Tag: Phrase origin

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English English language Etymology Expression Phrase origin Usage Word origin

Bird play

Q: What is the origin of the unfortunate phrase “to kill two birds with one stone”? I do use it by habit, but I catch myself every time I say it.

A: We think you’re being overly sensitive about this. The expression is rarely used literally. In fact, the phrase was used figuratively when it first showed up in writing in the 1600s and it has generally been used that way ever since.

The Oxford English Dictionary describes the usage as a proverbial phrase meaning “to accomplish two different purposes by the same act or proceeding.”

The earliest citation in the OED is from a 1655-56 exchange of views about free will between the philosopher Thomas Hobbes and the Anglican Bishop John Bramhall: “T. H. thinks to kill two birds with one stone, and satisfy two arguments with one answer.”

However, we’ve found an earlier example in A Complete History of the Present Seat of War in Africa Between the Spaniards and Algerines, a 1632 book by an author identified on the title page as “J. Morgan Gent.”

The gentleman writes that a Berber military chief “came resolved to kill two Birds with one Stone, return the Spaniards their Compliments, and conduct his insolent Turks, where he was certain at least some of them would be knocked on the head.”

We’ve seen quite a bit of speculation online that the expression originated in other languages—Latin, Greek, Chinese, and so on—but we’ve seen no evidence that English borrowed the usage.

A typical theory is that the expression originated with Ovid, but the closest example we’ve found in the Roman poet’s writing is the scene from Metamorphoses where Tiresias strikes two copulating snakes with a stick and is transformed into a woman.

Many online “experts” believe the usage originated in the story of Daedalus and Icarus, who escaped from the Labyrinth on Crete by making wings and flying out, according to Greek mythology.

Daedalus supposedly got the feathers to make the wings by killing two birds with one stone. However, neither Ovid nor Appolodorus, the principal sources of the myth, say anything about how Daedalus got the feathers.

In the 1600s, when the expression arrived in English, one sense of the word “bird” was a game bird, especially a partridge, according to the OED. And one sense of the term “stone” (or “gunstone”) at that time was a bullet.

A more likely explanation is that the expression was influenced by one that appeared nearly a century earlier: “to stop two gaps with one bush.”

The OED defines the earlier usage as “to accomplish two ends at once” or (you guessed it) “to kill two birds with one stone.”

The first citation for this usage is from John Heywood’s 1546 collection of proverbs: “I will learne, to stop two gaps with one bushe.”

And, with that, we’ll stop.

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Let’s do “do”

Q: I’m wondering how “do” has universally replaced almost all specific verbs: “do Italy,” “do quiche,” “do tennis,” “do the mail,” and on. I was in a diner with a friend who asked the Greek waiter, “Did you do the broccoli yet?” He had no idea what she meant. I interceded, “Did you cook the broccoli?” I’m an English teacher and it drives me crazy.

A: You might as well make peace with this usage. It may be overdone, but it’s not new, and it’s not likely to go away.

We’ve all heard it for years now, from “Let’s do lunch” to the eternal refrain of cleaning people everywhere: “I don’t do windows.”

In fact, from a historical standpoint, this kind of construction—“do” followed by a noun as direct object—isn’t unusual.  For more than a thousand years, English speakers have used it to mean achieve, perform, bring about, carry out, accomplish, and so on.  

We still use “do” this way, as in “do honor to one’s country,” “do the work,” “do nothing,” “do one’s duty,” “do justice,” “do evil,” “do penance,” “do your best,” etc.

We also use “do” plus an object to mean prepare, arrange, clean, put in order, deal with, work on, or make ready.

Your example “do the mail” falls into this category, and it’s not unusual. Similar examples include “do the flowers,” “do the room,” “do housework,” “do one’s hair [or makeup],” “do his homework,” “do the accounts,” “do your taxes,” and so forth.

“Do” is extremely useful in this way. As the Oxford English Dictionary remarks, “Since every kind of action may be viewed as a particular form of doing, the uses of the verb are as numerous as the classes of objects which it may govern.”

We’ve written before on the blog about usages like “do a burger,” “do lunch,” and so on. As we noted, “do” has been used to mean consume (as in “do a couple of pints” or “do a chop”) since the mid-19th century.

A related sense, “to eat or drink, esp. habitually,” dates from the 1970s, Oxford says. The dictionary’s citations include “do booze” (1970), “do sushi” (1987), “do coffee” (1989), and “do alcohol” (1994). We might add your example “do quiche” (as in “Does he do quiche?”). 

As we also mentioned in that earlier post, “do lunch” is vintage 1970s. This expression (sometimes it’s “do dinner”), was first recorded in Ladies’ Man (1978), a novel by Richard Price:

“ ‘Kenny, whata you doin’ now?’ ‘Now? I was gonna do lunch; you wanna do lunch?’ ”

The OED defines the phrase as meaning “to meet for the specified meal, esp. with a view to conducting business.”

This more businesslike exchange of pleasantries is from Marc Blake’s novel 24 Karat Schmooze (2001): “ ‘And if you come up with something more, do get in touch.’ ‘I will.’ ‘We must do lunch.’ ”

Let’s look at the other usages you mention: “do Italy,” “do tennis,” and “do the broccoli.”

It was 19th-century tourists, the OED says, who began using “do” to mean to visit a site.

Oxford’s citations include “do the Rhine” (1817), “done North and South America” (1830), “ ‘did’ a bit of continent” (1844), and “ ‘do’ Cologne Cathedral” (1854).

The fact that the writers sometimes used quotation marks or italics probably indicates that they considered  this usage a colloquialism.

Phrases like “do tennis” are more recent. The OED has citations since 1990 for “do” used to mean “to (be able to) partake of or engage in,” mostly in negative constructions.

The dictionary’s examples include “he didn’t ‘do’ relationships” (1990), “can ‘do intimacy’ ” (1994), “he doesn’t do boyfriends” (1999), and “doesn’t do small talk.”

As for “do the broccoli,” the OED says that since the 1600s “do” has been used to mean “to prepare or make ready as food; to cook.”

The dictionary’s earliest example is from Samuel Pepys’s Diary (1660): “We had … a carp and some other fishes, as well done as ever I eat any.” (He’s using “well done” here in the sense of “well prepared.”)

In another citation for the usage, an advertisement from the 1890s seeks a young woman “capable of doing pastry.”

It would be hard to overestimate the importance of the verb “do” in our language.

For example, we use “do” with a pronoun as object, in both questions and statements: “What has Jack done?” … “That does it!” … “What does your brother-in-law do?” … “This just isn’t done.” 

As auxiliary forms, “do”/”do not” and “did”/”did not” are especially handy.

We use the auxiliary “do” plus an infinitive to form an emphatic imperative, as in “Do tell!” … “Do be quiet” … “Do stay.”

In addition, the auxiliary “do” is often used with an infinitive to form a question: “Do you smoke?” … “Did they drive?” … “Does he love her?” Without this flexibility, we’d have to resort to the clumsy “Smoke you?” … “Drove they?” …”Loves he her?”

And in negative sentences, as Oxford points out, “do not” and “did not” allow “the negative to come after the auxiliary, instead of following the principal verb: e.g., ‘We did not recognize him’ instead of ‘We recognized him not.’ ”

In short, forms of “do” have helped English no end! We could go on, but for now this will do.

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English English language Etymology Expression Phrase origin Slang Usage Word origin

Why is a hick town a jerkwater?

Q: The two citations for “jerkwater” in my dictionary refer to remote, unimportant towns. Are there other uses for the word? And does it refer to pulling down the arm of a water tank or some other kind of jerking?

A: The term “jerkwater” was originally an adjective that described a stagecoach, train, or other conveyance serving a remote provincial area, according to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang.

The earliest example of the usage in Random House is from the March 1869 issue of the Overland Monthly, a California-based magazine published by Bret Harte.

The citation describes mules and oxen carrying mining supplies as “ ‘jerkwater’ stages, which had been three or four days making the trip of one hundred and ten miles.”

The dictionary’s next example of the adjectival usage—from the May 15, 1909, issue of the Saturday Evening Post—uses the word to describe a railroad train:

“The farther along Flagg got in the list the more disgusted he became with the prospect of living on jerk-water trains.” (We’ve gone to the original to expand the Random House citation.)

The slang dictionary also has examples of “jerkwater” used as a noun for a stagecoach or train serving a rural area. The first citation for the noun is from The Sazerac Lying Club, an 1878 book by Fred H. Hart:

“I wish I may be runned over by a two-horse jerk-water if there was a sage-hen in sight.”

And here’s a 1905 example—from Dialect Notes, a publication of the American Dialect Society—of the noun used for a train: “Jerkwater (train), n. Train on a branch railway. ‘Has the jerkwater come in yet?’ ”

Why was a train serving a remote area called a “jerkwater”? The Oxford English Dictionary points the reader to this explanation in Santa Fe: The Railroad That Built an Empire, a 1945 book by James Marshall:

“The Santa Fe was the Jerkwater Line—because train crews, when the water got low, often had to stop by a creek, form a bucket brigade and jerk water from the stream to fill the tender tank.”

By the late 19th century, the term “jerkwater” was also being used as an adjective to describe something provincial or insignificant, according to Random House.

The dictionary’s first citation for this usage is from the July 25, 1897, issue of the Chicago Tribune: “John J. Ingalls regards the Swiss mission as a jerkwater job, and would not take it if it were offered to him.”

The first Random House example of the adjective used to describe a small town is from “Above the Law,” a 1918 short story by Max Brand: “A jerk-water shanty village like Three Rivers.”

Interestingly, the dictionary’s earliest example of “jerkwater” used as a noun for a small town (from a June 1927 issue of the journal American Speech) suggests the usage was already on the way out:

“The advent of gasoline … has brought the expression filling-station to take the place of tank town or jerkwater.”

You’ve also asked about other uses for the word. Random House has many examples of the term used broadly to mean insignificant: “jerkwater hotels” (1936), “jerkwater cowcollege” (1938-39), “jerk water country” (1953), “jerkwater paper” (1983), and so on.

By the way, the word “hick” in the title of this post is derived from an old nickname for someone called Richard.

In the mid-1500s, according to the OED, the nickname came to mean “an ignorant countryman; a silly fellow, booby.” By the early 20th century, the term was being used adjectivally to mean unsophisticated or provincial.

Although the provincial sense of “hick” originated in Britain, Oxford says, it’s now chiefly an American usage. 

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Is there a bee in your bonnet?

Q: It can be difficult putting up with a bee in one’s bonnet—and where did THAT one come from?

A: Persistent (and perhaps crazy) ideas have reminded people of bees buzzing about the head for 500 years.

The Oxford English Dictionary says that “to have bees in the head or the brains,” or “a bee in one’s bonnet,” means to have “a fantasy, an eccentric whim, a craze on some point, a ‘screw loose.’ ”

However, standard dictionaries generally say you don’t have to be nutty to have a bee in your bonnet. The expression can refer to having an idea, a notion, or a fancy as well as an obsession.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), for example, defines “a bee in one’s bonnet” as an impulse, a notion, or an obsession. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) defines it as an eccentric notion or a fancy.

The earliest recorded example in the OED is from Virgil’s Eneados, Gavin Douglas’s Middle Scots version of the Aeneid:

“Quhat berne be thou in bed, with hede full of beis?” (“What, man, rot thou in bed with thy head full of bees?”)

The OED dates this citation from 1553, but scholars say Douglas finished his translation in 1513.

In a comic play written around the early 1550s, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister, we find the same image: “Who so hath suche bees as your maister in hys head.”

A century later, bees began invading brains. Here’s a line from Samuel Colville’s Mock Poem (1751): “Which comes from brains which have a bee.”

Bonnets entered the picture in the mid-19th century. The OED cites an essay Thomas De Quincey wrote for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1845):

“John Hunter, notwithstanding he had a bee in his bonnet, was really a great man.”

Here’s a 1935 example, from Oliver Wendell Holmes, cited in the online Merriam-Webster Unabridged: “He has the presidential bee in his bonnet.”

And in case you’re inspired to ask, we’ve written blog posts before on the phrases “bee’s knees” and “spelling bee.”

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Human resources?

Q: I am an HR manager. Am I a Human Resources Manager or a Human Resource Manager?  I’ve heard that one or the other is correct. I’ve also heard that both are correct. Which is it?

A: The usual term is “human resources manager,” though “human resource manager” is often seen. Both are correct.

The Oxford English Dictionary says the usual term is “human resources,” whether the phrase is used as a noun (“She’s in charge of human resources”) or as an adjective (She’s our human resources manager”).

The OED describes the adjectival use of “human resource” as occasional, but we think the dictionary may be underestimating the usage.

Here’s the Google scorecard: “human resources manager,” 10.3 million hits; “human resource manager,” 3.6 million.

The use of “human resources” to refer to people isn’t as modern as you might think.

The OED says it was first recorded in Britain in World War I, when it meant “people (esp. personnel or workers) regarded as an asset of a business or other organization (as contrasted with material or financial resources).”

Oxford’s earliest published example is from a 1915 issue of the Times of London:

“Side by side with the committees that have been set up to deal with the production of material there should be an organization to take stock of the human resources still at the disposal of the nation.”

The usage soon spread to the US. The OED has this 1920 example from the American Journal of Sociology, which was (and still is) published in Chicago:

“Federalism would have saved the Balkans from devastation and appalling waste of human resources.”

The phrase added a new meaning in corporate America in the mid-1960s, the OED says.

In American usage, “human resources” came to mean “the department in an organization dealing with the administration, management, training, etc., of staff; the personnel department.”

This additional, and more specialized, sense of the term was first recorded in an advertisement that ran in The New York Times in 1965: “Forward complete resume of education, experience, history and salary requirement to: Director Human Resources.”

The OED has an example of the specific usage you ask about. It’s from Business Week (1975): “Results of the experiment, which ended in mid-1974, are still being analyzed, says human resources manager Charles J. Sherrard.”

This corporate meaning of the phrase is now current in Britain too, according to OED citations.

An example of the adjectival usage in the less common singular form appeared in the British magazine Accountancy (1994): “Part of the background to all of this is the growing tendency for the human resource function itself to shrink in size.”

And this example of the noun phrase comes from Turning Thirty (2000), by the young British novelist Mike Gayle: “I would be free to leave as soon as I told Human Resources where I wanted to go.”

The two of us are old enough to remember when companies had “personnel managers” and “personnel departments.” And for a time we regarded “human resources” as jargon. But we’re human and resourceful, so we’ve come to terms with it.

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Hear Pat live today on WNYC

She’ll be on the Leonard Lopate Show around 1:20 PM Eastern time to discuss the English language and take questions from callers. Andy Borowitz is filling in for Leonard. Today’s topic: What would Jane say? Jane Austen’s contributions to the English language. If you miss the program, you can listen to it on Pat’s WNYC page.
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Is a clunker used or pre-owned?

Q: It seems to me that illiterate used-car salesmen have introduced the term “pre-owned” into the language to avoid advertising what they actually sell: USED CARS! This is driving me nuts. Please tell me that it’s incorrect and that you’ll help me stamp it out.

A: We don’t like this euphemism either, and we don’t use it ourselves, but the usage has been around for dozens of years and it’s in many standard dictionaries, including the two we consult the most.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) defines “preowned” (it doesn’t use the hyphen) as “previously owned or used; secondhand: a preowned car.”

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) defines the hyphenated version as “secondhand, used.”

All six American or British dictionaries we checked list the term, with or without the hyphen, as standard English.

The usage first showed up in the 1930s, according to published examples in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The earliest OED citation is from a May 27, 1934, advertisement in the Syracuse (NY) Herald: “Factory branch close out sale—floor sample and pre-owned washers.”

We’re generally more amused than irritated by euphemisms. We’re sorry that this one is driving you nuts. We suspect, though, that it’s here to stay. All you can do to stamp out a usage that bugs you is avoid using it yourself.

If you’re bothered by a “pre-owned” car, you’ll probably be bothered even more by a similar usage— a “pre-need” funeral—that is, a prepaid one. We had a brief post about it a few years ago.

The first citation for this usage in the OED is from a March 5, 1945, ad in the Waterloo (Iowa) Daily Courier: “Who will pay the Funeral Bill? … Ask us today for details of our pre-need plan. No obligation.”

By the way, the term “euphemism,” which entered English in the mid-1600s, is derived from the Greek compound euphemismos (speaking with good words), according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins.

Ayto says the term “originally denoted the avoidance of words of ill omen at religious ceremonies, but it was subsequently taken up by grammarians to signify the substitution of a less for a more offensive word.”

He notes that the opposite of a “euphemism” is a “dysphemism” (the use of a more offensive word), which he describes as a late 19th-century coinage based on the Greek prefix dus- (bad, difficult) instead of the Greek prefix eu- (good).

Although the term “dysphemism” is a relative latecomer, the usage itself has been around a lot longer.

Shakespeare, for example, uses it in All’s Well That Ends Well (circa 1605), when Mariana describes the advances of Count Rousillon as “engines of lust.”

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It’s a gas

Q: Does the expression “It’s a gas” (meaning “It’s a lot of fun”) come from the use of laughing gas?

A: It’s possible that the use of “a gas” to mean a lot of fun may somehow be connected with the common name for nitrous oxide, but we haven’t found any solid evidence to support this.

Eric Partridge, in A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, speculates about such a connection, but he doesn’t come to any conclusion.

In writing about the Irish English use of “gas” to mean fun, Partridge adds this brief notation: “Ex ‘laughing gas’?”

The use of “gas” to mean a vapor was coined in the mid-1600s by the Flemish physician and chemist J. B. van Helmont, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology says the Dutch word used by van Helmont was probably an alteration of chaos, the ancient Greek word for empty space.

Chambers says the letter “g” in Dutch “represents a sound somewhat like the modern Greek sound transliterated as ch.”

John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins notes that van Helmont used a Dutch version of the Greek chaos “to denote an occult principle, supposedly an ultra-refined form of water, which he postulated as existing in all matter.” 

The first use of “gas” in English, according to OED citations, was in a 1662 translation of van Helmont’s 1648 work Ortus Medicinæ: “for want of a name, I have called that vapour, Gas, being not far severed from the Chaos of the Auntients.”

The word’s modern sense of a shapeless substance that “expands freely to fill the whole of a container” dates from the late 17th century, according to Oxford citations.

As for nitrous oxide, the gas was first synthesized by the English chemist Joseph Priestly in 1772, and first used to anesthetize a dental patient in 1844.

The OED’s earliest example of “laughing gas” used for nitrous oxide is from a June 23, 1819, issue of the Times of London that refers to the “chymical experiments on gas at 9, when the laughing gas will be exhibited.”

“Laughing gas is so called from the euphoric intoxication it causes when inhaled at low concentrations,” the OED says. “It has been used as a general anaesthetic in dentistry and surgery, and also illicitly as a recreational drug.”

It wasn’t until the 20th century that the word “gas” took on the sense of “enjoyment, amusement, fun” in Irish English.

The OED’s first citation for the usage is from Dubliners, James Joyce’s 1914 story collection. In “An Encounter,” a story about two boys who skip school, Mahony tells the narrator that he’s brought along a slingshot “to have some gas with the birds.”

However, the usage you’re asking about (the use of “it’s a gas” or variants to mean it’s a lot of fun) didn’t show up in print until the mid-20th century, according to written examples in the dictionary.

The earliest citation in the OED is from “Sonny’s Blues,” a 1957 short story by James Baldwin in The Partisan Review: “Brand-new pianos certainly were a gas.”

Here’s a more recent example from Paul Auster’s 1990 novel The Music of Chance: “ ‘I’m looking forward to it immensely.’ ‘Me too, Bill,’ Pozzi said. ‘It’s going to be a gas.’ ”

The OED doesn’t speculate about the origins of this sense of “gas,” but it points the reader to a related slang word, “gasser,” which it says originated as a jazz term. 

The earliest Oxford citation is from “The Hepsters Dictionary” (1944), a brief glossary by Cab Calloway: “When it comes to dancing, she’s a gasser.”

The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang also links this use of “gas” to jazz. It cites several jazz examples, including one from Corner Boy, a 1957 novel by Herbert Simmons, in which a group of teen-agers discuss the jazz singer Nellie Lutcher:

“Man, don’t Nellie kill you?”

“She’s a gas, man, a natural petrol.”

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In a pickle

Q: I was eating a half-sour the other day, which inspired this question: Where does the expression “in a pickle,” meaning in trouble, come from?

A: We’ll be in an etymological pickle if we try to explain the origin of “in a pickle” without first discussing the history of “pickle” itself. Here’s the story.

When it first showed up in English in the 1300s or 1400s, the noun “pickle” referred to a spicy sauce served with meat or fowl.

The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology says English probably borrowed the word “pickle” from Middle Dutch, where pekel referred to brine.

The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that the ultimate source of pekel may have been the Germanic base of another Middle Dutch word, peken, meaning to prick or pierce.

With the -el suffix added, the OED says, the original sense of pekel was “something that pricks or is piquant.”

The English “pickle,” according to the OED and Chambers, was first recorded in the alliterative Morte Arthure, an anonymous Middle English poem that appeared in writing around 1440 but is thought by many scholars to date from the 1300s.

(The alliterative Morte Arthure, the stanzaic Morte Arthure, and several other Arthurian sources influenced the better-known Le Morte d’Arthure, 1470-85, attributed to Sir Thomas Mallory.)

The word “pickle” (pekill in Middle English) appears in the alliterative Morte Arthure in this gruesome description of a giant’s diet:

“He sowppes all this seson with seuen knaue childre, / Choppid in a chargour of chalke-whytt syluer, / With pekill and powdyre of precious spycez.” (He sups all this season on seven knavish children, chopped in a bowl of chalk-white silver, with pickle and powder of precious spices.)

Here “pickle” refers to a sauce, but by the early 1500s the word had taken on a new meaning: the brine, vinegar, or other solution in which food is preserved.

The earliest citation in the OED for this new sense is from an entry, written around 1503, in a chronicle of the London merchant Richard Arnold: “To make a pigell to kepe freshe sturgen in.”

By the late 1500s, “pickle” was being used in an extended figurative sense to mean a disagreeable or troubling condition—the sense found in the expression “in a pickle.”

The first two OED citations for this new usage are somewhat ambiguous, but here’s a clear 1585 example from the writings of the Protestant clergyman and historian John Foxe:

“In this pickle lyeth man by nature, that is, all wee that be Adams children.”

And here’s an example of the usage from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (circa 1610-11).

Alonso: “How cam’st thou in this pickle?”
Trinculo: “I haue bin in such a pickle since I saw you last.”

Why is someone in a disagreeable predicament described as “in a pickle”? The OED and Chambers don’t explain, but it seems clear to us that the usage alludes to the sour state of being in a pickling solution.

And where does the expression come from? “The usage is common and natural enough to English to be formed therein,” Chambers says, “but may have been reinforced by Dutch.”

The dictionary cites two Dutch phrases: in de pekel zijn (to be in a pickle) and iemand in de pekel zijn laten, or zitten (to get someone in a pickle).

Chambers says both Dutch phrases were common in the 1500s when the troublesome sense of “pickle” was first recorded in English.

It wasn’t until the late 1600s that the word “pickle” was used to refer to “a whole vegetable, or a piece of one, that has been preserved in vinegar, brine, etc.,” according to citations in the OED.

Oxford describes the use of the term “pickle” for a pickled cucumber as chiefly North American.

In Britain, the usual term is a dill cucumber or a pickled cucumber, according to Lynne Murphy, an American linguist at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England.

In a post on her blog Separated by a Common Language, Murphy says the British use “pickle” or “sweet pickle” for a condiment of chopped vegetables or fruit preserved in vinegar and a sweetener. Americans would refer to such a condiment as relish.

We’ll end with a half-sour comment from the Aug. 29, 2004, issue of the Montreal Gazette: “Today’s studs would sooner immerse themselves in a vat of pickles than spray themselves with Aqua Velva or Old Spice.”

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Is the present a gift?

Q: A friend posted this on Facebook: “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a GIFT. That’s why they call it the present.” Is there a connection between “the present” and “a present”?

A: That saying, which is often mistakenly attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, A. A. Milne, and others, is merely a play on words.

The “present” that means now and the “present” that means a gift are two separate nouns, though they have a common source.

Both of them originated in the notion of presence—of being at hand or on the spot. They can be traced to the Latin noun praesens (presence) and adjective praesentem (present or at hand, not absent).

In these Latin words we find the prefix prae- (before, in front of) and a participial form of the verb esse (be). So the original notion was of being before (in the presence of) a person or thing.

Derivatives of the Latin words came into English in the Middle Ages by way of Anglo-Norman and Old French.

And it was in Old French that the noun present first came to mean a gift, a sense that was passed along into English.

As John Ayto writes in his Dictionary of Word Origins, “The use of the related word present for ‘gift’ originated in Old French in the concept of ‘bringing something into someone’s presence,’ and hence of giving it to them.”

The other sense of the noun “present”—the time at hand—was also influenced by French, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. But it developed separately from the “gift” sense.

And the English adjective “present” is from French as well, in its usual senses related to place (here) and time (now).

It’s difficult to sort out which English words came first.

For example, the OED says the English adjective “present” was first recorded in writing in 1340, but that it may have influenced various noun usages, some of which were recorded more than a century earlier.

The etymology of these words helps explain why the English verb “present” has so many meanings.

The OED says that when first recorded, around 1300, to “present” meant “to bring or place (a person) before or into the presence of; to bring to the notice of another; to introduce, esp. formally or ceremonially; spec. to introduce at court or to society, or before a sovereign or other distinguished person.”

Today “present” can mean, among other things, to introduce someone or something (like a person, a product, a performer); to put before the public (a play, exhibition, etc.); to hold vertically in salute (as in the phrase “present arms”); or to lay before a court or other authority (as a lawyer offers documents to a judge).

That last meaning explains the use of the term “these presents” in legal language, a usage the OED says dates back to 1379. In the legal sense, “presents” means the  present documents, writings, words, or statements. (No, they’re not gift-wrapped.)

Here’s an example from the preamble to the Articles of Confederation (1781): “To all to whom these Presents shall come, we the undersigned Delegates of the States affixed to our Names send greeting.”

As you’ve probably gathered, the verb “present” is almost always transitive—that is, it has a direct object, the something that’s being presented.

But as we noted in a blog posting a few years ago, there’s an exception. In medicine, to “present” means to appear before a doctor. It’s one of the rare cases in which the verb is intransitive and doesn’t have an object.

The examples we used: “The patient presented in my office with symptoms of fibromyalgia” … “The head of the fetus is presenting.”

The OED has examples of this medical usage going back to 1719. So it may be odd, but it’s presentable.

As for that saying your friend posted on Facebook, it’s been cited in print in one form or another since at least the 1990s, and it may have originated in a Hallmark greeting card, according to the language sleuth Barry Popik.

In an entry on his Big Apple website, Popik traces the saying to an Aug. 31, 1994, installment of “The Family Circus,” a comic strip by Bill Keane: “Yesterday’s the past, tomorrow’s the future, but today is a GIFT. That’s why it’s called the present.”

Popik, who had help on his posting from the lexicographer Jonathan Lighter, says an earlier version of the saying that doesn’t connect the two senses of “present” appeared in the July 11, 1967, issue of the Altoona (PA) Mirror:

“You must forget the past. Yesterday is history, tomorrow’s a mystery. Follow the AA philosophy of quitting one day at a time and seeking divine guidance.”

A partial version of the saying showed up in the Aug. 2, 1993, issue of the Galveston (TX) Daily News, in a typo-ridden ad that suggested a greeting-card connection:

“Today is a gift, thats why its called the present
“MAINLAND FLORAL, INC.
“Hallmark.”

A citation from The Ten Habits of Naturally Slim People, a 1998 book by by Jill H. Podjasek with Jennifer Carney, also suggests a greeting-card origin of the saying:

“I read the following wisdom in a greeting card years ago: ‘Yesterday is history; tomorrow is mystery; today is a gift; that is why they call it the present.’ ”

If any readers of the blog have one of the greeting cards up in the attic, please send us a photo of it!

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If we had our druthers

Q: What does “if I had my druthers” mean and from where did the phrase originate?

A: The expression “if I had my druthers” means “if I had a choice” or “if I had a preference.”

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) describes “druthers” here as an informal plural noun meaning a choice or a preference.

American Heritage gives this example from the columnist George Will: “Given their druthers, these hell-for-leather free marketeers might sell the post office.”

The noun “druthers” actually began life as a verb in 19th-century America. The Oxford English Dictionary describes it as a US dialectal alteration of the verb phrase “would rather.”

The OED’s only two examples of the verb are in the writings of Mark Twain. Here’s the earliest, from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876): “I’d druther they was devils a dern sight.”

The noun “druthers” showed up a couple of decades later. Oxford has this example from an 1895 issue of the American Dialect Society’s journal Dialect Notes:

“Bein’s I caint have my druthers an’ set still, I cal’late I’d better pearten up an’ go ‘long.”

The OED says the usage is also seen as “druther,” “ruther,” and “ruthers.” Here’s an example with “ruthers,” from William Alexander Percy’s 1941 autobiography, Lanterns on the Levee:

“ ‘Your ruthers is my ruthers’ (what you would rather is what I would rather). Certainly the most amiable and appeasing phrase in any language, the language used being not English but deep Southern.”

If we had our druther, ruther, druthers, or ruthers, we’d take a break now. And so we will. See you tomorrow.

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Turning the tables

Q: What do you think is the origin of the expression “turn the tables”? Does it have anything to do with a table supposedly moving around at a séance?

A: No, the verb phrase “turn the tables” has nothing to do with séances. It originated with the playing of board games in the 17th century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

It means “to reverse one’s position relative to someone else,” the OED says, especially “by turning a position of disadvantage into one of advantage; to cause a complete reversal of the state of affairs.”

In its literal meaning, the phrase referred “to the position of the board in a board game being reversed, hence reversing the situation of each player in the game,” Oxford adds. But apparently it was used figuratively from the very beginning.

The expression first appeared in writing, the OED says, in The Widdowes Teares, a 1612 comedy by the poet and playwright George Chapman: “You doe well Sir to take your pleasure of me, (I may turne tables with you ere long).”

It showed up a few decades later in a sermon delivered by Bishop Robert Sanderson in 1648: “Whosoever thou art that dost another wrong, do but turn the tables: imagine thy neighbour were now playing thy game, and thou his.”

This more contemporary example is from Cynthia Freeland’s But Is It Art? (2001): “The images … celebrate the female artist’s ability to turn the tables on the men.”

Imagine that!

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Is “refer back” redundant?

Q: I often hear folks (even on the news) “refer back” to something. Do they need to add “back” here? Is it not enough to “refer” to something?

A: You’re not alone in considering this usage redundant. Some usage writers have criticized the verb phrase “refer back” since at least as far back as the 1920s.

George Philip Krapp, for instance, condemned it in The English Language in America (1927) as “a crude pleonasm for refer.” (A pleonasm is a redundancy.)

We disagree with Krapp, and we’re not alone. Many other language writers have pooh-poohed the belief that it’s redundant to “refer back” to something.

Theodore M. Bernstein, for example, points out in Miss Thistlebottom’s Hobgoblins (1971) that the word “back” here “may in some instances be superfluous, but it is not normally redundant.”

“The notion of back is not at all prominent or even necessarily present in the word refer, which has as its primary reason to direct attention to,” Bernstein writes.

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage agrees: “Back may seldom be necessary with refer, but the ‘backward’ connotations of refer are usually not strong, and back can be useful in reinforcing them.”

Merriam-Webster’s gives several examples of the usage by respectable writers, including this one from George Orwell’s 1946 book Politics and the English Language: “I number them so that I can refer back to them when necessary.”

A usage note in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) says some people “consider the phrase refer back to be redundant, since refer contains the prefix re–, which was brought into English from Latin and originally meant ‘back.’ ”

“But such an argument is based on what linguists call the ‘etymological fallacy’—the assumption that the meaning of a word should always reflect the meanings of the words, roots, and affixes from which it was derived,” American Heritage says.

The dictionary adds that “most words change their meanings over time, often to the point where their historical roots are completely obscured. Such change is natural and usually goes unnoticed except by scholars.”

“We conduct inaugurations without consulting soothsayers (augurs), and we don’t necessarily share bread (panis in Latin) with our companions,” the usage note says.

As for “refer,” American Heritage says it’s “quite often used in contexts that don’t involve the meaning ‘back’ at all, as in The doctor referred her patient to a specialist or Please refer to this menu of our daily specials.”

The dictionary says the position of its Usage Panel on “refer back” has shifted dramatically over the years:

“In 1995, 65 percent of the Panel disapproved of this construction, but by 2011, 81 percent accepted it in the sentence To answer your question it is necessary to refer back to the minutes of the previous meeting.”

With a word like “refer,” AH says, “where the ‘back’ meaning of re– has largely disappeared, adding back can provide useful semantic information, indicating that the person or thing being referred to has been mentioned or consulted before.”

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A case in point

Q: I am gradually becoming obsessed with the phrase “a case in point.” Does anyone know its origin? It looks like a clumsy translation from another language (French, perhaps) but is it?

A: You’re onto something. The phrase at the heart of your obsession, “in point,” does indeed come from French—or, rather, Anglo-Norman, a dialect of Old French used by England’s Norman conquerors.

In the Anglo-Norman phrase en point, the word point refers to a state or condition, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED says the word “point” showed up in English in the early 1200s with the sense of a condition, state, situation, or plight, though that meaning is now considered historic.

In the early 1600s, according to Oxford, “point” took on another sense—appropriate or pertinent—a sense that’s now chiefly seen in the expression “case in point,” meaning an example that illustrates the point.

The dictionary’s earliest citation for the expression is from Money and the Mechanism of Exchange (1875) by William Stanley Jevons:

“The wampumpeag of the North American Indians is a case in point, as it certainly served as jewellery.”

The most recent citation is from the January 1996 issue of Scientific American:

“Much of the ecological evidence about sex is open to sharply differing interpretations. A case in point concerns the ‘haplodipoid’ sex-determining system of ants, bees and wasps.”

And with that, we’ll buzz off.

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In pretty good company

Q: Whence comes “pretty,” the spoken dialectal equivalent to “rather,” as in, “We made it pretty far before we turned back”? Do you know if it’s common in a specific region? I live in Southern California, and I use it pretty often. I frequently hear it from others, too.

A: You’ll be surprised by our answer. The word “pretty” used in this sense isn’t dialectal, regional, or confined to speech. It’s been standard English since the 1500s.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines this adverbial use of “pretty” as “to a considerable extent; fairly, moderately; rather, quite. In later use also: very.”

The earliest citation for the usage in the OED is from Thomas Cooper’s Thesaurus Linguae Romanae & Britannicae (1565): “Audaculus, a pretie hardie felow: vsed in derision.”
(Shakespeare is believed to have used Cooper’s work as a reference.)

Oxford says the Cooper citation may have represented an adjectival use, but it has no doubts about its next example, from The Workes of a Young Wyt (1577), a collection of poetry by Nicholas Breton:

“Berlady tis prety good meate.” (“Berlady,” an oath or expletive, is a contraction of “by our Lady.”)

Here’s one more 16th-century example, from A Worlde of Wordes (1598), an Italian-English dictionary by John Florio: “Boccace is prettie hard, yet understood: Petrarche harder but explaned.”

The OED says the expression “pretty much” dates from 1682, and means “almost, very nearly; more or less; (also, in early use) very much, considerably.”

You didn’t ask, but the adjective “pretty” has been around since Anglo-Saxon times (spelled pæti, pætig, or prættig). In Old English, according to Oxford, it meant cunning or crafty at first, then clever, skillful, or able.

The adjective didn’t come to mean attractive until the 1400s. Here’s an example from Sir Walter Scott’s 1821 novel Kenilworth: “Having a cellar of sound liquor, a ready wit, and a pretty daughter.”

Getting back to your question, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) notes that some usage guides “complain that pretty is overworked” as an adverb and recommend restricting the usage “to informal or colloquial contexts.”

However, Merriam-Webster’s says in its usage note that “pretty” in this sense “is in wide use across the whole spectrum of English.”

“It is common in informal speech and writing,” the dictionary says, “but is neither rare nor wrong in serious discourse.”

M-W includes examples from George Bernard Shaw (“he may, if he be pretty well off or clever, qualify himself as a doctor”), Henry Steele Commager (“a return to those traditions of American foreign policy which worked pretty well for over a century”), and the Times Literary Supplement (“the arguments for buying expensive books have to be pretty cogent”).

So you’re in pretty good company.

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Bilingual education

Q: My Danish stepmother is completely bilingual, with one exception: she uses the phrase “not that I know to” instead of “not that I know of” when speaking English. It would be interesting to understand where this usage comes from.

A: There’s a verbal phrase in Danish, kende til, that means to “know about.”

But someone attempting a literal translation into English might render kende til as “know to.” That’s because the Danish verb kende means to “know” and the preposition til frequently means “to.”

Louise Møhl, a cultural officer with the Danish Consulate in New York, provided us with a couple of Danish-to-English examples of these terms used in the first-person singular:

Jeg kender ham fra mit arbejde. = “I know him from work.”

Det kender jeg ikke noget til. = “I don’t know anything about that.”

As for til, Ms. Møhl said, it “has many meanings in Danish depending on the situation.”

When it’s not part of the expression kende til, the preposition til can mean “to” (perhaps its most frequent sense), “of,” “for,” “about,” “toward,” “from,” or “at.”

Incidentally, the Danish til has a similar-sounding cousin in English, “till.” The Old Norse preposition til (“to”) is the ancestor of both the Danish til and the English prepositions “till” and “to.”

We’ve written on our blog about the English words “till” and “until” (you may be surprised to learn which came first).

Sorry that we can’t be more definite about why your Danish stepmother says “know to” instead of “know of,” but here’s a suggestion: ask her why she does it.

You might as well get it straight from the horse’s mouth. Or, as a Dane would put it, lige fra hestens mund.

Why a horse’s mouth? We had a brief posting back in 2006 that says there are two theories about the origin of the English expression, one involving horse racing and the other horse trading.

The most likely explanation is that it originated in the early 20th century in reference to inside information from a racing tipster that was supposedly as good as if it came straight from the horse itself.

We’ll end with an example from “The Reverent Wooing of Archibald,” a 1928 short story by one of our favorite writers, P. G. Wodehouse. The wooer (and eavesdropper) here is Archibald Mulliner:

“It might be an ignoble thing to eavesdrop, but it was apparent that Aurelia Cammarleigh was about to reveal her candid opinion of him: and the prospect of getting the true facts—straight, as it were, from the horse’s mouth—held him so fascinated that he could not move.”

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The rhubarb phenomenon

Q: Is there a term for the phenomenon of a word sounding completely nonsensical when you say it over and over again? That happens for me with the word “only.” I’d be interested if you folks have had the same experience.

A: Yes, we too have had this experience. After we repeatedly think, speak, or look at a word—say, “rhubarb”—it becomes gibberish.

This phenomenon isn’t new. James Boswell wrote about it in the 18th century, Edgar Allan Poe in the 19th, and James Thurber in the 20th.

In his memoir My Life and Hard Times (1933), Thurber recalls lying in bed, racking his brain in an attempt to remember the name Perth Amboy, the city in New Jersey:

“I fell to repeating the word ‘Jersey’ over and over again, until it became idiotic and meaningless. If you have ever lain awake at night and repeated one word over and over, thousands and millions and hundreds of thousands of millions of times, you know the disturbing mental state you can get into.”

A common term for this experience is “semantic satiation,” a phrase used by the psychologist Leon Jakobovits James in his 1962 doctoral dissertation. Other terms are “semantic saturation” and “verbal satiation.” (We might add “the rhubarb phenomenon.”)  

In his paper,  “Effects of Repeated Stimulation on Cognitive Aspects of Behavior: Some Experiments on the Phenomenon of Semantic Satiation,” James describes experiments testing subjects’ responses to repeated words, numbers, concepts, and so on.

He concludes, among other things, that “Repeated presentation of verbal stimuli results in a decrease of their meaning.”

What this means is that with enough repetition, “rhubarb”  becomes a meaningless collection of letters or sounds.

In 2010, many years after writing his dissertation, James contributed a few comments to a discussion of semantic satiation on the website Language Hat.

James wrote that his dissertation “was the first objective demonstration of a measurement of the intensity of reduction of meaning with repetition.”

“I demonstrated that this meaning reduction was a general cognitive and perceptual and temporary process, e.g., it slowed down our computing time for simple arithmetic when numbers were repeated first,” he said.

He said the paper also showed “that this meaning reduction process occurs at the macro or societal level, e.g., reduction of popularity of hit songs as a function of the number of times they were played on the radio.”

“I note from a Google search that the phrase and idea of semantic satiation has been applied to new areas in the past forty years (e.g., advertising, music, neurosemantics, etc.),” he added. “Today I still think that semantic satiation operates at several levels: universal, general, specific, and particular.”

He predicted that research “in the next forty years will uncover many of these effects produced by cumulative repetition or exposure (words, topics, issues, objects, tastes, experiences, colors, etc.).”

“Further,” he said, “there will be connection made to personality traits which I discuss in my dissertation as ‘semantic satiability’—people who for instance like to hear the same song over and over again (movie, etc.), vs. people who vary their way home because they get bored, etc.”

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Since Pluto was a pup

Q: Somehow, 175 older blog posts appeared on my Grammarphobia feed – which gave me a chance to do some review.  The Jan. 25, 2013, post about the expression “since Christ left Chicago” reminded me of “since Pluto was a pup.” A great phrase.

A: The phrase “since Pluto was a pup” is a variation of an earlier, 19th-century expression, “since Hector was a pup.”

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the “Hector” version (which it labels as an American colloquialism) and its variants as meaning “for a very long time” or “since a long time ago.”

So was there once a grizzled old dog named Hector? Maybe, or maybe not. Here’s how the OED explains the name:

“Hector may refer to the Trojan hero who lived around 1200 b.c. and whose mother Hecuba was, according to Euripides, turned into a dog (hence Hector could be regarded as her pup); it may also reflect the popularity at various times of Hector as a dog’s name.”

We’re inclined to think the latter explanation is more likely to be the origin of a 19th-century colloquialism. The literature of the 19th century—both fiction and nonfiction—is full of dogs named Hector.

The OED’s earliest citation for the “Hector” expression is from an 1895 issue of the Washington Post: “[They] have been scrapping with each other in this neighborhood ‘since long before Hector was a pup.’ ”  

But thanks to Google Books, we’ve located a slightly earlier version. It’s from George Parsons Lathrop’s novel Gold of Pleasure (1891):

“I hain’t been so hungry and thirsty as I am this minute, since Hector was pupp’d.” (To “pup” means to give birth to pups, and to be “pupped” means to be born or whelped.)

The “Pluto” version of the expression came along in the mid-20th century.

The OED’s earliest example is from 1959, but we found this earlier one in Armine Von Tempski’s novel Bright Spurs (1946): “Schultz and Yarrow have been taking people up Haleakala since Pluto was a pup.”

Who was the “Pluto” in the expression? We’re guessing that he could have been the Walt Disney cartoon character, who first appeared under that name in 1931. He was also sometimes called Pluto the Pup.

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Like the back of one’s hand

Q: From a Canadian television commercial: “The monks of Oka, Quebec, knew how to make cheese like the back of their hand.” What do you think? It doesn’t sound right to me.

A: We agree that the Canadian commercial is oddly phrased. It’s odd for several reasons.

First, the expression “like the back of one’s hand” is more familiar when used in the singular—“like the back of my (or his or her) hand.”

The imagery is out of kilter in the plural “backs of their hands”—and even more out of it in the illogical mixing of singular and plural in “back of their hand,” the version on Canadian TV.

Second, a person generally knows something—not how to do something—“like the back of his hand.”

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, the verb “know” in the expression refers to “a thing, place, or person.”

So we’d say, “He knows French like the back of his hand,” not “He knows how to speak French like the back of his hand.”

Finally, a literal-minded person might interpret the commercial to be saying the monks knew how to make cheese that resembled the backs of their hands. Or, as one viewer of the commercial commented online, “old, wrinkly, and smelly.”

The OED says that “to know (something) like the back of one’s hand” means “to be thoroughly familiar or conversant with.”

While the expression sounds venerable, Oxford has no published examples older than the mid-20th century. Here are the OED’s citations, all from mystery or suspense novels.

“I know him as well as I know the back of my hand.” (From Margaret Millar’s Wall of Eyes, 1943.) 

“I know that book like the back of my hand.” (From Michael Innes’s The Weight of Evidence, 1944.)  

“I know the district like the back of my hand.” (From Mary Stewart’s Wildfire at Midnight, 1956.)

“I know that photograph like the back of my hand.” (From Catherine Aird’s Henrietta Who? 1968.)

We’ve spotted a few earlier examples, though.

For instance the expression appears twice in John Collis Snaith’s novel The Sailor, first published in 1916:

“So much had he knocked about the world that he knew men and cities like the back of his hand” … “his native city of Blackhampton, certain parts of which he knew like the back of his hand.”

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In a jiffy

Q: I was packing my latest manuscript in a Jiffy bag when I thought of a question for my go-to word guys. What is a jiffy?

A: It’s an instant or a moment, which doesn’t describe the amount of time we’ve taken to get to your question. Sorry, but our in-box has been overflowing lately.

The Oxford English Dictionary describes “jiffy” as a colloquial noun of “origin unascertained,” and defines it as “a very short space of time.”

The OED says the word is seen “only in such phrases as in a jiffy,” but it later notes the use of “jiffy” in the names of padded bags and other products.

The first Oxford citation is from Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of His Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia (1785), by Rudolf Erich Raspe: “In six jiffies I found myself and all my retinue … at the rock of Gibralter.”

The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology speculates that the word might have been “spontaneously coined” by Raspe, a German librarian, writer, and scientist.

The full phrase “in a jiffy” was first recorded (with the spelling jeffy) in Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1796): “It will be done in a jeffy: it will be done in a short space of time, in an instant.”

In the 1950s, “Jiffy” showed up in trademarked names for a padded envelope, a book bag, and a peat pot for sowing seeds. The first Jiffy Lube opened in Ogden, Utah, in the 1970s, and franchises followed … in a jiffy.

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A loaded question

Q: I recently came across this quote from the Mormon lawman Porter Rockwell: “I never shot at anybody, if I shoot they get shot! He’s still alive, ain’t he?” That got me to thinking. You shoot an arrow, not the bow, but you shoot a gun, not the bullet. A friend of mine says he shoots targets. I’m confused.

A: The verb “shoot” has a lot of flexibility. It can be used intransitively—that is, without a direct object. Example: “He likes to go into the woods and shoot.”

But “shoot” can also be used transitively—with a direct object. When we’re talking about weapons, the transitive verb “shoot” can mean to discharge, to let fly, or to hit.

Consequently, it can have a variety of objects. You can “shoot” (that is, discharge) a gun, bow, slingshot, or catapult. You can “shoot” (let fly) a bullet, arrow, spear, javelin, or similar projectile. And finally, you can “shoot” a target.

All of these senses of the verb are recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary and have been around for hundreds of years.

By the way, that last sense of the word—to “shoot” a target—implies that the target was hit. But “shoot at” means only to fire in a particular direction.

We’ll have something to say later about Orrin Porter Rockwell, a colorful and controversial Mormon figure from the Wild West.

But first let’s look at the life of “shoot,” a verb with an interesting history, and not just in weaponry.

Its ancestors were old Germanic words that meant to go swiftly or suddenly, to rush or fly—yes, like an arrow from a bow.

It was first recorded in Old English in the ninth century in reference to the shooting of arrows, according to citations in the OED.

But other Old English examples use the term in a wider sense that reflects its earlier Germanic roots—to dart swiftly from one place to another.

So at the root of the word is the sense of moving quickly, and this ancestry explains the many ways in which “shoot” is used today.

For example, meteors “shoot” across the night sky, rafters “shoot” the rapids, and a toboggan “shoots” down a slope. A racehorse “shoots” from the gate, then “shoots” ahead of the pack.

A golfer “shoots” a birdie,” while a basketball player “shoots” a basket. Grownups “shoot” pool or dice, and children “shoot” marbles. If the kids are growing fast, they’re said to “shoot” up.

Plants in spring send out new “shoots” (a noun usage). Rays of the sun “shoot” through the clouds, and on a more prosaic note, product sales “shoot” up.

An indiscreet person “shoots off” his mouth or “shoots” himself in the foot, while an ambitious colleague “shoots” for success.

To lock a door a night, we “shoot” a bolt into its fastening. And if we don’t look where we’re going, our feet “shoot” out from under us (after which we experience “shooting” pains).

With that, we’ve “shot our bolt.” In case you’re curious (even if you’re not), the “bolt” in this old proverb is a thousand-year-old word for a short, blunt arrow fired from a cross-bow.

In olden days, there was a similar expression, “a fool’s bolt is soon shot.” The lesson: conserve your ammunition.

In case any readers are wondering about that quote you mention, Porter Rockwell was, among other things, a gunfighter, a deputy US marshal, and a bodyguard to the Mormon leader Joseph Smith Jr.

Rockwell was arrested in St. Louis in March of 1843 in connection with an attempt to kill Lilburn Boggs, a former governor of Missouri, the year before. (In 1838, as governor, Boggs issued an executive order evicting Mormons from the state.)

A grand jury found that there wasn’t enough evidence for an indictment on the charge of attempted murder, but Rockwell was tried in December of 1843 for trying to escape.

He supposedly made his comments at that trial, where he was found guilty and sentenced to five minutes in jail, according to Enemy of the Saints, a biography of Boggs by Robert Nelson.

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A matter of course

Q: In texting me, my daughter used the phrase “of course” (spelling it “of coarse,” naturally), which got me to thinking. How is it that we use “course” to refer to something in a positive manner (as in “of course”) as well as to a path, a route, or a plan—from a “concourse” to an “obstacle course” to a “course of study”?

A: The phrase “of course” means something akin to “naturally” or “it goes without saying.” When we say something occurred “of course,” we mean it was only to be expected, or that it was in the normal course of events.

And that last phrase, “in the normal course of events,” is a clue to the etymology of the phrase “of course.”

Our word “course” came into English in the late 13th century, and for several hundred years it was spelled without an “e” at the end, like the French word it came from (cours).

The French got it from Latin, in which cursus means a race, a journey, a march, or a direction. The Latin noun comes from the verb currere, to run.

John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins notes that a wide range of English words is derived from currere, including “current,” “courier,” and “occur.”

In English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the noun “course” originally meant an onward movement in a particular path, or the action of running or moving onward.

Consequently, “course” has long been used to mean a customary or habitual succession of things, or a part of such a series.

It has also been used for hundreds of years to mean the place or time where the series has its “run,” as well as the natural order or the ordinary manner of proceeding.

This notion—of a habitual path or a prescribed series of things—explains a great many uses of “course” in English.

To mention a few, it explains why the parts of a meal are “courses,” why a flowing stream is a “watercourse,” why a normal event happens “in due course,” why an orderly ship maintains a certain “course,” why we let nature or the law “take its course,” and why colleges offer “courses” of study and doctors prescribe “courses” of treatment.

It also explains how “racecourse” and “golf course” got their names. And it explains why women in the 16th through the 19th centuries called their menstrual periods their “courses.”

The phrase we’re getting to, “of course,” came along in the mid-16th century, according to citations in the OED.

In the early 1540s it was used both as an adjective to mean “natural” or  “to be expected” (as in the phrase “a matter of course”) and as an adverb to mean “ordinarily” or “as an everyday occurrence” (as in “the cake was of course homemade”).

By the early 19th century, “of course” was being used to qualify entire sentences or clauses, according to OED citations.  And that’s how we generally use it today.

Oxford’s earliest example of this usage is from John Dunn Hunter’s Memoirs of a Captivity Among the Indians of North America (1823):

“She made some very particular inquiries about my people, which, of course, I was unable to answer.”

This later example is from a bit of dialogue in Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist (1838): “ ‘You will tell her I am here?’ … ‘Of course.’ ”

We now take the phrase “of course” for granted, but it had some competition over the centuries.

It’s proved more durable than several variants with the same meaning—“upon course,” which was first recorded in this sense in 1619, “on course” (1677), and “in course” (1722).

In other words, its survival was not necessarily a matter of course.

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Yeah, no

Q: We North Queenslanders are considered rednecks even by Australian standards. I thought I’d pass on an example of English usage in this part of the world: Yeah, no, as in “Yeah, no, they should’ve won in the last quarter.”

A: We’ve written on the blog about “yeah,” but we haven’t looked into “yeah, no” until now.

Others, however, have studied this conversational response, which is used by both Americans and Australians.

In fact, Australians may use it, more—at least there’s been more written about “yeah, no” by language scholars in Australia.

A 2004 article in The Age, a Melbourne newspaper, quoted the Australian linguist Kate Burridge as saying, “It’s not going to disappear. It’s always hard to predict with language change, but it looks like its use is on the increase.”

The author of the Melbourne article, Bridie Smith, pointed out that English speakers aren’t alone in this usage, since “Germans use a similar ‘ja nein’ and the South Africans ‘ya nay.’ ”

“In Australia,” Smith wrote in 2004, “where the phrase has become entrenched in the past six years, ‘yeah no’ can mean anything from ‘yes, I see that, but can we go back to the earlier topic’ to an enthusiastic ‘yes, I can’t reinforce that point enough.’ ”

The meaning of “yeah, no” depends on its context, Smith says. She quotes Dr. Burridge, the linguist, as saying: “It can emphasise agreement, it can downplay disagreement or compliments, and it can soften refusals.”

Burridge and a colleague, Margaret Florey, published a paper in the Australian Journal of Linguistics in 2002 entitled “ ‘Yeah-no He’s a Good Kid’: A Discourse Analysis of Yeah-no in Australian English.”

An abstract of the paper said that as of 2002, “Yeah, no” was relatively new in Australian English and served many functions. It kept a conversation rolling, helped with “hedging and face-saving,” and indicated agreement or disagreement.

Since then, American linguists and language watchers have taken note of “yeah, no” in the US.

Linguists have discussed it on the American Dialect Society’s mailing list. And articles have been written by Stephen Dodson for Language Hat, by Mark Liberman for the Language Log, and by Ben Yagoda for the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Even presidents of the United States aren’t immune. When a radio interviewer in 2011 asked Bill Clinton how he felt about being spoofed on TV comedy shows, Yagoda writes, “The former president replied, ‘Oh yeah, no I thought a lot of the Saturday Night Live guys were great.’ ” 

Liberman surveyed the speech databases in the Linguistic Data Consortium, and found that “in all the cases that I looked at, the yeah and the no seem be independently appropriate in the context of use, even if the sequence seems surprising when viewed in merely semantic terms.”

In one comment on the ADS list, the lexicographer Jonathan Lighter quoted a former New York City police detective as saying on CNN: “Yeah, no, you’re right!”

Lighter added: “There it seems to mean, ‘Yes indeed, and no, I wouldn’t think of contradicting you.’ ” 

But it can also mean disagreement, as in this tweet a few months ago about horror movies: “yeah no i hate blood and guns and stuff like that.”

PS: Readers of the blog have reported sightings (or, rather, hearings) of the usage in New Zealand, in South African English as well as Afrikaans, and in Danish.

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Let’s rustle up an answer

Q: The other day, I asked my office manager  to order me new business cards. Her answer: “Sure, I’ll rustle up some for you.” So where in the world does “rustle up” come from?

A: The verb “rustle” dates back at least as far as the 14th century, and it may have its roots in the early days of Old English.

It originally meant—and still means—to move about with a rustling sound, or as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “to make a soft, muffled crackling sound when moving.”

The OED says the origin of the word is uncertain, but it’s probably imitative—that is, “rustle” probably imitates the sound it describes.

The dictionary suggests that it may possibly be related to a “small group of very poorly attested Old English words” that refer to making noises: hristan, for example, meant to make a noise, and hrisian meant to shake or rattle.

Over the years, the verb “rustle” took on many different meanings in connection with making noises while moving around. People as well as things noisily rustled “about,” “in,” “through,” “to,” “up,” and so on.

In the 19th century, however, “rustle” took on several colloquial senses in the United States, including the one you’re asking about. Here are the new meanings and their first citations in the OED:

● to stir or rouse oneself into action: “Get up, rouse and rustle about, and get away from these scores” (1835, The Partisan, a novel by William Gilmore Simms).

● to search for food, forage: “Cattle and horses rustled in the neighbouring cane-brake” (1835, The Rambler in North America, a travel book by Charles Joseph Latrobe).

● to acquire, gather, provide something: “He nailed my thumb in his jaws, and rostled up a handful of dirt & throwed it in my eyes” (1844, Spirit of the Times, a weekly newspaper in New York City).

● to move quickly: “ ‘Rustle the things off that table,’ means clear the table in a hurry” (1882, The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine).

● to gather people or animals: “I just told Billy … that it wasn’t any use for me to take her through … and he could rustle up some one to finish my drive” (1883, Our Deseret Home, by W. M. Eagan).

● to round up and steal cattle, horses, etc.: “He and Turner … went to Coppinger’s pasture, intending to kill the negro Frank, and ‘rustle’ six head of fat cattle, then in Coppinger’s pasture” (1886, Texas Court of Appeals Reports).

The sense that you’ve asked about (to acquire, gather, provide something) is defined more fully in the OED:

“To acquire or gather, typically as a result of searching or employing effort or initiative, and in response to a particular need; to provide (a person) with something urgently required; to hunt out; (freq. in later use) to put together (a dish or meal). Now usu. with up.”

Now, it’s time for us to take a break and rustle up some grub!

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Death, the great intensifier

Q: I find the death imagery in a sentence like “I love her to death” to be inappropriate and grotesque. I’d be thrilled (though not to death) if you would write something about this on the blog.

A: We’re sorry to disappoint you, but you won’t be thrilled by our answer. We don’t find the usage inappropriate or grotesque.

In fact, it has a long history, going back to the 1300s, though it’s often used negatively, not positively as in your example.

We’ve checked a half-dozen standard dictionaries and all of them list the use of “to death” in this sense as standard English for excessively or extremely.

The Oxford English Dictionary says the phrase “to death” (or “to dead”) has been used since the Middle Ages to intensify verbs of feeling or adjectives.

The OED defines the phrase in this sense as “to the last extremity, to the uttermost, to the point of physical or nervous exhaustion, beyond endurance.”

The dictionary’s earliest written example is from Cursor Mundi, a Middle English poem written sometime before 1400: “Herodias him hated to ded.”

And here’s an example from John Dryden’s 1672 play The Conquest of Granada: “I’m sad to death, that I must be your Foe.”

The common verbal phrase “to do something to death” showed up in Victorian times, according to published references in the OED.

Oxford’s earliest written example is from Recaptured Rhymes (1882), a collection of verse from the Saturday Review by the British writer Henry Duff Traill: “I am also called Played-out and Done-to-death, / And It-will-wash-no-more.”

The most recent citation is from an April 16, 1965, article in the New Statesman that describes a tune as “mercilessly done to death by countless performers.”

Although all the OED citations for the intensifier use it in a negative sense, we often see “to death” used positively and see nothing wrong with using the phrase for doing something intensely positive—like loving someone to death!

In case you’re wondering, the word “death” first showed up in Old English around 725 in Beowulf, according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology.

It ultimately comes from reconstructed Proto-Germanic and Indo-European words for the act of dying.

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The singularity of Mother’s Day

Q: Which is correct, Mother’s Day or Mothers’ Day? I have a customer who wants to use the name as an imprint on promotional gifts for the holiday. I think of Mother’s Day as singular possessive, my mother, but in this case is it correct?

A: We also think it’s Mother’s Day, and so do the 10 standard dictionaries we regularly consult—five American and five British.

More to the point, Anna Jarvis, the woman primarily responsible for the modern holiday honoring mothers, thought so as well, according to a dissertation by the historian Katharine Antolini.

In “Memorializing Motherhood: Anna Jarvis and the Defense of Her Mother’s Day,” Antolini says Jarvis wanted the singular possessive to emphasize that the day was to honor one’s own mother, not mothers in general.

As for common usage, “Mother’s Day” is the overwhelming favorite, according to our searches of online databases, though you’ll find many examples of the plural-possessive “Mothers’ Day” and the apostrophe-free “Mothers Day.”

Although the modern holiday originated in the US in the early 20th century, people have been celebrating mothers in one way or another since ancient times.

The specific term “Mother’s Day,” however, didn’t show up in print until the 19th century. The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from the June 3, 1874, issue of the New York Times:

“ ‘Mother’s Day,’ which was inaugurated in this City on the 2d of June, 1872, by Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, was celebrated last night at Plimpton Hall by a mother’s peace meeting.” (We’ve gone to the Times archive to expand on the citation.)

The OED points out that Howe saw Mother’s Day not as a day to honor mothers (the modern sense) but as a “day on which mothers met to advocate peace, as by the dissolution of a standing army, etc.”

Howe, an abolitionist and social activist, is perhaps best known for writing the lyrics to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” (The music is from the song “John Brown’s Body.”)

Like Howe, Anna Jarvis’s mother—Ann Marie Reeves Jarvis—was an activist who organized women for various social causes.

After the death of her mother on May 9, 1905, Anna Jarvis organized several “Mother’s Day” services and began a campaign, with the help of the Philadelphia retailer John Wanamaker, to make Mother’s Day a national holiday.

The first two services—on May 12, 1907, and May 10, 1908—were held at Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia, where Jarvis’s mother had taught Sunday school.

The national campaign got off to a bumpy start. On May 9, 1908, Senator Elmer Burkett, a Nebraska Republican, introduced a resolution to recognize the following day as Mother’s Day.

But as an article in the May 10, 1908, issue of the New York Times reports, the resolution inspired “a number of witty sallies” in the Senate and was referred to the Judiciary Committee where “it will be permitted to sleep peacefully.”

Interestingly, Burkett’s resolution used the plural possessive, according to an OED citation from the Congressional Record for May 9, 1908: “Resolved, That Sunday, May 10, 1908, be recognized as Mothers’ Day.”

Jarvis pressed ahead with her Mother’s Day campaign, writing letters and sending pamphlets to public officials. Two years after the Burkett resolution was put to rest, she had her first victory.

In 1910, William Glasscock, the Governor of West Virginia, proclaimed the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day, and soon the holiday spread to other states.

In 1912, Jarvis trademarked the phrases “Mother’s Day” and “second Sunday in May,” and established the Mother’s Day International Association to promote the holiday around the world.

On May 8, 1914, the US Congress passed a law designating the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day, and on May 9, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation declaring the first national Mother’s Day.

The American holiday inspired Mother’s Day observances around the world, but the date of the celebration varied from country to country.

In Britain, for example, where the holiday is also called Mothering Sunday (a name with roots in a religious ceremony dating back to the 16th century), it’s celebrated on the fourth Sunday in Lent.

A final note: Anna Jarvis, who was childless, began campaigning in the 1920s against the commercialization of Mother’s Day. She denounced confectioners, florists, and other commercial interests that she accused of gouging the public.

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The “poke” in “slowpoke”

Q:  In Rohinton Mistry’s novel A Fine Balance, a father tells his son that “slow coaches” get left behind. He uses “slow coach” the way I’d use “slowpoke.” Which term is more popular? And where does “slowpoke” come from?

A: Both terms refer to a slow or idle person, and both showed up in the 19th century—“slow coach” first in the UK and “slowpoke” soon after in the US.

So it’s not surprising to find “slow coach” used in Mistry’s novel about four people thrust together in a cramped apartment in India. The author himself was born and brought up in India, where English is of the British variety.

Which term is more popular? “Slowpoke” (or “slow poke”) by far, with 2.2 million hits on Google compared with 443,000 for “slowcoach” (or “slow coach”).

But a lot depends on where you live. “Slowcoach” shows up more often in the UK and Commonwealth countries. “Slowpoke” is seen more often in the US. (Most of the standard dictionaries we’ve checked prefer the single-word versions of these terms.)

The Oxford English Dictionary describes “slowpoke” as “colloq., chiefly U.S.” However, most of the OED’s citations for the term are from British writers.

The earliest Oxford citation for “slowpoke” is from John Russell Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms (1848): “ ‘What a slow poke you are!’ A woman’s word.”

But the next citation is from an 1877 British glossary of words used in East Yorkshire: “Slaw-pooak … a dunce; a driveller.” (In Old English, slaw means obtuse or dull.)

The most recent OED example is from Salman Rushdie’s 1981 novel Midnight’s Children: “Come on, slowpoke, you don’t want to be late.”

The OED’s earliest citation for “slowcoach” is from Charles Dickens’s first novel, The Pickwick Papers (1837):

“What does this allusion to the slow coach mean? … It may be a reference to Pickwick himself, who has … been a criminally slow coach during the whole of this transaction.”

The term “slowcoach” is clearly a figurative use of a literal phrase for a slow-moving vehicle. So where does “slowpoke” come from?

The OED raises the possibility that the second half of the compound may be derived from apooke, a Virginia Algonquian term for tobacco that literally means “thing for smoking.”

The dictionary says the English word “poke” used in this sense referred to “a plant (of uncertain identity) used by North American Indians for smoking; the dried leaves of this plant.”

“Plants with which poke has been identified,” Oxford adds, “include a lobelia (Lobelia inflata), pearly everlasting (Anaphalis margaritacea), and wild tobacco (Nicotiana rustica), all also called Indian tobacco.”

The dictionary, in its “slowpoke” entry, points the reader to its entry for the tobacco sense of “poke,” but it doesn’t speculate about any connection between the two words.

If there is a connection, perhaps the term for a slow-burning or slow-igniting wild tobacco may have been used figuratively to mean a slow-moving person.

A more likely etymology, we think, is that “poke” here is derived from “poky” and “poking,” adjectives meaning, among other things, slow or dawdling.

Those two adjectives are derived in turn from the verb “poke,” which can mean to potter about or dawdle away.

The OED’s first citation for “poke” used in this sense is from one of our favorite books, Jane Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility (1811): “Lord bless me! how do you think I can live poking by myself?”

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Parsing the Preamble

Q: I’m puzzled by this phrase from the Preamble: “in order to form a more perfect union.” What part of speech is “in order to”? It looks like a preposition. But how can the verb “form” be an object of a preposition? I struggle with this.

 A: You’ve raised an interesting Constitutional question. The short answer is that “in order to” is an idiomatic phrase that might be translated “so as to” and is followed by a verb.

As to what parts of speech are in play here, we think you can regard “in order to form” and similar constructions in two different ways:

(1) “In order to” is a compound preposition that has a bare infinitive (“form”) as its object.

(2) “In order” is a compound preposition that has a “to” infinitive (“to form”) as its object. The “to” here isn’t actually part of the infinitive, as we’ve written before on the blog.

In our opinion, arguing for one view over the other would be splitting hairs.

“In order” may not look like a preposition, but it functions like one, resembling “so as.” And as we’ll explain later, an infinitive can indeed be the object of a preposition.

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language has an explanation that agrees with our option #2 above. Cambridge describes “in order” as a preposition followed by either a “to” infinitive or by a clause starting with “that.”

The “in order that” construction, according to Cambridge, “is somewhat more formal and considerably less frequent” than one with the “to” infinitive. 

And “in order that” requires the use of more words. As Cambridge notes, it often calls for “a modal auxiliary,” such as “might” or “can.”

Take a sentence like “I left work early in order that I might go to the gym.” It’s much wordier than “I left work early in order to go to the gym.” (In fact, as we’ve written before on the blog, you can often drop “in order” and be even less wordy!)

The Cambridge Grammar adds that the subjunctive mood is sometimes used with “in order that,” giving this example: “The administration had to show resolve in order that he not be considered a lame-duck president.” (Note the subjunctive “be.”)

But getting back to “in order to,” we were surprised to find only one standard dictionary that analyzes how the phrase functions as a part of speech.

The Collins English Dictionary calls “in order to” a preposition that is followed by an infinitive. Collins defines the phrase as meaning “so that it is possible to.”

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) and The American Heritage Dictionary of the English language (5th ed.) simply say the phrase means “for the purpose of.”

But that definition is problematic on a literal level, since you can’t swap one expression for the other.

“For the purpose of” is followed by a gerund, like “forming,” while “in order to” is followed by an infinitive, like “form.” (A gerund ends in “-ing” and acts like a noun.)

The Oxford English Dictionary says “in order to” is used “with infinitive expressing purpose.” It defines the phrase as meaning “so as to do or achieve (some end or outcome).”

The OED’s first example of the usage is from the 1609 Douay translation of the Bible: “These are they that speak to Pharao, king of Egypt, in order to bring out the children of Israel from Egypt.”

A less lofty example is this caption from a 1994 issue of Food and Wine magazine: “True risotto must be stirred continuously in order to develop its unique texture.”

You expressed some doubt as to whether a verb can be the object of a preposition.

As we wrote on the blog in 2010, an infinitive as well as a gerund can be a direct object. We’ve also written about bare versus “to” infinitives several times, including posts in 2009 and 2013. 

We’ll add here that it’s not unusual for an infinitive—bare or not—to be the object of a preposition. For example, in all of these sentences, infinitives (both bare and with “to”) are the objects of prepositions:

“He can do everything but cook” … “She had no choice except to lie” … “I’d rather starve instead of steal” …  “We have better things to do than to argue” …”They were about to leave” … “He opened his mouth as if to speak.” (When used in this way, “as if” has a prepositional function, according to Cambridge.)

Finally, a Constitutional footnote. In case you’re bothered by the Founders’ use of  “more perfect” in that passage from the Preamble, take a look at our post on the subject.

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On the lam

Q: Some time ago I wrote you to recommend an essential book for someone in your trade: How the Irish Invented Slang, by Daniel Cassidy. There you will find, among many hundred entries, his view of the derivation of “lam” from the Irish word leim. Alas, Danny has since died, and his extraordinary achievement has not been properly recognized. I feel sure that if you look through his book you will be inspired to extend at least his scholarly life.

A: You won’t like what we have to say. This book sounds like a lot of fun, but perhaps there’s more fun in it than truth.

Cassidy’s book, which won an American Book Award for nonfiction in 2007, maintains that American slang is teeming with words of Irish origin—“jazz,” “spiel,” “baloney,” “nincompoop,” “babe,” and “bunkum,” to mention only a few.

But many of his claims have been disputed by linguists and lexicographers because they’re based merely on phonetic similarities.

The critics include Grant Barrett, a lexicographer and dictionary editor who specializes in slang, and Mark Liberman, a linguist who has called Cassidy’s book an “exercise in creative etymology.”

Cassidy himself has acknowledged that he based his etymologies on phonetic similarities. A New York Times interviewer wrote in 2007 about the inspiration that led to the book:

 “Mr. Cassidy’s curiosity about the working-class Irish vernacular he grew up with kept growing. Some years back, leafing through a pocket Gaelic dictionary, he began looking for phonetic equivalents of the terms, which English dictionaries described as having ‘unknown origin.’ ”

 The article continues: “He began finding one word after another that seemed to derive from the strain of Gaelic spoken in Ireland, known as Irish. The word ‘gimmick’ seemed to come from ‘camag,’ meaning trick or deceit, or a hook or crooked stick.”

 “Buddy,” as Cassidy told the interviewer, sounded like bodach (Irish for a strong, lusty youth); “geezer” resembled gaosmhar (wise person); “dude” was like duid (foolish-looking fellow), and so on. He thus compiled lists of American slang words that sounded as if they came from Irish, and based his book on them.

But in doing serious etymology, one has to do more than show that words in one language sound or look like those in another. A superficial resemblance might provide a starting point, but it shouldn’t be the conclusion.

A more authoritative approach would be to apply the academic standards that a lexicographer or a comparative linguist would use, supporting one’s case with documented evidence from written records. 

Let’s focus on the phrase you mention—“on the lam.”

Cassidy suggests an etymology of “lam” in a passage about an Irish-American gambler named Benny Binion: “Benny went on the lam (leim, jump), scramming to Vegas with two million dollars in the trunk of his maroon Cadillac.”

So Cassidy is proposing that “lam” in this sense is derived from the Irish leim. But other than that parenthetical note, he offers no evidence for the suggested etymology.

It’s true that leim (pronounced LAY-im) is Irish Gaelic for “jump” or “leap.” It’s similar to nouns with the same meaning in other Celtic languages (llam in Welsh, lam in Breton and Cornish, lheim in Manx Gaelic, leum in Scottish Gaelic), and it shows up in many Irish place names.

But we haven’t found a single other source that connects the Irish leim with the American slang term “lam,” meaning to run away. Not one.

If there were any truth in Cassidy’s assertion, etymologists and lexicographers would have picked up on it by now. 

Slang scholars still describe the origin of the “lam” in “on the lam” as unknown, and they would be only too happy to discover it.

Several theories have been proposed over the years: (1) that “lam” is short for “slam”; (2) that it’s from “lammas,” a mid-19th century British slang word meaning to run off; and (3) that it’s from the verb “lam” (to beat), used like “beat” in the older phrase “beat it.”

The last theory is the most commonly proposed—that the slang “lam” comes from the verb meaning to beat.

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, “lam” has had this meaning (to “beat soundly” or “thrash”) since Shakespeare’s day. The earliest citations in writing come from the 1590s.

In the late 19th century, the OED says, this verb “lam” acquired a new meaning in American slang—“to run off, to escape, to ‘beat it.’ ”

Oxford’s earliest citation for the slang verb is from Allan Pinkerton’s book Thirty Years a Detective (1886), in a reference to a pickpocket:

“After he has secured the wallet he will … utter the word ‘lam!’ This means to let the man go, and to get out of the way as soon as possible.”

The following year, the OED says, the word started appearing as a noun to mean “escape” or “flight.” Oxford’s earliest example here is from an 1897 issue of Appleton’s Popular Science Monthly: “To do a lam, meaning to run.”

Over the next few decades, according to slang dictionaries, to run or escape was to “lam,” “do a lam,” “make a lam,” “lam it,” “go on the lam,” “take a lam,” “take it on the lam,” and “be on the lam.”

Similarly, the OED says, a fugitive or somebody on the run was called a “lamster” (1904; also spelled “lamaster” and “lammister”).

It’s not hard to see how the “lam” that means to beat it might have descended from the “lam” that means to beat.

Since Old English, as the OED says, to “beat” has been “said of the action of the feet upon the ground in walking or running.”

This use of “beat,” according to Oxford, has given us phrases like “beat the streets,” “beat a path,” “beat a track,” and so on. In the 17th century, to “beat the hoof,” or “beat it on the hoof,” was to go on foot. 

The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang says the phrase “beat it” (to clear out, go in a hurry), was first recorded in 1878, when it appeared in A. F. Mulford’s Fighting Indians in the 7th United States Cavalry:

“The Gatling guns sang rapidly for a few seconds, and how those reds, so boastful at their war dance the night before, did ‘beat it!’ ”

So the slang use of “beat it” was around before “lam” (to beat) acquired its extended slang meaning (to run or beat it).

But we haven’t discussed where the earlier “lam” came from. Etymologists believe it’s derived from the Old Norse lemja (to flog or to cripple by beating). However, an even earlier source has been suggested, one that’s older than writing.

The linguist Calvert Watkins, writing in The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, identifies the source of “lam” and “lame” (both verb and adjective) as an Indo-European root that’s been reconstructed as lem-, meaning “to break in pieces, broken, soft, with derivatives meaning ‘crippled.’ ”

This Indo-European root developed into prehistoric Proto-Germanic words that have been reconstructed as lamon (weak limbed, lame) and lamjan (to flog, beat, cripple), according to Watkins and to the lexicographer John Ayto in his Dictionary of Word Origins.

Other authorities, including the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, say the Indo-European lem– also has descendants outside the Germanic languages, including an adjective in Old Irish and Middle Irish, lem (“foolish, insipid”).

The modern Irish equivalent, leamh, is similarly defined (“foolish, insipid, importunate”) in An Etymological Dictionary of the Gaelic Language, by Alexander McBain. 

This is a different word entirely from the Irish leim (jump), which McBain says was leimm in Old Irish.

We mentioned above that leim can be found in many Irish place names.

To mention just a few, there are Limavady (the Irish name is Leim an Mhadaidh, or “leap of the dog”); Lemnaroy (Leim an Eich Ruaidh, “leap of the reddish horse”); and Leixlip (Leim an Bhradain, “leap of the salmon”).

This last one is an interesting case. Leixlip is on the river Liffey, which is rich in salmon. The town’s original name came from Old Norse, lax hlaup (“salmon leap”).

In the 1890s, when Leixlip adopted an Irish name, it chose Leim an Bhradain (“leap of the salmon”), a direct translation of the Old Norse. Of course, the Vikings who settled there in the Dark Ages may have used a Norse translation from Irish. Who knows?

Some etymological questions may never be settled for sure. That doesn’t mean scholarly methods can’t be used to make an educated guess. Still, uneducated guesses are made all the time because people are so eager to know.

Woody Allen once satirized this desperate need to know. In a humorous essay called “Slang Origins,” from his book Without Feathers (1972), he wrote:

“How many of you have ever wondered where certain slang expressions come from? Like ‘She’s the cat’s pajamas,’ or to ‘take it on the lam.’ Neither have I. And yet for those who are interested in this sort of thing I have provided a brief guide to a few of the more interesting origins. …

“ ‘Take it on the lam’ is English in origin. Years ago, in England, ‘lamming’ was a game played with dice and a large tube of ointment. Each player in turn threw dice and then skipped around the room until he hemorrhaged. If a person threw seven or under he would say the word ‘quintz’ and proceed to twirl in a frenzy. If he threw over seven, he was forced to give every player a portion of his feathers and was given a good ‘lamming.’ Three ‘lammings’ and a player was ‘kwirled’ or declared a moral bankrupt. Gradually any game with feathers was called ‘lamming’ and feathers became ‘lams.’ To ‘take it on the lam’ meant to put on feathers and later, to escape, although the transition is unclear.

“Incidentally, if two of the players disagreed on the rules, we might say they ‘got into a beef.’ This term goes back to the Renaissance when a man would court a woman by stroking the side of her head with a slab of meat. If she pulled away, it meant she was spoken for. If, however, she assisted by clamping the meat to her face and pushing it all over her head, it meant she would marry him. The meat was kept by the bride’s parents and worn as a hat on special occasions. If, however, the husband took another lover, the wife could end the marriage by running with the meat to the town square and yelling, ‘With thine own beef, I do reject thee. Aroo! Aroo!’ If a couple ‘took to the beef’ or ‘had a beef’ it meant they were quarreling.”

We think there’s a lesson here—and some lessons come with a laugh. The human mind abhors a vacuum. When the most advanced methods of scholarship can’t (or haven’t yet) come up with definitive answers, then answers will be invented. 

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Hat tricks

Q: Have you ever answered this question: Where does “hat trick” come from? It’s really common and yet no one I know, not even my husband (a huge sports fan and an English major!), can tell me the origin of the phrase.

A: No, to our great surprise, we haven’t answered that question. So here goes.

The term “hat trick” originated among cricket players in 19th-century England, according to the Oxford English Dictionary and other sources.

A bowler was said to score a “hat trick” for taking “three wickets by three successive balls,” the OED says. 

Supposedly, this feat was called a “hat trick” because it entitled the bowler “to be presented by his club with a new hat or some equivalent,” Oxford explains.

The term first appeared in print, the OED says, in a sporting annual called John Lillywhite’s Cricketers’ Companion (1877):

“Having on one occasion taken six wickets in seven balls, thus performing the hat-trick successfully.”

This later example is from an 1882 issue of a London newspaper, the Daily Telegraph: “He thus accomplished the feat known as the ‘hat trick,’ and was warmly applauded.”

The use of the term spread in the early 1900s—first to horseracing, where a jockey scored a “hat trick” for riding three winners, sometimes in a day and sometimes in succession.

The usage then spread to sports in which three goals could be scored in a single game.

Oxford’s first non-cricketing sports example is from a racing story in the Daily Chronicle of London (1909):

“It is seldom that an apprentice does the ‘hat trick,’ but the feat was accomplished by … an apprentice.” (The young jockey won races on horses named Soldier, Lady Carlton, and Hawkweed.)

Here in the US, “hat trick” is perhaps most familiar in hockey. The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang quotes a 1949 sports dictionary that defined the phrase this way: 

“Hat trick. … In ice hockey it is achieved by a player scoring three goals in a game, and the term is used similarly in goal games such as soccer and lacrosse.”

But “hat trick” has occasionally been used in baseball as well. A 1950 sports story in the New York Times, quoted by Random House, included this definition: “In baseball, hitting a single, double, triple and home run in one game.”

The term is by no means confined to sports, however. By mid-century, it was being used to apply to any kind of three-fold victory.

The OED cites this 1958 quotation from the Economist: “The Tories are excited because it looks as if they may flout all precedents and complete a hat-trick of wins.”

Random House includes quotations dating from 1951 for “hat trick” used to describe triple feats in politics, book publishing, the auto industry, and classical music.

But to the best of our knowledge, the old custom of awarding a new hat to the happy victor is no longer observed.

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Should we watch our language?

Q: My question concerns your recent article about the origins of “Johnny-come-lately.” How is this grammar? You should watch your language!

A: As the banner on our website indicates, we answer questions on “grammar, etymology, usage, and more.”

Many of our readers write in to ask about the origins of various expressions and slang terms.

Others ask about problems in grammatical structure—sequence of tenses, problems with pronoun case, and so on.

Still others write us with questions about spelling, pronunciation, punctuation, and plural formation, and ask about how such usages developed.

A reader of the blog once asked us why we use the term “grammarphobia,” not “grammarphilia,” in the name of our website.

As we said in a posting six years ago, the name of the website comes from the subtitle of Pat’s 1996 book, Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English.

The website, like the book, tries to explain grammar (and other language issues) in terms that won’t intimidate grammarphobes, and won’t turn off grammarphiles.

By the way, we can’t take credit for coining either “grammarphobe” or “grammarphobia.”

Steven Pinker uses “grammarphobe” in his 1994 book The Language Instinct: “And who can blame the grammarphobe, when a typical passage from one of Chomsky’s technical works reads as follows?”

(The passage that follows includes terms like “L-markers,” “chain coindexing,” and “head-head agreement.”)

As for “grammarphobia,” we’ve found examples of the usage in two words (“grammar phobia”) or hyphenated (“grammar-phobia”) dating back to the 1920s and ’30s.

The single-word version (“grammarphobia”) showed up in print in the mid-1990s, about 10 years before we began using it on our website.

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Let’s play ball

Q: Given the start of the baseball season, it occurs to me that “play ball” is a rather interesting expression. Your thoughts?

A: Now that you mention it, the expression “play ball” is interesting. The “ball” is what’s being batted around, and “ball” here also happens to be the clipped name of the game.

In the US, “play ball” generally means “play baseball,” though the usage is often heard in connection with football, basketball, and other sports.

In fact, the phrase or various versions of it had been around for hundreds of years before any American stepped on the mound and threw the ball toward home plate.

In the early days, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the expression simply referred to a game played with a ball.

But you asked about baseball, so let’s consult Paul Dickson, who (in the words of a Washington Times book review) “may be baseball’s answer to Noah Webster or, at the very least, William Safire.”

The Dickson Baseball Dictionary (3rd ed.) defines “play ball!” as “the command issued by the plate umpire to start a game or to resume action. It’s sometimes abbreviated to a simple order of ‘play!’ ”

Dickson quotes (from the Boston Globe on May 13, 1886) what may be the first use of the baseball phrase in newsprint:

“McKeever held a long discussion with Pitcher Harmon about signs. The crowd got impatient; one man yelled ‘Get a telephone!’ while the umpire ordered them to ‘play ball.’ ”

The phrase certainly caught on, showing up a few years later in James Maitland’s The American Slang Dictionary (1891): “Play ball (Am.), go on with what you are about.”

The expression appeared more colorfully in a poem, “The Umpire,” in the July 27, 1893, issue of the Atchison (Kan.) Daily Globe:

“With features rigid as a block of stone, / He cries, ‘Play ball!’ ”

But apart from its use by umpires, Dickson says, “play ball” has a special meaning to baseball fans. It’s the “emblematic phrase for the start of any baseball game, from Opening Day to the opener of the World Series.”

The dictionary credits the pitcher Cy Young with the first use of the term in this sense, in 1905. It adds this quotation by a former baseball commissioner, Peter Ueberroth, some 80 years later:

“The best words—the most fun words—in our language are ‘play ball.’ Those words conjure up home runs and strikeouts, extra innings and double plays. … ‘Play ball’ is what baseball is all about—its call to arms—and there isn’t a baseball fan … who isn’t a little excited over the beginning of a new season.” (From USA Today, 1986.)

The OED says the word “ball” in “play ball” is a noun meaning “a game played with a ball (esp. thrown or pitched with the hand).”

Today in the US, as we’ve said, the phrase refers to baseball, but it predates baseball by several centuries.

The expression was first recorded in the Middle Ages as “play at the ball,” which was later clipped to “play at ball” and finally to “play ball.”

The OED’s earliest citation is from a description of St. Cuthbert in a medieval manuscript (circa 1300):

“With younge children he pleide atthe bal.” (Here we’ve changed two Middle English characters to “y” and “th.”)

An abbreviated version of the phrase first appeared in Nicholas Breton’s poem A Floorish Upon Fancie (1577):

“And let him learne to daunce, to shoote, and play at ball, / And any other sporte, but put him to his booke withall.”

During the 17th century, both “play at the ball” and “play at ball” were used. The modern form, “play ball,” finally emerged in the mid-18th century.

The OED cites an example from John Brickell’s The Natural History of North Carolina (1737). In a passage describing Native American games, Brickell writes: “Their manner of playing Ball is after this manner.”

The expression “to play ball” acquired another meaning in the early 20th century—to act fairly or cooperate.

The OED’s first example is from a 1903 novel, Back to the Woods, by Hugh McHugh (pen name of George Hobart): “Well, if Bunch should refuse to play ball I could send the check back to Uncle Peter.”

But the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang has a citation from a slightly earlier novel, Edward Waterman Townsend’s Chimmie Fadden & Mr. Paul (1902):

“He’ll give him de time of his life if he’ll sign up to play ball wit him whenever he’s wanted.”

Today, many of our most familiar expressions (or clichés, if you prefer), come from ball games of one kind or another. Here’s a sampling of figurative uses of sports terms, with their earliest recorded appearances, all from either the OED or Random House.

● “keep the ball rolling”—to maintain a momentum, 1770

● “keep (or have) one’s eye on the ball”—to be careful or alert, 1907

● “home run”—a great success, 1913

● “have something (or a lot) on the ball”—to be capable, 1936 (a reference to throwing a speedy or deceptive pitch, a sense first recorded in 1911)

● “carry the ball”—to assume responsibility, 1924

● “run with the ball” or “take the ball and run with it”—to take control, 1926

● “from out in left field”—from out of nowhere, 1930s (a subject we discuss on the blog)

● “on the ball”—accurate or alert, 1939

● “drop the ball”—to fail at something, 1940

● “curveball”—something tricky and unexpected, 1944

● “throw a curve”—to do something tricky and unexpected, 1953

● “that’s the way the ball bounces”—that’s life, 1952

● “ballpark”—approximate (adjective), 1957

● “there goes the ballgame”—it’s all over (1930)

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High on the hog

Q: During Pat’s last appearance on WNYC, she said living “high on the hog” refers to the choicest cuts of pork. I disagree. The sow has several pairs of teats starting at the chest area and continuing down the body. The teats at the top have the richest milk. The strongest piglets feed at the top, or high on the hog.

 A: We’re sorry to disappoint you, but your explanation is one of several dubious “high on the hog” etymologies involving the suckling of piglets.

The most common is that the piglets who suckle on the top row of teats when the sow is lying on its side fare better, perhaps because the top row is easier to reach.

Gary Martin, writing on his Phrase Finder website, notes that this supposed etymology didn’t show up until the late 20th century, many years after “high on the hog” first appeared in print.

 (The earliest published references that we’ve been able to find linking a sow’s teats and the expression “high on the hog” are from the 1960s.)

The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, by Christine Ammer, dates the idiomatic phrase to “live [or eat] high off [or on] the hog” to the late 19th century. (The first examples we could find were from the early 20th century.)

“It alludes to the choicest cuts of meat, which are found on a pig’s upper flanks,” Ammer writes in the American Heritage book of idioms.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “to live (also eat) high off (also (up) on) the hog” as “to live in an extravagant or luxurious style.” It describes the usage as “orig. and chiefly U.S.”

The earliest citation in the OED is from the Nov. 28, 1919, issue of the Kansas City  Times: “ ‘Dese days I’se eatin’ furder up on de hog!’ ‘We’re all eating too high up on the hog,’ Mr. Clyne concluded.”

An article in the March 4, 1920, issue of the New York Times clearly indicates that the expression refers to the choice cuts of meat from a hog:

“Southern laborers who are ‘eating too high up on the hog’ (pork chops and ham) and American housewives who ‘eat too far back on the beef’ (porterhouse and round steak) are to blame for the continued high cost of living, the American Institute of Meat Packers announced today.”

Now, of course, some pricey restaurants serve such “low on the hog” delicacies as caramelized pork belly and grilled trotters.

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Just sayin’

Q: Do you have any comment as to why so many people add “Just sayin’ ” at the end of a comment, especially a nasty one? Is it just a little cutesy thing like kids’ saying “just kidding” after a snide remark?

 A: As you’ve noticed, the expression “Just sayin’ ” follows an irritating or annoying or otherwise unpleasant observation. The speaker seems to imply that simply adding “Just sayin’ ” makes everything all right.

Well, it doesn’t.

We briefly referred to this stand-alone expression in a post we wrote a year ago on a similar usage sometimes referred to as a “false front,” “wishwasher,” “but head,” or “lying qualifier.”

This is a qualifying statement that comes BEFORE an unwelcome remark. Examples are all too familiar: “Nothing personal, but …,”  “Don’t take this the wrong way, but …,” “No offense, but….”

When someone opens a conversation that way, look out! What’s coming isn’t something you want to hear. The speaker is anticipating your response and trying to head it off at the beginning.

“Just sayin’ ” is the same kind of rhetorical device, but it comes at the other end, AFTER the bomb has landed. (We suggested in our post that it might be called “postcatalepsis.”)

An example would be “You really shouldn’t wear that color. It makes you look dead. Just sayin’.” The speaker seems to mean, “Don’t blame me—I’m merely stating the obvious.”

In 2009, a CNN news segment called “Just Sayin’ ” was widely criticized (notably by Jon Stewart of the Daily Show.

In the segment, the anchor Carol Costello inserted the expression into the network’s coverage of a news event or important issue.  An example: “Are we too wired? Just sayin’.”

(CNN likes contemporary slang so much that it also initiated segments called “Are you Kidding Me?” and “What the …?”)

How old is the stand-alone expression “Just sayin’ ” or “I’m just saying”? (It sometimes appears with “only” instead of “just.”)

Well, it’s a difficult question to research, since so many literal examples get in the way. But the usage we’re talking about has a German cousin dating from at least as far back as the 19th century. And a longer version was known a century ago in Irish English. 

The Oxford English Dictionary says that “just saying” and “only saying” originated as clipped versions of fuller phrases that are used in the same way: “I was just saying,” “I am only saying,” etc.

The dictionary says these expressions—both the originals and the shorter “just saying, only saying”—are “used to indicate that a previous statement or assertion is not intended to be combative or provoking, or should not be taken too personally or seriously.”

It suggests a comparison with the German ich sag’ ja nur  (“I’m just sayin’ ”), which it dates from the “late 19th cent. or earlier.”

The dictionary’s first English example is from Juno and the Paycock (1925), by the Irish playwright Sean O’Casey: “Sure, I know—I was only sayin’.”

And this “just” version is also found in dialogue: “I’m not knocking. I’m just saying” (Tucker’s People, a 1943 novel by Ira Wolfert).

But the clipped versions are more recent. We’ve mentioned a few examples from the early 2000s. Oxford’s earliest is a quotation in an Illinois newspaper: “It’d be a hard pill for Boehner to swallow. … Just sayin’ ” (The Pantagraph, Bloomington, June 30, 2013.)

As we recently noted in a posting to our blog, “Just sayin’ ” was spotted in an episode of the period drama Downton Abbey.

That was clearly an anachronism, since the clipped version would have been “out of place in 1916,” according to the linguist Ben Zimmer.

Another linguist, Mark Liberman, has written on the Language Log that “I haven’t seen any clear examples from before WWII.”

[Note: This post was updated on Dec. 12, 2022.]

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Plumb loco

Q: Am I right in believing that the phrase “plumb loco” is derived from the plumb used to determine the depth of water and a true vertical line? In other words, someone who’s plumb loco would be askew.

A: You’re right that the adverb “plumb” used in this sense is related to the lead plumb bob that’s hung from a line to determine water depth or verticality. But the relationship isn’t quite as straight as a plumb line.

English adopted the noun “plumb” in the 14th century from Anglo-Norman and Old French, but the word is ultimately derived from plumbum, the Latin term for lead, according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins.

Interestingly, the word “plumber” is a relative. It originally referred to a worker in lead, but came to mean someone who installs water pipes, which were once made of lead.

Getting back to your question, the Oxford English Dictionary says the adverb “plumb,” meaning vertically, first showed up in English in the early 15th century.

In the early 16th century, the adverb took on the sense of “exactly in a particular direction, position, or alignment; directly, precisely,” according to the OED.

By the end of the century, the adverb was being used in the sense you’re asking about—as an intensifier meaning completely, absolutely, and quite.

The OED’s earliest citation for this usage (with “plumb” spelled “plum”) is from The Misfortunes of Arthur, a 1588 play by Thomas Hughes based on the Arthurian legend:

“The mounting minde that climes the hauty cliftes … Intoxicats the braine with guiddy drifts, Then rowles, and reeles, and falles at length plum ripe.”

Here’s an example, with the modern spelling, from Rudyard Kipling’s 1897 novel Captains Courageous: “You’ve turned up, plain, plumb providential for all concerned.”

Although the OED has many British examples of “plumb” used as an intensifier well into the 20th century, the dictionary describes the usage as “Now chiefly N. Amer. colloq.”

Oxford doesn’t have an entry for “plumb loco,” but it includes the phrase in an 1887 citation for the adjective “loco,” from Outing, an American monthly magazine: “You won’t be able to do nuthin’ with ’em, sir; they’ll go plumb loco.”

The OED says English borrowed the adjective “loco” in the mid-19th century directly from Spanish. It means mad, insane, or crazy in both languages. The dictionary describes the term as “colloq. orig. U.S. regional (west.).”

Oxford traces the adjective to earlier nouns in Spanish and Portuguese meaning madness, but the editors say the etymology is “uncertain and disputed” beyond that.

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