expression is an idiom that’s not meant to be taken literally. We’ve written frequently on the blog about idioms, including posts in 2011 and 2012. We’ve also discussed “hobo” in a couple of posts, including one in 2009.

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Q: Is a “rescue dog” one that rescues (like the fabled St. Bernard with a cask of brandy strapped under its neck) or one that is rescued (like an abused puppy that ends up in a shelter)?

A: The phrase “rescue dog” has two meanings, according to the Oxford English Dictionary: “(a) a dog trained to aid in rescue operations; (b) a dog that has been rescued from abuse, neglect, etc.”

In the first sense, the phrase has been in use for more than a century. The second sense is newer, only about 35 years old.

But there’s little chance that the two can be confused, since the phrase’s meaning usually becomes clear in context.

Here are the citations given in the OED, listed chronologically, and the intended meanings seem obvious.

1901: “A great St Bernard, the most celebrated of all the rescue dogs that have worked in the hospice on Mount Bernard” (from the Strand Magazine).

1980: “If you are involved in dog rescue work, a rescue dog can be made much more suitable for adoption after two months of letting you practice on him in the Novice class” (from Patricia Gail Burnham’s book Playtraining Your Dog).

1992: “In addition to being an excellent working sheepdog it [the Appenzell, or Alpine Shepherd Dog] is also used as a ski patrol dog, security dog and rescue dog” (from the book 1001 Images of Dogs).

2003: “It seems that every other dog here is a rescue dog, ‘probably abused,’ their owners often say” (from Jon Katz’s The New Work of Dogs).

When “rescue dog” refers to a rescued animal, the OED says the noun “rescue” is being used attributively (that is, as an adjective) “with the sense ‘designating a domestic animal that has been rescued from abuse or neglect, typically by an animal welfare organization.’ ”

The dictionary notes that this usage can refer to other animals, such “as rescue cat, rescue horse, etc.”

It lists “rescue dog” (1980) as the earliest recorded version, followed by “rescue cats” (1993), “rescue horse” (1998), “rescue animals” (referring to shelter dogs, 2003), and “rescue kitten” (2009). 

We’ve found lots of other examples online, including “rescue bluebird,” “rescue hamster,” “rescue salamander,” “rescue snapping turtle,” and “rescue bunny.”

It’s true that this use of the phrase “rescue dog” would be more literal as “rescued dog.” But in pronunciation the adjoining d’s would tend to combine, so the phrase would end up sounding like “rescue dog” anyway.

Besides, while “rescue dog” in this sense is only a few decades old, the general concept of animal “rescue” is much older and justifies the use of “rescue” here instead of “rescued.”

The OED says that one meaning of the noun “rescue” is “the action of rescuing a (domestic) animal from abuse, neglect, etc., typically by an animal welfare organization; (also) an organization of this type, or a shelter or sanctuary run by such an organization. Freq. with modifying word, as animal rescue, cat rescue, dog rescue, pet rescue, etc.”

The earliest such use of “rescue” in the OED is from an 1899 issue of the Boston Daily Globe. A headline on an article about a shelter reads:

“Refuge for stray canines and felines. Animal Rescue League provides means for disposing of helpless animals by easy deaths or securing homes.”

The dictionary’s most recent example is from Pamela Duncan’s novel Moon Women (2001): “Border collie rescue, they called it. They also had poodle rescue, St. Bernard rescue, cocker spaniel rescue, and every other kind of rescue in the book.”

Did St. Bernard rescue dogs ever carry casks of brandy around their necks? No historical records have been found that document such a practice, according to a Jan. 1, 2008, article in the Smithsonian magazine.

The legend of the brandy-carrying dogs was apparently inspired by Alpine Mastiffs Reanimating a Distressed Traveller, an overly dramatic 1831 painting by Edwin Landseer.

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Q: Why is a “cakewalk” something that’s easy to do? It doesn’t make sense. Or does it?

A: The Dictionary of American Regional English says the term “cakewalk” originally referred to a contest among African-Americans in which “a cake was the prize awarded for the fanciest steps or figures.”

Historians generally believe these contests originated in the antebellum slave quarters of Southern plantations, according to a 1981 paper by Brooke Baldwin in the Journal of Social History.

In the paper, “The Cakewalk: A Study in Stereotype and Reality,” Baldwin notes that former slaves discussed the contests during interviews in the 1930s with researchers from the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration.

(The interviews were transcribed in what would now be considered heavy-handed dialect, with inconsistent punctuation.)

Louise Jones, an ex-slave from Virginia, is quoted as saying: “de music, de fiddles an’ de banjos, de Jews harp, an’ all dem other things. Sech dancin’ you never seen befo. Slaves would set de flo’ in turns, an’ do de cakewalk mos’ all night.”

Estella Jones, an ex-slave from Georgia, is quoted as saying, “De women’s wor long, ruffled dresses wid hoops in ’em and de mens had on high hats, long split-tailed coats, and some of em used walkin’ sticks. De couple dat danced best got a prize.”

The paper also cites several secondhand reports from the 1950s and ’60s that say the slaves dressed up and paraded around in their finery to mock the plantation owners.

In 1950, for example, Shepard Edmonds, a musical figure from the ragtime era, recounted this description of cakewalks from his parents, who had been slaves:

“It was generally on Sundays, when there was little work, that the slaves both young and old would dress up in hand-me-down finery to do a high-kicking, prancing walk-around. They did a take-off on the manners of the white folks in the ‘big house.’ But their masters, who gathered around to watch the fun, missed the point. It’s supposed to be that the custom of a prize started with the master giving a cake to the couple that did the proudest movement.”

Neither the Oxford English Dictionary nor the Dictionary of American Regional English has any 19th-century citations for the term “cakewalk” used to refer to these plantation contests.

In explaining the lack of such written evidence, Baldwin says in the Journal of Social History that slave narratives publicized by abolitionists generally “concentrated on the negative aspects of slave life and devoted little attention to slave culture.”

However, an 1863 citation from Contributions to the Montana Historical Society alludes to the slave term in what the OED describes as a “transferred sense”: “Around and around that bush we went…. We had a good laugh over our cake walk.”

By the late 19th century, according to OED and DARE citations, “cakewalk” was being used in reference to a strutting or prancing dance modeled after the earlier slave contests.

This new “cakewalk” (also spelled “cake walk” or “cake-walk”) was performed in African-American communities as well as in minstrel shows featuring blacks or whites in blackface.

The OED’s earliest citation for “cakewalk” used in this sense is from the October 1879 issue of Harper’s magazine: “Reader, didst ever attend a cake walk given by the colored folks?”

Oxford cites several other examples, including this one from Americanisms Old and New, an 1888 dictionary of colloquialisms and other usages, by John Stephen Farmer:

“In certain sections of the country, cake-walks are in vogue among the colored people. It is a walking contest, not in the matter of speed, but in style and elegance.”

In commenting on the use of cakewalks in minstrel shows, Amiri Baraka (writing as LeRoi Jones) remarked in his book Blues People: The Negro Experience in White America (1963) on the irony of whites satirizing blacks satirizing whites:

“If the cakewalk is a Negro dance caricaturing certain white customs, what is that dance when, say, a white theater company attempts to satirize it as a Negro dance? I find the idea of white minstrels in blackface satirizing a dance satirizing themselves a remarkable kind of irony—which, I suppose is the whole point of minstrel shows.”

In the 20th century, according to citations in DARE, the word “cakewalk” was also used for various marching or dancing games, as well as for a game similar to musical chairs.

The OED’s earliest example for “cakewalk” used to mean something easy to accomplish is from Coo-oo-ee! A Tale of Bushmen From Australia to Anzac, a 1916 book by John Butler Cooper:

“Whether they would give him victory in a fight that would not be a cake-walk, he did not know.”

However, the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang has a much earlier example from The “Fight of the Century,” an 1897 book by George Siler and Lou M. Houseman.

In describing the heavyweight championship bout between Bob Fitzsimmons and James J. Corbett, the authors write at one point: “It’s a cake-walk for Jim. … Fitz hasn’t a chance.”

(Fitzsimmons actually won the fight in the 14th round.)

Why did the term for a contest and a dance come to mean something that’s easy to achieve? We haven’t found a definitive answer, but perhaps the people doing a cakewalk made it look easy—at least those who took the cake did.

DARE notes that this “easy” sense of “cakewalk” is similar to a more popular expression, “piece of cake,” which showed up a couple of decades later.

The earliest citation for “piece of cake” in the OED is from The Primrose Path, a 1936 collection of light verse by Ogden Nash: “Her picture’s in the papers now, / And life’s a piece of cake.”

If you’d like to read more, we had a post a few years ago about “piece of cake.”

We’ll end now with a “cakewalk prance” from Scott Joplin’s 1902 song “The Ragtime Dance”:

Let me see you do the rag-time dance,
Turn left and do the cakewalk prance,
Turn the other way and do the slow drag
Now take your lady to the World’s Fair
And do the rag-time dance.

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Q: I have a question that three history teachers couldn’t answer. Why do we call Central and South America “Latin America”? And why are the inhabitants called “Latinos”? My only guess is that these areas were colonized by Spaniards and they spoke Latin for religious services.

A: The term “Latin” has been used since the 1700s “as a designation for the European peoples which speak languages descended from Latin,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED’s first example is from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1788), by Edward Gibbon.

In writing of the First Crusade, Gibbon mentions “Godfrey of Bouillon, first King of Jerusalem” and the “Institutions of the French or Latin Kingdom.”

By extension, the term “Latin America” came to mean “those countries in Central and South America in which Spanish or Portuguese is the dominant language collectively,” the OED says.

The dictionary’s first example of “Latin America” used this way is from a 1912 issue of The Chambers Journal, a Scottish newspaper: “The amount of British capital invested in the countries of Latin-America is very great.”

One advantage of “Latin America” is that it’s a lot shorter than “Central and South America.” This is probably why it’s more popular too, with over 36 million hits in a Google search to under 2 million for the longer version.

As for “Latino,” the OED says, it refers to “a Latin-American inhabitant of the United States.” However, standard American dictionaries define “Latino” as either a Latin American or someone of Latin American origin living in the US.

The earliest example of “Latino” in the OED is from San Antonio: City in the Sun, a 1946 book by Green Peyton:

“The first program on the University’s list is an exchange of students with Latin America. That in itself would be a fresh intellectual experience for Texas, where Latinos are usually looked on as sinister specimens of an inferior race.”

If you’d like to read more, we answered a question a few years ago about whether Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court justice, is a “Latina” or a “Hispanic.”

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Q: I’ve always been amused by the expression “bruising the gin,” which seems to me the kind of thing one of Bertie’s pals at the Drones Club might utter. What’s the origin/history of “bruise” used in this context?

A: When the verb “bruise” showed up in Old English in the ninth century (spelled brysan), it meant to crush or mangle by a blow with a blunt instrument.

By Shakespeare’s day, however, the crushing-and-mangling sense of “bruise” had weakened considerably to mean injure with a blow that discolors the skin but doesn’t break it.

The Oxford English Dictionary cites this example from Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor (probably written sometime before 1600): “I bruiz’d my shin th’ other day.”

Since then, the verb has taken on various literal and figurative meanings—peaches and egos are bruised, for example, as well as gin.

However, the sense of bruising gin hasn’t made it into the OED or the half-dozen standard dictionaries we usually consult.

We’re not big on martinis, but we’ve read that they can be bruised—that is, diluted and made to taste sharper—by shaking.

The shaking breaks up the ice and, as a 1999 British Medical Journal study notes, is “more effective in deactivating hydrogen peroxide” than simply stirring the gin and vermouth.

To bruise or not to bruise? Most martiniacs seem to believe a martini should be stirred, not shaken, to avoid bruising the gin. However, the earliest written example we’ve found of “bruise” used in this sense takes the opposite position.

In John O’Hara’s 1935 novel Butterfield 8, Paul Farley explains his change of heart on the subject of martini-making:

“I’ve always taken a holy delight in not bruising a poor little cocktail until this English barkeep explained the right way, or his way, and I must say it sounds plausible. He told me a Martini ought to be shaken very hard, briskly, a few vigorous shakes up and down, so that the gin and vermouth would be cracked into a proper foamy mixture.”

For the other side of the stir-versus-shake debate, John T. FitzGerald, chief instructor at the Bartenders School in New York City, offers this advice in an ad for Hiram Walker gin in the June 19, 1939, issue of Life magazine:

“Why should a martini be stirred instead of shaken? Because shaking ‘bruises’ the vermouth … that is, emulsifies it and makes the cocktail cloudy.”

No discussion of shaking and stirring would be complete without mentioning the most famous advocate of shaking—James Bond.

In Casino Royale (1953), Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel, 007 orders a “dry martini” made to his own, distinctive specifications.

Bond directs the barman to mix vodka, gin, and the French aperitif Lillet: “Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?”

The scene continues: “He watched carefully as the deep glass became frosted with the pale golden drink, slightly aerated by the bruising of the shaker. He reached for it and took a long sip.”

Interestingly, Bond doesn’t use his catchphrase “shaken, not stirred” until the film version of Goldfinger (1964), when he tells a stewardess: “A martini, shaken, not stirred.” However, he uses a similar phrase, “shaken and not stirred” in the novel Dr. No (1958).

Getting  back to your question, we haven’t come across a good explanation of why the word “bruise” was originally used to describe the transformation that occurs when a martini is shaken.

We wonder, though, if the bruising of ginger—the pounding of the root to release its juices—in ginger beer may have influenced the usage. Or perhaps the bruising of mint in making a mint julep.

Although the ginger and the mint are physically bruised, the ultimate goal of the bruising is to intensify the flavor in the drinks.

By the way, we don’t recall any remarks by Bertie Wooster or his pals at the Drones Club about gin-bruising. But we recently came across this comment by the British writer Robert McCrum about P. G. Wodehouse’s intoxicating contributions to the OED:

“Wodehouse’s Drones will make for the bar like buffalo for a watering-hole. Their lexicon for inebriated includes: awash; boiled; fried; lathered; illuminated; oiled; ossified; pie-eyed; polluted; primed; scrooched; stinko; squiffy; tanked; and woozled.”

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Q: What is “the line” that Johnny Cash walked and Eddie and the Cruisers walked on down? There is the obvious geometric sense and the implication of faithfulness or doing right, but the usage seems to vary in American popular culture.

A: The noun “line” has taken on quite a lot of senses since it showed up in Anglo-Saxon times and meant a rope or string, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Today, it can mean a line on a piece of paper, a railway line, a line of work, a power line, a pickup line, a line of products, a foul line in sports, a defensive line on the battlefield, a line of people, a line of a musical staff, a bookmaker’s line, and so on.

The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology says the English word is ultimately derived from linea, Latin for linen thread and the source of the English noun “linen.”

The noun “line” has taken on even more meanings in such expressions as “draw the line” (18th century, to lay down a limit beyond which one won’t tolerate or act) and “hold the line” (20th century, to maintain a position or a viewpoint).

As for the expressions you’re asking about, let’s begin with the beginning of the 1956 Johnny Cash song “I Walk the Line”:

I keep a close watch on this heart of mine
I keep my eyes wide open all the time
I keep the ends out for the tie that binds
Because you’re mine, I walk the line.  

As you’ve noted, in the Cash song the expression “to walk the line” means to be faithful. That’s how he explained it in a Feb. 26, 2010, interview with NPR: “It was kind of a prodding to myself to play it straight, Johnny.”

[Update, Jan. 16, 2015. A reader writes to point out that the song “Sixteen Tons,” first recorded by Merle Travis in 1946 and later by Tennessee Ernie Ford in 1955, uses the same expression. One stanza, as recorded by Travis, ends, “Ain’t no high-tone woman make me walk the line.”]

Where does this usage come from?

We couldn’t find any entries for “walk the line” in the OED, standard dictionaries, or authoritative slang dictionaries.

However, we’ve found many examples from as far back as the 1700s of the expression used in the sense of being faithful.

For example, Masonic Miscellanies, a 1797 collection of Masonic poetry and prose collected by Stephen Jones, includes these lines:

To the secret and the silent,
To all Masons who walk the line,
To him that did the Temple rear,
To each true and faithful heart,
That still preserves the sacred art.

As for “Boardwalk Angel,” the John Cafferty song from the 1983 film Eddie and the Cruisers, here’s the stanza that caught your attention:

The world has let you down and it broke your heart
But tonight’s the night for a brand new start
We’ll leave the world behind
We’ll go walking on down the line
Come on girl, let’s make our dream come true.

The expression “down the line” is often used literally, meaning from one end to the other, as in down a line of troops or down a railway line.

Here’s an OED example from Tony, an 1898 children’s book by the English novelist Florence Montgomery: “A few stations down the line.”

The expression is also used figuratively in the sense of complete, as in this OED example from the June 9, 1962, issue of the Economist: “Mr. Yarborough described himself as a ‘down-the-line supporter’ of President Kennedy.”

However, Cafferty doesn’t seem to be using “down the line” either way in his lyrics for “Boardwalk Angel.” Two other uses of the phrase make more sense to us.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Idioms says the expression is usually spoken and means in the future. It gives this example: “Waiting even a year to put money into your retirement account can make a big difference down the line.”

So according to Cambridge, a statement like “We’ll go walking on down the line” could mean “We’ll go walking on into the future.”

Green’s Dictionary of Slang offers another possible explanation of the lyric. It says the verb phrase “go down the line” means “to make an effort, to commit oneself.” This sounds a lot like the way Johnny Cash used “walk the line.”

Here’s an example from a 1955 novel by Budd Schulberg based on the screenplay he wrote for On the Waterfront (1954): “I go down the line for them and the Doyle crowd still treat me like a bum, Terry thought bitterly.”

So, according to Green’s, “We’ll go walking on down the line” could mean something like “We’ll be committed to each other.”

Sorry we can’t be more definite here. We’ve asked John Cafferty, the guy who wrote “Boardwalk Angel,” for the final word on this, but we haven’t heard from him yet.

In the meantime, let’s say “We’ll go walking on down the line” means something like “We’ll be faithful to each other as we walk on into the future.”

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