Q. I have heard that ahoy derives from a Czech greeting, apparently popularized by sailors docking in English-speaking ports – from the Czech ahoj, meaning ‘hello’. Would you like to comment?
A. Wonderful! Another strange etymological story to add to my collection. Your informant, you see, has the matter exactly backwards.
Ahoj, said the same way as ahoy, is indeed used informally in Czech, and more widely still, I’m told, in Slovak. Jan Čulík, Senior Lecturer in Czech Studies at the University of Glasgow, tells me that Czech ahoj is a modern introduction from English and was borrowed from the sailor’s hail, despite the indisputable fact that the Czech Republic is landlocked (the Swiss have a navy, a very small one, but the Czechs don’t). A Czech etymological dictionary of 2001 says that it was introduced by hikers, boy scouts, sportsmen and young people; it came into wide use in the 1930s when hiking and scouting became generally widespread, though there are examples on record from as far back as the 1880s, when it was used, for example, as a word of command for the horses pulling sleighs.
Ahoy in English goes back a long way:
While he was thus occupied, a voice, still more uncouth than the former, bawled aloud, ‘Ho! the house, a-hoy!’
The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, by Tobias Smollett, 1751. The idea of a person hailing a house as though it were a ship creates a comic image.
It’s based on hoy, an even older cry that dates from medieval times, a formalized spelling of a natural or inarticulate cry. William Langland was the first person known to have used it, in his poem Piers Plowman in the fourteenth century. Down the years it was used when driving pigs or cattle, or when you wanted to attract a person’s attention. Its successor is today’s uncouth shout of oy! In particular – and this is where the maritime connection really does appear – sailors used hoy! when hailing another ship. Ahoy was a development of this that added force to the cry:
I was wakened – indeed, we were all wakened, for I could see even the sentinel shake himself together from where he had fallen against the door-post – by a clear, hearty voice hailing us from the margin of the wood: ‘Block house, ahoy!’ it cried. ‘Here’s the doctor.’
Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson, 1883.
Incidentally, Alexander Graham Bell suggested ahoy as the way to answer his new telephone, and operators at his first exchange did just that. This seemed too peremptory for others and hello replaced it, a word of the early nineteenth century that was based on shouts such as the hunting-field cry hollo!, an exclamation that can be traced back at least as far as Shakespeare’s use of it in Titus Andronicus.
Q. Where does the expression all-singing, all-dancing come from? I see it most often applied to some computer wizardry that seems to do everything. I’d guess it’s from the theatre – is that right?
A. Though a version was used for stage shows, the phrase itself is from the early days of film.
These days you do usually find that it means something equipped with lots of impressive features or which seems to offer everything you could possibly want, and more, though the superlative can be tinged with sarcasm.
Our confidence in James Murdoch’s ability to turn BSkyB into an all-singing, all-dancing multi-media stock, offering broadband and telephony alongside pay TV, proved well founded.
Independent, 1 January 2008.
An ‘all-singing, all-dancing crimefighting tool’ has been revealed with hopes it will be one of the most comprehensive community safety websites in the country.
East Anglian Daily Times, 5 April 2007.
Variations on the phrase appeared in the days of vaudeville in the US. As an example, the Robison Park Theatre in Fort Wayne, Indiana, advertised several acts around 1907 with the phrase talking, singing and dancing. Early attempts at adding sound to film used the same phrase:
The talking, singing and dancing pictures, the latest development in the moving picture art, as presented by the Humanovo company, drew another large crowd to the Racine theater last night.
The Racine Daily Journal, Wisconsin, 2 September 1908. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain, because he’s an actor talking and singing to lip-sync the silent film.
However, the phrase as we know it had to wait for the coming of the version of the talkies that became standard. Several films were promoted as state-of-the-art aural experiences in 1929. The most significant was Broadway Melody, famously the first film musical, for which a version of this tagline was used. But it was beaten in the etymological stakes by the slightly earlier Close Harmony, advertised in March and April 1929 under several versions of the tagline as All talking-singing-dancing and 100% all-talking all-singing.
The canonical form all-singing, all-dancing came along later in the same year. My first sighting is this:
‘The Gold-Diggers of Broadway.’ Warners’ all-color, all-singing, all-dancing hit.
Syracuse Herald, 21 October 1929. This film, now almost entirely lost, was only the second talkie (as sound films were then known) to have been photographed in Technicolor. It was a lively comedy, with a set of popular songs, including ‘Tiptoe Through the Tulips’ (best known to most people from Tiny Tim’s falsetto version of the 1960s), and lots of lovely showgirls.
The phrase became famous enough, largely through the pressure of early movie promotion, that it entered the language. Oddly perhaps, in view of its country of origin, the expression appears more often in British newspapers than American these days. Perhaps we haven’t tired of it yet.
Q. A question arose recently during a discussion here in California about the origin of the expression argy-bargy (also written argey-bargey), meaning a relatively amicable, if somewhat heated, argument. Any ideas?
A. I’m not so sure the term refers to an amicable argument: in my experience (as a spectator, you will understand) argy-bargies are often not only heated arguments but also rather bad-tempered ones, amounting to a spat or minor quarrel. But then, the term is mainly a British or Commonwealth one, not that well known in the US, and easily misunderstood out of context.
Argy-bargy was a late nineteenth-century modification of a Scots phrase, which appeared early in the same century in the form argle-bargle. The first part of this older version was a modification of argue. The second parts of the two forms, bargle and bargy, never had any independent existence – they are no more than nonsense rhyming repetitions of the first elements.
An example in the old spelling from later in the century:
Last night ye haggled and argle-bargled like an apple-wife.
Kidnapped, by Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886. An apple-wife was a seller of apples from a stall, the female equivalent of a costermonger (who, historically and etymologically, also sold apples, an ancient large ribbed variety called a costard). By repute apple-wives were just as argumentative and foul-tongued as their male counterparts.
An early example of the modern form, also as a verb:
Ten minutes at the least did she stand at the door argy-bargying with that man.
Margaret Ogilvy, by J. M. Barrie, 1896. This autobiographical novel, by an author who is most famous for his play Peter Pan, takes its title from the maiden name of his mother; it deals with his childhood memories of the death in a skating accident of his 13-year-old brother David in 1867.
Linguists refer to such doublets as reduplication. The second part isn’t always invented, but can be a real word if one is available that fits in meaning and form. English is fond of the trick and the language is full of such pairs. Some are conventional rhymes (super-duper, hoity-toity, namby-pamby, mumbo-jumbo) while others are pairs that modify an internal vowel (dilly-dally, shilly-shally, wishy-washy, zig-zag).
Q. An obituary of Nathan Pusey, a president of Harvard, contains the following sentence: ‘As education is an ever-interesting Aunt Sally, inevitably there are critics of the academic art of money-squeezing.’ What does the phrase Aunt Sally mean and what is its derivation?
A. An Aunt Sally in its popular sense today is a person or thing that’s been set up as an easy target for criticism, abuse or blame, in political circles often to deflect attention from the real issues and waste opponents’ time.
Iraq was set up by the neocons as an Aunt Sally, and its weapons of mass destruction were as much a figment of the imaginations of Messrs Bush and Cheney as they were a figment of Saddam Hussein’s.
New Statesman, 17 January 2008.
The original Aunt Sally was a game, popular in Britain under that name from the middle of the nineteenth century at fairgrounds and racetracks.
London, Saturday, March 31st, 1866. Yesterday was Good Friday, which in England is a close holiday. The streets are full, the omnibuses crowded; there are railway excursions, the Crystal Palace is thronged – forty or fifty thousand were there yesterday – and multitudes gather in the parks and play kiss in the ring or Old Aunt Sally. Aunt Sally is a big black doll on a stick, with a pipe in her mouth, and an orange or some toy for a prize, which you win by hitting her with a stick if you are lucky.
The New York Times, 16 April 1866. The delay in printing the correspondent’s report was because it had to be sent by steamship across the Atlantic; the first fully working cable across the ocean was opened that year but it would have been too expensive for anything except hot news. The writer might have added that the objective was to knock the pipe out of Aunt Sally’s mouth. Close holiday is an old term for a public holiday on which businesses close; the modern British term bank holiday didn’t appear in the language until 1871.
From the fairground sense the term moved on, as the result of a moderately obvious process of thought, to become our modern figurative expression. The game itself is still played under that name in pubs in some southern counties of England, notably Oxfordshire, where the Oxford & District Aunt Sally Association was founded before the Second World War. However, the game today instead uses a stubby white skittle, called a dolly, perhaps as the result of greater racial sensitivity.
The aunt part of the name may refer to an old black woman, a term employed both by blacks and whites in the USA from the eighteenth century onwards but also known in London; aunt could also be applied familiarly to any elderly woman.
The direct influence, according to J. Redding Ware’s Passing English of the Victorian Era of 1909, may have been an 1820s black-face doll that derived from a low-life character named Black Sal who had been created by Pierce Egan in his series Life In London of 1821–8. Ware says that it was probably adopted ‘owing to the popularity of that work, precisely as in a later generation many of Dickens’s characters were associated with trade advertisements. Very significant of Pierce Egan’s popularity, which from 1820 to 1840 was as great as that of Dickens, whose fame threw Egan into obscurity.’
Q. How about a discussion of the phrase bail out, meaning to escape from some difficult situation? I’m guessing it’s spelled that way, rather than bale out, but I don’t know why. I wonder if it was originally used for leaving an aircraft before landing, or if there is some other origin?
A. It does look from the evidence that the figurative sense – to leave hurriedly, escape an unpleasant situation or abandon a burdensome responsibility – does come from the idea of leaving an aircraft by parachute in an emergency. Americans are pretty certain how to spell it, but Brits much less so.
The early evidence is from the US, in which the term was always spelled bail:
One or two [parachutists] have said they found the descent exhilarating. However, the average pilot who has to ‘bail out’ hurriedly from a crippled or burning plane never is able to recall any such sensation.
Oakland Tribune, California, 1 September 1929.
He successfully bailed out of an airplane at an elevation of 1,500 feet.
The New York Times, 11 April 1932.
There’s little doubt from this early evidence that aviators were thinking that escaping from an aircraft in danger was like bailing water out of a boat, the immediate image being that of throwing the water over the side. Eric Partridge, in A Dictionary of Forces’ Slang, published in 1948, gave this as the origin. However, seriously muddying the waters, he spelled it bale.
The Oxford English Dictionary has changed its view on the definitive form. In its Second Edition of 1989 it argued it should be bale out, suggesting people may have been influenced in spelling it that way by the image of an escaping airman being like a bale or bundle thrown through the aircraft door. In a recently revised entry online, it goes for bail out instead.
The current position is that American English almost always uses bail out. British English seems to be divided about 50:50 between that and bale out, and it’s easy to find examples of baled out in the British press:
This poor lad had baled out of his plane and was found embedded in the soil, his hand clutching his radio lead instead of the ripcord.
Daily Telegraph, 16 May 2008.
Does the disagreement over the spelling matter? Probably not a lot, since the meaning is always clear from context.
Q. Despite our politically correct times, people seem to casually use the most indecorous expressions every day without considering their effects on those around them. Take balls-up, for example. I’ve assumed it’s low slang but, since it is common, perhaps I’m wrong. Where does it in fact come from?
A. Though now widely known in the English-speaking world, this is in origin a British slang term for a bungled or badly carried out task or action, a messed-up or confused situation, or a complete foul-up. It came into the language from First World War services’ slang:
‘What do you make of it, sergeant?’ he asked. ‘I don’ know what to make of it. What the bloody hell do you make of it, yourself? After all, that’s what matters. I suppose we’ll come through all right; we’ve done it before, so we can do it again. Anyway, it can’t be more of a bloody balls-up than some o’ the other shows ’ave been.’
The Middle Parts of Fortune, by Frederic Manning, 1929. The novel is set on the Western Front in France during the battles of the Somme in the First World War, which Manning – an Australian – experienced during his service with the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry. The text as he wrote it could not be published in his lifetime because of the authentic bad language it contained. Show here is services slang for a military engagement, battle or raid.
The obvious implication, as you suggest, is of a testicular association, which is why it is regarded as coarse or low slang, though quite how it might have come about is unclear. As soon as one begins to look into matters more deeply, that origin becomes more unlikely still.
The verbal construction, ball up – in much the same sense as in British slang, though not regarded as coarse – turns out to have a long history in the US. Jonathan Lighter has recorded examples in the Historical Dictionary of American Slang from the middle of the nineteenth century. The 1856 revised edition of Benjamin Hall’s A Collection of College Words and Customs records that ball up meant to fail a recitation or examination. From no later than the 1880s it implied becoming mixed up or confused in some way. There’s a reference to the noun ball-up in the US publication Dialect Notes in 1900, meaning a confused or muddled situation. It looks highly plausible that balls-up, although a British expression, derives from this older American one, perhaps through contact between US and British servicemen in the First World War.
Having said all that, there’s no obvious clue from the examples where it might come from. Indeed, Professor Lighter remarks at the beginning of the entry that the term’s ‘semantic development is obscure’, which is academic-speak for ‘I haven’t a clue, either’. The ball might be of string or yarn that has become snarled up, or perhaps it refers to crumpling a piece of paper into a ball, or conceivably it comes from some incident in college sports. Sylva Clapin, in his New Dictionary of Americanisms of 1902, suggested an origin in the balling up of a horse in soft, new fallen snow, when a snowball forms within each shoe and stops the horse moving.
You can take your pick from these – there’s no more evidence for one than another.
Q. For my job – I’m a translator, based in France – I have to read American magazines concerning consumer electronics, home systems, burglar alarms, etc. I very often come across the expression bells and whistles, which seems to relate to equipment, accessories or features that are offered to the customer as plusses but are not really indispensable. Is that right? And where does that funny phrase come from?
A. You’re right about the meaning, which usually refers to non-essential features added to a piece of technical equipment or a computer program to make it superficially more attractive without enhancing its main function. It has now spread well beyond its American homeland and is familiar, I’d guess, to most English speakers.
All in all, the W890i is a standard mobile phone that is worth considering if you are looking for one without bells and whistles.
Malaysia Star, 5 June 2008.
It has widened beyond technical contexts:
To get the most out of your super [fund] requires systematic planning to take full advantage of the tax-minimisation opportunities. The more bells and whistles your fund offers the better off you can be.
The Age, Melbourne, 19 June 2005.
The phrase is relatively modern. One of its earlier appearances was in an article in the US magazine Atlantic in October 1982, which said it was ‘Pentagon slang for extravagant frills’. But I’ve found that the term is recorded from a couple of decades earlier:
A beautiful tri-level in the woods situated on quiet street. This home has many of the plus features: 3 bedrooms, den, family room, 2 baths, 1st floor laundry, patio doors, kitchen with all the bells and whistles, fallout shelter plus many other features.
A classified advertisement in the Wisconsin State Journal, 27 April 1963.
Where it comes from is still a matter of debate. As a literal phrase, it has been around since at least the middle of the nineteenth century, in reference to the noisemakers on streetcars, railway locomotives and steamships. Before modern electronics, there were really only two ways to make a loud warning noise: you either rang a bell or tooted a whistle. US railroad locomotives had both:
You look up at an angle of sixty degrees and see sweeping along the edge of a precipice, two-thirds up the rocky height, a train of red-and-yellow railway-cars, drawn by two wood-burning engines, the sound of whose bells and whistles seems like the small diversions of very little children, so diminished are they by the distance.
A Day At Dutch Flat, by Albert F. Webster, in Appleton’s Journal of Literature, Science and Art, New York, October 1876. Dutch Flat is north-east of Sacramento in Placer County, California. It’s a small community these days, but at the time it was a big mining camp for workers extracting gold from one of the richest deposits in the state. The town was actually founded by two German brothers, not by Dutchmen, but the locals got muddled. The train was running on the Central Pacific Railroad.
I’m told the bells and whistles on locomotives were used for different signalling purposes, so that both were considered necessary, though not strictly essential, parts of its equipment. It may be that the coiners of the modern figurative phrase had this in mind. Indeed, it has been said that the term arose from American model railway societies – to have a layout in which the engines had all their bells and whistles meant that it was fully equipped down to the smallest detail, and thus one up on enthusiasts who didn’t have them.
However, it’s much more probable the slang sense of the term comes from that extraordinary entertainment machine, the cinema organ, which in the heyday of films would rise out of the pit, bringing with it the organist to entertain during intervals. In an earlier era it enabled the accompaniment to silent films; organs such as the Mighty Wurlitzer augmented their repertoire by sound effects to help the organist, among them car horns, sirens, and bird whistles. These effects were called toys, and organs often had toy counters with 20 or more noisemakers on them, including various bells and whistles. In the 1950s, decades after the talkies came in, but while theatre organs were still common in big movie houses, these fun features must have been considered no longer essential to their function but mere fripperies, inessential add-ons.
Q. I have heard the expression beyond the pail from my mother many times as a child, but I don’t know what the pail is or what the phrase means.
A. Isn’t that where you go when you kick the bucket?
I have to tell you that it has nothing to do with containers for carrying water. It’s a common misspelling because the word that really belongs in the expression has largely gone out of use except in this one situation. The phrase is properly beyond the pale. It means an action that’s regarded as outside the limits of acceptable behaviour, one that’s objectionable or improper.
I look upon you, sir, as a man who has placed himself beyond the pale of society, by his most audacious, disgraceful, and abominable public conduct.
Mr Pott to Mr Slurk (we never learn their first names) in The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens, 1837. This is a classic example of the expression but by no means the earliest. That’s more than a century older, in 1720, in the third volume of The Compleat History of the Lives, Robberies, Piracies, and Murders committed by the most notorious rogues, by a man hiding, perhaps wisely, under the pseudonym of Captain Alexander Smith.
Pale has nothing to do with the adjective for something light in colour except that both come from Latin roots. The one referring to colour originates in the Latin verb pallere, to be pale, whilst our one is from palus, a stake (also the name of the wooden post that Roman soldiers used to represent an opponent during fighting practice). Pale is an old name for a pointed piece of wood driven into the ground and – by an obvious extension – to a barrier made of such stakes, a palisade or fence. Pole is from the same source, as are impale, paling and palisade. This meaning has been around in English since the fourteenth century and by the end of that century pale had taken on various figurative senses – a defence, a safeguard, a barrier, an enclosure, or a limit beyond which it was not permissible to go. The idea of an enclosed area still exists in some English dialects.
Both Dove-like roved forth beyond the pale To planted Myrtle-walk.
The History of Polindor and Flostella, by the Elizabethan courtier and author Sir John Harington, written some time before 1612 but published in 1657. This uses pale in its literal sense of a boundary or enclosure. In the poem, Ortheris and his beloved risk going beyond the boundary (the pale) of their quiet park lodge with the result that Ortheris is attacked by five armed horsemen. Harington is best remembered now for his Metamorphosis of Ajax (this last word being a pun on a jakes, meaning a privy) of 1596, a scatological and satirical work that contains the first description of a water closet, more than 200 years before anybody built one.
In particular, the term was used to describe various defended enclosures of territory inside other countries. For example, the English pale in France in the fourteenth century was the territory of Calais, the last English possession in that country. The best-known example is the Russian Pale, between 1791 and the Revolution of 1917, which were specified provinces and districts within which Russian Jews were required to live. Another famous one is the Pale in Ireland, that part of the country over which England had direct jurisdiction – it varied from time to time, but was an area of several counties centred on Dublin. The first mention of the Irish Pale is in a document of 1446–7. Though there was an attempt later in the century to enclose the Pale by a bank and ditch (which was never completed), there never was a literal fence around it. The expression has often been claimed to originate in one or other of these pales, most often the Irish one, but the earliest appearance of 1720 for beyond the pale is extremely late if it’s linked to the Irish one and much too early for the Russian one.
The earliest relevant figurative sense was of a sphere of activity or interest, a branch of study or a body of knowledge; we use field in much the same way. This first appeared in 1483 in one of the earliest printed books in English, The Golden Legende, a translation by William Caxton of a French work. Our figurative sense seems in part to have grown out of this, since those who exist outside such a conceptual pale are not our kind and do not share our values, beliefs or social customs. There may well have been an echo of a literal pale as well, with an implication that civilization stopped at its boundary.
Q. A friend told me the other day, when discussing a new acquaintance, ‘He’s a big cheese in the rugby world.’ What in heaven’s name is the origin of this strange term?
A. The big cheese is the most influential or important person in a group, though it has often been used in a derogatory way to refer to somebody self-important. These days, it’s more than likely to appear as a joking reference to a real cheese, since its slang use is rare and definitely outdated.
There’s no shortage of expressions invoking cheese: one may be cheesed off (miserable, annoyed, fed up), or something may be cheesy (cheap, unpleasant or blatantly inauthentic). These refer to the unhappy habit of ripe cheese making its presence known to anyone within sniffing distance.
But big cheese has a quite different origin, based on the only positive slang sense of cheese that seems ever to have existed. This was first recorded in London in the nineteenth century, in forms like he’s the cheese, it’s quite the cheese or just the cheese, with the sense of a thing that was ‘good, first-rate in quality, genuine, pleasant or advantageous’ as John Camden Hotten defined it in his Slang Dictionary in 1859.
Cries Rigmaree, rubbing her hands, ‘that will please – My “Conjuring cap” – it’s the thing; – it’s “the cheese”!’
The Ingoldsby Legends, by R. H. Barham, 1840. The Reverend Richard Barham wrote the legends partly in verse, partly in prose, under the pretence that the antiquarian Thomas Ingoldsby of Tappington Everard in Kent was presenting old documents he had found. The resulting comic and grotesque retellings of medieval legends and tales of crime, witchcraft and the supernatural were first published in the magazine Bentley’s Miscellany from 1837 on. They remained highly popular thoughout the second half of the century – an edition of 1881 sold 60,000 copies on its first day.
Explanations of its origins were often ingenious rather than satisfying:
Just the Cheese. This phrase is only some ten or twelve years old. Its origin was this:–Some desperate witty fellows, by way of giving a comic turn to the phrase ‘C’est une autre chose,’ used to translate it, ‘That is another cheese;’ and after awhile these words became ‘household words,’ and when anything positive or specific was intended to be pointed out, ‘That’s the cheese’ became adopted, which is nearly synonymous with ‘Just the cheese.’
Notes and Queries, 23 July 1853. The expression is rather older than the writer’s ‘ten or twelve years’, since the supposed French connection was floated as its origin in the London Guide in 1818. The French phrase means ‘that’s another thing’. As it happens, another writer in the same journal a month earlier had given what we now accept as the true origin.
Though it seems certain that it had nothing to do with a literal big cheese, Americans often offer one as its origin. This was the Mammoth Cheese that was created for President Thomas Jefferson by the staunchly Republican citizens of Cheshire, a community in western Massachusetts that, like its English county namesake, was famous for its cheese. A Baptist preacher named John Leland conceived the idea of making a vast cheese from one day’s output of the local cows. It turned out to be more than four feet in diameter and weighed 1235 pounds (561 kg). It arrived at the executive mansion (not yet called the White House) on New Year’s Day 1802 and stayed on display for two years; it is said that slices of it were still being served to guests in 1805. If you’re a fan of the US television series The West Wing, you will remember Big Block of Cheese Day, in which White House staffers met fringe groups that would not otherwise get a hearing; this refers to a later presentation of an even bigger cheese to Andrew Jackson in 1837; it’s said that he invited passers-by into the White House to sample it.
Notwithstanding this suggested American connection, the most probable source is the Persian or Hindi word chiz, meaning a thing.
The expression used to be common among Anglo-Indians, e.g., ‘My new Arab is the real chiz’; ‘These cheroots are the real chiz,’ i.e. the real thing. The word may have been an Anglo-Indian importation, and it is difficult otherwise to account for it.
Hobson-Jobson: The Anglo-Indian Dictionary, by Sir Henry Yule and Arthur C. Burnell, 1886. Sir Henry was primarily a historical geographer of central Asia and an expert in medieval travel writing. This huge work was therefore something of a sideline, which he completed after Burnell’s death in 1882. Its unique view of the everyday language of British officers in colonial India is so important to scholars that it has proved to be his primary legacy. We shall meet the book again in the entry on Blighty.
Another expression with the same meaning that pre-dated the real chiz was the real thing, so it’s probable that Anglo-Indians changed thing to chiz as a bilingual joke. Once returnees from India started to use it in Britain, hearers naturally enough converted the unfamiliar foreign chiz into something more recognizable, and it became cheese.
The phrase big cheese developed from it in early twentieth-century America:
Roosevelt looks like the big cheese. He stands at the head of every preempted party and if the greatest care is not exercised a vote will be cast for him regardless of whether it is the intention or not.
Daily Independent, Monessen, Pennsylvania, 30 October 1912.
It followed on several other American phrases containing big to describe a person of more than common importance, many with animal or vegetable associations – big bug, big potato, big fish and big toad, of which the oldest is probably the British English bigwig of the eighteenth century (more recent examples are big shot, big enchilada and big banana).
Like the others, big cheese was by no means always complimentary and often had derisive undertones, no doubt helped along by the influence of other slang meanings of cheese.
Q. Could you possibly shed some light on the origin of the expression big girl’s blouse? We were having a discussion about it in the office the other day; I checked all my references and couldn’t find any information on it.
A. I can tell you what it means and a bit about its history, but tracking it down to its source is impossible in the present state of knowledge. It’s a northern English expression that belongs with such obscure gems as the exclamation of surprise I’ll go to the foot of our stairs! and the deeply dismissive comment, usually uttered by a woman with reference to the uselessness of some male, he’s all mouth and trousers!
People mean by big girl’s blouse an ineffectual or effeminate male, a weakling or coward, though it’s often used in a bantering or teasing way among friends rather than as an out-and-out insult (‘You can’t drink Coke in a pub, you big girl’s blouse!’; ‘Blokes who don’t take on dares are big girl’s blouses’). It has working-class associations, being more common in downmarket British tabloid newspapers such as the Sun and the Mirror; it’s also a frequent pejorative on the sports pages:
The reason [Newcastle United manager Sam] Allardyce had to go was because he wasn’t man enough for the Geordie hordes. Wearing a woolly hat and coat in the game against Birmingham when it was only -2 degrees? Pink scarf and sponsored gloves during a defeat to Man City when the thermometer had not touched freezing? Big Sam? Big girl’s blouse more like.
Sun, 14 January 2008.
It seems to have been first used in the 1960s:
ELI: Go round talking like that, you’ll be hearing from our solicitor.
NELLIE: He is our solicitor, you big girl’s blouse.
Nearest and Dearest, Series 2, Episode 1, 1969. This ITV network sitcom starred Jimmy Jewel as Eli Pledge and Hylda Baker as his spinster sister Nellie, who inherit a pickle-bottling factory in Colne, Lancashire. It was rough-and-ready Northern humour, full of innuendo (plus malapropisms from Nellie). This is the earliest example so far known.
It has been suggested that Hylda Baker invented the phrase in her stage act. If she didn’t, where big girl’s blouse came from is likely to remain a mystery. However, as a possible clue, I’ve been told of a Liverpool variation, ‘he’s flapping like a big girl’s blouse’. This conjures up the twin ideas of a large garment flapping on a washing line and of a man flapping in the sense of panicking. It’s plausible as the image from which the current version could have derived.
Other than that, your guess is as good as mine.
Q. I am a Brit living in Australia and I’ve been asked by an ocker where the term Old Blighty comes from. I was appalled to realize I had no idea. Can you help please?
A. No worries. Old Blighty or Blighty is an affectionate way of referring to Britain, still very common among expatriates. It’s also a mildly disparaging way by which certain former colonials sometimes refer to the UK:
That’s the conclusion of Her Majesty’s government, which acknowledged yesterday that letting pubs stay open past the traditional 11 pm closing has failed to curb old Blighty’s notorious binge-drinking problem.
Boston Herald, 5 March 2008.
It’s a relic of British India:
Bilayut, Billait. Europe. The word is properly Arabic Wildyat, ‘a kingdom, a province,’ variously used with specific denotation, as the Afghans term their own country often by this name; and in India again it has come to be employed for distant Europe… The adjective bilāyatī or wilāyatī is applied specifically to a variety of exotic objects… most especially bilāyatī pani, ‘European water’, the usual name for soda-water in Anglo-India.
Hobson-Jobson: The Anglo-Indian Dictionary, by Sir Henry Yule and Arthur C. Burnell, 1886. The expression hobson-jobson was once used by British soldiers in India for any ‘native festal excitement’, as the authors described it. They explained that it was a corruption of the Muslim exclamation Yā Hasan! Yā Husayn! during the Muharram procession; Hasan and Husain were the grandsons of Muhammad who were killed while fighting for the faith.
Blighty was the inevitable British soldier’s corruption of it. But it only came into common use as a term for Britain during the First World War in France, about 1915. It then appeared in the titles of many popular wartime songs:
There’s a ship that’s bound for Blighty, We wish we were in Blighty, and Take me back to dear old Blighty, put me on the train for London town, as well as in Wilfred Owen’s poems and many other places. Unlike other slangy terms of that conflict, it survived after the war.
In modern Australian usage, old has been added to make a sentimental reference to Britain.
Q. In addition to calling each other mate, us Aussies also refer to blokes, as in, ‘That Tim is a good bloke, isn’t he?’ I use the term, but have no idea why, or where it originated! Can you help?
A. This slang term for a male person is originally British, recorded from the early nineteenth century, probably as a variation on the slightly older gloak (a buzzgloak was a pickpocket, according to an 1812 glossary of low slang). To start with, bloke was the jargon of criminals for a man, usually one of superior status, presumably meaning anybody who wasn’t a criminal.
The earliest example I know about is in a virtually illiterate letter by one John Daly, aged 17, read in evidence at his trial for housebreaking at the Old Bailey on 9 April 1829; it appears there once as blake and once as bloke. (Daly, by the way, was found guilty and sentenced to death.) In 1839, H. Brandon included it in a glossary in his survey Poverty, Mendacity, and Crime but spelled it bloak and defined it as ‘a gentleman’. From the early 1850s onwards it appears in the works of various writers about low life in London, including Henry Mayhew and George Augustus Sala, where it’s clearly a straightforward slang term for a man of any class.
It was taken early on to Australia, where it was commonly used at first to mean the boss or some person of status. That ties in with the one-time lower-deck slang sense in the Royal Navy for the commander of a ship. Americans often think of it as British slang, but it was common in the US in the late nineteenth century and is even now not entirely extinct there. At one time, Americans also used it in the sense of a stupid or worthless person.
The experts aren’t altogether sure where it came from. Some, especially in the United States, have suggested it derived from the Celtic word ploc, a large, bull-headed person. Others have argued that the ‘stupid person’ sense may be from the Dutch blok, a fool, which is where we get blockhead from. This derivation is probably correct, but we’re now fairly sure that bloke in the broad sense of a man derives either from Romany, the language of the Rom or gypsies, or more probably from Shelta, a secret language used by Irish and Welsh tinkers and some gypsies. It may ultimately derive from Hindi loke, a man.
Q. I was re-reading one of John Wyndham’s science fiction novels last night (The Kraken Wakes, as it happens) and came across a character who was said to have blown the gaff, clearly a slangy reference to revealing something that others would prefer to keep hidden. It is an extremely odd phrase. I can think of a couple of senses of gaff, but neither of them fit. Where does blow the gaff come from?
A. That’s not so common a slang phrase these days, though it’s still about:
Tell him to grow up and leave you alone, otherwise you’ll blow the gaff on his lecherous behaviour.
Mirror, 5 January 2006.
Blow the gaff starts to appear early in the nineteenth century as criminal slang. Trying to find an origin isn’t easy – a lot of dictionaries don’t even try – because the matter is clouded by the fog of ages and the poor state of recording of early slang usage. There are also all sorts of meanings for gaff recorded down the centuries – many more than the two you know – which has added to our difficulties.
In the eighteenth century there was another version of the expression, to blow the gab, similarly criminal slang meaning to betray a secret or to betray a confederate, in which gab comes from the word for conversation or speech (as in gift of the gab).
I, Crank Cuffin, swear to be
True to this fraternity;
That I will in all obey
Rule and order of the lay.
Never blow the gab or squeak;
Never snitch to bum or beak.
The Oath of the Canting Crew, taken from The Life of Bampfylde Moore Carew, by Robert Goadby, 1749. Carew was born in 1693, the son of the rector of Bickley, near Tiverton, but ran away to join a group of travellers and became known in popular writing as the king of the gypsies. Crank Cuffin was a generic slang term for a rogue; blow, squeak and snitch all meant to betray one’s associates by becoming an informer; a bum was a bailiff, a lowly law-enforcement officer (his name was an abbreviation of bum-bailiff, one who was close behind you in pursuit); and a beak was a magistrate.
One of the least-known meanings of gaff is for a cheating device in gambling. Originally this was a ring worn by card-sharps (Charles Leland describes one in his Dictionary of Slang, Jargon & Cant of 1889) with a small hook set in it to grip the cards, so the origin is probably in gaff in the sense of a hooked stick for landing large fish, perhaps augmented by some idea of hooking a sucker. It has come to mean any cheating device used by card players.
What may have happened was that blow the gab became the model for a newer phrase, blow the gaff, under the influence of the cheating trick sense of gaff, where it would at first have meant exposing the trade secrets of gamblers and cheats. It’s then a short step to extend it to the meaning of the older phrase – and indeed to supplant it as the older one went out of fashion.
One of the French officers, after he was taken prisoner, axed me how we had managed to get the gun up there but I wasn’t going to blow the gaff, so I told him as a great secret, that we got it up with a kite; upon which he opened all his eyes, and crying ‘Sacre bleu!’ walked away, believing all I said was true.
Peter Simple, by Frederick Marryat, 1833. Axed here is a dialectal form of asked.
Q. A television program here in the US said recently, I believe, that boycott came from the Revolutionary War and the boycott of British taxes. Is that right?
A. Wrong country and wrong century, I’m afraid. No one who organized a boycott in the 1770s or 1780s could have used the word, because it only appeared in the language in 1880. It’s an excellent example of an eponym, a word based on a proper name, like wellingtons, chauvinism or the Ferris wheel.
Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott was an Englishman working in Ireland. In the 1870s he was farming at Loughmask in County Mayo and serving as a land agent for an absentee English landlord, Lord Earne. This was the time of the campaign organized by the Irish Land League for reform of the system of landholdings. In September 1880, protesting tenants demanded that Captain Boycott give them a 25 per cent reduction in their rents. He refused and became subject to mob attacks. Charles Stuart Parnell, the President of the Land League, suggested in a speech that the way to force Boycott to give way was for everyone in the locality to refuse to have any dealings with him. Labourers would not work for him, local shops stopped serving him (food had to be brought in from elsewhere for him and his family), and he even had great trouble getting his letters delivered. In the end, his crops were harvested that autumn through the help of fifty volunteers from the north of the country, who worked under the protection of 900 soldiers.
The events aroused so much passion that his name became an instant byword. It was first used – in our modern sense of collective and organized ostracism – in The Times of 20 November 1880, even while his crops were still being belatedly harvested; within weeks it was everywhere. It was soon adopted by newspapers throughout Europe, with versions of his name appearing in French, German, Dutch and Russian. By the time of the Captain’s death in 1897, it had become a standard part of the English language.
Q. While looking in Wikipedia for something else, I found a page that said bringing home the bacon came from a twelfth-century practice that survives only in the English town of Great Dunmow. The church promised a side of bacon (a flitch) to any man who could swear that he and his wife had ‘not wisht themselves unmarried again’ for a year and a day. Men who ‘brought home the bacon’ in this way were held in high esteem in their communities. Is this one of those too neat explanations that defy belief?
A. It is. It’s also been said that it refers to the old fairground contest of catching the greased pig, whose prize was the pig, so the winner literally brought home the (greasy) bacon. Your story reminded me at once of one of the tales told in that infamous e-mail about life in the 1500s that endlessly circulates online. One version of it claims that ‘it was a sign of wealth that a man could bring home the bacon.’
That’s true today, though usually in a broader sense of supplying material support to one’s family or achieving success, but it’s hard to assert with a straight face that it was so back in 1500 or 1300. We can’t absolutely prove it wasn’t around then but its total absence from the historical record before 1906 rather gives a pointer to its being modern.
The first recorded user of the expression was Mrs Gans, mother of Joe. He was a famous boxer at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the first native-born black American to win a world title. That was in 1900, when he was 26. Six years later he fought Oscar ‘Battling’ Nelson in Goldfield, Nevada. It’s virtually a ghost town now but it was a booming community then, the largest in the state. The match has been rated as the greatest lightweight championship bout ever contested, whose fame has endured enough that its centenary was celebrated locally. A report of the fight noted:
The following telegrams were read by Announcer Larry Sullivan. Gans received this from his mother: ‘Joe, the eyes of the world are on you. Everybody says you ought to win. Peter Jackson will tell me the news and you bring back the bacon.’
Reno Evening Gazette, 3 September 1906.
Various stories say that after he won the fight (it ended in Gans’s favour after forty-two rounds when his opponent hit a low blow and was disqualified) he sent a telegram to his mother in Baltimore: ‘Bringing home the bacon’. Other reports claim that what he actually said was that he wasn’t only bringing back the bacon but the gravy, too. These are probably later elaborations of what soon became a widely known and popular story.
Was Mrs Gans repeating a saying she already knew and used? Perhaps, even probably. But it isn’t recorded anywhere that I can discover before she sent that telegram. And it clearly struck a powerful chord of both originality and relevance with those at the 1906 bout. She repeated the phrase in another telegram at his next match the following January and her words were greeted with laughter and repartee.
Almost immediately – within weeks rather than months – it became common on the sports pages of the newspapers, at first referring to boxing but later also to baseball, football, horse racing and rugby. By 1911 it had started to be used of politics. By the time P. G. Wodehouse used it in Ukridge in 1924 (‘It may be that my bit will turn out to be just the trifle that brings home the bacon’) it had become firmly established in the US.
Both bring home the bacon and bring back the bacon remain widely known and used, these days often far from American shores:
This is how much an hour of your (working) time is worth. Look at all the things you do that could be done just as effectively by someone else for less than $30 an hour – in other words outsource your non-core activities so you can focus all your energy on bringing home the bacon.
The Australian, 12 April 2008.
Q. It is quite common these days to hear of people gaining brownie points as reward for some small favour or as a sign of approbation. What is the origin of this phrase?
A. It’s originally from the US. A trawl through a database of American newspapers yields a lot of examples from the 1950s, two from 1954 describing it as school slang. I reproduce one of these reports as a quick glance down nostalgia alley for anybody interested in old US slang:
Miami young people keep their teachers agog with their lingo says Sanford Schnier, of the Miami Daily News. He offers these ‘cool’ expressions: ‘Flake out’ – Too much study is tiring. ‘Browse me on the scene’ – Request for information. ‘Pull a boo boo’ – Make an error. ‘Racking up the Brownie points’ – Teacher’s pet. ‘Toe Dancers’ – High school sissies. ‘Calories’ – Plump girls. ‘Fluffs’ – Fat boys.
The Daily News, Newport, Rhode Island, 15 April 1954.
However, flake out, in the sense of being exhausted, is actually American services slang from early in the Second World War. The Historical Dictionary of American Slang cites evidence that suggests Brownie points, too, was US Army slang from that period, a view backed up by indirect and anecdotal evidence.
The earliest known example to date is this:
You don’t know about brownie points? All my buddies keep score. In fact every married male should know about ’em. It’s a way of figuring where you stand with the little woman – favor or disfavor. Started way back in the days of the leprechauns, I suppose, long before there were any doghouses.
Los Angeles Times, 15 March 1951. A different gloss on the meaning.
Several suggestions have been put forward for where it comes from. But it seems most likely that the origin is the obvious one: Brownie points is an allusion to the junior branch of the Girl Scouts in the US (Girl Guides in other countries), named by Lady Baden Powell after the elves that do helpful things around the house for small rewards. Linking it to their merit badges, or their good deeds, is a neat idea, to such an extent that even now the phrase almost always appears with an initial capital letter. The phrase was surely a sarcastic, inverted compliment. To earn credit by doing some little task to earn a badge or prize is fine for Brownies but it’s childish and embarrassing if an adult does it.
The experts are agreed that the sense was given greater strength and impetus through scatological undertones, being intimately (and I use that word advisedly) associated with the older term brown-nose, for a sycophant, toady or arselicker, a person who curries favour to such an extent that his nose seems to be up his superior’s backside. Brownie by itself is recorded as student slang from 1944 in this sense in the journal American Speech, which defined it as ‘A person who is always asking and answering questions in class to impress the instructor. Also a person who stays after class to try to insinuate himself into the teacher’s good graces.’ A teacher’s pet or apple polisher, in other words. An earlier issue of the same journal suggested that brown-nose itself was pre-war student slang that was carried into the American military by cadets.
Q. Watching earth-moving near my home the other day, I wondered why the machine that was doing the job was called a bulldozer. I can see how it might be like a bull butting, but is that really where it comes from?
A. There is a link. But the story’s surprisingly complicated.
The word is definitely American. The earliest sense of bulldozer had nothing to do with machinery, but referred to a person inflicting a severe punishment, nominally one applied with a bullwhip, also an American term, a big whip with a long heavy lash for driving cattle.
Bulldozer became very widely known during the US presidential election of 1876, which historians suggest may have been the most hard-fought, corrupt and rigged in the history of the Union. All reports say that it came into being as a result of a determined attempt by Democrat supporters in the Southern states to stop blacks from voting Republican:
In very obstinate cases the brethren were in the habit of administering a bull’s dose of several hundred lashes on the bare back. When dealing with those that were hard to convert, active members would call out ‘give me the whip and let me give him a bull-dose.’ From this it became easy to say ‘that fellow ought to be bull-dosed, or bull-dozed,’ and soon bull-doze, bull-dozing and bull-dozers came to be slang words.
The Daily Constitution, 21 November 1876. The paper is reprinting a report from The New Orleans Times of 15 November, which records that many journalists have been writing the word wrongly as bull-dogged, comments that it was a word coined in Louisiana, and implies that it had been in existence for some months.
‘Bull-dozers’ mounted on the best horses in the state scoured the country in squads by night, threatening colored men, and warning them that if they attempted to vote the republican ticket they would be killed.
Janesville Gazette, Wisconsin, 22 November 1876.
By the early 1880s, the verb bulldoze was widely used in the sense of intimidating or coercing by violence, specifically the threat of a flogging. A bulldozer could be a bully, an intimidator, or a member of a vigilante mob. It could also refer to a type of gun, presumably seen as a usefully intimidating device.
The next step occurs around the end of the century. We start to get references to bulldozer being the name for a powerful machine for bending big pieces of metal.
The unfortunate man proved to be Anton Olson, of the blacksmithing department, who in some unknown way became caught in the machine known commonly as the ‘bulldozer,’ thereby sustaining severe injuries.
The Daily Gazette, Wisconsin, 23 July 1898. There’s no way to tell whether this sense appeared independently or had been borrowed from the earlier ones, but the idea of forceful manipulation or bending something to one’s will are common to both.
Our modern sense began to appear around 1910. Various reports mention canal boats fitted with bulldozers, blades for breaking up winter ice. Crude mule-powered earth-movers were also fitted with such blades (the problem, it was said, was getting the mules to go backwards ready for the next stroke). As you can imagine, in time bulldozer, as the term for the pusher blade at the front of a machine, became extended to the whole machine. But the first cases of bulldozer for a powered machine fitted with one appear only at the end of the 1920s and are usually linked with the then new Caterpillar tractors.
It’s intriguing that though it might seem our modern figurative sense of the verb bulldoze, to force through acceptance of some proposal insensitively or ruthlessly, is based on the image of the earth-moving machine, the figurative sense actually pre-dated the literal one by some 50 years.
Q. In Stock Exchange parlance, bull and bear relate to being ‘long’ or ‘short’ of a particular security. I have heard that the term has its origins in two old English family stockbroking or banking businesses – the Bulteels and the Barings. The Bulteels tended toward a more aggressively positive or bullish view on stocks and shares while the Barings tended to be more cautious. I should be grateful for your comments.
A. Your explanation of the two terms makes perfect sense to somebody in the business, but it lacks a bit for the rest of us. To keep it simple (this being a ritual incantation to prevent my being nibbled to death by pedants), a bear sells shares, sometimes shares he doesn’t own (in the jargon, he is short of the necessary shares), hoping to buy them back at a lower price in order to make a profit, so he is hoping for a fall in the market price and he may be considered a pessimist; a bull buys shares hoping to sell them at a higher price later, so is essentially an optimist about the way the market is moving (by analogy, he is said to be long because he has some shares on hand).
The story about the two famous banking families is widespread, and believed by a lot of people, but there’s no truth in it. Barings was a well-known bank, whose spectacular demise in 1995 rendered it even more famous than it was in life. The only bank containing the name Bulteel that I can find traded as Harris, Bulteel and Co; it was the first bank in Plymouth, established there in 1773–4 under another name, but it was never sufficiently well known to conceivably become the focus for an expression.
In any case, bull pre-dates that bank’s foundation by more than half a century, being first recorded in 1714. Bear is slightly older still:
A noble gentleman of this city, who has the honour of serving his country as major in the Train-bands, being at that general mart of stock jobbers called Jonathon’s, endeavouring to raise himself (as all men of honour ought) to the degree of colonel at least; it happened that he bought the Bear of another officer, who, though not commissioned in the army, yet no less eminently serves the public than the other, in raising the credit of the kingdom, by raising that of the stocks.
Tatler, 7 July 1709. This tongue-in-cheek tale is saying that the major, wanting to buy a promotion, speculated by selling some stock short. When the transaction went wrong, the story goes on, the major described his fellow officer as a bear-skin man, among other epithets, and called him out, satisfaction being achieved through a fist-fight, neither man being keen on firearms.A jobber was a middleman or wholesaler who bought and sold shares. A train-band was properly a trained band, a company of citizen soldiery, a militia. Many stock transactions at this period took place in coffee houses, which were convenient meeting places; Jonathon’s, in Change Alley in the City of London, was the precursor of the London Stock Exchange, much as Lloyd’s coffee house later became formalized as Lloyd’s of London, the insurance market.
Other early examples described such traders as bear-skin jobbers. This expanded form of bear gives us the clue we need. There was at the time a proverb, probably borrowed from French ne vendez pas la peau de l’ours avant de l’avoir tué, ‘don’t sell the bear’s skin before you’ve killed him’, though the English equivalent refers to catching rather than killing the bear. It had the same sense as ‘don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched’ – don’t assume your success is assured until it actually happens, don’t be over-optimistic. A bear-skin jobber or bear sold shares he didn’t own, in the hope that their price would fall and that he would be able to ‘catch his bear’ by buying them more cheaply in the market before he had to deliver them.
The suggestion is that bull was invented as an alliterative animal analogy to bear, perhaps with a subconscious image of charging forward fearlessly.
Q. Lazing about the other day, I said, this will butter no parsnips. But I have no idea of its derivation. Please help.
A. It’s interesting you should use the phrase to refer to idleness, since its usual associations are with flattery and honeyed words. The full expression is fine words butter no parsnips (or sometimes soft or fair words), meaning that words alone are useless, especially flattering phrases or extravagant promises, and that you should judge people by what they do rather than by what they say.
As a proverb, it’s at least 400 years old:
Faire words butter noe parsnips.
Parœmiologia Anglo-Latina… or Proverbs English and Latin, by John Clarke, 1639. Clarke was then headmaster of Lincoln grammar school. One former pupil described him as ‘a master very famous for learning and piety’, but also remembered him as a conceited and supercilious pedant.
The link between butter and flattery is easy to understand. We have had the verb to butter up in the language at least since the early eighteenth century with the meaning of flattering a person lavishly. It and the proverb share the image of fine words being liberally applied to smooth their subject and oil the process of persuasion. Parsnips were featured in the proverb early on because they were common in the English diet and were usually buttered before being put on the table. There’s nothing special about parsnips, however: foreign visitors recoiled in disgust at the English habit of using butter to cook almost everything.
Words are but wind that do from men proceed;
None but Chamelions on bare Air can feed;
Great men large hopeful promises may utter;
But words did never Fish or Parsnips butter.
Epigrammes, written on purpose to be read: with a Proviso, that they may be understood by the Reader, by John Taylor, 1651, quoted by Nigel Rees in Oops, Pardon, Mrs Arden!: An Embarrassment of Domestic Catch Phrases. John Taylor was a Thames waterman who styled himself as the Water Poet and who made substantial profits from accounts of his well-publicized sponsored travels to exotic destinations.
Taylor’s verse shows that other foodstuffs were involved in the saying at that time – indeed there’s an example in the Oxford English Dictionary from 1645: ‘Fair words butter no fish’ – and that it’s the act of buttering that’s the key part of the saying. Our association today solely with parsnips results from the expression’s having become fossilized in that one form at some point.
Q. This is probably desperately simple but perhaps you could please tell me from where the phrase butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth originates?
A. It’s most definitely not simple. It’s one of those idioms that are so old their origins are lost in the proverbial mists of time. It refers contemptuously to a person who appears gentle or innocent but isn’t as harmless as he looks.
When a visitor comes in, she smiles and languishes, you’d think that butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth: and the minute he is gone, very likely, she flares up like a little demon, and says things fit to send you wild.
The History of Pendennis, by William Makepeace Thackeray, 1849.
At 5 years of age, [he] looks as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. But he has gained the unenviable distinction of being one of the youngest pupils in Britain to be expelled from school.
Daily Mail, 16 November 2007.
The saying appeared in print first in John Palsgrave’s book about the French language, Lesclarcissement de la Langue Françoyse of 1530, but it’s more than likely that he was borrowing a saying that was already proverbial.
Since putting butter in one’s mouth, even straight from the fridge in these technologically advanced times, is certain to cause it to melt, the saying isn’t easy to understand. It may be tied up with the idea of coolness, of a nonchalant ease coupled with high self-control that is unaffected by passion or emotion (a sense of cool that goes back at least a century before the first recorded appearance of the butter saying). If you are that icily insouciant, the suggestion seems to be, butter really won’t melt in your mouth.
Q. We do a lot of thinking here at Ben & Jerry’s (besides a lot of eating) and we were suddenly curious about the origins of the word butterscotch. Does it have anything at all to do with Scotland?
A. It would be neat if it did, but it seems unlikely.
The first part is easy enough because butterscotch does contain butter. The Collins Dictionary suggests that the second part may indeed be there because it was first made in Scotland; a Scottish link seems plausible because Keillers of Dundee has made butterscotch commercially. However, there’s no written evidence of a Scots link. Some writers have argued that the second part is actually scorch, from the manner of its making. Another suggestion was put forward by Charles Earl Funk in Horsefeathers in 1958: ‘All directions for the preparation of this candy after it is properly cooked close with some such statement as: Pour upon oiled paper or well-buttered pan and when slightly cool score with a knife into squares.’ He points out that one sense of scotch was to score or cut a shallow groove in something. As things stand, you can take your pick between Scotch, scorch or score and nobody can prove you wrong.
The earliest known examples are worth quoting at some length for their period flavour:
Well, you know, next morning I put my things in my cart, ready for Nottingham goose-fair: the brandy-balls here, by themselves – the butter-scotch there – the tuffey in this place – the black-jack in that; then I filled in with cure-all, and hard-bake, and peppermint pincushions: really it was beautiful to look at, I’d done it so nicely.
The Boy’s Autumn Book, 1847. Although it was published in New York it quotes a British itinerant seller of sweets. Tuffey is toffee; hard-bake was also called almond toffee, made from boiled sugar or treacle with blanched almonds; black-jack was another treacle-based sweet, but included spices; cure-all was presumably some variety of a supposed universal remedy or panacea that would almost certainly also have included treacle (treacle was originally the name for a medicinal compound supposed to be a remedy against snake venom, poisons and disease).
Fisher and Co., Victoria-street, Nottingham, have the honour to announce to the ladies, that Messrs. Hannay and Dietrichsen, Dealers in Patent Medicines and Perfumers to the Royal Family, 63, Oxford-street, London, have become agents for their Improved Doncaster Butter-Scotch; celebrated in the North of England for the immediate relief of coughs, colds, hoarseness, &c. Taken as a lozenge, and sold in green and gold packages, stamped and sealed.
The Lady’s Newspaper, London, 20 March 1847. This advertisement suggests by its use of ‘improved’ that butterscotch was known by that name rather earlier.
The mention of Doncaster here may be the best pointer we have to the source. An article published in The Doncaster Review in September 1896 asserts that ‘It was on the 11th of May 1817, that the late Mr. Samuel Parkinson commenced the manufacture of butter-scotch’ in that town. Mr Parkinson was claimed to be the first maker of the sweetmeat. We do not know if he called it that – no records of the firm survive before 1848 – but it would seem unlikely considering the lack of any mention before 1847, even in advertisements.
None of this, however nostalgically evocative, gets us anywhere near finding out the true history of the word, though it does strongly suggest that there was nothing at all Scotch or Scots about it.
Q. We were talking around the breakfast table on Sunday morning and my aunt said she had often wondered where the common expression by and large came from. Can you help?
A. With by and large the modern landsman means ‘in general; on the whole; everything considered; for the most part’.
By and large, the track record of hiring women directors is no different at any studio, whether the studio is run by a man or a woman.
Los Angeles Times, 20 May 2008.
But it’s a nautical expression, from sailing ship days.
Taking it ‘by and large,’ as the sailors say, we had a pleasant ten days’ run from New York to the Azores islands – not a fast run, for the distance is only twenty-four hundred miles, but a right pleasant one in the main.
The Innocents Abroad; or, The New Pilgrim’s Progress, by Mark Twain, 1869. This was Twain’s first bestseller, based on his journeys on the steamship Quaker City; it became one of the most successful travel books of the century, selling 80,000 copies in sixteen months. In the tradition of such humorous works – a tradition it helped to create – it poked fun at foreign customs, unhelpful guidebooks, and the inconveniences of travel.
It’s easy to get confused when attempting to explain its origins because dictionary editors and writers on word origins (this one included) have a lot of trouble understanding the extremely complicated terminology of sailing-ship operations.
We cast off our weather-braces and lifts; we set in the lee-braces, and hauled forward by the weather-bowlings, and hauled them tight, and belayed them, and hauled over the mizen tack to windward, and kept her full and by as near as she would lie.
Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift, 1726. As condensed a string of nautical terminology as one might find in one sentence anywhere. Don’t ask me to explain it. One has to wonder whether Swift, who at the time was dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, could have done so at the time.
Imagine a ship at sea. If the wind were blowing from exactly sideways on, it was said to be on the beam (the beam being the side of the ship at its widest point, usually by the mainmast). If the wind was blowing from any point nearer the stern, on the quarter, the ship was said to be sailing large. This comes from the idea of a thing being unrestricted, allowing considerable freedom (as in a fugitive being ‘at large’), because ships sailing large were able to maintain their direction of travel anywhere in a wide arc without needing to make continual big changes to the set of the sails.
As soon as Desmond stepped on board the grab, the hawser connecting the two vessels was cast off, the mainsail was run up, and the grab, sailing large, stood up the coast.
One of Clive’s Heroes, by Herbert Strang, 1906. A grab (from an Arabic word meaning a raven) was a large coastal vessel used in Indian waters, drawing very little water and so suitable for inshore work.
Sailing ships were able to make some progress into the wind, that is, with it blowing from forward of the beam. Those with good handling capabilities could get within five or six points of the wind (there are thirty-two compass points in a complete circle). In such cases, the ship was said to be sailing by the wind, by here having the ancient sense of ‘in the region or general direction of, towards’.
‘But it will serve only when we are sailing by the wind,’ I explained. ‘When running more freely, with the wind astern, abeam, or on the quarter, it will be necessary for me to steer.’
The Sea Wolf, by Jack London, 1904. The narrator, the literary critic Humphrey Van Weyden, is talking to the poet Maud Brewster, at the point in the story when they have escaped from the sealing schooner The Ghost and its ruthless captain, Wolf Larsen.
If the ship were pointed closely into the wind, but with some margin for error in case the wind changed direction slightly, it was said to be full and by (sailing by the wind with her sails full of wind, as in the Gulliver’s Travels quotation above), or close-hauled, because the lower corners of the main sails were all drawn as close as possible down to her side to windward.
If the helmsman by mistake turned the ship closer to the direction of the wind than it was capable of sailing, the wind would press the sails back against the masts, stopping the ship dead in the water and perhaps even breaking the masts off; in this case the ship was taken aback, the maritime source of another common metaphor.
You will appreciate that a ship could either sail by the wind or it could sail large, but never both at the same time. The phrase by and large in sailors’ parlance referred to all possible points of sailing, so it came to mean ‘in every possible direction’ and therefore ‘in all possible circumstances’. You can see how that could have become converted in layman’s language into a sense of ‘all things being considered’.
Q. In my traversals through Wodehouse I have three or four times encountered the Bertie Woosterism C3. From context it obviously means substandard, low-grade, bottom-of-the-barrel, but I haven’t found a reference explaining the origin and precise meaning of the term. My guess is that it comes from some sort of government grading or rating system, C3 being the antithesis of Al, analogous to the old US Draft Board designation of 4F.
A. You have the sense and origin exactly right. Here’s one of the Wodehousian examples you’ve surely come across:
Anatole, I learned, had retired to his bed with a fit of the vapours, and the meal now before us had been cooked by the kitchen maid – as C3 a performer as ever wielded a skillet.
Right Ho, Jeeves, by P. G. Wodehouse, 1934.
In the First World War, as a result of conscription under the Military Service Act of January 1916, British recruits were graded from A1 to C3. The latter was the lowest grade, for men who were totally unsuitable for combat training, fit only for clerical and other sedentary jobs (it was discovered that a horrifyingly and scandalously large proportion of men – about 40 per cent of them – fell into this category).
He was only two hours in the barracks. He was examined. He could tell they knew about him and disliked him. He was put in class C3 – unfit for military service, but conscripted for light non-military duties.
Kangaroo, by D. H. Lawrence, 1923.
The C3 classification became a figurative term for somebody of the lowest grade or of grossly inferior status or quality. The system was later simplified, but C3 caught on as a dismissive epithet and took a long time to vanish again.
The population, fed on improperly grown food, has to be bolstered up by an expensive system of patent medicines, panel doctors, dispensaries, hospitals, and convalescent homes. A C3 population is being created.
An Agricultural Testament, by Sir Albert Howard, 1940. Sir Albert is regarded as one of the key pioneers of modern organic farming, borrowing many techniques from India, which he observed first-hand while running a government research farm at Indore. This book focuses on the loss of soil fertility caused by intensive farming methods and on ways to restore it.
Q. This is from the Economist, so I assume it must be some obscure Briticism: ‘And most recently, Mr Pitt has been stunningly cack-handed over the appointment of William Webster as head of the new Public Company Accounting Oversight Board.’ What does cack-handed mean?
A. It’s certainly British. It’s only obscure, though, if you’re from somewhere else, since it’s a well-known British informal term for somebody who is inept or clumsy.
A decade ago, I acquired an acoustic guitar, and taught myself to play. But it requires the endless repetition of monotonous exercises, resulting in shredded finger pads and strained eyes from squinting at chord patterns. It’s tedious enough having to listen to your own cack-handed efforts, and many times worse for your next-door neighbour as you stumble repeatedly over the same passage of Ralph McTell’s Streets of London.
Sunday Herald, Glasgow, 6 August 2008.By extension, as I know to my cost, being of the sinistral variety, it also means somebody left-handed, who does everything ‘backwards’ and so looks clumsy or awkward.
It first appeared in the middle of the nineteenth century in glossaries of various English dialects in the spellings keck-handed or cag-handed. However, it only started to become at all popular in mainstream British English in the 1960s, because it required a loosening of people’s objections to using words with obvious sexual or scatological associations. The direct link is with cack, another fine old English term for excrement or dung, with cachus (a cack-house) being Old English for a privy. Such words are from Latin cacare, to defecate.
The idea behind cack-handed almost certainly derives from an ancient tradition that has developed among mainly right-handed peoples that one reserved the left hand for cleaning oneself after defecating and used the right hand for all other purposes. At various times this has been known in many cultures. Some consider it rude even to be given something using the left hand. So to be left-handed was to use the cack hand or be cack-handed.
Q. I have been trying to find the origin of the phrase open a can of worms. It was used by a financial expert in commenting on the banking meltdown at the end of September 2008, saying that ‘This thing is an unbelievable can of worms.’ It’s hardly salubrious-sounding, perhaps for that reason appropriate to the situation. Where did this phrase really come from?
A. To open a metaphorical can of worms is to examine some complicated state of affairs, the investigation of which is likely to cause trouble or scandal and which you would much prefer was left alone. It sounds as though it might be a small-scale equivalent of the box or jar that Pandora brought with her as dowry to her husband Epimetheus, which let out all the troubles of the world when she opened it, leaving only hope.
The lid is at last being prised off the can of worms containing all the behind-the-scenes goings-on which seem to have characterised the ‘reign’ of Tony Blair at 10, Downing Street. It is not a pretty sight.
Western Daily Press, 13 May 2008. Just one example from several hundred in newspapers in this one month alone, which I’ve picked because the writer plays with the idea. The phrase has long since become an overused wordsmith’s cliché.
This is the earliest example I’ve so far found:
The question of command for Middle East defense against Soviet aggression is still regarded as ‘a can of worms’ at General Eisenhower’s SHAPE headquarters here.
Edwardsville Intelligencer, Illinois, 26 November 1951.
If you were hoping for some exotic origin, I have to disappoint you. Sad to relate, the original cans of worms were almost certainly real cans with actual worms in them, collected as bait for fishing. Fishermen have told me that the most annoying aspect of opening a literal can of worms is that, being live bait, they crawl out and are a nuisance to put back. It’s also easy to see how a non-fishing friend or relative of an angler who opened a can containing a wriggling mass of worms would regard it as something that had better been left unexamined.
Q. I read in a British newspaper that the PM is happy that his successor as Chancellor is more than willing to carry the can for the PM’s mistakes. There may be a couple of confusing terms in that sentence, especially for your legions of American readers, but the expression carry the can piques my curiosity. The journalist’s meaning is obvious, but what is the origin of the phrase? I see some bleak public school playing-field, with all the big boys launching themselves at some hapless fourth-former with an empty sausage tin in his hand. Is there anything in this?
A. Nice image, but no, although it’s certainly a weird expression. If you carry the can for something you’re bearing the responsibility for its having gone wrong, frequently with the implication that you’re taking the blame for someone else:
A judge has questioned why a senior Army officer left his subordinates to carry the can after a brutal punishment session which ended in the death of a soldier.
Daily Mail, 1 August 2008.
That example is particularly relevant because we’re fairly sure the expression derives from services’ slang. The first recorded cases are from the Royal Navy in the late 1920s, though Eric Partridge, in his Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, says it had been around since the late nineteenth century. In his Dictionary of Forces’ Slang he suggests that the idiom refers to ‘the member of a gang or party who fetches the beer for all and then has the melancholy task of returning the empty’. This was a tedious chore, one moreover that left you open to censure or reprisals if you spilled the beer or dropped the can.
There’s an older slang expression that’s probably relevant: to carry the keg, also as to carry the cag. Cag and keg are variants of the same dialect word, meaning to offend or insult (cag or kag was also once Royal Navy slang for one of those arguments in which everybody is shouting and no one is listening). To carry the cag then was to hold a grudge, or to be easily annoyed or unable to take a joke. There’s an obvious pun in the phrase on keg, a small cask, being something that you literally might carry, as you would figuratively carry a grudge.
It may be that carry the can developed as a joking reference to the older idiom, but then took on a life of its own.
Q. You mentioned in your World Wide Words newsletter, while reviewing a book on word histories, that the origin of cash on the nail given there wasn’t correct. Please explain?
A. The origin of cash on the nail was there linked to four famous ‘nails’, bronze pillars with flat tops, like small circular tables, that are set in the pavement outside the Corn Exchange in Bristol. The story says that merchants paid their debts by putting their money on one of these nails. So pay on the nail or cash on the nail came to mean settling a debt promptly.
A couple of days ago, Ashton called on the owner of that property and made an offer. The offer was for cash on the nail.
The Case of the Caretaker’s Cat, by Erle Stanley Gardner, 1955, in which Perry Mason investigates Charles Ashton, an irritable caretaker with a shrivelled leg and a Persian cat.
The story is retold in almost every popular book on word history I have on my shelves, as well as in Bristol’s tourist literature and on its websites, and is firmly embedded in the minds of a substantial proportion of the British population. Nevertheless, it is untrue. Since extraordinarily robust belief requires equally powerful refutation, I’m going to write about this one in some detail. My apologies if this tells you more than you want to know.
Some history first. The nails were erected in Bristol between about 1550 and 1631. They were originally elsewhere but were moved to their present site after the Corn Exchange was built in the 1740s. Although the story seems to have been captured by Bristol, nails have also been recorded in the stock exchanges in Liverpool and Limerick. The latter dates from 1685:
An ample piazza under the Exchange was a thoroughfare: in the centre stood a pillar about four feet high, upon it a circular plate of copper about three feet in diameter; this was called the nail, and upon it was paid the earnest for any commercial bargains made, which was the origin of the saying, ‘Paid down upon the nail.’
Recollections of the Life of John O’Keeffe, written by himself, 1826. O’Keeffe was the most produced playwright in London in the last quarter of the eighteenth century; William Hazlitt called him ‘the English Molière’. The nail still exists and is now in Limerick Museum.
All this might seem to confirm the truth of the story, though not which nail was the source of the expression. But the linguistic history says otherwise.
The expression on the nail, on the spot, at once, without delay, is first recorded in print in 1596, in a polemical tract by the Elizabethan author and playwright Thomas Nashe. This pre-dates almost all of the known nails. This isn’t definitive, because they might have replaced others of earlier date. But the 1826 reference by John O’Keeffe is the first record of the word nail for them, an astonishingly late one if they had been the source of on the nail by 1596.
Similar expressions were recorded in other languages from even earlier, including German and Dutch. In particular the Anglo-Norman payer sur le ungle, to pay immediately and in full, is known from about 1320. Ungle is from Latin unguis, a finger or toe nail; it’s a relative of ungula, a hoof or claw, from which we get ungulate for a hoofed animal.
The phrase ad ungulum, ‘on the nail’ – to a nicety, to perfection or to the utmost – is in the Satires of the Roman poet Horace of 2000 years ago and is based on an even older Greek expression. This may be from the idea of a sculptor having created a carving so perfect that running a fingernail over it couldn’t detect any unevenness, or from a joiner testing the accuracy of a joint. This is likely to have been the inspiration for the Anglo-Norman phrase, albeit with a shift in sense from ‘to the utmost’ to ‘completely; in full’.
So the evidence is that on the nail is the English version of an old phrase that came into the language via Latin and Anglo-Norman, one that refers to a fingernail rather than brass pillars. It seems certain from the dating that the various nails in the exchanges borrowed their names from the expression, and not the other way round.
Q. I have heard the expression checkered past for many years but continue to be puzzled about why it should have the meaning it does. What is the origin of it?
A. Somebody with a chequered past, which is the British spelling I naturally use as opposed to your American one, or a chequered history, has had periods of varied fortune that have probably included actions considered to be discreditable.
He joined the church as a fully ordained Baptist minister in 1996 after a chequered past as a gambler.
The Times, 6 June 2008.
If the game of chess comes to mind, that’s a good guess, although it’s not the twists of fate experienced by the players that’s being referred to, but the board it’s played on. The idea behind it is of alternations of good and bad, like the colours of the squares on the board.
Something chequered is marked like a chess board, with a geometric pattern in different colours, if not literally arranged in squares. It’s pretty much the same word as checked, both of which appeared in English in the fifteenth century. The latter was often spelled chequed in Britain until about a century ago but has now settled down to the ck spelling everywhere. Chequered in the literal sense is less common than it once was, although the chequered flag that’s waved when a racing car passes the winning post continues to be well known.
That usage links us directly with its origin. Chequered came out of heraldry – the first known example is in the Book of St Albans in 1486, which explains – translated into modern English – that heraldic arms are said to be chequered when they are made in two colours in the manner of a chess board. The word came from French escheker, derived from late Latin scaccarium, a chess board. Our exchequer came from the same source and originally also meant a chess board, though it came to be connected with finance through a table covered with a cloth divided into squares on which the accounts of the revenue were kept using counters.
Q. I found myself using an idiom to a sea of blank faces in my primary classroom. Where did old chestnut originate?
A. I can tentatively give you an answer, one that is described by the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘plausible’, which seems to be about as good as we’re going to get.
It is said to go back to an exchange between the characters in a play:
ZAVIER: At the dawn of the fourth day’s journey, I entered the woods of Collares, when suddenly from the thick boughs of a cork tree –
PABLO: (Jumping up): A chestnut, Captain, a chestnut!
ZAVIER: Bah! You booby, I say, a cork.
PABLO: And I swear, a chestnut – Captain! this is the twenty-seventh time I have heard you relate this story, and you invariably said, a chestnut, until now.
The Broken Sword; or, The Torrent of the Valley, by William Dimond, first performed at the Royal Covent Garden Theatre, London, on 7 October 1816. It was described on the title page as ‘a grand melo-drama: interspersed with songs, chorusses, &c’. William Dimond was born in Bath and in 1816 was managing theatres in Bath and Bristol. The play was popular, to judge from contemporary reports, and was toured and revived in the following decades.
This sounds reasonable enough as the source of the expression, but there are loose ends. Chestnut, meaning a joke or story that has become stale and wearisome through constant repetition, only starts to appear around 1880. The Oxford English Dictionary comments, ‘The newspapers of 1886–7 contain numerous circumstantial explanations palpably invented for the purpose’, implying that it was then new and that people were as puzzled by it as we are now. Where had it been all that time, if the source was this play? More puzzling still, the British newspapers said it was American.
They were right. It does seem that the word was imported from the US, where Dimond’s play had remained as popular for many years as it had in Britain. A newspaper report in that country at the end of the century claimed that the word took on its new sense through the agency of a famous Boston comedian named William Warren, who had often played the part of Pablo:
He was at a ‘stag’ dinner when one of the gentlemen present told a story of doubtful age and originality. ‘A chestnut,’ murmured Mr. Warren, quoting from the play. ‘I have heard you tell the tale these 27 times.’ The application of the line pleased the rest of the table, and when the party broke up each helped to spread the story and Mr. Warren’s commentary.’
The Daily Herald, Delphos, Ohio, 23 April 1896, reprinting an article from the New York Herald. This event must have occurred, if it ever did, many years earlier, since William Warren died in 1888 and the story noted that the play was ‘long forgotten’.You may take this with as large a pinch of salt as you wish, though the tale was often retold later and a similar story, also attributing it to Warren, is in the current edition of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Even if it wasn’t William Warren, it’s not hard to see how somebody else familiar with the play could have made the same quip.
As the play remained in the repertory for some decades, and the joke could have been made at any time the play was still known, and as it probably circulated orally for a time before it was first written down, the long gap between the play’s first performance and its first recorded use isn’t so surprising.
The old in old chestnut is merely an elaboration for emphasis – another form is hoary old chestnut – both of which seem to have come along a good deal later.
Q. A friend of partially Irish ancestry here in Minneapolis, who is a most delightful conversationalist, enjoys a visit to me, which he refers to as having a chin wag. I had never heard this term before. What can you tell me about it?
A. On this side of the big pond, it’s regarded as unremarkable, though it feels a touch old-fashioned. Stabbing my electronic pin at a collection of newspaper articles, I speared this one:
He seems to understand that yes, we all enjoy watching football and having a good chin-wag about it, but, at the same time, we’ve all seen thousands of matches before so let’s not get too carried away.
The Racing Post, 16 March 2008.
To have a chin wag in current usage is to have a gossip or a wide-ranging conversation on some mutually interesting subject. It goes back a long way.
As an example of the byways that searches can take one down, the earliest example that I’ve found is in the North Lincoln Sphinx, a regimental journal prepared by and for the officers and men of the second battalion of the North Lincolnshire Regiment of Foot. The issue for 28 February 1861, prepared while the battalion was based in Grahamstown, South Africa, included some sarcastic ‘rules’ of whist, whose first item was ‘Chinwag is considered rather as an addition to the game, than otherwise, and is allowed.’ A footnote said that it was an ‘American slang term for excessive talking.’
I wonder if the footnoter was right. All the early examples are British, including this one from Punch in 1879: ‘I’d just like to have a bit of chin-wag with you on the quiet.’ The British slang recorder John Camden Hotten included it in the second edition of his Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant and Vulgar Words in 1873, but intriguingly defined it as ‘officious impertinence’. It was more often used in the sense of those facetious whist rules to mean inconsequential talk or idle chatter or to suggest unkindly that some person couldn’t stop talking. Wagging one’s chin, indeed.
Q. Do you have any idea where the word claptrap comes from? I associate it with talking rubbish but I’ve no idea what a clap is – other than the obvious infectious disease – or why you would build a trap for one.
A. Your claptrap is indeed a trap to catch a clap, but it’s the sort of clap you make by putting your hands together in appreciation. It was originally a trick of theatrical language to force the audience to applaud:
A Clap Trap, a name given to the rant and rhimes that dramatick poets, to please the actors, let them get off with: as much as to say, a trap to catch a clap, by way of applause from the spectators at a play.
An Universal Etymological English Dictionary: Comprehending the Derivations of the Generality of Words in the English Tongue, Either Ancient or Modern, by Nathan Bailey, 1727. ‘An Universal’, you will note, not ‘A Universal’. It was conventional then to treat U in writing as a vowel, requiring an rather than a, even though universal was said the same way that we do now.
Such cheap showy sentiment or actorly flourishes, designed to appeal to the unthinking instincts of the audience, were thought unworthy of the serious dramatist or thespian. A writer in The New-England Magazine in 1835, fulminating against the star system that was contributing to the decline of the modern drama (how times do change), complained that in order to feed the performance of the lead actor, ‘The piece must abound in clap-traps’. Nor was the technique confined to the theatre: an article in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1855 about a new play said that ‘All the clap-traps of the press were employed to draw an audience to the first representation.’ And in 1867, back in London, Thomas Wright wrote in Some Habits and Customs of the Working Classes that: ‘The Waggoner’s entertainment, of course, embraced the usual unauthenticated statistics, stock anecdotes, and pieces of clap-trap oratory of the professional teetotal lecturers.’
The word developed from this theatrical technique into a more general term for showy or insincere platitudes or mawkish sentimentality directed at the lowest common denominator of one’s audience. From there it was only a short step to the sense of talking nonsense or rubbish, though the older ideas are often still present.
The man famous for making more-or-less the same film over and over, brings us another slice of spooky, vaguely supernatural claptrap, as a neurotoxin creates chaos around the world, laying waste to pretty much everyone but Mark Wahlberg and a coterie of friends and well-wishers.
Irish Independent, 9 June 2008. The film being adversely reviewed by Darragh McManus was M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening.
Incidentally, some time in the early nineteenth century, 150 years after the word was first recorded, an unsung backstage hero invented a mechanical device, a sort of clapper, that made a noise like that of applause (perhaps to encourage the real thing, though we are not told). Presumably it was similar to a football rattle. This also was called a claptrap. It has led some people into the error of suggesting that this device was the source of the word.
Q. While reading a news article online I came across the term cleft stick. An Internet search turned up several definitions, all of them a variation on ‘being stuck in a difficult position’. But, for the life of me, I couldn’t find anything that gave a history of it. This is the first time I’ve ever seen it, and it’s such an intriguing term that I’d love to know where it came from, hence I turn to you for help. Any clues?
A. It’s mainly a British and Commonwealth expression. It’s often rather stronger than just being in a difficult situation – it’s one in which you’re in a dilemma or bind in which you have no room for manoeuvre and in which any action that you take will be unfavourable to you.
Islamabad is caught in the cleft stick between getting into a bloody counter-insurgency war on the side of the unpopular Americans, on the one hand, or surrendering the tribal areas to self-avowed fundamentalists, on the other.
Business Standard, India, 12 February 2008.
Cleft is now unusual outside a small number of fixed phrases, of which the best known are cleft palate and cleft chin. It’s one of the two past participles of the verb cleave, to split or sever, the other being cloven, as in animals with cloven hooves. You might know it in Augustus Toplady’s hymn of 1775, ‘Rock of Ages’ (‘Rock of Ages cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee.’)
The first example in the Oxford English Dictionary is dated 1782, in a letter from William Cowper: ‘We are squeezed to death, between the two sides of that sort of alternative which is commonly called a cleft stick.’ The image is of a stick which has been partially severed along the grain of the wood to make a springy clasp for some object. A thing held in this way is in an unyielding embrace, from which the figurative expression derives.
Things once held in a literal cleft stick included candles (as in Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens: ‘He bore in his right hand a tallow candle stuck in the end of a cleft stick’) and an arrowhead attached to a cleft shaft, but what at once comes to mind for me is a letter or dispatch, a usage intimately connected with nineteenth-century colonial Africa.
About the middle of the morning we met a Government runner, a proud youth, young, lithe, with many ornaments and bangles; his red skin glistening; the long blade of his spear, bound around with a red strip to signify his office, slanting across his shoulder; his buffalo hide shield slung from it over his back; the letter he was bearing stuck in a cleft stick and carried proudly before him as a priest carries a cross to the heathen in the pictures.
The Land of Footprints, by Stewart Edward White, 1913. This famous work of travel writing is still in print. It told of the year that White, an American, spent in East Equatorial Africa early in the century. I’m told that the phrase cleft stick and runner is known today in South African English (‘The parcel took so long to reach to him it would have been quicker to have used a cleft stick and runner’).
This is another famous appearance:
I should take some cleft sticks with you. I remember Hitchcock – Sir Jocelyn Hitchcock, a man who used to work for me once; smart enough fellow in his way, but limited, very little historical backing – I remember him saying that in Africa he always sent his dispatches in a cleft stick. It struck me as a very useful tip. Take plenty.
Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh, 1938. Lord Copper, the proprietor of the Daily Beast, advises William Boot, the hapless nature writer he has mistakenly engaged to cover an African revolution. In the shop where he is being fitted out for his expedition, Waugh neatly illustrates the irregularity of English: ‘ “We can have some [cleft sticks] cloven for you,” she said brightly. “If you will make your selection I will send them down to our cleaver.” ’
Q. Can you tell me anything about the origin of the expression cloud nine for a very happy person?
A. The phrase to be on cloud nine, meaning that one is blissfully happy, started life in the United States and has been widely known there since the 1950s.
Dusty Rhodes of the Giants admitted today he will have to come down off cloud nine pretty soon and go to work again.
Holland Evening Sentinel, 20 April 1955. Rhodes was an outfielder for the New York Giants, a baseball player about whom it was said that on the surface he seemed to be unable to run, hit, throw, or field, but who beat you anyway; he’s still remembered by aficionados of the game as helping to ensure his team’s 4–0 victory in the 1954 World Series.
The expression is often said to have been popularized by the Johnny Dollar radio show of the early 1950s, in which every time the hero was knocked unconscious he was transported to cloud nine. But there was another show, often listed alongside it in the schedules:
Cloud Nine. Friday. 8:00 p.m. This excitingly new show presented by the Wm. Wrigley Jr., Co. blends fantasy, music, drama and comedy into 30 minutes of imaginative entertainment.
Portland Sunday Telegram, 2 July 1950. Originally produced in Chicago by the CBS affiliate WBBM, this was the show’s network premiere, one of several that summer sponsored by the chewing-gum manufacturer.
Might this have been the origin? It’s certainly the earliest example of cloud nine we have, but it’s not the first expression of the type. Others are cloud eight, known from Albin Pollock’s glossary The Underground Speaks of 1935, in which it’s defined as ‘befuddled on account of drinking too much liquor’, and also cloud seven:
We latched onto an ultimate meetin’ where a local crew was makin’ with the music that liked to rock the roof and everyone was havin’ a ball. Lots of noises, lots of sounds that put us up on cloud seven though we weren’t in the States. The drummer was beatin’ the skins, the pianist was really ticklin’ the eighty-eight. The sax man was frantic and the horn was the most.
Pacific Stars And Stripes, 20 January 1954. The writer, Private Joe Nevens of the US Army, is taking R&R with friends in Tokyo. ‘Crush me, Dad, I’m stoned.’
Seven and heaven, a pair of words that help lyricists by rhyming, remind us of the Jewish and Islamic seventh heaven, the most exalted level, the place where God dwells over the angels, the souls of the righteous, and the souls of those yet to be born, hence the phrase seventh heaven as a place or state of supreme bliss, which dates from the later eighteenth century.
Cloud nine and its variations have always had close associations with the euphoria that is induced by certain chemicals, as you can tell from the quotations – alcohol in its earlier days but more recently cannabis and crack cocaine. The cloud here is an obvious reference to some drug-induced dreamy floating sensation.
This link, and the numerical variations, makes deeply suspect a common explanation of its origin – that it is from the US Weather Bureau. This organization is said to describe (or once did describe) clouds by an arithmetic sequence. Level nine was the highest cumulonimbus, which can reach 30,000 or 40,000 feet and appear as glorious white mountains in the sky. So if you were on cloud nine you were at the very peak of existence. I can find no evidence to support this classification’s existence.
I suspect that seven was chosen in part because of the religious associations and because it’s a traditional lucky number and that cloud was substituted for heaven because of the links with the drug-induced sensation. Today’s more usual nine may have come to be preferred because it reminds people of other idioms, such as dressed to the nines and the whole nine yards.
Q. A really strange movie, Tristram Shandy: A Cock & Bull Story, whose title seems to borrow from an incident in Laurence Sterne’s book, has sent me unavailingly to the Net for information on the origin of cock-and-bull story. All I have been presented with is a tale about two inns in England that’s more weird than the movie. Is there any truth in it?
A. Nary a smidgen of a trace of a germ of truth. It’s a cock-and-bull story in two senses.
The tale speaks of two inns of these names, which still stand today on High Street in Stony Stratford, Buckinghamshire. This is how it is told in one account:
I was billeted in a pub called ‘The Bull.’ This was in a town called Stony Stratford, on the Watling road between London and Birmingham, the oldest road in the British Isles, supposedly. Three doors from The Bull was ‘The Cock.’ In the old coaching days coaches from London stopped at the Bull, while the ones from Birmingham stopped at the Cock, and the drivers told their respective stories in their respective Inns. By the time the Birmingham story had been retold in the London crowd and vice versa, you can see why the natives developed the idea of ‘a cock and bull’ story and this is supposed to be the very origin of the phrase.
Enigma In Many Keys: The Life and Letters of a WWII Intelligence Officer, by Robert E. Button, 2004. Colonel Button of the US Army was seconded to Bletchley Park, where the top-secret decryption of the German Enigma codes was carried out, hence the title.
The story is widely believed in Stony Stratford and is a source of civic pride. Step warily if you ever go there – if you are unwise enough to dispute its truth, any local who ripostes with ‘well, tell us where it really comes from then, smart-arse’ will leave you in embarrassed confusion, as you won’t be able to supply an altogether satisfactory answer.
The experts note a French expression, coq-à-l’âne, which appears these days in phrases such as passer du coq à l’âne, literally to go from the cock to the ass, but figuratively to jump from one subject to another (in older French, to tell a satirical story or an incoherent one). This meaning is said to have come about through a satirical poem of 1531 by Clément Marot with the title Epistre du Coq en l’Asne (the epistle of the cock to the donkey), though the phrase is two centuries older still. Coq-à-l’âne was taken into Scots in the early seventeenth century as cockalane, a satire or a disconnected or rambling story.
The suggestion is that some similar story once existed in English, akin to one of Aesop’s fables, in which a cock communicated with a bull rather than a donkey. Nobody, however, has been able to discover what it might have been. Another idea is that the French phrase was borrowed in partial translation, with donkey changed to bull for some reason.
The first sense of the phrase in English, in the seventeenth century, was in much the same sense as cockalane, a long, rambling or idle story that may be tedious or misleading. In Sterne’s book, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, published 1759–76, the only reference to it is right at the end: ‘L..d! said my mother, what is all this story about? – A Cock and a Bull, said Yorick – And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard.’ Since the book is a stream-of-consciousness story, rambling and inconsequential, this self-referential summing-up is entirely apt.
It was only at the end of the eighteenth century that the expression came specifically to mean a manufactured tall tale.
Q. Where, pray tell, are the cockles of your heart? I even asked a cardiologist, and he didn’t know either!
A. It’s one of the more lovely idioms in the language, isn’t it? Something that warms the cockles of one’s heart induces a glow of pleasure, sympathy or affection. It’s not surprising that it should be associated with the heart, since that’s been assumed to be the seat of the emotions for most of recorded history. It’s also linked to the warming effects of strong liquor:
Well, come in and taste a drop o’ sommat we’ve got here, that will warm the cockles of your heart as ye wamble homealong.
In Thomas Hardy’s epic drama The Dynasts of 1904–8. The speaker is a Wessex rustic, hence the dialect (to wamble is to walk with a reeling or staggering gait, which suggests the sommat, something, was strong stuff). Hardy had been working on this vast work about the Napoleonic Wars for thirty years (you may judge how vast from the subtitle, ‘In three parts, nineteen acts and one hundred and thirty scenes’). You will not be surprised to hear that it has never been performed in full, but then Hardy meant it only ‘for mental performance’.
As you say, the problem is to identify these cockles. There are many meanings for the word but easily the most likely candidate is the bivalve mollusc, familiar to most British people:
In Dublin’s fair city,
Where girls are so pretty,
I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone,
As she pushed her wheelbarrow
Through streets broad and narrow,
Crying, ‘Cockles and mussels, alive, alive oh!’
A popular song that has achieved the status of an unofficial anthem in Dublin, it’s usually attributed to the Scotsman James Yorkston of Edinburgh, whose composition – described as a comic song, though surely one intended to be sung lugubriously with mock pathos, as Molly dies in a later verse – was published in London by Francis Day & Hunter in 1884. A version appeared the year before in Students’ Songs in Cambridge, Massachusetts. So the song is neither Irish nor traditional and despite widespread belief to the contrary Molly Malone was most definitely fictional.
Cockles are still to be found as a tasty snack, eaten with vinegar, that are associated in many people’s memories with the seaside. Their twin shells are ribbed and heart-shaped, which explains why the zoological name of the common British cockle is Cardium edule, where Cardium is from Greek kardia, the heart, and edule means edible. Eat your heart out, cockle taster.
Since the ventricles of the heart are similarly ribbed, the obvious conclusion is that they reminded surgeons of the twin shells of the cockle. But – to confirm your failure to find out more from a heart specialist – I can’t find an example of cockle being applied to the heart outside this expression. Another explanation sometimes heard is that the shape of the cockleshell, suggesting the heart as it so obviously does, gave rise to cockles of the heart as an expansion. Some observers of word history, who prefer to speculate along more risqué lines, have noted that in the nineteenth century, the labia minora were nicknamed the cockles, implying a different route to pleasure and satisfaction. Sadly for that story, we know that the idiom – appearing first as rejoice the cockles of one’s heart – is about two centuries older than the low slang term. Another possibility that’s been suggested is that the idiom comes from a different sense of the word, in full cockle-stove, for a type of heating stove with ribbed projections to radiate the heat better, whose name comes via Dutch from the German Kachel for a stove tile. This seems unlikely.
One further explanation is much more probable. In medieval Latin, the ventricles of the heart could be called cochleae cordis. Cochleae is the plural of cochlea, the Latin word for a spiral (the same name is given to the spiral cavity of the inner ear) and cordis is an inflected form of cor, heart, meaning ‘of the heart’.
Those unversed in Latin might have misinterpreted cochleae as cockles, or it might have been a medical in-joke. Since cochlea is also Latin for a snail, if this origin is right we should really be speaking of warming the snails of one’s heart, though somehow it doesn’t have the same ring.
Q. I can’t dream up any relationship between the pit where chickens fight and the place in an F16 fighter where chickens definitely don’t fight. Any ideas? Where does the word cockpit come from?
A. When you stop and think about it, the term for the pilot’s cabin on an aircraft – and other spaces such as the driver’s compartment in a racing car or for a helmsman in a yacht – is rather curious, isn’t it?
The experts are sure that it does come, as you suggest, from a place where cock fights were held. The word is recorded from the latter part of the sixteenth century, during the reign of the first Elizabeth. It came about because the fighting area for cocks (one of the favourite recreations of the time, together with bull- and bear-baiting) was often thought of as a pit. It was usually a roughly circular enclosure with a barrier around it so that the birds couldn’t escape, sometimes fitted up with rows of seats like a tiny theatre so that the spectators could look down on the action. The first recorded mention of the word is in Thomas Churchard’s The Worthiness of Wales of 1587: ‘The mountains stand in roundness such as it a Cock pit were’. Shortly afterwards, a more famous example appears:
Can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram
Within this wooden O, the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
From the Prologue to Henry V, by William Shakespeare, 1600. The chorus laments the inadequacy of a theatre and a limited cast to portray the tumultuous events about to unfold. Shakespeare is using the word – and also wooden O – to allude to the round shape and noisy crowd of an Elizabethan theatre, in which the central area in which the groundlings stood was called the pit. The casques are the helmets of the troops, though how they affright the air isn’t clear.
Nearly a century earlier, Elizabeth I’s father, Henry VIII, had bowling alleys, tennis courts and a cockpit built on a site opposite the royal palace of Whitehall. A block of buildings later erected on the site were taken over in the seventeenth century for government offices such as the Treasury and the Privy Council but continued to be referred to by their old function. That explains the entry in Samuel Pepys’s Diary for 20 February 1659: ‘In the evening Simons and I to the Coffee Club, where nothing to do only I heard Mr. Harrington, and my Lord of Dorset and another Lord, talking of getting another place at the Cockpit, and they did believe it would come to something.’
A little later, the term came to be applied to the rear part of the lowest deck, the orlop, of a fighting ship (orlop is from Dutch overloop, a covering). During a battle it became the station for the ship’s surgeon and his mates because it was relatively safe and least subject to disturbance by the movements of the ship. Like all lower-deck spaces, it was confined, crowded and badly lit. During a battle, it was also noisy, stinking and bloody. All this reminded people of a real cockpit, hence the name. On 21 October 1805, Admiral Lord Nelson died in the cockpit of HMS Victory during the battle of Trafalgar.
The move to today’s sense came through its use for the steering pit or well of a sailing yacht, which also started to be called the cockpit in the nineteenth century. This was presumably borrowed in fun from the older term because it was a small enclosed sunken area in which a coxswain was stationed. (To start with, that word was cockswain, he being the swain, or serving man, who was in charge of a cock, a type of ship’s boat.) From here, it moved in the early twentieth century to the steering area of an aircraft, and later still to other related senses.
Q. I am not familiar with the term cock-up that you used in one of your newsletters, and am interested in both its meaning and its derivation. It’s not a phrase that is commonly used here in the United States – indeed, it has connotations that would keep many from using it in a column read by so many subscribers!
A. Oddly, in British English it is not these days a vulgarism, or at least only a very mild one.
It was journalism’s most spectacular collective cock-up in years – a prime example of the results of ‘groupthink’. And it happened on the world’s most important story.
New Statesman, 17 January 2008. The writer, Brian Cathcart, is lamenting the way that the press erred so badly in predicting that Barack Obama would easily win the New Hampshire primary that month.
It comes from one of several senses of cock, to bend at an angle, as in – for example – cocking a gun, an animal’s cocking up its ears, or a man’s turning up the brim of his headgear, so producing an old-time naval officer’s cocked hat.
At present a Man may venture to cock up his Hat, and wear a fashionable Wig, without being taken for a Rake or a Fool.
The Spectator, 22 August 1711.
The use of cock-up to mean a blunder or error was originally British military slang dating from the 1920s. The penile slang sense of cock clearly had a lot to do with its adoption, but this hasn’t stopped it being used in respectable publications, and modern British dictionaries mark it merely as informal or colloquial.
Q. Why is there a letter n at the end of the word column?
A. Or, putting it another way, why is it there but not pronounced?
The source of our word is the Latin columna, which had a syllable break between the m and n, so both letters were pronounced. It was brought into English via French in the fifteenth century, in the earliest examples as colomne, in which it kept the Latin syllable break.
However, it went through a lot of changes and different spellings in the following 250 years. William Caxton, the first person to print books with movable type in England, spelled it colompne in a work in 1471, taking its form from Old French. Others dropped the ending altogether, leaving a word with roughly the same pronunciation as we use now, but spelled colum. It is also recorded with a silent b on the end to make it colomb.
The spelling settled down to our modern form in the latter part of the seventeenth century:
As in a fiery column charioting His godlike presence.
Samson Agonistes, by John Milton, 1671.
The n seems to have been added back by classically educated scholars who wanted to match the spelling of its Latin original, in much the same way that the b was added back to debt, in medieval times spelled and said dette, because the Latin original was debitum, ‘something owed’. The pronunciation of column was unaffected, so the n has always been silent (in fact, it’s impossible to sound it following the m without making an extra syllable of it, as the Romans did). However, it is sounded in compounds like columnar.
Q. I have heard that the phrase come a cropper relates to getting a hand crushed in a Cropper printing press in which paper is hand fed, so that any mistiming results in a trapped hand. I have seen a printing press made by Cropper at the Blists Hill Open Air Museum at Ironbridge.
A. We use come a cropper now to mean that a person has suffered a bad fall, sometimes figuratively that he has been struck by some serious misfortune. Though getting a hand crushed in a printing press would certainly qualify, it turns out that there’s no link between the press and the expression. Henry Cropper made a couple of very well-known manual letterpress machines in the nineteenth century, but the first was only introduced in 1867, about a decade after the expression was first recorded.
Come a cropper actually derives from hunting, where it originally meant a heavy fall from a horse. Its first appearance was in 1858, in a late and undistinguished work, ‘Ask Mamma’, by that well-known Victorian writer on hunting, R. S. Surtees, who is much better known for his Jorrocks’ Jaunts and Jollities. This is an early figurative use:
When his companion had left him, Nidderdale sat down, thinking of it all. It occurred to him that he would ‘be coming a cropper rather,’ were he to marry Melmotte’s daughter for her money, and then find that she had got none.
The Way We Live Now, by Anthony Trollope, 1874.
The earliest easily traceable source of cropper is the Old Norse word kropp for a swelling or lump on the body. This is closely related to the Old English word for the rounded head or seed body of a plant, from which we get crop for the produce of a cultivated plant. In the sense of a bodily lump, it was applied first to the crop of a bird but then extended to other bodily protuberances. This is where things get complicated: the same word travelled from a Germanic ancestor through Vulgar Latin and the Old French croupe back into English as croup for the rump of a horse. From this we also get crupper, the strap on a horse’s harness that passes back from the saddle under the tail and stops the saddle sliding forward. (The Old French croupe, incidentally, also led to croupier, the person in charge of a gaming table; a croupier was originally a person standing behind a gambler to give advice and the name was borrowed from Old French cropier, a pillion rider or a rider on the croupe.)
At the end of the eighteenth century English developed a phrase neck and crop, with the sense of completely, totally or altogether.
The startish beast took fright, and flop The mad-brain’d rider tumbled, neck and crop!
The first known appearance of the phrase, in a poem by Edward Nairne, published in 1793. He was supervisor of customs at Sandwich in Kent, where he was born. Because of his verse he became known as the Sandwich Bard.
Now neck and crop is a rather odd expression, and we’re not sure how it came to be. It could be that crop is a variant of croup, suggesting that a horse had collapsed all of a heap, with both head and backside hitting the ground together (one later example does spell the phrase neck and croup, though this might be an error). Or perhaps crop had its bodily protuberance sense, so the expression might have been an intensified version of neck, perhaps linked to an older expression neck and heels that’s similar to head over heels.
Whatever the origin, it’s thought that come a cropper derives from neck and crop, with cropper in the role of an agent noun, referring to something done in a neck-and-crop manner, and that the phrase developed from there.
Q. My wife and I had a discussion a while back after I heard her say ‘Come hail or high water’. I politely explained that this was not the correct way to say this, but she argued her point rather intensely. She does make sense when she asks ‘What do hell and high water have to do with one another, anyway, aren’t hail and high water weather events?’ Am I right to persist in arguing that it’s come hell or high water?
A. We don’t do marriage counselling here. Try the Yellow Pages.
But you’re right to say that it’s come hell or high water. The context of many of the earliest examples shows it has nothing directly to do with the weather, nor with any kind of maritime experience. Instead, they strongly point to cattle ranching as the source, in particular the driving of cattle to railheads in the Midwest in the latter part of the nineteenth century.
There is an expression still current in the American language: ‘In spite of hell and high water.’ It is a legacy of the cattle trail, when the cowboys drove their horn-spiked masses of longhorns through high water at every river and continuous hell between, in their unalterable determination to reach the end of the trail which was their goal.
The Trampling Herd: The Story of the Cattle Range in America, by Paul Wellman, 1939.
Further support comes from this story of an old-time cattleman, Zack Addington, from three decades earlier:
He prospered in those palmy days until he became the largest cattle owner in the territory and felt able to take his regular blowout in St Louis, until 1884, when, between the alien land law, drought and rustlers, the ‘hell and high water of the cattlemen,’ he… walked out of the Kansas City stock yards a few hundred thousand dollars worse off and no cattle worth putting an iron on, much less pulling grass by hand to feed.
Washington Post, 26 November 1905.
The expression appears in print in the US in the last quarter of the nineteenth century in the Washington Post’s form, hell and high water. The first example on record is from 1879, but it starts to frequently appear in books and newspapers only from the 1890s. Other variations, including the form you give – which is now standard – came along several decades later.
The phrase can now be used frivolously for problems that are less than serious:
‘There’s only one way of dealing with early mornings,’ says John Humphrys of Radio 4’s Today programme, ‘and that’s early nights – however good the party you have to leave. I’m in bed at 9pm come hell or high water.’
Daily Telegraph, 4 August 2008.
Q. Are compleat and complete really two separate words, as the American Heritage Dictionary seems to say? Or is the former merely an alternate spelling of one meaning of the latter? While compleat is said to mean ‘quintessential’, one meaning of complete is closely related as ‘skilled; accomplished’.
A. In Britain, compleat is regarded by dictionary makers as merely an archaic way to spell complete, used nowadays only as a bit of whimsy, and not very often at that. It’s rather more common in the US, which is why the American Heritage Dictionary – and at least one other US dictionary – has included it as a separate entry. Though hardly in everybody’s spelling box, it’s not hard to find examples of it in American English:
Professor Mersky was a longtime friend of The Texas Observer. He was a generous spirit, a compleat gentleman, and a tireless combatant on behalf of religious and civil liberties.
The Texas Observer, Austin, Texas, 16 May 2008.
Above and behind him a window went up with a rattling bang and he knew what was coming next. ‘I hope you rot!’ she screamed down at him. The Compleat Bronx Fishwife.
From the revised 1990 edition of The Stand, by Stephen King. This incident happens early in this post-apocalyptic novel, which King described as ‘an epic fantasy with an American backdrop’, before most of the population of the world dies from the superflu bug called Captain Trips.
As the older spelling of complete, it died out around the end of the eighteenth century. One of its last appearances was a reference to George III in the US Declaration of Independence: ‘He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny’.
It was reintroduced at the beginning of the twentieth. For this we must blame the continuing popularity of Isaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler, which combines practical information on fishing with folklore, pastoral songs and ballads. Writing in 1653, he naturally used the older spelling of complete and modern editions retain it. Because Isaak Walton’s book has stayed so well known, the word in that spelling has been taken as a model for modern book titles, mostly in the USA. The American Psychological Association issued The Compleat Academic: A Career Guide; Jake Bernstein wrote The Compleat Guide to Day Trading Stocks; there’s even Heart Monitor Training for the Compleat Idiot by John L. Parker. From its specialized use in book titles, this spelling has escaped into the general written language, though – as I say – it’s much more common in the US than in Britain.
I’d argue that there’s no real difference in meaning between the two forms, except that you may feel that compleat is pretentious and unnecessary.
Q. A simple question, but it’s bothering me. Where does crib come from, in the sense of a cheat’s answer sheet or for illicitly copying somebody else’s work? It’s listed as the same word as the baby’s bed, but the connection is beyond me.
A. It is indeed the same word, though a lot lies behind it.
The use of the term for a baby’s cot is more common in US English than in British English, where it’s mainly reserved for a model of the Nativity of Christ, with a manger as a bed. The verb to crib in the sense of plagiarizing or stealing another’s schoolwork is mainly British English, though both US and British English know crib notes. Both varieties of English share the sense of a barred container or rack for animal fodder, a manger. This is the original, which turns up in English around the year 1000 and which is from an Old German word whose descendants are to be found in modern Dutch and German.
There are other senses of crib, especially that of a cabin or hovel (from an extension of the sense of an animal stall), which eventually led to the meaning in the South Island of New Zealand of a small house at the seaside or at a holiday resort; to thieves’ slang of the early nineteenth century for a house, shop or public house; to the slightly later US slang usage for a saloon, a low dive or brothel; and to the current US Black English sense of one’s room, house or apartment. The baby’s bed sense arrived in the seventeenth century as an instance of the barred container idea, others from the same source being a repository for hops during harvest and a wickerwork basket or pannier. A shift from container to contents may explain why it has sometimes meant a light meal or a workman’s lunch, though it’s also suggested that an eighteenth-century slang sense of the stomach (a repository for food) may be the direct link.
The basket sense was used in particular for one in which a poacher might conceal his catch. The experts guess that this may have led to the thievery sense around the middle of the eighteenth century. They base their view on this example:
A brace of birds and a hare, that I cribbed this morning out of a basket of game.
The Nabob, a play by Samuel Foote, 1778. The title borrows a term then only recently introduced into English from Urdu, probably via either Portuguese or Spanish. It originally referred to a Muslim official or governor under the Mogul empire, a nawab, but in English came to mean a person of conspicuous wealth or high status, especially one who returned from India to Europe with a fortune, the group that this play savagely satirizes. Foote is the first known user of nabob in this sense, in an earlier work of 1760.
The plagiarism sense arrived around the same time, though it seems to have become applied to stealing or illicitly copying another’s school work only in the following century.
Q. When I used the phrase crocodile tears recently I was asked to provide a derivation. My dictionary is not very enlightening; can you help?
A. To weep crocodile tears is to pretend a sorrow that one doesn’t in fact feel, to create a hypocritical show of emotion.
Inauthentic CEOs downsize their organization, increase their own compensation, and weep crocodile tears for the employees who have lost their jobs.
Ethics, the Heart of Leadership, by Joanne B. Ciulla and James MacGregor Burns, 2004.
The idea comes from the ancient belief that crocodiles weep while luring their prey to its death or devouring it. The story seems to have been taken up by medieval French and English writers and that’s where we get it from. The first example known in English is in a travel book of about 1400, The Voyage and Travail of Sir John Mandeville. Another is from a deeply misogynistic account about a century later:
His nature is ever when he would have his prey, to cry and sob like a Christian body, to provoke them to come to him, and then he snatcheth at them; and thereupon came this proverb, that is applied unto women when they weep, lachrymae crocodili, the meaning whereof is, that as the crocodile when he crieth goeth then about most to deceive, so doth a woman most commonly when she weepeth.
In an account of 1565 by John Sparke of the second voyage of John Hawkins to the New World, published in Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, 1600. Lachrymae crocodili is Latin for crocodile tears.
The story was taken up by Edmund Spenser in The Fairie Queene and then by Shakespeare (who put the crack about insincere female tears into the mouth of Othello). Having such authorities on its side made it almost inevitable that the reference would stay in the language.
Quite how the story came into being puzzles zoologists. The experts say that crocodiles can indeed weep – they have tear glands like most other animals – though of course they don’t cry in the sense of emitting tears as part of an emotional response. However, there have been observations of caymans and alligators, close relatives of crocodiles, emitting tears while they’re eating (a more probable source of the misunderstanding). This probably happens because of the huffing and hissing behaviour that often accompanies feeding. Air forced through the sinuses may force tears in the crocodiles’ tear glands to empty into the eye, making it look as though they are weeping.
Q. I have noticed that here in Sweden people are now using the English expression cry all the way to the bank translated into Swedish. What does the English expression mean?
A. The English phrase means that you’re making money undeservedly at the expense of others. It often refers to a sportsman who loses a match, or to a show-business person who gives a poor performance, but who still cynically collects a thumping fee. The expression has become extremely common throughout the English-speaking world in the past decade or so and has become a knee-jerk journalistic cliché. As well as crying, you may sob, smile or laugh your way.
In all the hoo-ha about rising interest rates and the pain they cause borrowers, one important point has been lost: savers are laughing all the way to the bank.
The Age, Melbourne, Australia, 4 March 2008.
The phrase is often credited to that flamboyant and camp American pianist Liberace, he of the candelabra, extraordinary costumes and piano-shaped swimming pool. It became a catchphrase for him and he is often quoted as originating it. The first four examples in the Oxford English Dictionary all refer to him, the first being this:
On the occasion in New York at a concert in Madison Square Garden when he had the greatest reception of his life and the critics slayed him mercilessly, Liberace said: ‘The take was terrific but the critics killed me. My brother George cried all the way to the bank.’
Daily Mirror, 26 September 1956. Liberace is quoted in closely similar terms in an article in The Corpus Christi Caller-Times of Texas on 23 May 1954. In the form laughed all the way to the bank, it’s also attributed to him in the San Mateo Times of California on 7 November 1953. It has the feel of a story he told to laugh off the interior pain of the stinking reviews he so often got.
This looks pretty conclusive. Sadly, for what survives of Liberace’s reputation, he may have borrowed an existing expression:
Eddie Walker perhaps is the wealthiest fight manager in the game… The other night when his man Belloise lost, Eddie had the miseries… He felt so terrible, he cried all the way to the bank!
Waterloo Daily Courier, Iowa, 3 September 1946. In the following years, this is repeated in various forms and is attributed to other fight managers.
Q. Could you please give the meaning and derivation of the curate’s egg? I keep coming across it in books and newspapers but nobody explains it.
A. The phrase curate’s egg means something that is partly good and partly bad and so not wholly satisfactory:
The supporting cast is a curate’s egg: Steven Mackintosh is chilling as a predatory weirdo, while Fiennes is miscast.
In a review in The Times on 19 June 2008 of the prison-break film The Escapist.
Remarkably, just for once we know exactly where the expression comes from:
RIGHT REVEREND HOST: I’m afraid you’ve got a bad egg, Mr. Jones!
THE CURATE: Oh no, My Lord, I assure you! Parts of it are excellent!
Punch, 9 November 1895. This caption is underneath a cartoon with the title True Humility, drawn by George du Maurier. A timid curate is overawed by having breakfast in his bishop’s home and desperately attempts to avoid giving offence. One reason why Americans are so often puzzled by the expression is that they don’t know that a curate is a junior clergyman in Britain, whose lowly status and utter dependence on his bishop for advancement is an important contributor to the joke.
Readers liked this exchange so much that the cartoon led to the catchphrases good in part, like the curate’s egg and parts of it are excellent, along with curate’s egg itself. The last of these became so over-used that H. W. Fowler referred those searching for it in his Modern English Usage in 1926 to the articles on Hackneyed Phrases and Worn-out Humour.
Anyone who uses or hears curate’s egg will probably have the phrase ‘good in parts’ spring to mind. However, some modern users of the expression reason, quite logically, that an egg can’t be part bad and change the sense accordingly, so completely misunderstanding the point of du Maurier’s joke. A guide written for journalists in 2004 correctly described the phrase as a cliché but gave the bad-egg advice, ‘If you are tempted to use it, please be aware that it does not mean a bit good and a bit bad – an egg that is good “in parts” is still rotten.’ Not in the original cartoon, it didn’t, nor in common usage.
Q. I wondered how the phrase dab hand originated, meaning someone particularly skilled at a task. Any ideas?
A. This is mainly a British and Commonwealth expression.
I am a dab hand at ordering a caffè latte, and know not to order a latte in Italy (fools, you will get a glass of milk).
Daily Telegraph, 6 February 2008.
The phrase dab hand turns up first in the early nineteenth century and is widely recorded in English regional and dialect usage through the century. The first recorded use of dab by itself in a related sense is in 1691. It’s also in A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew of 1698–9: a dab there is ‘expert, exquisite in Roguery’. It is also said to have been gaming jargon of the period, indicating a person who was an expert gamester. Dabster, an expert, which has mainly been an American word, is from the same source at about the same time. Dab has often been reported as school slang, but that may be a later development, as early sightings all had criminal associations.
Nobody is sure where dab came from: it may be linked to the Old Dutch dabben and German tappen. The verb first appears about 1300, when it meant to give somebody a sharp blow; it weakened in sense over time, until in the sixteenth century it arrived at its modern meaning of pressing lightly and repeatedly with something soft (the more recent criminal slang dabs for fingerprints seems to derive from this sense, perhaps based on the image of an arrested person giving his fingerprints with an inkpad and paper, though a nod towards dab hand might also be there).
It’s difficult to see how the idea of expertise grew out of the various senses of dab and it’s possible that in this sense it’s a separate word, perhaps from adept, or just possibly from dapper.
Q. Who were Darby and Joan? My dictionary tells me that they were ‘a devoted old couple, characters in a poem’, but did they actually exist or were they fictional? I’m assuming their devotion was to each other (as opposed to a religion or building model aeroplanes), but does this mean that a Darby and Joan club is about old couples, or merely, as I have always assumed, about old people?
A. In the UK, Darby and Joan is still a way to describe an elderly and mutually devoted married couple who live a placid and uneventful life, often in humble circumstances.
Together with her late husband John, she was a familiar figure around the community centre in Craigyhill. The pair even continued helping with the area’s meals-on-wheels service while in their 80s. They were always seen together, referred to fondly by many as ‘Darby and Joan’.
Larne Times, Northern Ireland, 25 June 2008.
There are many Darby and Joan Clubs, so named, in various parts of the country, social clubs for pensioners, which hold dances and other events. The name is indeed strictly a misnomer, since the clubs are for all pensioners, not only married couples. The term has long been used to evoke an image of companionship in old age. Many modern references are linked to a once-popular song:
Darby dear we are old and grey,
Fifty years since our wedding day.
Shadow and sun for every one,
as the years roll by.
‘Darby and Joan’, words by Frederic Weatherly and music by James Molloy, 1890. As well as being a barrister, Weatherly was a prolific and popular lyricist for more than 50 years, who wrote the words for ‘Danny Boy’ and ‘Roses of Picardy’ among many others. It was once usual for wives to refer to their husbands by their surnames, even in private.
But the expression is certainly older than that – it turns up in the middle of the nineteenth century in works by Thackeray, Melville and Trollope. An advertisement in The Times on 1 February 1802 announced that a ‘comic divertisement’ entitled Darby and Joan; or The Dwarf was being performed at the Royalty Theatre, London; there was a new dance of the same title, which was ‘received with loud and general plaudits’ according to the issue of the same newspaper dated 26 May the previous year; in June 1801 the newspaper reported that a ballet of that title was being performed. So by 1800, the phrase was already widespread.
We must go even further back:
Old Darby, with Joan by his side,
You’ve often regarded with wonder:
He’s dropsical, she is sore-eyed,
Yet they’re never happy asunder.
The Joys of Love never forgot. A Song, an anonymous poem that appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine in March 1735.
The Oxford English Dictionary describes these verses as ‘mediocre’ and comments, ‘This has usually been considered the source of the names, and various conjectures have been made, both as to the author, and as to the identity of “Darby and Joan”, but with no valid results.’
One of the conjectures that’s supported by more circumstantial evidence than others is that the author was Henry Woodfall, the eldest of three generations of printers with the same name who worked in London. He was apprenticed to John Darby, a printer who lived in Bartholomew Close with his wife Joan, who was equally active in the business. John Darby died in 1704 aged about 80. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, in an earlier edition, claimed that Henry Woodfall wrote the ballad to commemorate his late employer and his wife. However, the claim does not appear in the current edition online and the connection seems not so clear-cut as once thought. In any case, the stimulus to publish a eulogistic memorial would have dissipated by 1735, though Henry Woodfall was still alive then.
Leaving aside the question of authorship, it is remarkable that the expression Darby and Joan should have remained active in the language for more than 200 years.
Q. I’d never come across the phrase dead cat bounce before the recent dips and dives on the world’s stock markets but then heard it on various media reports three times in one day. I’d guess it refers to a small improvement in the market’s fortune. Am I correct? And what is its origin?
A. This bit of gruesome, if graphic, jargon of the financial world does refer to a temporary recovery from a big drop in a stock’s price, but one that’s an illusory sign of improvement and which is short-lived. This early appearance in print explains the imagery behind it:
DeVoe suggests the printing of a bumper sticker reading: ‘Beware the Dead Cat Bounce.’ ‘This applies to stocks or commodities that have gone into free-fall descent and then rallied briefly,’ he says. ‘If you threw a dead cat off a 50-story building, it might bounce when it hit the sidewalk. But don’t confuse that bounce with renewed life. It is still a dead cat.’
San Jose Mercury News, California, 28 April 1986.
Despite the associations with the US, the earliest known example appeared in a report in a British newspaper that had been filed from the Far East:
Despite the evidence of buying interest yesterday, they said the rise was partly technical and cautioned against concluding that the recent falls in the market were at an end. ‘This is what we call a “dead cat bounce”,’ one broker said flatly.
Financial Times, 7 December 1985.
The phrase gradually caught on during the 1990s but became particularly common – for the obvious reasons associated with the financial turmoil of the time – after 2000. Observers of financial jargon thought that its heyday was passing, but the economic downturn of 2007 onwards gave it new life:
Bank shares were today able to repair some of the damage caused by this week’s sell-off. But does this standalone performance mean it is time to call the bottom of the credit crunch, or is this just a Wall Street-inspired dead cat bounce? That was the question brokers were asking themselves today.
Evening Standard, 17 July 2008.
Q. As a non-native speaker of the English language (I’m Dutch), I wonder where the phrase dear John letter comes from. I have always taken it to be a letter in which the recipient is told a love affair is over, but I might be amiss.
A. You have it right. It’s conventionally a letter from a woman to a boyfriend or husband saying that all is over between them, usually because the woman has found somebody else.
Like many marriages, these partnerships are born of convenience and when one partner outgrows the other, or sudden changes in behaviour act as tell-tale signs of disillusion, a Dear John or Dear Jane letter cannot be far away.
IT Week, 29 May 2006. As you might gather from the publication, which focuses on digital technologies, the term is figurative here: the story actually refers to the strains on a vendor partnership between Dell and Intel. Dear Jane letter is a more recent form that reflects today’s sexual equality.
The expression seems from the evidence to have been invented by Americans during the Second World War. At this time, thousands of US servicemen were stationed overseas for long periods; many of their wives and sweethearts left at home found that absence didn’t make the heart grow fonder. The unhappy news was necessarily communicated in a letter.
‘Dear John,’ the letter began. ‘I have found someone else whom I think the world of. I think the only way out is for us to get a divorce,’ it said. They usually began like that, those letters that told of infidelity on the part of the wives of servicemen… The men called them ‘Dear Johns’.
The Democrat and Chronicle, Rochester, NY, 17 August 1945.
Why Dear John? That isn’t entirely clear but a couple of pointers give a plausible basis for it. John was a common generic name for a man at this period (think also of terms like John Doe for an unknown party to a legal action). Such letters were necessarily written in a formal way, since any note of affection would obviously have been out of place. So a serviceman getting a letter from his wife or girlfriend that started stiffly with ‘Dear… ’ knew at once that a particular kind of bad news had arrived.
A second pointer may be an American radio programme, at first called Dear John, broadcast between 1933 and 1944, starring the former silent-film actress Irene Rich. Drama episodes were framed by a letter from the gossipy lead character to her never-identified romantic interest that began with these words. It’s conceivable this played a part in the genesis of the term.
Q. This one has been worrying me for a long while – ever since I was asked and didn’t know the answer. So why do we call a game between two local sides a Derby? I presume it has nothing to do with the name of the horse race which was named after Lord Derby.
A. Actually, it does. That race, first run in 1780, was named after Edward Stanley, 12th Earl of Derby (its proper name is the Derby Stakes, universally abbreviated). Legend has it that the race was nearly named the Bunbury Stakes, because Lord Derby and another racing enthusiast, Sir Charles Bunbury, tossed a coin to determine which of them was to have it named after him. Sir Charles’s consolation prize was to have his horse win the first Derby.
It soon became established as the high point of the racing season as part of the meeting at Epsom in Surrey in early June. Benjamin Disraeli once famously described it as ‘the Blue Ribbon of the Turf’. Derby day, the day of the race – always a Wednesday until very recently – became a hugely popular event:
It is the one great London holiday, which in variety, in cheerfulness, and in cordial good fellowship of all classes of the community, beats hollow, in my opinion, even the merriest of our Bank holidays.
London Up to Date, by George Augustus Sala, 1895. This work, published in the year of Sala’s death, was – as he admitted in his preface – ‘so many detached essays describing scenes and characters which did not find a place in Twice Round the Clock’, his earlier and better-known work about London, published in 1859.
It became so important that other classic races were named after it, such as the Kentucky Derby, though Americans understandably say the word the way it’s spelled rather than the British darby. At about the time Sala was writing, the word was moving into more general use to describe any highly popular and well-attended event. In particular, it came to be applied to a fixture between two local sides, first called a local Derby and then often abbreviated. It has become widely known and extremely common:
The Auckland Blues adapted best to experimental new rules to end a run of home defeats against the Waikato Chiefs with a 32–14 win in the Super 14 local derby yesterday.
Taipei Times, Taiwan, 17 February 2008.
Q. In browsing your biographical details on the World Wide Words site from here in New York I notice that you served as dogsbody at one time in your career. What a great word! Where does it come from?
A. A dogsbody is a lowly person who gets all the dirty jobs, like emptying the ashtrays or putting new toner in the photocopier. Anything menial, disagreeable or boring somehow makes it into the job description. Americans might prefer gofer instead.
I’m Lieutenant Marc Vitrac, US ASF, and one of the Ranger squad here, which means specimen-collector, liaison with the locals, and general dogsbody.
The Sky People, by S. M. Stirling, 2006. New arrivals are being introduced to Venus, which in this alternate universe has been made habitable by an alien species of Great Ones; in the sequel, In the Courts of the Crimson Kings, we find they have also terraformed Mars, now inhabited by a race of beings with more than a passing resemblance to those created by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
The word is probably a product of that great melting-pot and fount of culture, the Royal Navy. Sailors at the time of Nelson were just about the worst-fed people around, living as they did on a monotonous diet that included such culinary awfulnesses as boiled salt beef and ship’s biscuits (which after weeks at sea had to be rapped on the table to persuade the weevils to leave before you could eat them). One of their staple foodstuffs was dried peas boiled in a bag. The official name for this concoction was pease pudding (pease being the old form of the vegetable’s name that was later wrongly presumed to be a plural and changed to pea) but the jolly Jack Tars called it dog’s body. We don’t know why. Perhaps it came from the shape and look of the bag after it had been boiled.
In the early part of the twentieth century, the same word began to be applied to midshipmen, who got unloaded on to them all the nasty jobs that more senior officers wanted to dodge. Presumably the term was borrowed from the sailor’s foodstuff, though we can’t be sure about that, since there’s no link in meaning or any evidence how it got from the one to the other.
Anyway, the word seems to have escaped the Royal Navy in the early 1930s to become a more general term in the civilian world for the person in a group who got stuck with all the rough jobs. And so it has remained.