Category: Word origin

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 As the linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum has written on the Language Log, it’s merely outdated and no longer common in English usage.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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Q: I was reading The Egoist, George Meredith’s 1879 novel, the other day when I came upon a passage that imagines a sailor “blown from the masthead in a gale.” Am I right in assuming that the nautical “masthead” gave us its periodical sense?

A: Yes, it’s likely that the “masthead” on a ship inspired the “masthead” in a newspaper or magazine, though we haven’t found an authoritative source to confirm this.

The terms are clearly related. Both are derived from “mast” and “head,” two old words with roots in Anglo-Saxon times. And an early masthead from the 19th-century American journal Gleason’s Weekly features an image of a sailing ship.

However, the word “head” had been used figuratively for hundreds to years to refer to the top of a page when the term “masthead” first appeared in its journalistic sense in the 1800s.

Both “mast” (spelled mæst) and “head” (spelled heafdu, heafod, or heafde,) showed up early Old English, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary.

King Alfred uses both terms in his Old English translation of the Roman philosopher Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiæ (circa 888).

The term “mast” originally meant pretty much what it means now: an upright pole to support the sails of a sailing ship. And “head” originally had the principal meaning it has today: the upper part of a human or animal body.

In the 1500s, the word “head” took on a new sense: the top of a page or the title at the top of a page. The OED’s earliest citation for this usage is from the Geneva Bible of 1560:

“We haue set ouer the head of euery page some notable worde or sentence which may greatly further aswel for memorie, as for the chief point of the page.”

The combined term “masthead” showed up in the late 1400s in the nautical sense, meaning the top of a mast. The OED says it usually referred to a place for observation or flying a flag, though it was once a place for punishment.

The earliest citation for “masthead” in the OED is from a 1495 entry in the naval accounts and inventories of King Henry VII: “A parell for the mayne Toppe maste ffeble j Garlandes of yron abought the mast hede j.”

The word took on a journalistic sense in the early 1800s, when it referred to “the title, motto, or similar device, of a newspaper or journal, printed in a conspicuous place, usually at the top of the first page or front cover,” according to the dictionary.

The first Oxford citation for the usage is from the Dec. 22, 1838, issue of the Hennepin (Illinois) Journal: “Many of our Whig friends … were anxious that the Journal should … carry Whig colors at the mast-head.

In the early 1900s, according to OED citations, the word took on a new journalistic sense: “a section in a newspaper or journal (usually on the editorial page or next to the table of contents) giving information relating to the publication, such as the owner’s name, a list of the editors, etc.”

The dictionary’s first example for this usage is from a 1934 entry in Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition:

“Masthead, the matter printed in every issue of a newspaper or journal, stating the title, ownership, and management, subscription and advertising rates, etc.”

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Q: American here;  I am never sure that I understand the source, meaning, and cultural nuances of British vernacular, most recently the gist of two words, “tosser” and “twee.” Where are they on the incendiary scale?

A: “Tosser” and “twee”—sounds like a UK law firm. Well, both of these British terms are derisive, but to varying degrees.

The slang noun “tosser,” dating from the 1970s, is pretty high on the incendiary scale. It’s defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “a term of contempt or abuse for a person; a ‘jerk.’ ” (A “jerk-off” is closer to its etymological roots.)

The colloquial adjective “twee,” dating from the early 1900s, isn’t nearly as insulting. British speakers use it the way Americans use “precious” in its negative sense of overly nice or affected.

“Tosser,” the OED says, is probably derived from the verbal phrase “toss off,” meaning to masturbate. This phrase can be transitive (as in “he tossed himself off”) or intransitive (“he tossed off”).

The OED’s earliest recorded use of this phrase is from a poem in The Pearl, a journal of Victorian erotica that was briefly published in 1879 and ’80: “I don’t like to see, though at me you might scoff, / An old woman trying to toss herself off.”

Oxford also describes an earlier noun usage, in which “toss-off” was “coarse slang” for “an act of masturbation.” This usage was recorded as far back as 1735 in The Rake’s Progress etchings of Hogarth: “And take a Toss-off in the Porch.”

Suffice it to say that the underlying sense of “tosser,” a term first used in the 1970s, is masturbator—or, to use a slightly earlier British vernacular term, “wanker.” (On the source of the mid-20th-century verb “wank,” the OED has only “origin unknown.”)

But despite its underlying sense, “tosser” is generally (though not always) used loosely to mean, as the Collins English Dictionary says, “a stupid or despicable person.” 

The OED’s earliest published example is from a 1977 issue of the British music magazine ZigZag: “She came on in a big mac and flashed her legs like an old tosser before throwing it off.”

This milder example is from the British mystery writer Peter Inchbald’s novel Short Break in Venice (1983): “Poor little tosser. As if he wasn’t suffering enough already.”

As for “twee,” it represents “an infantile pronunciation of sweet,” the OED says. And originally “twee” simply meant “sweet,” as in this 1905 example from Punch: “ ‘I call him perfectly twee!’ persisted Phyllis.”

But today, Oxford says, the adjective is seen “only in depreciatory use,” and means “affectedly dainty or quaint; over-nice, over-refined, precious, mawkish.”

Standard dictionaries agree.

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), defines “twee” as chiefly British and meaning “affectedly or excessively dainty, delicate, cute, or quaint.”

The Macmillan Dictionary puts it this way: “something that is twee is intended to be attractive but seems too perfect to be real.”

The OED gives this example from a 1983 issue of a former BBC publication, the Listener: “Mike Nichols’s thriller-fantasy about dolphins should be as nauseatingly twee as the worst Disney—but it isn’t.”

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Q: Have you ever looked into “pardon my French”? I think it would make an interesting, and perhaps titillating, item for the blog.

A: As a matter of fact, we ran a post about “pardon my French” back in 2008, but we think it’s time for an update.

Robert A. Simon, a novelist, librettist, and New Yorker critic, seems to have been the first person to use “pardon my French” in writing to excuse swearing or other questionable language.

The earliest example of the usage we’ve found in a search of Google Books is from Simon’s 1923 novel Our Little Girl:

“ ‘Hell, you don’t want anybody to impress you!’

“Mrs. Loamford stiffened. Harper noted the reaction.

“ ‘Pardon my French, Mrs. Loamford,’ he apologized.”

However, similar expressions have been used since the mid-1800s, soon after English speakers began using the term “French” euphemistically for bad language, according to written examples in the OED.

We’ve found even earlier examples of “pardon my French” used literally to excuse the use of a French expression in conversation, either because the listener might not understand or because the usage might be taken as pretentious.

Here’s an example from Randolph, an 1823 novel by John Neal: “I do not believe that I am yet ‘une fille perdue!’ Pardon my French. You know that I am not very ostentatious of such things.”

The earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary of “French” used for bad language is from Adventures in New Zealand, an 1845 book by Edward Wakefield: “The enraged headsman spares no ‘bad French’ in explaining his motives.”

The dictionary’s first citation for an expression similar to “pardon my French” used to excuse questionable language is from Marian Rooke, an 1865 novel by Henry Sedley: “Excuse my French.”

The latest Oxford example uses “pardon my French” to excuse an attack on another kind of bad English—academese.

In the May 12, 2005, issue of the New York Times Book Review, a book is described as “a welcome change from theory-infected academic discourse, pardon my French.”

The adjective “French,” of course, has been used in a negative way in English for hundreds of years.

A 1503 citation in the OED, for instance, refers to venereal disease as the “Frenche pox.” The French, naturally, referred to it as the mal des Anglais. Touché!

And “French” has been used since the mid-18th century to describe racy novels and pictures. As an example, here’s an excerpt from Robert Browning’s Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister (1842):

Or, my scrofulous French novel
On gray paper with blunt type!
Simply glance at it, you grovel
Hand and foot in Belial’s gripe.

Belial was the personification of evil in the Old Testament and a fallen angel in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

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Q: When did “seniors” take over the playing field as a replacement for “the elderly” or “the aging” or “retirees”? And why? Can’t stand that usage. Never have, even during my working years. Seems condescending when it isn’t applied to students.

A: The noun “senior” was used to mean an old person or an elder long before it was applied to students. In fact, this was the original sense of the word, but 600 years ago it didn’t have quite as broad a meaning as it has today. 

Back in the Middle Ages, when “senior” was first recorded in writing, it was a noun meaning an elderly person of a particular kind—someone who was not merely aged, but respected or venerated for that reason.

The noun’s original sense, the Oxford English Dictionary says, was “one superior or worthy of deference and reverence by reason of age; one having pre-eminence in dignity by priority of election, appointment, etc.”

The term, according to OED citations, first appeared in writing in the works of the 14th-century theologian and philosopher John Wycliffe. In a religious tract from around 1380, Wycliffe used “seniours” to mean church elders.

We found a few examples that are more secular. In his Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), John Dryden wrote: “Arriv’d, he first enquir’d the founder’s name / Of this new colony; and whence he came. / Then thus a senior of the place replies.”

Another poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, used the term in a similar way in his Threnody (1842-44): “Each village senior paused to scan, / And speak the lovely caravan.”

But it appears that “senior” wasn’t used much as a general noun for any elderly person until fairly recently. Our guess is that the wider usage has become popular because of the ubiquitous “senior citizen,” a euphemism born in pre-World War II America.

Oxford’s first citation for “senior citizen” is from a 1938 issue of Time magazine: “Mr. Downey had an inspiration to do something on behalf of what he calls, for campaign purposes, ‘our senior citizens.’ ”

As the OED says, this “term for an elderly person, esp. one who is past the age of retirement,” is frequently used “in official communications and by the media as a euphemism for ‘old-age pensioner.’ ”

(Speaking of euphemisms for the elderly, Pat recalls that back in the 1970s the phrase “super adult” made a brief appearance. Mercifully, it passed away, except in reference to porn movies and disposable diapers.)

Though “senior citizen” originated in the US, it’s established in the UK as well. The examples in the OED include several from British books and periodicals of the 1960s and ’70s.

We can only speculate that, as we said above, the popularity of “senior citizen” may have revived the old use of “senior,” but in a wider sense.

On the other hand, the current use of “senior” as a noun for anyone who’s elderly could be regarded merely as short for “senior citizen.”

We were about to close this post when we remembered that we hadn’t discussed the academic use of the noun “senior.”

(We may have had a “senior moment,” which the OED defines as a humorous colloquialism dating from the mid-1990s and meaning “an instance or short period of forgetfulness or confusion, such as might be experienced by an elderly person.”)

Anyway, the noun “senior” was first used in the early 17th century to mean an upper-level student. Today’s definition, according to the OED, is “one of the more advanced students” or, in American usage, a fourth-year student.

Appropriately, Oxford’s earliest example of this usage is from a schoolmaster. In his book Ludus Literarius; or, The Grammar Schoole (1612), John Brinsley wrote: “That the two or fowre Seniors in each fourme, be as Vshers in that fourme.”

The OED also cites an American example from The Customs of Harvard College, a 1741 manuscript copy of rules for new students. “No Freshman shall be saucy to his Senior.”

By the way, this amusing manuscript was eventually printed as part of A Collection of College Words and Customs, an 1851 book by Benjamin H. Hall. If you have any spare time, the manuscript makes fascinating reading.

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Q: When Phil Everly died the other day, Nancy Sinatra tweeted, “I love you Phillip–Godspeed.” I’ve always assumed “Godspeed” is short for something like “May God speed you on your way.” But why speed? Why the hurry?

A: The “speed” in “Godspeed” has nothing to do with quickness. In fact, the word “speed” itself didn’t mean quickness when it first showed up in Anglo-Saxon times almost 1,300 years ago.

The noun “speed” (spelled spoed in Old English) originally meant “success, prosperity, good fortune; profit, advancement, furtherance,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED cites this early example from a glossary, written around the year 725, of Latin and Old English terms: “Successus, spoed.”

Similarly, the verb “speed,” which showed up in the late 900s, meant to succeed or prosper. The dictionary’s earliest citation is from The Battle of Maldon, an Old English poem dating from 993.

Here’s the citation in Modern English: “No need to slaughter each other if you speed [are generous with] us.”

Although the “success” sense of “speed” is now considered obsolete or archaic except in Scottish English, according to the OED, the usage lives in the term “Godspeed” (also written “God-speed” and “God speed”).

The “Godspeed” usage first showed up in the 1300s in verbal phrases like “God spede me” and “God spede thee,” meaning “May God give you success” (or “prosperity” or “good fortune”).

The OED’s earliest citation is from Sir Tristrem, a Middle English romance dating from around 1330: “He may bidde god me spede.”

And here’s an example from around 1385 in the “The Knight’s Tale,” the first story in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales: “God spede yow go forth and ley on faste.”

In the 1500s, according to the OED, people began bidding one another “God speed,” especially “to express a wish for the success of one who is setting out on some journey or enterprise.”

The dictionary’s first example of this usage is from the Tyndale Bible of 1526: “Yf ther come eny vnto you and bringe not this learninge him receave not to housse: neither bid him God spede.”

And here’s a 1597 example from Shakespeare’s Richard II: “A brace of draimen bid, God speed him wel.”

By the way, don’t confuse “Godspeed” with the old phrase “good speed.” (The word “good” was sometimes spelled “god” in Old English and Middle English.)

The expression “good speed” is a separate usage, in which “speed” in the old sense of success was coupled with adjectives like “good” or “evil.”

Among the OED citations is this line from Daniel Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720): “The King wished us good Speed.”

So when, you’re probably wondering, did “speed” get its speedy sense?

The noun “speed” took on its sense of quickness a few hundred years after it showed up in Old English meaning success, prosperity or good fortune.

The OED’s earliest example of “speed” used in the sense of quickness is from an Old English manuscript of Genesis believed to have been written sometime around the year 1000.

The citation begins after God promises the elderly Abraham and Sarah that they will soon have a son. Here it is in modern English: “Then at once after the speech they departed with speed, eager to be gone.”

Oxford‘s earliest example of the verb “speed” used in this sense (Egipte folc hem hauen ut sped) is from a manuscript of Exodus, dating from around 1250, in which the Egyptians speed the Israelites—that is, force them to flee in haste.

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Q: Why was Ectopistes migratorius called a “passenger pigeon”? Was the “passenger” a message like those carried by homing pigeons?

A: No, the word “passenger” here has nothing to do with carrying messages. It’s an old term (originally spelled “passager”) for a migratory bird—that is, a bird of passage.

English adapted the word “passenger” in the 1300s from passager and several similar “n”-less terms in Anglo-Norman and Middle French for a ferry, a ferryman, or a passenger on a ferry or other vessel.

Why an “n” in the English version of the word? The Oxford English Dictionary explains that it’s an example of “the development of an intrusive n before g found chiefly in loanwords from the late Middle English period onwards.”

The OED cites several similar words of French origin, including “messenger” and “harbinger,” in which an “n” was inserted during the Middle English period (from the late 12th to the late 15th centuries).

From the 1300s to the 1500s, the English term “passenger” developed several senses: a pilot of a ferry, a ferry or ship that carries passengers, a passenger, and a traveler.

In the late 1500s, “passenger” came to mean a migratory bird. The earliest OED citation for this usage, minus the “n,” is from Thomas North’s 1579 translation of Plutarch’s Lives:

“Which hathe geuen some occasion to holde … that the vulters are passagers, and come into these partes out of straunge countryes.”

The intrusive “n” shows up in the next OED citation, from The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624), by John Smith:

“Sometimes are also seene Falcons … but because they come seldome, they are held but as passengers.”

The OED says the use of the word “passenger” in the migratory sense is now obsolete, but the usage lives on in the terms “bird of passage” and “passenger pigeon.”

The dictionary’s earliest example of “bird of passage” used to mean a migratory bird is from a 1717 entry in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.

In the citation, flamingos are said to “sometimes visit us here in Europe, and so may be accounted amongst the Migratory Kind, or Birds of Passage.”

Oxford suggests that the use of “bird of passage” in this sense may have been influenced by the Middle French term oiseau de passage, which dates from 1549.

The dictionary’s first citation for “passenger pigeon” is from a 1772 entry in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London: “Passenger Pigeon, Faun. Am. Sept. 11. Severn River, N^o 63.”

The term “passenger pigeon” is defined in the OED as “a long-tailed North American pigeon, Ectopistes migratorius, noted for its former abundance, rapid and sustained flight, and mass migrations.”

The dictionary adds that the passenger pigeon (once commonly known as the wild pigeon) “was relentlessly hunted to extinction, the last individual dying in captivity in 1914.”

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Q: The New York Times Book Review says former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates “is naming names” in his new memoir. I’ve always thought that to “name names” is strangely redundant, but you hear it all the time. Does anyone question it nowadays?

A: Is the verb phrase “name names” redundant? No, though a lot of people online seem to think so.

Just because a verb and a noun sound the same doesn’t make using them together redundant. A redundant word is superfluous. The phrase “name names” would lose its meaning if you eliminated either word.

The fact that the phrase has an interior rhyme is probably responsible, at least in part, for its popularity.

Many people believe “name names” is a 20th-century creation, perhaps inspired by crackdowns on organized crime or even the McCarthy hearings.

But in fact this verb phrase is more than 300 years old.

The Oxford English Dictionary says that “name names” means “to specify the names of people, esp. those involved in a discreditable or illegal incident, etc.; to incriminate or implicate people.”

Frequently, the OED says, the phrase is used “in negative contexts, as to name no names, without naming names, etc.”

“It may often be the case,” Oxford notes, “that only one person is alluded to, despite the use of the plural names.”

The dictionary’s earliest example of the usage is from a comic play by Thomas Sotherne, The Wives’ Excuse (1692): “No naming Names, good Wellvile.”

However, our own searches turned up an earlier example. In a treatise entitled The Case of Kneeling at the Holy Sacrament, Stated and Resolved, published in London in 1685, the English rector John Evans wrote: “but it’s uncivil to name names.”

The expression (along with its variants) certainly has staying power, since it’s been used steadily ever since. The OED has many other examples, including these:

1696: “Don’t press me then to name Names” (from John Vanbrugh’s comedy The Relapse);

1763: “without naming any names” (a letter in The Gentleman’s Magazine);

1792: “She desired he would name no names” (from the novelist Fanny Burney’s journal);

1843: “Naming no names, and therefore hurting nobody” (from Charles Dickens’s novel Martin Chuzzlewit);

1888: “I will name no names” (from Rudyard Kipling’s story collection Soldiers Three);

1908: “I name no names” (from Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows).

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Q: A recent mini-review of a film on the New York Times television page used the expression “pedal to the mettle.” I’ve always thought it was “pedal to the metal.” Is the former a proper usage?

A: The recent TV brief that caught your attention quotes the first sentence of an Aug. 23, 2012, review in the Times of the movie Premium Rush, a screwball thriller about a New York City bicycle messenger:

“Pushing pedal to the mettle and its breezily thin, goofy story to the breaking point, ‘Premium Rush’ provides just about all the late summer air-conditioned relief you could hope for.”

You’re right that the correct expression is “pedal to the metal,” but the Times reviewer may have deliberately taken creative liberties here, inspired by the mettle of the biker, who runs “a gantlet of darting cars, buses, trucks and pedestrians” while dodging a crooked cop.

The Oxford English Dictionary says the colloquial expression “pedal to the metal,” which originated in the United States in the 1970s, was used first “in the context of driving, later also in extended use.”

In a literal sense, the “pedal” in the expression is a vehicle’s gas pedal, and the “metal” is the floorboard. (Putting the pedal to the metal is the same as “flooring” it.)

This may have started as a Citizens Band radio term used by truckers. We found the expression in a glossary of CB lingo published in the July 1976 issue of Popular Mechanics: “Pedal to the metal: Accelerator to the floor.” 

It also appears in books on CB radio published that year, and we found one mention from the year before, suggesting that the usage was well established in the CB world by the mid-70s. 

The phrase is used both literally and figuratively as an adjective, an adverb, and a verb.

The OED defines the adjective phrase—usually hyphenated, “pedal-to-the-metal”—as meaning “high-speed, fast-paced; reckless, unrestrained.”

The adverbial phrase—often worded as “with the pedal to the metal”—means “at top speed; headlong, recklessly,” according to Oxford.

And the OED defines the verb phrase (“to put the pedal to the metal”) as meaning “to accelerate, to drive at top speed; (in extended use) to proceed very rapidly or recklessly; to perform to one’s full capacity.”

The OED’s earliest published citation for the phrase is from a 1976 issue of Time magazine: “Up to 3,500 fans will … watch these two ‘pedal-to-the-metal’ drivers bump fenders as they scream around the track.”

Another 1976 citation, this one from the National Lampoon, uses the phrase as a verb: “Once again D.D. puts the pedal to the metal.”

This 1987 quotation, from Jon Franklin’s book Molecules of the Mind, uses the phrase as an adverb: “Our world was an eighteen-wheeler full of dynamite, careening down the highway with the pedal to the metal.”

This more figurative sense of the phrase comes from the Chicago Tribune (1998): “[He] is heading pedal-to-the-metal into matrimony.”

When expressions are used figuratively, people sometimes lose sight of the original meaning of the words, which accounts for phrases like “pedal to the mettle” used mistakenly—not in jest.

Although “mettle” is sometimes misused for “metal,” the opposite is true too, as when we read of someone “on his metal” or “showing his metal.”

The proper phrases are “on his mettle” (prepared to do his best) and “testing his mettle” (showing his best qualities).

The noun “mettle” means a combination of qualities—spirit, determination, courage, strength of character, and so on. As the OED says, it’s “the ‘stuff’ of which one is made, regarded as an indication of one’s character.”

Interestingly, “metal” and “mettle” have separate meanings now, but they began life as different spellings of the same word.

“Mettle” first showed up in the 16th century as a variant spelling of the much older term “metal,” which English borrowed from Old French in the 1200s.

But by the early 18th century “mettle” had become established as the proper spelling for the metaphorical sense of “metal,” meaning “the material from which a person is made,” to quote the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology.

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Q: A mentor of mine, an MD, taught me that a contagious disease spreads by contact between people while an infectious one doesn’t need contact. This would suggest that laughter or fun is “contagious,” not “infectious.” Other usage gurus are a bit vague, but I hope to find your usual precision on this one.  

A: Medline Plus, the online medical dictionary from the National Institutes of Health, generally agrees with your mentor. It defines “contagious” as “communicable by contact,” and “infectious” as “capable of causing infection.”

Of course the two terms aren’t mutually exclusive. As William Arthur Hagan explains in The Infectious Diseases of Domestic Animals (1943), “All contagious diseases are also infectious, but it does not follow that all infectious diseases are contagious.”

Although many people use the two terms interchangeably, the definitions for “contagious” and “infectious” in standard dictionaries are similar to those in medical references.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), for example, defines “contagious” as “transmissible by direct or indirect contact,” and “infectious” as “capable of causing infection.”

However, both terms have strayed from those senses when used figuratively, according to the Oxford English Dictionary and Fowler’s Modern English Usage (rev. 3rd ed.).

The lexicographer R. W. Burchfield, writing in Fowler’s, discusses the figurative evolution of “contagious” and “infectious”:

“In figurative uses, contagious tends to be used of both pleasant and unpleasant things (in the OED and OED files of corruption, folly, guilt, panic, and suffering, but also laughter, shyness, and vigour), whereas infectious is mainly restricted to pleasant things (enthusiasm, good humour, laughter, sense of fun, simple delight, virtue, and zeal).”

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage agrees that in recent figurative usage “contagious can be used of pleasant and unpleasant things, but infectious is almost always used of pleasant things.”

So, “laughter” and “fun” can be described as either “contagious” or “infectious,” though they’re more likely to be called “infectious.”

Now, let’s look at the history of these two adjectives.

English adapted the word “contagious” from the Old French contagieus in the 1300s, but the ultimate source is the Latin noun contagion, which refers to touching and contact as well as contagion.

In the OED’s earliest example, from Chaucer’s 1374 translation of Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiæ, “contagious” is used to describe the corruption of the soul by being in contact with the body:

“Whan I lost my memorie by the contagious coniunccioun of the body with the soule.” (We’ve replaced the runic letter thorn with “th” throughout.) 

By the early 1400s, the adjective was being used in its medical sense. in Lanfranc’s Science of Cirurgie (circa 1400), leprosy is referred to as “oon of the syknessis that ben contagious.” (We’ve replaced a thorn here with “th.”)

In the 1600s, according to OED citations, people began using “contagious” figuratively to describe all sorts of things “communicated from one to another or to others.”

The dictionary’s first example is from A Treatise of Seraphic Love (1660), by Robert Boyle: “If our Friends do not allay our Love or Affection by unwelcome Actions, or their contagious Sufferings.”

The next citation is from Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667): “Well understood Of Eve, whose Eye darted contagious Fire.”

As for “infectious,” English adapted the term from Anglo-Norman and Middle French in the 1500s, but the ultimate source is inficere, Latin for to dye, stain, infect, imbue, or corrupt.

Originally, according to the OED, the English term referred to “causing or spreading disease, esp. of an epidemic nature.” Later, it came to be used more widely to mean capable of “causing or transmitting infection.”

The dictionary’s earliest citation for “infectious” is from a 1534 treatise on epidemic disease by Thomas Paynell, an English friar who wrote on literary and medical subjects:

“For from suche infected bodies commethe infectious and venemous fumes and vapours, the whiche do infecte and corrupte the aire.”

Soon, according to OED citations, the term was being used figuratively to mean “tending or liable to infect or contaminate character, morals,” but that sense is now considered rare.

By the early 1600s, the adjective took on its modern figurative sense of “having the quality of spreading from one to another; easily communicable.”

The earliest Oxford example is from The Maid’s Tragedy, a 1619 play by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher: “She carries with her an infectious griefe, / That strikes all her beholders.”

The next citation, from John Dryden’s Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), uses the term positively: “Through the bright Quire th’ infectious Vertue ran. All dropp’d their Tears.”

We’ll end with a more recent example from a 1988 issue of Rugby News: “He’s very infectious and the sort of guy people want to follow.”

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