Q. What is the origin of doolally tap? I used to hear the phrase as a youngster in London fifty years ago and used in the context of someone being rather peculiar mentally.
A. This is an excellent illustration of the reach of the English language. The expression is certainly a British one – though now not so often heard in that form – but to find its origins we must travel to India.
In 1861, the British Army established a military base and sanatorium at Deolali, about 100 miles north-east of Bombay (it is still an important Indian military centre today). One of its functions was to act as a transit camp for soldiers who had finished their tours of duty (‘time-expired’, in the jargon of the time) and were waiting for a troop ship to take them back to Britain. Ships left Bombay only between November and March, so a soldier ending his tour outside those dates might have a long wait. It was often dispiriting:
The time-expired men at Deolalie had no arms or equipment; they showed kit now and again and occasionally went on a route march, but time hung heavily on their hands and in some cases men who had been exemplary soldiers got into serious trouble and were awarded terms of imprisonment before they were sent home. Others contracted venereal disease and had to go to hospital. The well-known saying among soldiers when speaking of a man who does queer things, ‘Oh, he’s got the Doolally tap,’ originated, I think, in the peculiar way men behaved owing to the boredom of that camp.
Old Soldier Sahib, by Frank Richards, 1936. This described his service in India and Burma in the years 1902–12. It followed his earlier book of 1933, Old Soldiers Never Die, a memoir of a private soldier in the Great War. The Times said of this book, ‘He has the double gift of conjuring up sights, sounds, and smells and of slipping in pungent anecdotes to illustrate and enliven his narrative.’
To say someone was doolally tap meant he was mad, or at least very eccentric. The first bit is obviously the result of the standard British soldier’s way of hacking foreign place names into something that sounded at least vaguely English. The second part is from a Persian or Urdu word tap, a malarial fever (which is ultimately from Sanskrit tapa, heat or torment). So the whole expression might be loosely translated as ‘camp fever’.
We’re not sure when the term entered soldier’s jargon. The earliest example I know of is in a glossary forming part of the book Rhymes of the Rookies by W. E. Christian, published in 1917.
The full expression, though it’s still heard from time to time, must have already been falling out of common use when you heard it, since most reference books imply that by the 1940s it had already been shortened to doolally. That’s the way most people have learned it, meaning that somebody’s behaviour goes well beyond the merely odd. You still come across it, though not one speaker in a hundred can connect it to a place in India.
‘And what’s wrong with me saying Cirencester?’ Danny asked politely. ‘Nothing, given the right context,’ said the voice smoothly. ‘In a conversation about Cotswold towns, nothing could be more natural. In the present case, though, a less charitable man than myself might take it as proof that you’ve finally gone completely doolally.’
Flying Dutch, Tom Holt, 1991. Concerning Julius Vanderdecker, the immortal captain known as The Flying Dutchman, who took out an insurance policy around 1588 with the House of Fugger (a real business, by the way), which is now worth more than enough to buy up the whole world. Danny is Danny Bennett, a journalist who finds conspiracy involving the Milk Marketing Board at every turn.
Q. Do you know the etymology of the phrase dreaded lurgy? I know it’s related to illness and the Cambridge online dictionary says it’s ‘a humorous way of speaking of any illness which is not very serious but is easily caught’.
A. This is the immediate origin:
Lurgi is the most dreadful malady known to mankind. In six weeks it could swamp the whole of the British Isles.
The Goon Show, Series 5, Programme 7, broadcast 9 November 1954. This anarchic and surreal radio comedy series starred Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Spike Milligan. Spike also wrote most of the scripts. There was no epidemic – it was a fraud perpetrated by those arch-criminals, Count Jim ‘Thighs’ Moriarty and the Honourable Hercules Grytpype-Thynne, trading as Messrs Goosey and Bawkes, a barely disguised reference to the music publisher and instrument maker Boosey and Hawkes. They put it about that nobody who played a brass-band instrument had ever been known to catch lurgi; this resulted in their disposing profitably of vast amounts of merchandise.
The Goons were then highly popular and the episode resulted in the phrase dreaded lurgi becoming a school playground term for some horrid infection that you had supposedly contracted, especially one you had as a result of being dirty or smelly or just not like the other kids. It has survived to the present day, though it’s now almost invariably spelled lurgy and is most common in Australia and New Zealand:
The team are struck down by the dreaded lurgy while on the trail of a murderous gang who are killing witnesses in a high-profile court case.
From the television guide in the New Zealand Herald, 3 May 2008.
However, all Americans seem to be inoculated against it at birth, since it’s virtually unknown to them (but then, they never experienced the Goons phenomenon and instead have cooties; these are literally body lice, from a Malay word, but figuratively a cootie is an imaginary germ that only infects people you don’t like).
OK, so much for the background. Where did this word lurgi or lurgy come from? There are several theories bandied about. One school of thought holds that Milligan invented it out of the air. It might, say others, be allergy with the beginning cut off; it’s an ingenious idea, though English doesn’t usually lose a stressed initial vowel and lurgi is said with a hard g, to rhyme with Fergie, so that the soft g in allergy tells against it. The most plausible suggestion is that it’s from the Lurgi gasification process, which was developed by the company of that name in Germany in the 1930s to get gas from low-grade coal and which Milligan came across during his military service in the Second World War.
Intriguingly, there was once a dialect term that might have played a part in its genesis. The English Dialect Dictionary notes lurgy or lurgie from northern England, meaning idle or lazy. This may well be linked with fever-largie, fever-lurden or fever-lurgan, a sarcastic dialect term for a supposed disease of idleness; this was recorded as still current in some places at the time the dictionary was compiled at the end of the nineteenth century (I mean the term was still being used, but presumably the malady was lingering on as well).
The coolie, drawn from his native village reluctant, like a periwinkle from its shell, is never a good starter, and when he finds himself at the end of a tow-rope or bowed beneath half a hundredweight of the sahib’s trinkets, with a three-thousand-feet pass to attain in front of him, he is extremely apt to burst into tears – idle tears – or be overcome by a fit of that fell disease – ‘the lurgies’. Lest my reader should not be acquainted with this illness, at least under that name, here is the diagnosis of the lurgies as given by a very ordinary seaman to the ship’s doctor. ‘Well, sir, I eats well, and I sleeps well; but when I’ve got a job of work to do – Lor’ bless you, sir! I breaks out all over of a tremble!’
A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil, by Major T. R. Swinburne, 1907. The valley is in Kashmir; his work remains a significant record of early tourism in that region and is still in print.
Spike Milligan and the Goons would have been tickled by the idea of an epidemic outbreak of idleness.
Q. I overheard someone recently saying money was arriving in dribs and drabs. What is the origin of that phrase? Is it to do with art or painting?
A. Neither of those things, as it happens. However, dribs and drabs – scattered or sporadic amounts of something – contains some interesting etymological archaeology.
Drib is known from some English, Irish and Scottish dialects of no later than the eighteenth century and meant an inconsiderable quantity or a drop. It’s most probably a variant form of drip or drop. It was taken by emigrants to the US and at one time was fairly common there. The English Dialect Dictionary quotes this:
We are sending such regiments and dribs from here and Baltimore as we can spare to Harper’s Ferry, supplying their places, in some sort, by calling in Militia from the adjacent States.
A letter written to Major General George Brinton McClellan by US president Abraham Lincoln on 25 May 1862. McClellan was then commanding, if that’s the right word, the Army of the Potomac in the Civil War.
The experts are undecided whether the second half is an invented rhyming echo of the first, as in reduplicated compounds like helter-skelter, see-saw and hurly-burly, or if drab is a real word in its own right. Drab certainly existed as a dialect term that could mean much the same as drib, though it was used in particular for a minor debt or a small sum of money. The first example in the Oxford English Dictionary is this:
Drab, a small debt. ‘He’s gain away for good, and he’s left some drabs.’
The Dialect of Craven, in the West Riding of the County of York, by W. Carr, 1828. In standard English, ‘He has gone away for ever and he’s left some debts.’ The English Dialect Dictionary also quotes this entry and notes that the word is recorded only from Yorkshire and Cheshire.
The Oxford English Dictionary is fairly sure that it isn’t the same word as the one that describes a dirty and untidy woman, which may either be from Gaelic drabag or Irish drabog, a dirty woman, a slattern, though it might be linked to the old Low German drabbe, dirt or mire. Nor is it the word for something drearily dull – this began by referring to undyed cloth and comes from French.
The limited distribution of drab suggests that the word in the phrase is indeed a mere variation on drib for the sake of a neat and bouncy phrase.
Q. Is that universal sticky tape stuff that everyone has in their toolkit called duct tape or duck tape? I’ve read and heard it both ways but can’t work out which is correct.
A. It’s possible to make a case that either is right. The story behind the stuff is confusing enough to require some sorting out. Bear with me while I trace the evidence and the contrary opinions.
Let’s first dispose of one possible confusion. Examples of duck tape are recorded from as far back as the beginning of the twentieth century, which might suggest it’s the older form. But that’s misleading. This duck tape isn’t the sticky-backed stuff but plain fabric cotton tape made from the material called duck. It’s been called that for four centuries; its name is from the Middle Dutch doek, linen or linen cloth; only later was it manufactured using cotton. It was a lighter and finer material than canvas, often used for seamen’s trousers and sometimes for sails on small craft. Duck tape was widely used at one time for the vertical binding tapes of venetian blinds.
There’s nothing in any records of usage in historic databases or in the entries for both terms in the Oxford English Dictionary that suggests what the original name of the adhesive-backed material might have been. Various accounts have appeared on web pages and in a column by William Safire in The New York Times in March 2003. All tell the same story (so much so that they arouse unworthy suspicions).
The original material was developed, it is said, by the Permacel division of Johnson & Johnson in 1942 for the US Army as a waterproof sealing tape for ammunition boxes. The tape proved immensely versatile and was used for all sorts of repair purposes on military equipment. These facts come from Johnson & Johnson’s historians, so ought to be accurate. But the story goes on to say that because the fabric backing was made from cotton duck and perhaps because it repelled moisture ‘like water off a duck’s back’, soldiers started to call it duck tape. However, there’s no known relevant use of duck tape in any document of the Second World War that anyone investigating the matter has looked at. A column by Jan Freeman in the Boston Globe in March 2003, partly in response to Safire’s, implies that the story about the name duck tape might have been a folk etymology passed on in good faith by employees of Johnson & Johnson. Otherwise, we have no idea what Permacel – or the US Army – called the material.
Some time after the war, it is said, engineers began to use the tape to seal the joints in air-conditioning ducts. This tape was manufactured in the same way, though to match the ducting it was coloured silver rather than the green of the Army version. Because of this use, it became known informally as duct tape. There are examples of that name in newspaper advertisements dating from the mid 1960s, though the earliest ones don’t make clear what the material is. One in The News of Frederick, Maryland, dated 17 November 1966, is the first I’ve found that describes a product like the modern one – a plastic ‘self-adhering’ tape, in rolls 2 inches wide and 30 feet long.
Duck tape is a trademark of Henkel Consumer Adhesives, dating from 1982, who sell it under that name in several countries. John Kahl, the CEO of the firm, was reported by Jan Freeman in the same article as saying that his father chose the name after noticing that duct tape sounded like duck tape when customers asked for it. (The collision of the two ts in the middle of duct tape causes the first one to be lost by a process called elision.) The term duct tape has never been trademarked, though several compound terms that include it have – it looks as though it had become generic before anybody thought of registering it. Apart from a one-off instance in the Oxford English Dictionary of duck tape from 1971 (which looks like a case of the duct-duck elision), I can’t find duck tape in the adhesive sense until the 1980s.
The evidence strongly suggests that the original name among non-military users post-war was duct tape, given to it informally by heating engineers, and that the duck tape version is elision in rapid or casual speech, later capitalized on by a manufacturer. But, as things stand, nobody knows for sure.
Q. I was taken aback to read the following in Jerome K. Jerome’s book Three Men in a Boat, which was published in 1889: ‘Maidenhead itself is too snobby to be pleasant. It is the haunt of the river swell and his overdressed female companion. It is the town of showy hotels, patronised chiefly by dudes and ballet girls.’ Just how long have dudes been with us?
A. Many people have first come across references to dudes in connection with dude ranches, where American urbanites could experience a sanitized version of Western life, and it is often assumed that this is the source of the term. However, dude ranch is relatively recent, with the first known examples being from 1921. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first example of dude is from 1883, though we now know it had been around for a few years before that in the sense of an effete man. It’s definitely an Americanism. So how could it be casually used in a British book as early as 1889 with no hint that it was other than a native word?
The cause was an extraordinary craze or fashion identified by that name:
It is d-u-d-e or d-o-o-d, the spelling not having been distinctly settled yet. Nobody knows where the word came from, but it has sprung into popularity within the past two weeks, and everybody is using it… The word ‘dude’ is a valuable addition to the slang of the day.
Brooklyn Eagle, 25 February 1883.
A detailed description of the dude appeared the following month and was widely syndicated:
A dude is a young man, not over twenty-five, who may be seen on Fifth Avenue between the hours of three and six, and may be recognized by the following distinguished marks and signs. He is dressed in clothes which are not calculated to attract much attention, because they are fashionable without being ostentatious. It is, in fact, only to the close observer that the completeness and care of the costume of the dude reveals itself. His trousers are very tight; his shirt-collar, which must be clerical in cut, encircles his neck so as to suggest that a sudden motion of the head in any direction will cause pain; he wears a tall black hat, pointed shoes, and a cane (not a ‘stick’), which should, we believe, properly have a silver handle, is carried by him under his right arm, (projecting forward at an acute angle, somewhat in the manner that a sword is carried by a general at a review, but with a civilian mildness that never suggests a military origin for the custom). When the dude takes off his hat, or when he is seen in the evening at the theatre, it appears that he parts his hair in the middle and ‘bangs’ it. There is believed to be a difference of opinion among dudes as to whether they ought to wear white gaiters.
New York Evening Post, 10 March 1883.
The article noted that dudes, unlike the mashers of the time and the dandies, fops and swells of earlier generations, set out to give an impression of protest against fashionable folly and of being instead serious-minded young men with missions in life: ‘A high-spirited, hilarious dude would be a contradiction in terms.’ But dudes were also widely reported as being vapid, with no ideas or conversation.
The Brooklyn Eagle fleshed out this portrait by noting that a dude was as a rule a rich man’s son, was effeminate, aped the English, had as ‘his badge of office the paper cigarette and a bell-crown English opera hat’, was noted for his love of actresses (to the extent of carrying on scandalous ‘affairs’) but with no knowledge of the theatre.
In June, the Daily Northwestern reported that dudes had taken to wearing corsets, ‘in order to more fully develop and expose the beauties of the human form divine’. The Richwood Gazette of Ohio argued in July that the dude was useful ‘as an example of how big a fool can be made in the semblance of a man’; the Prince Albert Times of Saskatchewan noted the same month that ‘The dude is one of those creatures which are perfectly harmless and are a necessary evil to civilization.’ The New York Times reported that a city man staying in a hotel in Long Branch, New Jersey, had been ‘grieved in his spirit’ by being called a dude and asked in its headline whether the word should be considered defamatory. The Manitoba Daily Free Press reported the story, ‘bearing evident marks of reportorial invention’, that a dude was seen being chased up Fifth Avenue, by a cat.
You will note that dude was most definitely a term of ridicule. The geographical spread of the references shows that the whole of North America was variously intrigued and disgusted by the spread of the dude phenomenon in the cities of the East Coast. The Atlanta Constitution wrote in June, ‘So great a success the dude has had here in the United States, most every newspaper in the country has written editorials on him and brought him before the public in such manner as to create comment, if not surprise.’ News of him crossed the Atlantic very quickly. In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary’s first example of the word is in the Graphic, a popular illustrated paper of London. Its report in March 1883 reads as if it were cribbed from the New York Evening Post: ‘The one object for which the dude exists is to tone down the eccentricities of fashion… The silent, subfusc, subdued “dude” hands down the traditions of good form.’
Dude became widely known in the UK and it isn’t surprising that Jerome K. Jerome came across the term, as he was at the time an actor in London. Indeed, some US newspapers stated at the time that the term had been brought to New York from the London music halls and that this was the reason for the pronounced Anglophile streak in the fashion. But, so far as I know, nobody has found British examples that pre-date the US ones.
That leaves us without any direct leads to the source of dude. Earlier examples are on record – the Historical Dictionary of American Slang takes it back to 1877 and there’s at least one instance of it as a personal name or nickname a year or two earlier still as well as a Dude Club that was mentioned in a newspaper from Dubuque in 1877. But it is clear from the 1883 articles that these had made no impression on the American public. We may leave aside the theory of Daniel Cassidy in his book How the Irish Invented Slang, that it is from the Irish word dúd for a foolish-looking fellow or dolt, since he provides no evidence and none is known. But it has been plausibly linked by etymologists to the much older duds for clothes, which could especially refer to ragged or tattered ones or even to rags, with dudman being an old term for a scarecrow (hence, at the end of the nineteenth century, dud meaning something useless). We may guess that dude was a sarcastic way to describe the understated but foppish dress of these fashionable young men. Another possibility is that it is linked to the old song ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’; an 1830 poem refers to Yankee Doodle Dandies, a pretty obvious reference, and the middle word might well have been extracted and shortened.
Dude has softened and changed in the century since. It can now refer to a man who is no more than stylish or fastidious; in Black American speech in particular it often means simply ‘chap’, ‘guy’ or ‘fellow’. The Coen brothers film The Big Lebowski of 1998 did much to make dude more widely known, since Jeffrey Lebowski refers to himself as The Dude. As an aside on the way language develops, two women governors of US states – Sarah Palin in Alaska and Kathleen Sebelius in Kansas – have husbands who are known not as first gentlemen, which would be the male equivalent of the common term first lady, but as first dudes.
Q. Settle an argument, please. Can you tell us where eavesdrop and eavesdropper originate?
A. It began in Anglo-Saxon England, when the word was yfesdrype, related to an Old Norse word of similar sense, which in modern English would be eavesdrip. People later turned it into eavesdrop for no good reason anybody can work out.
One meaning was the area around a building that was liable to be wetted by water pouring off the projecting eaves of the roof above (gutters hadn’t been invented yet). The word also referred to an old custom in English law by which a landowner was prevented from building within two feet of his boundary, for fear that the water cascading off his eaves might cause problems for his neighbour. This was considered a sufficiently important issue that a special legal term was invented in connection with it: stillicide. If a householder were to let rain fall from his eaves on to the land of a neighbour, he first needed the neighbour’s permission, called a servitude.
By the latter part of the fifteenth century, the word eavesdropper had been invented for somebody who stood within this strip of ground, close to the walls of a building, in order to listen surreptitiously to the conversations within. This was initially also a legal term:
Eavesdroppers are such as stand under walls or windows by day or night to hear news and to carry them to others, to make strife and debate among their neighbours: these are evil members in the commonwealth, and therefore are to be punished.
Les termes de la ley; or Certain difficult and obscure words and terms of the common laws and statutes of this realm now in use, expounded and explained, by John Rastell, first compiled in 1527. I’ve modernized the spelling. John Rastell was a lawyer, printer and member of Parliament, among other accomplishments, who married Sir Thomas More’s sister, Elizabeth.
The verb to eavesdrop in the same sense came along about a century later.
Q. I keep coming across the expression elephant in the room in newspapers and wondered if you could shed any light on where the phrase comes from.
A. The expression is American in origin, though it has been around in the UK since about 2000 and has become extremely common in the press and broadcast media since 2004, becoming a fashionable journalistic cliché. The American phrase started life as the elephant in the living room but it has generally been shortened to your form, though the longer version can still be found in the US.
It refers to a problem or issue that everyone ignores or avoids mentioning, because it’s politically or socially embarrassing, though in truth it’s too big to ignore:
For much of the day Zimbabwe was the elephant in the room, a crisis the summit strenuously avoided discussing.
Sky News, 1 July 2008.
An early example is the title of a well-known American book of 1984 by Marion H. Typpo and Jill M. Hastings, An Elephant in the Living Room: A Leader’s Guide for Helping Children of Alcoholics.
Two earlier examples are not in our current sense but are obviously its precursors. A piece in the Winnipeg Free Press in October 1976 said, ‘What is big and unfamiliar is mistrusted. Anyone would feel uncomfortable with an elephant in the living room, no matter how friendly it might be.’ There’s another from The New York Times of June 1959: ‘Financing schools has become a problem about equal to having an elephant in the living room. It’s so big you just can’t ignore it.’
The idea seems to have been around for quite some time before it became common or took on its modern sense, most probably being reinvented from time to time by writers seeking a vigorous image.
Q. Whilst talking with one of my colleagues recently she expressed a great deal of amusement at the term faff, as in faffing about, where the meaning is to be doing something without any real purpose and often in an effort to avoid doing something else. I often accuse my children of faffing around, especially in the mornings when they ought to be getting ready for school but will do pretty much anything to avoid it. Is my definition of faff correct, and where did the term come from in the first place?
A. You’re correct with your definition. It’s originally British, informal but not rude, and moderately common, especially – as you say – in the form to faff about or faff around.
Let us all hope our blessed British climate smiles upon us: hope for just enough rainy days to make it all grow well, enough sunny ones in which to enjoy faffing about and plenty of gorgeous balmy evenings so we can knock back a few outdoor bevvies with friends.
Daily Telegraph, 4 January 2008.
A new report says that we waste three hours faffing around, doing nothing in particular, pootling, dawdling, pottering, hanging about.
Guardian, 13 August 2008.
It can be used as a politer alternative to another four-letter word beginning with f (which, I suspect, is why your colleague was amused) but has no link with it. It starts to appear as a dialect word in Scotland and northern England at the end of the eighteenth century, as a description of the wind blowing in puffs or small gusts.
As when a person blows chaff away from corn held in his hands, or the wind when it causes brief puffs of smoke to return down the chimney.
A Glossary of the Cleveland Dialect, by the Rev. J. C. Atkinson, 1868. John Atkinson was an antiquary and amateur archaeologist based for most of his adult life in the North Yorkshire village of Danby, from where he also wrote books on folklore and ornithology, as well as several for children. He’s best remembered for his 1891 book, Forty Years in a Moorland Parish. He had enough energy left over to be married three times and sire 13 children.
Faff may have been imitative of the sound of gusty wind, or it may be a variation on maffle, a more widely distributed dialect term in Scotland and England that means to stutter or stammer or to waste time or procrastinate; this might be from the old Dutch regional word maffelen, meaning to move the jaws. There’s also faffle, another dialect word, which has very similar senses and geographical distribution, and which might have influenced the sense.
The word started to move into the wider language around the end of the nineteenth century in its modern sense, though it didn’t much appear in print until the 1980s.
Q. In one of the Monty Python movies, as a woman falsely accused of being a witch is being carted off to her destiny she says under her breath, that’s a fair cop! Is this the common British slang for being arrested?
A. It’s a fair cop was what the essentially good-natured thief with a typically British sense of fair play was once supposed to say as his collar was fingered by the fuzz, meaning that the arrest was reasonable and he really had done what he was accused of doing. You will appreciate that this was an entirely fictitious and romanticized view of the relationship between criminals and the police, despite late nineteenth-century newspaper reports:
‘It’s a fair cop,’ said the thief.
The Daily News, 24 October 1891.
It’s a well-understood British and Commonwealth expression, though it has been used so often in second-rate detective stories and police television series down the decades that it has long since ceased to be possible to use it seriously and the Monty Python team was playing on its hackneyed status.
Thank you to David Brayford who wrote in, ‘prepare to blush, Louise’, listing the grammatical errors in [my book] A Novel in a Year. It’s a fair cop. Anyone who has the nerve to write a how-to-write book deserves to be corrected, after all.
Daily Telegraph, 21 September 2007. Louise Doughty has suffered a version of McKean’s Law, named after its inventor, Erin McKean, the editor of the Oxford American Dictionary: ‘Any correction of the speech or writing of others will contain at least one grammatical, spelling, or typographical error.’
Cop here comes from the same root as cop for a policeman. This may be from the slang verb cop, meaning to seize, originally cap, a dialect term of northern England that by the early nineteenth century was known throughout the country. This can be traced back through French caper to Latin capere, to seize or take, from which we also get our capture. So a cop in this sense was a seizure or capture.
Q. I’m looking for the origins of the Australian slang phrase fair dinkum, which I’m told originates from Chinese. It means real, and is used to allay any potential disbelief about some claim the speaker is making. Apparently, Chinese gold miners in the nineteenth century would tell others of any discoveries of gold using the phrase din gum meaning ‘real gold’ in Chinese.
A. People are particularly intrigued by dinkum because it’s a totemic Australianism that seems to have no connection with any other word in the language. Fair dinkum means something that’s reliable or genuine, fair and square or on the level.
If the government is fair dinkum about the binge drinking issue they must increase the tax on cask wine and they must increase the tax on beer, or alternatively bring the tax back on alcoholic beverage drinks.
The Age, Melbourne, 15 May 2008.
Yours is an excellent story, full of oriental charm. It’s been told before:
Jim Kable believes that ‘dinkum’ may come from the Cantonese expression ‘din kum’, meaning ‘real gold’. It would have come, he says, from Chinese workers during the gold rush.
Sydney Morning Herald, 9 February 1984.
It is possible to generate a Cantonese phrase ding kam, ‘top gold’, but there’s no evidence at all that any Chinese ever used it, whether in the goldfields or anywhere else. It’s just another example of folk etymology – a well-mean-ing attempt to make plain the puzzling and explain the inexplicable.
Most dictionaries published outside Australia and New Zealand are unhelpful about where dinkum comes from, just saying ‘origin unknown’. But it seems highly probable that – like a lot of Australian expressions – it’s from English dialect. Almost the only place in which it’s recorded is in Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary of 1896–1905 in which he notes dinkum is used in Derbyshire and Lincolnshire in the sense of a fair or due share of work. A correspondent told him that fair dinkum existed in north Lincolnshire, used in the same way that people might exclaim fair dos! as a request for fair dealing. But there’s no clue where dinkum comes from, and dictionaries are cautious because it is not well recorded.
It turns up first in Australian writing in 1888 in Robbery Under Arms by Rolf Boldrewood, in which it had the sense of work or exertion: ‘It took us an hour’s hard dinkum to get near the peak’. Early on it could also mean something honest, reliable or genuine, though this is actually first recorded in New Zealand, in 1905. Fair dinkum is recorded from 1890 in the sense of fair play, and soon after for something reliable or genuine. The related dinkum oil for an accurate report came out of soldiers’ slang in the First World War.
Woggo? He’s all right. We get the dinkum oil off him. He knows all the jockeys and trainers and everything.
Here’s Luck, by Lennie Lower, 1930. Lower was once considered Australia’s funniest writer. This was his one novel, a classic of Australian humour that observed life in the eastern suburbs of Sydney and which has never gone out of print.
For me, being about as far from Australia as it’s possible to get on this planet, dinkum first brings to mind Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, dated 1956, about a future penal colony on the moon in which everyone speaks a weird patois containing elements of Australian, American and Russian slang. The sentient computer at the centre of the story is described as ‘a fair dinkum thinkum’.
Q. Here in Dallas, Texas, I have often heard the phrase fair to Midland in response to the inquiry ‘How are you doing?’ Any ideas on the origins of this phrase?
A. Fair to Midland is a Texas joke, a play on fair to middling, in reference to the city called Midland in the state.
Fair to middling is a phrase now not as much heard as it once was. It was formerly common in Britain and Commonwealth countries as well as North America, but is best known now in the last of these areas. It refers to something that’s merely moderate to average in quality, at times written the way people often say it, as fair to middlin’. All the early examples that I can find in literary works – from authors like Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott and Artemus Ward – suggest it became common on the east coast of the US from the 1860s on.
The night was intensely cold, in-doors as well as out; the house [theatre] was thin; the playing from fair to middling; yet I was in raptures from first to last.
Recollections of a Busy Life, by Horace Greeley, 1868. Greeley was a famous journalist and social reformer of the mid nineteenth century, a key supporter of the abolition of slavery. He established the New York Tribune in 1841 and edited it for the next thirty years.
But occasional examples turn up from earlier in the century:
Dinner on the Plains. – On Tuesday last, there was dinner at the country seat of J. C.Jones, Esq., in honor of the officers of the Peacock and Enterprise. The viands were – ‘from fair to middling’ – (we wish we could say more).
New Bedford Mercury, 21 April 1837, reporting an event that took place in Honolulu the previous September (these were more leisurely times).
The phrase is undoubtedly American. But middling turns out to have been used as far back as the previous century for an intermediate grade of various kinds of goods, both in Britain and the US – there are references to middling grades of flour or meal, pins, and the like. This developed in the US early in the nineteenth century into a fuller form:
J. Haskell has just received 4 cases prime HATS, new style – also 4 cases imitation HATS, at $2, ‘from fair to middling’.
An advertisement in the Eastern Argus of Maine for 23 March 1824. I can find no clue as to the nature of an imitation hat.
We venture to assert that a moderate advance was realized on all kinds of Beef, and we quote prime market Beef at $5 per cwt.; from fair to middling 3½ to $4, and thin qualities less.
Connecticut Courant, 3 November 1829.
Despite these and other examples that connect the expression with a variety of commodities, American newspapers and journals later in the century link it with one trade in particular:
Every man is said to have his price, and I had long known that if you were not particular about quality one of the cheapest articles in the London man-market was a detective. Ours was ‘from fair to middling,’ in cotton-brokers’ phrase, and we purchased his services for two guineas.
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, New York, September 1867.
Fair and middling, it turns out, were terms in the cotton business for specific grades – the sequence ran from the best quality (fine), through good, fair, middling and ordinary to the least good (inferior). The expression from fair to middling was a reference to a range of intermediate qualities – it was common to quote indicative prices, for example, for fair to middling grade or fair to middling quality.
Because the cotton trade was so important to the US at this period, it was widely known and used, to the extent that it escaped into the wider language. It was brought to Britain on the back of the cotton imports that fuelled much of Lancashire’s prosperity at the time.
Q. I was wondering if you can shed any light on the set phrase for Pete’s sake. A very interesting explanation was given on a TV show, which attributed it to Michelangelo requesting funds for St Peter's.
A. That’s a classic example of a ridiculous invented origin that we needn’t spend much time refuting, even if we assume it was meant seriously, which I somehow doubt. Michelangelo spoke a dialect of Italian, so how did it get into English? And the expression isn’t recorded before about 1900, so for Pete’s sake where has it been in all the centuries in between?
In this case, there’s an etymological vacuum that the speaker was trying to fill. There’s no very obvious origin, though we’re not totally without ideas. One clue is that another version of the exclamation is for the love of Pete, which seems to be about the same age. In turn that reminds us of for the love of Mike, which is also contemporary. This last expression seems to have been a euphemistic cry to replace for the love of God, which is known from the early eighteenth century as an irritated exclamation. Another well-known cry, for pity’s sake, seems likely to have been a strong influence on the choice of Pete.
As a result, at some point around 1900, Pete joined Mike as the person to invoke when you were impatient, annoyed, frustrated or disappointed in someone or something, both men being stand-ins for the God that it would be blasphemous to mention.
Q. Please shed light on the origin and meaning of from pillar to post. I’m rather puzzled about it, because I recently came across the version from pile to pillar.
A. That’s an interesting variation, showing how little the idiom is now understood. A lot of people are unsure even of the meaning, which is to be forced to go from one place to another in an unceremonious or fruitless search for assistance.
His grouse is that for the past one month he and other members of his team have been moving from pillar to post, but all their efforts have failed thanks to a simple error in handling computerised records.
Calcutta Telegraph, 25 December 2007.
There are two main theories about its origin among the experts.
The one that most dictionaries rather cautiously subscribe to sounds less than credible. It’s said that it derives from the ancient game now called real tennis (court tennis in the USA) to distinguish it from its upstart successor, lawn tennis. The game was played by personages of high status in rather complex indoor courts based on the medieval cloisters in which it first evolved; it is supposed that the pillars and posts were parts of the court. There were gallery posts in real tennis courts but I can’t find evidence that they were ever described as pillars.
A second suggestion that has been widely put forward argues that the full form was originally from whipping-post to pillory. The suggestion is that a criminal being punished in medieval times would first be tied to a post to be whipped and then put in a pillory for public spectacle, amusement and further punishment. In support of this idea the original version of our idiom was the inverted from post to pillar. If that origin were true, you’d expect to get at least some examples of from post to pillory; it does appear in John Ray’s A Compleat Collection of English Proverbs of 1737 but that’s two centuries after from pillar to post is first recorded and there are no known examples of the pillory form before Ray. In favour of it is the first appearance of the expression:
Thus from post to pillar was he made to dance. And at the last he went forward to penance.
The Assembly of the Gods, often said to have been composed by John Lydgate around 1420. I’ve modernized the spelling. The character Freewill, having enlisted in the army of Vice and been captured on its defeat by Virtue, is passed successively to Conscience, Humility, Confession, Contrition and Satisfaction.
The Oxford English Dictionary notes, however, that the idiom usually appeared early on as tossed from post to pillar, which rather suggests some sort of game and not the punishment. It also argues that it was the near rhyme of post with tossed that caused the medieval idiom to invert to our modern pillar to post.
As so often happens at the end of an etymological enquiry, we’re now much better informed but no wiser.
Q. Where does the phrase take a gander at, meaning to have a look at something, come from? I heard it used on radio recently for the first time in years, and both parties in the telephone conversation (one of whom was in America) knew what was meant without a moment’s hesitation.
A. To take a gander is as weird a formation as one might encounter anywhere. What can a male goose possibly have to do with looking at something?
SEAGOON: ‘Good evening. Do you mind if I take a gander around the shop?’
CRUN: ‘No, as long as it’s housetrained.’
‘1985’, a popular and successful parody of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four that Spike Milligan and Eric Sykes wrote for an episode of the Goon Show broadcast on 4 January 1955. The stimulus for it was the controversial BBC Television screening the previous autumn of Nigel Kneale’s adaptation of Orwell’s book.
A quick, er, gander at the word’s history is illuminating. It seems the verb to gander in this sense is actually American in origin, something I find more than a little surprising, because it sounds English to me. Further delving, however, shows that the roots of the expression are indeed from this side of the pond. A work of 1887, The Folk-Speech of South Cheshire, says, ‘Gonder, to stretch the neck like a gander, to stand at gaze’. The next known example is from the Cincinnati Enquirer of 9 May 1903: ‘Gander, to stretch or rubber your neck’.
There’s your source. Think of a gaggle of farmyard geese, wandering about in their typically aimless way, poking their noses in everywhere and twisting their necks to stare at anything that might be interesting. Geese are the archetypal rubberneckers. It’s likely that gander became the term because goose had already been borrowed; this was taken from the way that the birds were known to put their beaks embarrassingly – and sometimes painfully – into one’s more private places.
The form you quote, to take a gander, is recorded from the USA around 1914; here, gander is a noun in the sense of an inquisitive look. In the century since, that form has become much more common while the verb has lost ground.
Q. In the P. G. Wodehouse novel Joy in the Morning, Bertie Wooster uses the expression, everything is once more gas and gaiters. Could you enlighten us on the origin and relevance of the expression and its terms?
A. It’s a delightfully typical Wodehousian expression, which he employs more than once:
She cries ‘Oh, Freddie darling!’ and flings herself into his arms, and all is gas and gaiters again.
Ice in the Bedroom, by P. G. Wodehouse, 1961. In which Freddie Wigeon is conned by trickster Thomas ‘Soapy’ Molloy into buying junk oil stocks. The setting is Valley Fields, the London suburb that’s a thinly disguised Dulwich, where Wodehouse went to school. Stolen jewellery (the punning ice of the title) also features.
But the original is this:
‘Aha!’ cried the old gentleman, folding his hands, and squeezing them with great force against each other. ‘I see her now; I see her now! My love, my life, my bride, my peerless beauty. She is come at last – at last – and all is gas and gaiters!’
Nicholas Nickleby, by Charles Dickens, 1839. A mad old gentleman who has been paying his addresses to Mrs Nickleby arrives precipitously down the chimney of an upstairs chamber dressed only in his underwear. Miss La Creevy comes into the room and the man mistakes her for Mrs Nickleby. The mad gentleman had immediately before this called for ‘bottled lightning, a clean tumbler, and a corkscrew’, for ‘a thunder sandwich’ and for ‘a fricassee of boot-tops and goldfish sauce’. ‘All gas and gaiters’ was clearly designed by Dickens to be another incomprehensible utterance of similar kind.
Despite its being nonsense (or perhaps because it was), all is gas and gaiters became a well-known interjection. The sense – as you will realize – is of a most satisfactory state of affairs. This is what Wodehouse meant by it, in common with other writers of his time.
He shook his head. ‘What I want to say – what I have been wanting for the past twenty-four hours to say to every man, woman, and child I met – is “Mabel and I are betrothed, and all is gas and gaiters.”
Trent’s Last Case, by E. C. Bentley, 1913, published in the US as The Woman in Black. Bentley was irritated by the infallibility of Sherlock Holmes in Conan Doyle’s stories and conceived this book as an antidote, in effect a send-up of the genre, in which the convincing solution worked out by his gentleman sleuth Philip Trent was proved wrong in the end.
But another sense grew up in the twentieth century in which gaiters was a metaphor for senior clergy – such as bishops and archbishops – because of their traditional dress that included those garments, and gas alluded to their supposedly meaningless eloquence. So all gas and gaiters can mean mere verbiage or pompous nonsense.
A BBC television and radio programme in the late 1960s had the title All Gas and Gaiters, about the goings-on at a cathedral, starring Robertson Hare and Derek Nimmo, for which an alternative title was suggested by a wag at the time: ‘fun with the clergy’. This brought the phrase back into usage for a while.
Q. I was in a bookstore looking to spend some of the gift certificates I got when I retired from teaching and came across a priced-down book on word histories. I looked it over and came to the expression get someone’s goat. According to the book, it used to be known that putting a goat in the stall of a horse would quieten the horse and make it more docile, but if someone wanted to irritate another person, he would steal the goat, creating trouble in the home of its owner. This explanation struck me as being in the same class of etymology as Ship High in Transit, Port Out Starboard Home and For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge. Please put the author right and me out of my misery.
A. It’s a perplexing expression. To get somebody’s goat means you’re annoying or irritating them. It’s first recorded from the US in the early twentieth century, but is now known wherever English is spoken.
The bit that has really got my goat is that that Minister chose to attack their integrity.
Hawke’s Bay Today, Hastings, New Zealand, 23 February 2008.
The earliest known reference to it is in a book, Life in Sing Sing, of 1904, in which goat is glossed as prison slang meaning anger. Examples begin to appear in US newspapers in the following years:
The crowd simply got his goat, to which many far more seasoned players than Knight have succumbed, not only here, but in nearly every city in both big league circuits.
Philadelphia Inquirer, 6 October 1907.
In 1910, Jack London included it in a letter: ‘Honestly, I believe I’ve got Samuels’ goat! He’s afraid to come back’, and later used it in several of his books. The saying became common in the next decade and reached the UK no later than 1916, when it featured in Punch.
The most common story to explain the phrase – the one on which your book provides a muddled variation – was promoted by H. L. Mencken and relates to horse racing in North America. It was said to have been common practice to put a goat in a stall with a skittish thoroughbred racehorse to help calm it. Enterprising villains capitalized on this by gambling on the horse to lose and then stealing the goat. I agree that a substantial desire to suspend one’s disbelief is needed to accept this story at face value.
Other people have tried to identify it in some way with scapegoat, have seen it as a variant form of goad, have linked it with an old French phrase prendre la chèvre (literally, ‘to take the goat’, but idiomatically to offend somebody), and suggested that the tendency of irritable billy goats to butt people could have associated the animals with anger in people’s minds. But evidence is lacking for all of them.
Q. What the heck does gibus mean? I read it in a Lord Peter Wimsey mystery. From context it might be an article of clothing, a type of hat perhaps, but I find no mention of it in any of my dictionaries.
A. That’s not surprising. It’s one of those words that have gone out of the language because the things they refer to are now not used, though gibus is still to be found in several British dictionaries.
Was this what you came across?
A quarter of an hour late, Mr Bredon emerged from his seclusion. As she had expected, he was in evening dress and looking, she thought, very much the gentleman. She obliged by working the lift for him. Mr Bredon, the ever-polite, expanded and assumed his gibus during the descent, apparently for the express purpose of taking it off to her when he emerged.
Murder Must Advertise, by Dorothy L. Sayers, 1933. Mr Bredon is, of course, Lord Peter Wimsey in disguise.
The unknowing reader will be puzzled what the object was and how it might be expanded while in a lift. You’re spot on with your guess. It’s a type of hat. More precisely, it’s a species of top hat, whose crown can be folded down flat with the brim by means of an ingenious arrangement of rods and springs. The general name for them is opera hats or crush hats. Some writers identify the gibus with the chapeau bras, one designed to be carried under the arm, but the gibus was never used like that.
The gibus, often with an initial capital letter, was named after the Frenchman Antoine Gibus, who invented it while based in London; it was also known in French as a chapeau claque, from the noise it made when it opened. There is disagreement about dates, because he’s not well recorded – some references say Gibus created it in 1823, others 1812; my Petit Robert dictionary gives 1834 for the first use of the hat’s name in French, which may also have been the date at which it was patented in that country.
Such hats became popular. Top hats at the time were very tall and they were cumbersome to carry; theatre cloakrooms could overflow with the hats of a whole audience. You could instead fold a gibus down and slip it under your seat.
The word often turns up in English works of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the time that Dorothy L. Sayers was writing, it was going out of style, as H. G. Wells noted in a minor work of 1929, The Autocracy of Mr Parham (‘His Gibus hat, a trifle old-fashioned in these slovenly times’). If you ever saw the film Top Hat, you may remember that Fred Astaire popped open a collapsible top hat as part of a routine. That was of the Gibus type.
So far as I know, its first appearance in English is this:
Ask little Tom Prig, who is there in all his glory, knows everybody, has a story about every one; and, as he trips home to his lodgings in Jermyn Street, with his gibus-hat and his little glazed pumps, thinks he is the fashionablest young fellow in town, and that he really has passed a night of exquisite enjoyment.
A Book of Snobs, by William Makepeace Thackeray, 1848. It had originally been published anonymously in Punch between March 1846 and February 1847 as a series of articles with the title The Snobs of England. By One of Themselves, not altogether a false statement.
Q. There’s a word that I keep hearing here in the US that I’ve not encountered before: gobsmacked. In print and on radio, it’s heard used as a colourful word to connote being flabbergasted or absolutely astounded. It feels British. Is that right?
A. It is. Gobsmacked is one of a set that includes gobstruck and the verb gobsmack formed from the adjective. It combines gob, mouth, and smacked. It is indeed much stronger than merely being surprised: it’s used for something that leaves you totally speechless, or otherwise stops you dead in your tracks. It may suggest the rather theatrical gesture of clapping a hand over the mouth as a way to show extreme surprise, or it may be based on the idea that something is as unexpected as suddenly being hit in the face.
‘No,’ said Alf, clicking his fingers, ‘we do have a player we can field!’ ‘Who?’ He pointed at me. ‘Thursday!’ I was gobsmacked. I hadn’t played for over eight years.
Something Rotten, by Jasper fforde, 2004, in which Thursday Next saves the day in the Swindon superhoop final of the World Croquet League, thereby defeating the machinations of the dastardly Goliath Corporation.
I popped into the local Marks & Spencer the other evening to buy something. The girls on the check-out were completely gobsmacked when I just turned up with my basket.
Guardian,17 May 2008. Cherie Blair relishes her new-found freedom from the constraints of being a prime minister’s wife, while being chuffed with her continuing celebrity.
It comes from northern dialect, most probably popularized through television programmes set in Liverpool or Manchester, where it was common long before it was written down. One of its earliest appearances in print was in Jeffrey Miller’s Street Talk – The Language of Coronation Street of 1986, which was created to help those North American viewers who were addicted to this Manchester soap, and who probably, but with luck only temporarily, believed that everyone in England went around saying blimey O’Reilly, ecky thump, and same to you with knobs on!
It’s an obvious derivation of an existing term, since gob, originally from Scotland and the north of England, has been a dialect and slang term for the mouth for 400 years (often in insulting phrases like shut your gob! to tell somebody to be quiet). It possibly goes back to a Scottish Gaelic word meaning a beak or a mouth, which has also bequeathed us the verb gob, meaning to spit. Another form is gab, from which we get gift of the gab.
The phrase came out of the working-class slang of football terraces (it appeared in print first in the Guardian in February 1985 in a report of an encounter with the famous footballer Sir Stanley Matthews, in which it was implied that it was even then 40 years old). It was taken up shortly afterwards by the broadsheet newspapers (such as The Times, The Sunday Times and the Independent as well as the Guardian) and various politicians, who used it to display their demotic credentials. It has since travelled to such countries as the US and Australia. William Safire commented in The New York Times in 2004 that ‘the locution is sweeping the English world’.
Q. Although the meaning is quite clear to us and examples of use are readily available on the web, so far we have not been able to locate the expression in any dictionary, let alone discover how it came about! Why green-ink letter?
A. I knew immediately what you mean by a green-ink letter, or one written by a member of the green-ink brigade, the form which is more common. They are terms largely restricted to Britain, though I’ve come across a couple of isolated references in American publications.
They refer to a particular kind of letter writer, who may variously claim he or she is the victim of injustice, or who composes long and vehement complaints against a person or organization, or who believes that a numerical calculation based on the name of the prime minister shows him to be an agent of the devil, or who puts forward a thesis which, if adopted, will inevitably lead to world peace.
Now it is quite impossible to prove to the people who write to me in green ink, complaining that the Pope and the Queen Mother are putting thought-rays into their heads from outer space, that His Holiness and Her Majesty are doing no such thing.
Bernard Levin, writing in The Times, 20 January 1987.
In most cases, the expression is figurative, the key characteristic being the eccentricity or disturbed reasoning of the individuals, not their actual use of green ink. Or indeed their writing of letters:
Sipping coffee in the House of Lords, [Lord] Lawson bristles at the charge that his book is nothing more than an upmarket green ink letter from an ill-informed retiree.
Guardian, 3 May 2008. The book was An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming, in which Nigel Lawson, a former Chancellor of the Exchequer, took a sceptical view of the conventional wisdom on the subject.
I’m sure that the term arose in journalism, though – like you – I can find no information about exactly when. I’ve asked several senior journalists of my acquaintance about it. They all know the expression. Some claim to remember receiving letters of the type in their younger days, while others deny literal green-ink letters ever existed. But they all think the phrases were coined relatively recently to reflect journalistic experience or folklore.
An earlier reference, less direct, is from Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1953). The hero gets letters from a person purporting to be an editor of a learned journal, ‘ill-written in green ink’. The implication is that green ink is a sign of mental instability (the writer turns out to be an academic thief).
In the civil service and certain of the more bureaucratic professions, the use of green ink was once restricted to senior staff, so that juniors receiving a note written or annotated in green ink would know immediately that it was to be given priority. Green ink has also been used for proofing, because it shows up better against black text. It may be that deranged writers of green-ink letters used green because they thought that their letters would command more immediate attention or they would stand out from other correspondence. The suggestion that at one time all senior civil servants were thought to be deranged is one we may discount.
The term can hardly refer to the emotion mentioned in an article that appeared in several US newspapers in 1970 (here from the Modesto Bee of California): ‘If a girl writes you a letter in green ink, young fellow, do not treat it lightly. It is supposed to convey eternal love.’
Q. My twin brother recently brought back from an arduous medical congress on Grenada a splendid bottle of rum, which bore an equally splendid story that the origin of the name of the daily ration of grog served to British seamen was to be found in that island, and was derived from the brand with which the casks were marked, namely GROG, or Georgius Rex Old Grenada. The George in question is said to be George III. Does this story hold any water?
A. No. Nor rum either. However, the real story sounds even less likely, though the experts are pretty much convinced it is true.
Parts of the bottle’s tale are correct, though. The ration of rum mixed with water that was once served to sailors on board British warships was indeed called grog. And the rum did come from the West Indies – the custom of serving it instead of other strong spirits such as brandy began in 1687, following the British capture of Jamaica.
In 1740, Vice Admiral Edward Vernon was commanding officer of the British naval forces in the West Indies during the conflict with Spain that was weirdly named the War of Jenkins’ Ear, after Robert Jenkins; he claimed that in 1731 he had had an ear sliced off during an encounter with the Spanish guarda costa in the Caribbean (it was believed by some at the time that Jenkins’ ear was intact and hidden beneath his wig). Vernon was so concerned about the bad effects of the rum ration that he issued an order that in future it was to be served diluted:
To Captains of the Squadron! Whereas the Pernicious Custom of the Seamen drinking their Allowance of Rum in Drams, and often at once, is attended by many fatal Effects to their Morals as well as their Health, the daily allowance of half a pint a man is to be mixed with a quart of water, to be mixed in one Scuttled Butt kept for that purpose, and to be done upon Deck, and in the presence of the Lieutenant of the Watch, who is to see that the men are not defrauded of their allowance of Rum.
Order to Captains No 349, issued on board HMS Burford at Port Royal, Jamaica in August 1740. The usual allowance in the following century was a pint of rum a day, served in two halves, at 12 noon and 6 pm; it became known as three-water grog, because of the ratio of one part rum to three parts water. Scuttled butt, by the way, is the origin of scuttlebutt, meaning gossip (see p. 258).
One may presume the tars were not best pleased by this, not least considering the foul stuff notionally called water that was usually available on board ship (the Admiral said graciously later in his order that men might, if they had the money, buy sugar or limes to make the water more palatable to them).
The men, as was their custom, had already given Vernon a nickname. His was Old Grogram, shortened to Old Grog, because on deck in rough weather he wore a cloak made of a coarse fabric called grogram, a mixture of silk with mohair or wool, often stiffened with gum. (Its name is from French gros grain, coarse grain.) So it was a short step to naming the diluted drink grog.
Until recently, no contemporary example of grog has been found, which suggests that the story ought to be dismissed as no more than another folk tale about word origins. However, Stephen Gorenson of Duke University has turned up this:
The next Day, we met a Spanish Sloop from Cadiz, going into the Havaana, who told us of the Peace: I cursed him for coming in our Way, for we should have gone and taken all the Galleons else and been as rich as Princes. I am sure we deserved it, for we lived at Short Allowance all the Cruize, and but two Quarts of Water a Day, to make it hold out in Hopes of meeting them (but short Allowance of Grog was worst of all) and now we have brought this Prize here, we are told she will be given up to the Spaniards again, so we have fought them for nothing.
In an article headed An exact Account of the late Action fought between Admiral Knowles and the Spanish Admiral, taken from the Jamaica Gazette, which was reprinted in the Whitehall Evening Post or London Intelligencer of 31 January 1749. The Havaana is the way Havana was described at the time. Admiral Charles Knowles was then commanding the Cornwall. With two other ships, he had unavailingly engaged the Spanish treasure fleet off Cuba on 1 October 1748, for which he was court-martialled in December 1749 and sentenced to be reprimanded. He later became governor of Jamaica, causing great disturbances when he insisted on moving the capital from Spanish Town to Kingston. In November 1747, he had been responsible for what became known as the Knowles Riot as a result of his over-eager empressment of men in Boston for his depleted ship. One writer noted sourly that you could tell where Knowles was at any moment by checking where riots erupted.Within the Royal Navy it was certainly believed to be the origin, to judge from this:
The sacred robe which Vernon wore Was drenched within the same; And hence his virtues guard our shore, And Grog derives its name.
Lines written by Dr Thomas Trotter, the surgeon of HMS Berwick, on board ship in early August 1781.
The term was broadened by landlubbers who were ill-conversant with naval customs to mean any strong drink, though in Australia and New Zealand it can also mean beer. Groggy, a word first recorded in the West Indies in 1770, came from grog to mean a person overcome by strong liquor; later its meaning expanded to include anybody who was unsteady and dazed for any reason.
Q. What is the origin of the term grub for food?
A. You might not like to know that it’s the same word as the one we use for caterpillars or other insect larvae, though you will be relieved to hear that it has nothing to do with actually eating them.
Then there’s all that lovely grub you can line your stomach with – no wonder this is such a popular port of call, for both discerning drinkers and eaters (I can particularly recommend the home-made curries of the day).
Liverpool Echo, 16 November 2006. Lovely grub is a catchphrase from the Second World War, still to be heard.
The source is an old Germanic word meaning to dig, which is also the source of grave. The verb to grub came first in English, around 1300, and meant just what it still does: to break up the surface of the ground or to clear the ground of roots and stumps. Derived from it is our adjective grubby for somebody or something dirty and the Australian grub for a person who is unclean or who has messy habits.
The connection with food is the idea of animals foraging. In their wild state, for example, pigs grub for edible roots and the like. The larval sense comes from this, because grubs often feed in leaf litter or around roots. The slang sense of human food appears around the middle of the seventeenth century and is also linked to the figurative idea of grubbing in the ground for something to eat. The two ideas were neatly combined in the US mining slang term grub-stake, for food and equipment provided to a prospector. Grub has remained slangy – at best informal – ever since.
Grub, by the way, has had several other slang senses that have not survived, such as that for a dwarfish, mean, slovenly sort of person, or someone of small abilities who can survive only by the most menial sort of work. Grub Street was a development:
GRUBSTREET, originally the name of a street in Moorfields in London, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems; whence any mean production is called Grubstreet.
A General Dictionary of the English Language, by Samuel Johnson, 1755. The street was possibly named after a man named Grubbe. Despite Johnson’s implication, it was officially renamed Milton Street only in 1830. Grub Street, as we now write it, had become a collective term (always more a state of mind than a physical location) for such drudges and their products by the beginning of the eighteenth century – hence the short-lived sense of grub in that century for an impoverished author or needy scribbler.Q. I have, for some time, been fascinated by disgruntled. How may you be disgruntled if you are not already gruntled? I do not know how to be gruntled and I’ve not been able to find the word in the dictionaries I’ve examined. Any thoughts about them?
A. Any mention of gruntled is likely to bring this to mind:
He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.
The Code of the Woosters, by P. G. Wodehouse, 1938. In which we meet the magistrate Sir Watkyn Bassett and the fascist would-be dictator Roderick Spode, by whom Wodehouse is guying Sir Oswald Mosley; Spode’s organization was the Black Shorts, because all the shirts had been taken (‘Footer bags, you mean?’ said Bertie Wooster. ‘How perfectly foul.’) There is much complicated comedy involving sundered lovers, a leather-covered notebook and a cow-creamer. The code of the Woosters, it transpires, amounts to ‘never let a pal down’.
If you’re the opposite of disgruntled, the implication is that you’re pleased, satisfied and contented. Wodehouse invented this sense and has been quoted or flatteringly imitated many times since, almost always humorously:
Our Terry does seem to have had something of a sense of humour failure about the whole exercise this year; he was worryingly less than gruntled, for a start, by Dustin’s reference to the disputed territory of his scalp; Wogan has never conceded that he wears a wig.
Daily Mail, 27 May 2008.
The assumption behind it is that putting dis- on the front of a word makes it negative in meaning in some way, as in disappear, discontent, disconnect, dishonest, and dozens of others. Adding dis- is an active way of making new words – it has been used in recent decades to create disinformation, disambiguate and many others. So if you take the dis- off, people assume, you turn the word positive in sense.
Sometimes, however – very rarely and only in old words – dis- is what the grammarians call an intensifier: it makes an existing sense stronger. For example, the unusual word disannul was used in the sense ‘to make null and void, bring to nothing, abolish’ and dissever means ‘to divide, separate, disjoin’. A third example is our disgruntled, a state of being that’s more than merely gruntled.
Time to introduce a second grammatical term: frequentative. This is an ancient trick of word formation, now obsolete, in which an ending created a verb to suggest some action is often repeated. The one most often used was -le. So crackle is the frequentative of crack, gamble of game (in the wagering sense) and sparkle of spark. Most examples are so old that they’re based on verbs that no longer exist, at least in the sense in which they were used when the ending was attached to them; others are disguised by changes in spelling.
Gruntle is the frequentative of grunt. The first sense of gruntle was of a repeated grunt, especially the conversational noise that pigs make in company.
After this his speech went quite away, and he could speak no more than a Swine or a Bear. Therefore, like one of them, he would gruntle and make an ugly noise, according as he was offended, or pleased, or would have any thing done.
The Life and Death of Mr Badman, by John Bunyan, 1680. He intended this work to be a companion to the first part of Pilgrim’s Progress, in which instead he would show the travel of an allegorical person, personified as Mr Badman, from this world to Hell.
Gruntle appeared in the fifteenth century; by the end of the next century it had begun to be used to mean grumbling or complaining. I think of it as old-retainer mumble, the noise that someone fed up with their condition will make under their breath all the time.
If we put the intensifier and the frequentative together in one word, disgruntled has its current meaning. Taking the intensifier off ought not to turn it into a word for a pleasant emotion, despite Wodehouse and his modern imitators.
Q. I am moved to inquire if you might know of the origin of the phrase gussied up. I recall hearing it used by my Nebraska grandmother in the 1940s in reference to the way a woman looked when she had obviously given extra time and attention to her appearance, including special, or dressy, clothing and make-up. When female family members were getting ready to attend a special occasion and had donned finery not normally worn on a day-to-day basis, she would say ‘My, aren’t you all gussied up!’
A. As you say, something that’s been gussied up has been made more attractive. However, the phrase is often used for something that’s been done over in a showy or gimmicky way, so it’s often far from complimentary. The British equivalent in this case would be tarted up.
‘He’s gussied up more than a twenty-dollar whore,’ Anytime said.
Holmes on the Range, by Steve Hockensmith, 2006. Gustav ‘Old Red’ Amlingmeyer, a cowboy of 1893, comes across the Sherlock Holmes story The Red-Headed League and decides to apply the precepts of the great detective.
The expression is definitely American. This is the first example I’ve found:
The young Shipping Clerk used to fly to his Kennel and get himself all Gussied up and then edge into the Parlor and turn the Music for Miss Livingstone, who looked to him like Lily Langtry and sounded like Adelina Patti.
Out of Class B into the King Row, a short story by George Ade, included in his collection Knocking the Neighbors, 1912. It was first published in syndicated form in US newspapers on 17 March that year. It was one of a long-running series called Fables in Slang, which weren’t written so much in slang as in the colloquial vernacular of the time. George Ade was a famous humorist who specialized in gentle satires that often featured the little man or the experiences of the country boy in the city. The capitalization of nouns, weird to our modern eyes, is presumably intended to imitate the standard usage of earlier generations.
Suggestions about its origin include a connection with gusset, a piece of fabric sewn into a garment to strengthen or enlarge a part of it, which might have indicated that it was more fancy than usual. Until recently, gussied up was thought to date from the early 1950s, so some years ago I proposed a link with the American tennis player ‘Gorgeous Gussie’ Moran, who is best remembered for appearing at Wimbledon in 1949 wearing frilly panties, which caused considerable interest and controversy. As I have since found the George Ade 1912 quotation, I have refuted myself, a disconcerting experience.
Both the Oxford English Dictionary and The Historical Dictionary of American Slang point to an earlier use of Gussie (or Gussy) as a term for an effeminate or weak person, which came into being in the US at the end of the nineteenth century. It was used in Australia from about the same period to describe a male homosexual. It looks as though any male who took care with his appearance or who wore something more dressy than the norm was suspected of unnatural inclinations, was called a gussie and was said to be gussied up. It is noteworthy that the three early examples I’ve found – down to the 1930s – refer to men, not women.
Early on, Gussie was usually written with an initial capital letter, which suggests it comes from the proper name Augustus. This name is one that many authors have linked to an effete or weak-willed man – think of P. G. Wodehouse’s Gussie Fink-Nottle, who wasn’t gay but otherwise fitted the stereotype.
We don’t need to look any further for the origin, I’d argue.
Q. My father-in-law often referred to something painful as giving me gyp. This does not seem to correlate with the other meaning of ‘cheat’. Any suggestions?
A. Give someone gyp is a moderately common expression, mainly restricted to the UK and Commonwealth:
The world’s greatest golfer took the title despite a knee injury which was giving him considerable gyp throughout.
Daily Telegraph, 17 June 2008. The golfer with the superlative is Tiger Woods.
My gut feeling is that it’s now mostly used by older people, though it does also appear in the broader sense of something that’s a nuisance or annoyance, a figurative pain:
Being stuck in heavy traffic behind a car with its driver holding a cellphone in one hand and steering with the other, or similar in an oncoming car, is enough to give anyone the gyp.
Rotorua Review, New Zealand, 20 June 2008.
This sense of pain is connected with a Yorkshire or Lakeland English dialect word, variously spelled gip or jip, that almost always appeared in the form ‘to give somebody or something jip’. It could mean to give a person or an object a sound thrashing (one example is of a man giving a carpet a beating with a stick in each hand), or generally to treat roughly or to cause pain, perhaps as a punishment.
We’re not certain where it comes from, but the English Dialect Dictionary gives one sense of the word as ‘to arouse to greater exertions by means of some sudden, unexpected action’. That fits with the suggestion in the Oxford English Dictionary that it’s a contracted form of gee-up, a conventionalized version of the cry one utters to get a horse to move. Since the cry has often been accompanied by mild physical hurt, either with a whip or by digging one’s heels into the horse’s flanks, it’s easy to see how an association with pain arose.
The other meaning you give, to cheat, has no connection. It’s a derogatory term that arose in the US and which is sometimes said to be from gypsy. Gypsies were once thought to be from Egypt, though they actually have their origin in north-western India and arrived in Europe via Constantinople and the Balkans in the fifteenth century. The verb only began to appear in print near the end of the nineteenth century and took some time to become well known (it’s not in the 1913 edition of the Webster Unabridged Dictionary, for example). Most people who use gyp in this sense probably don’t associate it with gypsy, although some US dictionaries and newspaper style guides warn against using gyp as a verb because it may be considered to be a racial epithet.
There are several other senses of the word in various spellings, including the old dialect one of gip in the Shetland Islands and in Whitby in Yorkshire for gutting a fish. A college servant at the universities of Cambridge and Durham is a gyp; this word is also sometimes said to be from gypsy, though it may equally well come from the obsolete gippo, a menial kitchen servant; this once meant a man’s short tunic, from the obsolete French jupeau which – like the modern French jupe for a skirt – derives ultimately from Arabic. There’s also gyppy, as in gyppy tummy, a term for diarrhoea. This does have the same origin as gypsy – a mangled version of Egyptian. Gyppy tummy is noted by Eric Partridge as Second World War services slang for the ailment suffered by British forces in the North African campaign, and it was a phrase common in Britain after the war. It seems certain that gyppy was influenced in its creation by the pain sense of gyp, but also built on gyppy or gippy, a slang term for an Egyptian that can be traced back to Lord Kitchener’s army in Egypt in the 1880s.
Q. A friend was kind enough to refer to a poem I’d written as hackneyed. Before I take any action, it would be good to know the origin and exact meaning of the word!
A. Remonstration would be justified, though I would not advise physical violence.
Let us consider the geography of London. Hackney is now the name of an area embedded within the metropolis, north-east of the City. But if we take a large step back in time, say to the year 1300, Hackney was then a small village that lay on the west side of the River Lea but separated from it by a large area of marshland, which was to be commemorated about 550 years later by a music-hall song whose refrain went: ‘With a ladder and some glasses / You could see the Hackney Marshes, / If it wasn’t for the houses in between.’
The countryside around Hackney was pleasant, open, good-quality grassland, which became famous for the horses bred and pastured there. These were riding horses, ‘ambling horses’, as opposed to war horses (destriers) or draught horses. Hence hackney became the usual term for a horse of this type, bred for strength and endurance rather than looks. It’s now the standard name, adopted in the eighteenth century, for a breed of gentle and elegant horses that are mostly bred for harness work.
Because riding horses were often made available for hire, the word also came to refer, about the end of the fourteenth century, to any horse that was intended to be hired out. Later still, the emphasis shifted from ‘horse’ to ‘hire’: it came to be used for any passenger vehicle that was similarly available, especially the hackney coach or hackney carriage (even hackney-boat, by which Joseph Addison translated a Dutch term in 1711) and sometimes even more widely, as in hackney-woman or hackney-jade, a prostitute (no doubt with a knowing reference to ride). Hackney carriage became the usual term for a vehicle that plied for hire – London’s black taxis, and those in other cities, are still formally referred to in legislation by that title.
Horses of the hackney type were often worked heavily, in the nature of things hired out to all and sundry. So the word evolved in parallel with the previous sense to refer figuratively to a person who was overused to the point of drudgery:
At the office all the morning, where comes a damned summons to attend the Committee of Miscarriages to-day, which makes me mad, that I should by my place become the hackney of this Office, in perpetual trouble and vexation, that need it least.
Diary, Samuel Pepys, 11 February 1668. Pepys was then Secretary to the Navy Board and was continually being called to account over the mismanagement of the recent war with the Dutch, in which De Ruyter’s ships sailed up the River Medway and burned a number of English warships in Chatham Dockyard. In another entry four years earlier, Pepys used hackney in the sense of a carriage for hire.
Hackney was abbreviated about the start of the eighteenth century to hack, as in hack work; it was applied in particular to literary drudges who dashed off poor-quality writing to order; hence its modern application to journalists, who wear the title as a self-deprecatory badge of membership and honour.
Some years ago I came up with the idea of IQ points for journalists – no, not the usual measure of abstract intelligence, which let’s face it was always going to be a bit of a non-starter when applied to such alcohol-addled, trivia-obsessed types as us hacks.
Julie Burchill, in The Times, 30 July 2005.
Hackney horses were also widely available and commonly seen, to the extent that they became commonplace and unremarkable. So yet another sense evolved – for something used so frequently and indiscriminately as to have lost its freshness and interest, hence something stale, unoriginal or trite. The adjective hackneyed communicated this idea from about the middle of the eighteenth century on.
By the way, it was thought at one time that this whole set of words derived from the French haquenée, an ambling horse. The first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary considered this to be so, but modern French etymologists are sure that the French term was borrowed from the English place name around 1360, so great was the reputation of Hackney’s horses at the time.
Q. I was reading an article by Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper’s Magazine, in which he used the term hairbrained. I’d always assumed it was harebrained. Which is it, and how did it come about?
A. It would be easy to say the right answer is harebrained, because that’s the first form recorded and the reference is clearly to the apparently stupidly senseless behaviour of hares in the mating season (they’re not so different from humans, I note from long observation, but don’t let me side-track myself). Approach the term through mad March hares and you will get the idea.
One of my friends came up with this harebrained scheme to ride through all the counties in England in a few days and I told him it was ridiculous.
Pocklington Post, North Yorkshire, 23 May 2008.
So is hairbrained wrong? A search through newspaper archives shows that many journalists don’t agree: harebrained is only about twice as common as hairbrained in one database I searched, with thousands of examples of each. And even a quick look at the historical evidence gives one pause. The first example in the Oxford English Dictionary is dated 1548, and that has hare. But the second is from 1581, spelled hair. The editor who compiled the Oxford English Dictionary’s entry seems to have deliberately alternated examples in the two forms, since there’s roughly one of each cited from every century since.
The reason for this, at least in early years, was that hair was another way to spell hare. This spelling was preserved in Scotland into the eighteenth century. As a result, it’s hard to tell when people began to mistakenly write hairbrained instead of harebrained, in the belief that it referred to somebody who had a brain made of hair, or perhaps the size of a hair. When Sir Walter Scott used it in The Monastery in 1820 (‘If hairbrained courage, and an outrageous spirit of gallantry, can make good his pretensions to the high lineage he claims, these qualities have never been denied him’), he was perpetuating the Scots spelling, not making an error.
The current status of hairbrained is disputed: some style guides say that it should not be used, as does the Fourth Edition of the American Heritage Dictionary: ‘While hairbrained continues to be used and confused, it should be avoided in favor of harebrained which has been established as the correct spelling.’ Garner’s Modern American Usage dismisses it as a ‘common blunder’. The Third Edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage describes it as an erroneous form ‘which is still occasionally found’ (rather more often than that, Dr Burchfield, as my research shows). Other guides disagree, a case in point being Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage which says of hairbrained, ‘Our opinion based on the evidence is that it is established’.
At the very least, it’s an error of such antiquity that the patina of age has softened the hard edges of disfavour. My own feeling, however, is that it’s better to stick to harebrained; at least you have the original animal associations on your side with which to fight off critics.
Q. I’m a fan of Agatha Christie, and I have seen her use the phrase hairy at the heel several times. It sounds so terribly English, yet I’m unsure what it means, or its derivation. Any reflections would be welcome.
A. One example from her books is this:
The Colonel delivered himself of the opinion that Godfrey Burrows was slightly hairy at the heel, a pronouncement which baffled Poirot completely.
Murder in the Mews, by Agatha Christie, 1937, a story about Ms Christie’s Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. His little grey cells are understandably perplexed by this curious English idiom; his bafflement is a state he shares, I suspect, with most readers.
Walter James Macqueen-Pope made its meaning clearer in Back Numbers in 1954, in which he described someone as ‘a cad, a bounder, an outsider, hairy at the heel’. Putting it simply, such a person was ill-bred, not one of us.
You’re right to say it’s characteristically English, but it was a term more of clubland, the upper middle classes and the landed gentry than of people at large. It placed the speaker as much as the person being spoken about:
I can’t say I ever liked him, and I’ve once or twice had a row with him, for he used to bring his pals to shoot over Dalquharter and he didn’t quite play the game by me. But I know dashed little about him, for I’ve been a lot away. Bit hairy about the heels, of course. A great figure at local race-meetin’s, and used to toady old Carforth and the huntin’ crowd. He has a pretty big reputation as a sharp lawyer and some of the thick-headed lairds swear by him, but Quentin never could stick him. It’s quite likely he’s been gettin’ into Queer Street, for he was always specula-tin’ in horse flesh, and I fancy he plunged a bit on the Turf.
Huntingtower, by John Buchan, 1922. This extract sets the linguistic and social background beautifully. For the story behind Queer Street, see p. 24.
The reference to horse racing is spot on, because the term came out of bloodstock breeding. It used to be said that it was a sign of poor breeding if a horse had too much hair about the fetlocks. It didn’t take much to shift the saying, figuratively, to humans. Of course, it applied only to thoroughbred racehorses and to humans who aspired to belong to society’s equivalent: heavy working horses such as shires have very hairy heels, but then they’re common as muck.
The expression was rather variable, also appearing as hairy in the fetlocks, hairy round the heels, hairy-heeled, even at times simply hairy, though it doesn’t seem to be connected to any of the many other senses of that word. Dating-wise, its heyday was of the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. You can still find it on occasion, but it’s outmoded, a term solely of elderly upper-class men remembering their youth.
Q. Can you tell me the origin of the expression to hang fire? I came across it in a racing newspaper the other day, ‘That one can hang fire a bit under pressure, however, so the temptation to back him at longer odds should be resisted.’ It seems rather odd.
A. It’s a pleasure to report that, unlike so many expressions, this one is well understood.
It dates from a time when firearms were loaded and primed using a gunpowder charge poured from a flask, which was then ignited by a spark from a flint striking against an iron plate. Gunpowder was notoriously unreliable, partly because it varied a great deal in quality, but also because the slightest damp stopped it igniting properly. When this happened, the powder in the firearm smouldered instead of exploding and was said to hang fire.
It was a very curious kind of gun… sometimes it would hang fire, and then seem to recollect itself, and go off, maybe, just when you were going to take it down from your shoulder.
Boy Life; stories and readings selected from the works of William Dean Howells, and arranged for supplementary reading in elementary schools, edited by Percival Chubb, 1909.
This was highly dangerous, as you may imagine, because the remainder of the powder might explode at any time, perhaps while its owner was trying to clean the gun out and reload it. So to hang fire became an expression for some event that was slow in acting or of a person hesitating, usually with the inference that a matter of some importance was involved.
This expression should not be confused with the closely related flash in the pan for an ineffective effort or outburst. This referred to gunpowder that burned fiercely but ineffectually in the touch hole of a gun, without igniting the main charge. The result was a flash and some smoke, but the gun didn’t fire, and the ball didn’t actually go anywhere.
Q. Who is Larry and why is he happy?
A. It’s a neat question, but readers may need some background before I can address it.
The phrase happy as Larry seems to have originated in Australia and New Zealand:
We would be as happy as Larry if it were not for the rats.
Adventuring in Maoriland in the Seventies, by George Llewellyn Meredith. Though published only in 1935, his anecdotes and observations were written in the 1870s and this sentence is probably dated 1875.
Now that the adventure was drawing to an end, I found a peace of mind that all the old fogies on the river couldn’t disturb. I was as happy as Larry.
Such is life: being extracts from the diary of Tom Collins, by Joseph Furphy, writing as Tom Collins, published in 1903 in severely abridged form from a manuscript of 1220 pages that had been in existence since about 1897. The author called himself ‘half bushman and half bookworm’ and described the book as ‘offensively Australian’.
Australian (and New Zealand) English is fond of fanciful similes and outrageous phrases. Happy as Larry belongs with happy as a pig in shit and happy as a flea at a dog show, all meaning extremely happy, as opposed to obscurely fantastic descriptions of the opposite emotion, such as happy as a boxing kangaroo in fog time, happy as a bastard on father’s day and happy as a sick eel on a sandspit.
We could add happy as an etymologist with an unknown origin to this second set, because nobody knows the source of happy as Larry for certain. It might include the name of the nineteenth-century Australian boxer Larry Foley (1847–1917), though why he was especially happy nobody now seems able to say. Was he naturally gifted with a sunny disposition, or did he just win a lot of contests?
Another suggestion is that it comes from English dialect larrie, joking, jesting, a practical joke. A further possible link is with the Australian and New Zealand term larrikin for a street rowdy or young urban hooligan, recorded from the late 1860s but known especially in both countries from the 1880s onwards in reference to a specific subculture. Like other groups before and since, the larrikins had their own dress style, in their case very neat and rather severe, rather like the dudes in the US a little later. Their name may have come from another English dialect word, larrikin, for a mischievous youth, once known in Warwickshire and Worcestershire. Either of these could afterwards have been reinforced through a supposed connection with Larry Foley.
The expression is now known outside Australia and New Zealand:
He pointed out that an official in the Commons refreshment department, guilty of such ‘embezzlement’, would have been summarily dismissed. MPs who have been subject to the committee’s ‘punishments’ take their 15 minutes of pain and go around the House ‘as happy as Larry’, as Mr Field put it.
The Sunday Times, 3 February 2008.
Q. I mentioned to a work colleague here in the United States that my sister back in Britain would have my guts for garters if I didn’t send her a card, but she didn’t understand. Any ideas on the origins of this saying, sadly falling into disuse, it would seem?
A. Somehow I don’t think this one is going to go away soon, at least not to judge by its track record. This exaggerated threat may not be meant literally these days, merely implying that the speaker will take some unspecified but severe reprisal for unacceptable behaviour, but when it first appeared, around the end of the sixteenth century, it sounded horribly literal:
I’ll make garters of thy guts, thou villain.
The Scottish History of James the Fourth, by Robert Greene, c. 1590. Greene, a novelist and playwright, is best known today for having written the first contemporary reference to Shakespeare, as an ‘upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers’, though he also may have worked on the Henry VI plays or Titus Andronicus.
There were other expressions around this time, such as our guts should be about our ears, as well as the still-common to hate somebody’s guts. Guts for garters dropped out of literature after the eighteenth century, perhaps in deference to higher standards of decorum, though it never vanished from the spoken language, being kept alive in part by hard-shouting NCOs in the services. That the expression has persisted surely owes a lot to the alliteration of guts and garters.
It has risen somewhat in the social scale in recent times to become a macho phrase among some middle managers and to become noticeable, if not exactly common, in newspapers and books.
I was absolutely gutted, but I was actually more worried about what Gemma would say. I thought she would have my guts for garters but she didn’t have a go at me at all.
Salford Advertiser, 26 June 2008. The speaker lost the disk containing the couple’s recent wedding photos.
The fact that modern British men rarely wear garters, and that when they do they tend to call them sock suspenders, has not affected the popularity of the phrase one jot.
Q. In my office someone said they had a Heath Robinson solution to a problem, to the complete confusion of the international members of the team. Can you tell me who was Heath Robinson, and was everything he did makeshift and temporary?
A. A device or solution that’s Heath Robinson in nature is neither of these things but instead is simultaneously absurdly ingenious and impracticable:
It is true that the existing EU rulebook, the Nice treaty, is enough to keep things going, though there is a real danger that its Heath Robinson machinery and complex procedures will collapse under the sheer strain of an enlarged union.
Guardian, 30 May 2005.
William Heath Robinson was a gifted illustrator of the first half of the twentieth century. But his enduring fame, and the reason why his name entered the language early in his lifetime, was a result of the other side of his work – comic drawings. The typical Heath Robinson creation was a machine for carrying out some whimsical purpose, such as training cat burglars, or stretching spaghetti, or putting square pegs into round holes. His meticulously conceived and magnificently executed mechanisms were miracles of ineffective ingenuity. Every participant was intent on serious purposes while managing some aspect of an absurdly over-complicated construction of magnets, pulley wheels and conveyor belts, all linked and controlled by lengths of knotted string. Every part of his daft machines exhibited evidence of regular use over a long period, often amateurishly patched or repaired.
His name became slang as long ago as the early years of the First World War, as a result of a series of newspaper cartoons in which he mocked the enemy (such as harnessing the German Army to a goose to teach it to goose-step, or an attempt by the Germans to make the British troops cry by whittling onions under cover of night, a sarcastic reference to chemical warfare). The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography remarks of these cartoons: ‘The Germans (wearing the uniforms of the Franco-Prussian War) invented “frightful” means of teasing, discomfiting or embarrassing our troops who (looking scarcely less ridiculous) confounded them.’ Their fame quickly spread:
W Heath Robinson, the British cartoonist, keeps up his extraordinary jests upon the German methods of conducting war. Mr. Robinson is undoubtedly one of the oddest geniuses of our day. His infinite capacity for imagining grotesque details and combining them in a pleasing and artistic picture gives him a unique position. When, however, he draws inspiration from the peculiar forms of warfare by which the Germans are slaughtering his fellow countrymen, his calmness takes one’s breath away. Perhaps the strangest thing about it is that the English highly appreciate Mr. Robinson’s cartoons in the London Sketch, and laugh heartily at ‘the ridiculous methods employed by the scientific barbarians to kill them,’ as one Briton has expressed it.
The San Antonio Light, Texas, 3 October 1915.
In the US, the equivalent is a Rube Goldberg device, a term taken from the strip-cartoon creations of Reuben Goldberg that illustrated some unnecessarily complicated though ingenious procedure for carrying out a simple task:
Charles Jackson is accused by the state with using a Rube Goldberg device to break Leslie Betterton’s leg, in a complaint on file here today. Jackson is formally charged with assault by automobile. This is how Betterton’s leg was broken, according to the complaint: Jackson’s cement truck and another truck sideswiped; Jackson’s truck struck a car, caromed into another car which was parked, and the latter was pushed into the automobile in which Betterton was sitting.
The San Antonio Light, Texas, 19 December 1937.
Q. Do you have any idea of the origin of the term his nibs? I use it as a facetious way of referring to the ‘man of the house’, or sometimes even to my infant grandson, and I was wondering where it came from. I’m English, although I reside in the US, and my American-raised daughter questioned the use of the expression, which she didn’t know.
A. It’s a mock title used to refer to a self-important man, especially one in authority.
Stollen only became enriched with butter in 1647, when the Pope got involved (it took a letter to his nibs from Duke Albrecht to get permission to include butter in the recipe during what was then a time of fasting).
Observer, 9 March 2007.
It’s modelled after the pattern of references to the British aristocracy, such as his lordship. It’s first recorded in print about 1820, but is presumably older. Most sources say something like ‘origin obscure’, a fair description. Several closely similar words have been around at various times – nab, knap, neb and nob (plus knob), as well as nib. It seems the vowel was highly fluid and that all the words may in fact be connected, though the evidence is unclear. Bear with me while I particularize.
There’s some evidence that nibs is a variant form of nabs (his nabs is a slightly older variant form of his nibs) and that both may have an origin in the ancient Germanic word neb that meant a beak or nose, or more generally, the protruding bit of anything (nib for the business end of a pen is from the same root). A knap – by far the oldest of the set – was the summit of a hill or a sudden steep rise; another sense of nab at one time was a promontory or a steep hill. Knob was a slang term for the head in the eighteenth century. Nib itself was once used as a slang term for a gentleman, as was nob, another old slang word that’s still to be heard, which may be just a variation on knob.
Perhaps the idea behind it is that those supposed social superiors may have been so elevated in self-importance that they had their noses in the air or were stuck up?
Q. I have long been puzzled by the expression Hobson’s choice. Was there ever a real Hobson involved?
A. There was indeed a real Mr Hobson, who has bequeathed us this expression meaning a choice that is no choice at all.
Buyers get a choice of three doors or five, and Hobson’s choice of a three-cylinder 989cc petrol engine.
Aberdeen Press & Journal, 30 July 2003.
Thomas Hobson was the proprietor of an extremely prosperous carrier’s business that ran between Cambridge and London, which he took over when his father of the same name died in 1568. One edition of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says that he ‘conducted the business with extraordinary success, and amassed a handsome fortune’. He continued to travel to London in person until shortly before his death in 1631, aged about 86. John Milton wrote two poems about him shortly after his death, in one of which he said that he died of enforced idleness, having been prevented from travelling because of an outbreak of plague: ‘And surely Death could never have prevailed, / Had not his weekly course of carriage failed.’
However, it wasn’t his carrier’s firm that gave rise to the term, but his other business of hiring out horses. Many of his customers were undergraduates; these young men often treated his horses very badly, driving them too hard and wearing them out. He kept telling them that they’d get to London just as quickly if they didn’t push mounts so hard, but that had no effect. So, to give his horses some time to recover, he instituted a rota. The most recently returned horse was put at the back of the stable queue, and customers had to take the next one available at the front, which was therefore the most rested. There were no exceptions to the rule: if the customer didn’t like the horse he was offered, he could take his custom elsewhere. So Hobson’s choice was no choice at all.
When a Man came for a Horse, he was led into the Stable, where there was great Choice, but he obliged him to take the Horse which stood next to the Stable-Door; so that every Customer was alike well served according to his Chance, and every Horse ridden with the same Justice: From whence it became a Proverb, when what ought to be your Election was forced upon you, to say, ‘Hobson’s Choice’.
Richard Steele, in The Spectator, 10 October 1712. Steele is using election here in the sense of ‘choice’. Note the eighteenth-century preference for capitalizing nouns, which we’ve come across before and which makes prose of the period look a little like modern German.
Some people today use it to mean a poor set of choices, none of which they like. This is an understandable extension of the original sense, but it would be nice to keep it reined in to the original idea of ‘no choice at all’, if only to commemorate the late Mr Hobson.
Q. I know what to hoodwink means, but cannot imagine how it came about. There seems no connection between its meaning and the individual words it is made up from. But then, I’m Dutch, so what do I know?
A. If asked, most native English speakers would be confused by this one.
The original sense of hoodwink was to prevent somebody seeing by covering their head with a hood. Our main sense now is a figurative one derived from it, to deceive or trick (as we might also say, pull the wool over someone’s eyes), which appeared in the early seventeenth century.
A photograph of the grinning couple, taken in Panama, surfaced four years after he disappeared. They had hoodwinked police and insurance companies.
Daily Record, Glasgow, 24 July 2008. This refers to the notorious case of the canoe couple, in which the husband faked his death in a staged accident; both were jailed in 2008.
There’s no problem with the first part – a hood is just a hood – but wink here isn’t in the sense we use now of closing and opening one eye quickly as a signal of some sort. When it first appeared, in Old English in the form wincian, it meant to close both eyes for some reason, or to blink, or to close the eyes in sleep (hence forty winks).
A hoodwink was usually an opaque hood that covered the whole head. It deprived somebody of the power of sight as though they had closed their eyes. Hoodwinks were used to cover the heads of prisoners.
But my escort gave the password, each of the guards questioned me separately, and we exchanged recognition signals. I got the impression that they were a little disappointed that they couldn’t let me have it; they seemed awfully eager. When they were satisfied, a hoodwink was slipped over my head and I was led away.
If this Goes On—, by Robert Heinlein, 1940, an SF short story that tells of a theocratic US society, ruled by a prophet, that began in 2012 with the election of a backwoods preacher named Nehemiah Scudder to be US president, after which elections ceased.
Incidentally, when we say that somebody winks at some offence, meaning that they connive at it, we’re also using a relic of the same sense. And long before wink became a flicker of one eyelid it meant a significant glance. If you find something written before the nineteenth century that says one person winked at another, a glance is what’s meant – both indicate that the person is sending a message, but the method is slightly different.
Q. I am an English teacher and we had a poser today – where does the word hullaballoo come from? No one in our staffroom could give the answer – can you solve the mystery?
A. The sound is evocative of the uproar, noisy confusion, fuss or commotion to which it refers:
Jack had a good strong voice, but it was almost drowned out by the hullabaloo in the theatre. Such howls, such cheers!
Life Mask, by Emma Donoghue, 2005, a novel set in the eighteenth century, a fictionalized account of a supposed triangular relationship between the Earl of Derby, an actress and a widowed sculptress.
The usual spelling now is hullabaloo, but it has been written in so many ways down the years that that has to be considered arbitrary. This is its first known appearance:
I would there was a blister on this plaguy tongue of mine for making such a hollo-ballo, that I do.
The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves, by Tobias Smollett, 1762.
Several explanations have been made for where it comes from. Some dictionaries just say it’s a rendering of a semi-inarticulate cry. But the Oxford English Dictionary suggests it might come from a call of the hunting field, variously said and written – among other ways – as halloo, hullo, hilloa and hollo. The first in this set turns up in view-halloo (first recorded in the spelling view-hollow at the end of the eighteenth century), the shout of a huntsman on seeing a fox break cover. All of these are related to our modern greeting hello, which first appeared in the US near the beginning of the nineteenth century.
A French connection is also plausible since that language has the closely similar hurluberlu for a person who is scatterbrained or behaves in a bizarre manner. François Rabelais used it first, in 1564, as the name of an imaginary saint, two centuries before the first appearance of hullabaloo in English. Unfortunately, French etymologists are no more sure of the genesis of hurluberlu than English ones are of hullabaloo. One suggestion is that it was borrowed from the even older English hurly-burly, with the closely similar senses of strife, uproar or tumult, known from about 1530.
FIRST WITCH: When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning, or in rain?
SECOND WITCH: When the hurly-burly’s done. When the battle’s lost, and won.
Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 1, by William Shakespeare, 1606.
Hurly-burly is a contracted form of hurling and burling, where a hurling is an even older term for a commotion or disturbance, based on the verb hurl. Burling never existed on its own – it’s no more than a rhyming variation on the first word for emphasis and rhythm, as happened also in namby-pamby, itsy-bitsy and lots of other reduplicated terms.
The image of a word ping-ponging across the Channel, changing its form as it travels, may seem bizarre, but there’s nothing intrinsically idiotic about it. The worst one can say of it is that it may not be true.
Q. It has been my understanding that Ivy League referred to a sporting competition held long ago between four US colleges, so ivy was formed by saying the Roman numerals IV. I’m now told that the ivy is that which actually grows on the walls of these ancient universities. I took this ivy explanation as being folk etymology. Would you know which is correct?
A. There has been much confusion, but the creeper is undoubtedly meant.
The Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins of 1962 gave more details of the supposed origin from the Roman numerals than did other works, calling it ‘a plausible theory’. It quoted a letter from a Columbia graduate who said that it refers to a nineteenth-century athletic competition between Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Princeton. Though a meeting did take place in 1873 between four colleges (though not those four) to try to fix the rules of college football, only three attended and no formal link was established.
However, Ivy League did start as a sporting term:
The so-called ‘Ivy league’ which is in the process of formation stage among a group of the older eastern universities now seems to have welcomed Brown into the fold and automatically assumed the proportions of a ‘big eight.’
San Antonio Light, Texas, 7 February 1935. The eight colleges were Brown, Columbia, Princeton, Yale, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania.
Teams from the Military Academy at West Point and the Naval Academy joined later but dropped out again in 1940. Ever since then, the league has been made up of the original eight college teams, a group that became official in 1954. You can attach the numbers ten or eight to the group, but not four.
The earliest form of the phrase was a little different:
The fates which govern [football] play among the ivy colleges and academic boiler-factories alike seem to be going around the circuit.
Stanley Woodward, in the New York Herald Tribune, 16 October 1933.
It has been argued that ivy league was formed from this by another sports writer connected with the same paper, Caswell Adams. Charles Earle Funk, in Heavens To Betsy! and Other Curious Sayings (1955), reprints a letter from Adams in which he recalls, a little vaguely, that he coined the phrase ‘in the mid-thirties’, but says Woodward borrowed it, crediting him. However, no supporting evidence is known to exist and Adams’s claim to its invention remains unproved.
These days the sporting associations are only a small part of the concept that we understand by the term Ivy League. For many, it has become a disparaging term for long-established eastern US universities that exhibit academic excellence, selectivity in admissions, and a reputation for social elitism. Their great age is integral to the term, since there’s no doubt that it is the ivy on the college walls that led Stanley Woodward to create the term ivy college in 1933. But he was surely borrowing an association that had long been made between ivy and ancient institutions of learning:
He had his ticket and a sleeper reservation – it was fifteen hours’ journey back to the old ivy-covered halls which had grown dear in his memory.
Red and Black, by Grace Smith Richmond, 1919.
Q. On a British internet discussion group, the question came up – why do people say Jesus H. Christ? It never seems to be any other letter. It sounds American, but what does it stand for and where did it originate? Holy seems to be a strong candidate, or could it be from ‘Hallowed be Thy (middle) name’?
A. Some consider it blasphemous, but it’s a relatively mild oath in the US that indicates exasperation with some malfunctioning piece of equipment or frustrating situation. It’s familiar to most of us here in the UK through the influence of American films and books, though we don’t use it much.
Don’t you know anything, woman? Jesus is the new cool word. Anytime you want to swear, you can say Jesus. Or Jesus Christ. Or if you’re really pissed off you can say Jesus H. Christ.
Hollow Be Thy Name, by Tom Reilly, 2002. Mr Reilly is Irish, born in Drogheda.
Various ingenious theories have been suggested for the H, but the one that’s most plausible is linked to the Greek monogram for Jesus, IHS or IHC. These forms are extremely ancient: the Oxford English Dictionary records the first examples in England from about the year 600 for the first and 900 for the second. They’re generated from the first two letters plus the last letter of His name in Greek (the letters iota, eta, and sigma; in the second version, the C is a Byzantine Greek form of sigma). The H is the capital letter form of eta, but as knowledge of Greek wasn’t common, churchgoers were puzzled by it, thought it was the Latin letter H and came to believe in their ignorance that it must be the Saviour’s middle initial. Since medieval times the monogram has also been expanded into Latin phrases, such as Iesus Hominum Salvator, Jesus Saviour of Men, In Hoc Signo (vinces), in this sign (thou shalt conquer), and In Hac Salus, in this (cross) is salvation.
The oath does indeed seem to be American, first recorded at the end of the nineteenth century.
Jesus H. Christ, will you lay there all day?
1892. Recorded in Folk Songs of North America, by Alan Lomax, 1960.
Mark Twain wrote in his Autobiography about an incident during his time as a printer’s apprentice on the Courier in Hannibal around 1847. With another apprentice, he set in type a sixteen-page sermon by a visiting evangelist, the founder of the Disciples of Christ, Alexander Campbell, but accidentally left out two words. To avoid having to reset the type, the words Jesus Christ were abbreviated to JC. Campbell insisted that the name should appear in full, which gave the two apprentices a lot of work. It appeared in the reset text as Jesus H. Christ, a joke that Twain insisted was due to his fellow apprentice. The implication is that the form was known even then.
Its long survival must have a lot to do with its cadence, and the way that an especially strong stress can be placed on the H. You might also think of it as an example of emphatic infixing that loosely fits the model of words like abso-bloody-lutely or tribu-bloody-lation.
Q. Who do you think I am – Joe Soap? My dear old mother used to use this expression occasionally. We migrated to Australia from the UK in 1951 and I’ve never heard it used by Australians. What is its origin and is it still in use in the UK?
A. It remains only moderately common. But the meaning has shifted since your mother learned it. She was clearly using the expression to refer to a stupid or naive person, one who could be easily put upon or deceived. That was the original slang sense; these days it usually refers to an ordinary person:
Ms Ash, who was already quite wealthy, was able to sue the health service, where the average Joe Soap is not.
Sunday Mercury, Birmingham, 27 January 2008.
The earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary is from a 1943 British book, Service Slang, by John Hunt and Alan Pringle: ‘Joe Soap, the “dumb” or not so intelligent members of the forces. The men who are “over-willing” and therefore the usual “stooges”.’ It’s also in the caption below an illustration in Cyril Jackson’s It’s a Piece of Cake – RAF Slang Made Easy, also from 1943: ‘The Erk. A.C.2 Joe Soap, who carries the can for one and all.’ A services origin is further supported by this:
Farther along the road to Enna I saw many captured German vehicles. German divisional and regimental signs had been painted out and flaring red Canadian maple leaves painted on sides and fenders. On one captured truck was painted in huge letters ‘Smith’s Transport.’ Another had the sign ‘Joe Soap and Company.’
Lethbridge Herald, Alberta, Canada, 30 July 1943.
The implication of the other examples is that the Canadian soldiers borrowed the term from British ones. However, the opposite route is just about possible.
The usual view is that the second part is rhyming slang for dope, a stupid person, which started life as local English dialect (it’s first recorded in Cumberland in 1851). The first part is the short form of Joseph, widely used in compounds to refer to an ordinary person, more often in the US than the UK – Joe Bloggs, Joe Blow, Joe Sixpack, Joe Average, Joe Citizen, plain Joe, ordinary Joe, Joe Doakes, Joe Public – there are lots of examples.
It was first noted as a generic term, in a different sense:
Joe, an imaginary person, nobody, as Who do those things belong to? Joe.
The Swell’s Night Guide to the Great Metropolis, by ‘The Lord Chief Baron’, 1846. The author’s real name was Renton Nicholson. He is best remembered for running a series of enormously popular mock trials called the Judge and Jury Society at the Garrick’s Head and Town Hotel in Covent Garden, London. Judges, lawyers, peers and members of Parliament visited the trials and even took part.
Q. My colleagues and I here in Australia are puzzled as to the origins of the phrase jolly hockey-sticks, used, it seems, to describe old-school-tie-type high jinks or behaviour. Can you elucidate how this phrase began?
A. It’s not especially surprising that you’re puzzled, since you are half a world away from the British girls’ schools that provoked this parodic phrase, and in attitudes even further, if that were possible.
Indeed, with her throaty, upper-crust voice and manifest pluck when the going gets rough, there’s more than a hint of the jolly hockey sticks about her, like one of PG Wodehouse’s more amiable aunts.
Daily Telegraph, 21 March 2007. The actress in question is Joanna Lumley.
It’s gently dismissive of the hearty, games-playing, unscholastic tone of many girls’ public schools (which, confusingly for Americans, in British parlance mean fee-charging private schools), in which the game of hockey has long been a favourite sport. Such schools for girls were late on the scene compared with their counterparts for the male of the species. Early examples, in the middle nineteenth century, were set up in deliberate imitation of public schools like Winchester and Eton. By the early years of the twentieth century, there were enough in existence for a new genre of writing to evolve, of which the most celebrated early exponent was Angela Brazil. She and her successors and imitators did much to further this energetic, adventurous, sporting image.
A BBC radio comedy programme from 1950 was called Educating Archie and featured the ventriloquist Peter Brough and his dummy Archie Andrews. Yes, a ventriloquist on radio, one of the stranger ideas in broadcasting history, though there was an American precedent in the entertainer Edgar Bergen. Though the show, even viewed in rose-tinted retrospect, was moderately dreadful, it was also extremely popular, in part because its producer was a genius at spotting up-and-coming new performers. The list of Archie’s tutors and supporting cast reads like a Who’s Who of British talent from the fifties – Harry Secombe, Hattie Jacques, Benny Hill, Sid James, Max Bygraves, Tony Hancock, Alfred Marks, Dick Emery, Robert Moreton, Bernard Miles and Julie Andrews, among others.
One of Archie’s tutors was Beryl Reid, who played the part of a ghastly schoolgirl named Monica, a parody of the sporty public-school type. She invented the phrase jolly hockey-sticks! on the show because, as she said once, ‘I know what sort of thing my characters should say!’ Her phrase struck a chord and it has passed into the language.
Q. I recently heard the phrase Katie bar the door while drinking coffee with older gentlemen. It was said in this context: ‘She came in mad as hell and it was Katie bar the door when she found him kissing another girl.’ Then I also heard it used in the film Dodgeball. I know what it means, but where did it come from?
A. Various sources have been put forward. However, the more one investigates, the further away a simple answer seems to get, which is so often the case in the etymologist’s life.
Katy bar the door! (also as Katy bar the gate! and more often these days spelled Katie) is an American exclamation, at one time more often heard in the South than elsewhere, but now appearing quite often, especially in sports reports. It often means – as your example shows – that trouble is coming and that it would be wise to take prudent precautions or keep a watch out:
Mark my words, if Dallas wins Saturday in Seattle, which by the way I predict they will, all… will be talking about how genius Bill is and how he must stay and on and on and on. If they don’t, katy bar the door, because this is going to get U-G-L-Y.
Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 5 January 2007.
There were not many opportunities at auction. Therefore, when decent auctions did pop up, it was pretty much ‘Katie bar the door!’ in terms of sale prices. Up, up and away!
Implement & Tractor Magazine, 1 March 2008.
In that form, it’s from the late nineteenth century. It’s in a poem, When Lide Married Him, by James Whitcomb Riley, published in the collection Riley Love Lyrics in 1894. A young lady marries a known drunkard against family advice and forcibly reforms him. The first stanza ends with the line: ‘When Lide married him, it wuz “Katy, bar the door!” ’
One possible source is a traditional Scots ballad from medieval times, usually entitled Get Up and Bar the Door, which is still widely known and sung. But no version I’ve found mentions a person called Katy, although it’s just possible that ‘get up’ was later converted to ‘Katie’.
Others have pointed to a different tale, also from Scotland, involving one Catherine Douglas. King James I of Scotland, a cultured and firm ruler, was seen by some of his countrymen as a tyrant. Under attack by his enemies while staying at the Dominican chapter house in Perth on 20 February 1437, he was holed up in a room whose door had the usual metal staples for a wooden bar, but whose bar had been taken away. The legend has it that Catherine Douglas, one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting, tried heroically to save James I by barring the door with her naked arm. Her attempt failed, her arm being broken in the process, and the King was murdered, but she was thereafter known as Catherine Barlass.
Like iron felt my arm, as through
The staple I made it pass: –
Alack! it was flesh and bone – no more!
’Twas Catherine Douglas sprang to the door,
But I fell back Kate Barlass.
The King’s Tragedy, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1881. The nearest that Rossetti comes to the conventional expression in the poem is ‘Catherine, keep the door!’
In this poem’s favour as a source is that the first known example of Katy, bar the door! is from only seven years after it was published. Though it was popular, both in Britain and the USA, it’s hard to see why the expression should have appeared first in the USA rather than Britain. It’s probable that it merely acted as a stimulus to some existing expression that we have no record of.
Q. A very common turn of phrase, in Melbourne anyway, is someone referring to a separate case or situation to one being discussed as a different kettle of fish. It would make more sense to me if it were pot, frying pan or basket. I keep picturing someone trying to force a fish into a kettle presumably to boil it, or maybe add an unusual flavour to someone’s tea. Do you have any information on its history or derivation?
A. Its origins are, alas, mysterious.
These days, especially in Britain and in Commonwealth countries, we think of a kettle solely as a container in which to boil water to make tea. In the eighteenth century, though, a kettle was any large vessel for boiling stuff in. For example, a kettle of hats was a trade term for a number of hats all dyed at the same time in a dye kettle.
There are actually two common idioms based around the phrase kettle of fish. The first is an exclamation; it has appeared in a variety of forms, such as a pretty kettle of fish, a fine kettle of fish or a nice kettle of fish, meaning that some awkward state of affairs has arisen or that some situation has been thrown into muddle or confusion. It dates from the early eighteenth century and in its various forms has long been common.
When a person has perplexed his affairs in general, or any particular business, he is said to have made a fine kettle of fish of it.
Lexicon Balatronicum, A Dictionary of Buckish Slang, University Wit and Pickpocket Eloquence, the 1811 enlarged version of A Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, by Captain Francis Grose. One of the contributors was named on the title page as Hell-fire Dick of Cambridge, which suggests a detailed acquaintance with the subject matter.
There’s an end to the Clock trade now, and a pretty kettle of fish I’ve made of it, haven’t I? I shall never hear the last on it.
The Clockmaker; or, The Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick, of Slickville, by Thomas Chandler Haliburton, 1837. Sam Slick was a Yankee pedlar, who took advantage of the gullible locals in Nova Scotia, Haliburton’s home area. The book is an early collection of dialect humour and is a valuable source for word historians because it contains many expressions not previously recorded in North America.
The other idiom is the one you quote – that’s a different kettle of fish or that’s another kettle of fish – which means ‘That’s a different matter from the one previously mentioned’. This is early twentieth century in date and seems to be derived from the earlier one.
Warner was thinking how the Pueblo-type Indians were a different kettle of fish from the Sioux and the Blackfeet, who lived in tents, and would as soon, or even sooner, kill a white man as look at him.
A Life, by Wright Morris, 1973, a sequel to his Fire Sermon of two years earlier. It recounts the last hours of the lonely figure of Floyd Warner, aged 82, who is murdered for his watch in the empty spaces of Nebraska.
Nobody is sure where the expression comes from, but we do know that the phrase a kettle of fish was originally a literal term. There was, it transpires, a custom in the eighteenth century by which folk on the border of Scotland with England would hold picnics (though that term was not then known) on the banks of the river Tweed:
It is customary for the gentlemen who live near the Tweed to entertain their neighbours and friends with a Fete Champetre, which they call giving ‘a kettle of fish’. Tents or marquees are pitched near the flowery banks of the river, on some grassy plain; a fire is kindled, and live salmon thrown into boiling kettles. The fish, thus prepared, is very firm, and accounted a most delicious food.
A Tour in England and Scotland in 1785, by Thomas Newte, 1788. Newte’s real name was William Thomson; he was a Scottish lawyer who wrote prodigiously under several pen names, including Sergeant Donald Macleod and Andrew Swinton.
Later writers confirmed that the tradition continued well into the following century:
A custom prevails in these parts of holding what may be described as a salmon-picnic. ‘The Kettle’, as the party or club is technically called, appoint a day, and come together at some part of the river agreed on, provided with the elements of a feast. The fish already bespoken are kept alive in the river till the last moment, and are then transferred to the kettle and boiled, and eaten with the adjuncts; and sports and pastimes end the holiday.
Northumberland, and the Border, by Walter White, 1859, one of a series of travel books based on the walks he took during holidays from his post as assistant secretary of the Royal Society.
What puzzles scholars is how this literal reference became an idiom – assuming, of course, that the phrase comes from the custom, which isn’t altogether certain, though nobody has come up with a plausible alternative. The idiom would seem to be sarcastic – that the messy situation being referred to is far from that of the firm appearance of the salmon boiling in their kettle. Or might it have something to do with being in figurative hot water? We can only guess, a most unsatisfactory state of affairs.
Q. Members of my wife’s online quilt workshop were discussing the different pronunciations of lieutenant. Can you add to or clear up the confusion?
A. I’d rather not add to it, if you don’t mind. There’s been more than enough head-scratching down the years about why Americans say the word as ljutenant or lootenant while British and Commonwealth people prefer leftenant.
Like other military words (army, captain, corporal, sergeant and soldier), lieutenant came into English from Old French after the Norman Conquest. It’s from lieu, meaning ‘place’ (ultimately from Latin locus), plus tenant, holding. A lieutenant is a place-holder, a person who at need fulfils the role of a more senior one or who functions as his deputy. He acts – one might say – in lieu of another, where in lieu of now means ‘instead’ but could equally be construed as ‘in the place of’. Lieutenant is closely related in origin and meaning to locum tenens for a person who stands in temporarily for someone else of the same profession, such as a cleric or doctor.
On etymological grounds the pronunciation ought to be lieu, which suggests that Americans are saying it ‘correctly’. Historical evidence, on the other hand, shows that we English early on adopted the way of saying the word which is still our standard one, that this was taken by emigrants to the North American colonies and that it was only in the nineteenth century that it slowly changed to its modern pronunciation there.
Why English settled on leftenant isn’t at all clear. Some writers have suggested that early readers began by misreading u as v. This sounds plausible: in fourteenth-century English, when lieutenant first appeared in the written language, a distinction between the two letters didn’t yet exist and they were interchangeable; however, the Oxford English Dictionary says that the theory doesn’t fit the facts. Another theory is based on a medieval form lueftenant that’s known in French dialect; this matches a Scots spelling of the fifteenth century and it may be that English speakers picked up this variant way of saying the word. A further idea is that they may have heard the glided sound at the end of lieu when it appeared in compounds as a v or an f.
Early spellings like leef-, lyff- and leif- show writers were trying to record a pronunciation rather like the now-standard British one; others like lyeu- and lew- suggest that the other form was also around, most probably modelled on the common French way of saying the word. The spelling settled on lieutenant only in the seventeenth century.
The change to the American version might be the result of a speak-as-you-spell movement but, if that is the case, we have to explain why it happened in the US and not in the UK. It actually shifted through the influence of Noah Webster, a prominent advocate of spelling and pronunciation reform. In his famous dictionary of 1828, he said the word should be said as ‘lutenant’, though he continued to spell it lieutenant.
Others also felt that the usual pronunciation of the word should be deplored as a corruption and ought to be corrected. John Walker wrote in his Critical Pronouncing Dictionary of 1791, ‘the regular sound, as if written Lewtenant, seems not so remote from the corruption as to make us lose all hope that it will in time be the actual pronunciation’. Despite Webster, it was only slowly adopted in the US, though by 1893 Funk’s Standard Dictionary in the US was able to note that the lieu pronunciation was ‘almost confined to the retired list of the navy’, indicating that Walker and Webster had triumphed.
Q. I’d like to live the life of Riley, have a really good time without any cares, but if I ever achieve it, who is this Riley person whom I shall be emulating?
A. Oh, dear. The experts have been struggling with this one for decades but can’t agree on who Riley might have been or how he managed to achieve his enviable existence of comfort and ease. He (that much is assumed) was certainly fictional, but competing theories argue that he might have been either American or British. They can’t even agree whether he was Riley or Reilly (or even sometimes O’Reilly). However, the finger of suspicion points most clearly to popular music.
William and Mary Morris suggested in the Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origin that the origin lies in a once-famous American comic song:
Is that Mister Reilly, can anyone tell?
Is that Mister Reilly that owns the hotel?
Well, if that’s Mister Reilly they speak of so highly,
Upon me soul, Riley, you’re doing quite well.
Written in 1883 by Pat Rooney, a well-known vaudeville comedian, singer and Irish impersonator. The hero, an innkeeper, describes what he will do when he strikes it rich: ‘New York will be swimming in wine’ and ‘A hundred a day will be very small pay / when the White House and Capitol are mine.’ The indications are that it became popular very quickly. The lyric was quoted in The New York Times on 29 January 1884 as a sarcastic comment about how difficult it was to find out the extent to which the city registrar, John Reilly, had profited from his office. In December the same year the Philadelphia Record used it in referring to a New York police captain, also of the same surname, who was supposedly (and surprisingly) untouched by a city financial scandal.
Other musical compositions have been suggested. It has been said that there was one of 1890 performed by the well-known burlesque performers Edward Harrigan and Tony Hart. I’ve only been able to trace their play of that year, Reilly and the Four Hundred, and the supposed link is probably a mistake based on the title. Another version put forward (by H. L. Mencken) is ‘The Best in the House is None Too Good for Reilly’, by Charles E. Lawlor and James W. Blake. I don’t have its date, but it was certainly written after their first and most famous song, ‘The Sidewalks of New York’, whose words Blake knocked out in an hour on the counter of the hat shop where he was working as a clerk in 1894.
Pat Rooney’s song was revived during the First World War:
The song heard just now wherever the Tommies are gathered together is nothing else than our old favorite, ‘Is This Mr. Reilly They Speak of So Highly. Is This Mr. Reilly That Keeps the Hotel?’ Several months ago it became a craze with the English soldiers.
The Star And Sentinel, Gettysburg, 1 October 1915. The newspaper said that the song had quite displaced ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ as the soldiers’ favourite. British publishers in search of the rights, it reported, were surprised to discover that it was actually American. How it got into the trenches of northern France one can only guess.
A problem is that the expression living the life of Reilly doesn’t appear in either the Rooney or the Lawlor-Blake lyric. However, they certainly put the idea in people’s heads of a link between the surname and the leisured lifestyle of a very rich man.
The first known examples of the phrase are American and strongly suggest that it started life in the US Army around the time America entered the First World War in 1917. Small-town newspapers frequently published letters sent home by soldiers from training camps in the US and from active service in France. Many of them remarked on this strange expression they’d never heard before:
Besides the Polish troops there are a few quartermaster’s corps men and two companies of regulars here for guard duty. In addition there are about 43 medical men and we live like princes or, as they say here, ‘the life of Riley.’ We get wonderful ‘eats’ and have the best pass privileges of any men at the post.
Lowell Sun, Massachusetts, 16 January 1918. This is an extract from a letter home by Private Robert D. Ward, who was on the medical staff at Fort Niagara, New York state.
In Britain, it is often claimed that the expression is of Anglo-Irish origins, based on a music-hall song of the immediate post-war period, though the lyric is using the phrase in a way that suggests the audience was expected to recognize it:
The best time we had was the morning after when we occupied cities formerly held by the Huns. They must have led the life of Reilly as we caught them all asleep in beds and it was quite a sight to see our boys chasing them around in their pajamas – the German officers’ pajamas, not our boys’.
Bridgeport Telegram, Connecticut, 22 October 1918.
Faith and my name is Kelly, Michael Kelly, But I’m living the life of Reilly just the same.
‘My Name is Kelly’, written by Harry Pease in 1919.
Putting all this together, the most likely sequence is that at some point around the time of America’s entry into the First World War the expression was either created among troops in the US Army or was a previously locally known expression that was spread and popularized by contacts within army camps. Either way it echoed Rooney’s vaudeville song. It was then taken to France, was picked up by British soldiers who had been exposed to Rooney’s song earlier in the war, who took it into civvy street, where Harry Pease picked it up.
Q. I’m sure I have seen a short story (maybe it was very short) that was written without the use of the letter e. Have you ever come across such an item?
A. There are a very few such works, usually created more as a demonstration of the writer’s technical flair than as a contribution to literature:
Now, any author, from history’s dawn, always had that most important aid to writing: an ability to call upon any word in his dictionary in building up his story. That is, our strict laws as to word construction did not block his path. But in my story that mighty obstruction will constantly stand in my path; for many an important, common word I cannot adopt, owing to its orthography.
From the first chapter of Gadsby, a 50,000-word novel written by Ernest Vincent Wright in 1939 entirely without the letter e; it was described rather sniffily by one critic as ‘artistically unpretentious’. In his introduction, Wright said, ‘The entire manuscript of this story was written with the E type-bar of the typewriter tied down; thus making it impossible for that letter to be printed. This was done so that none of that vowel might slip in, accidentally; and many did try to do so!’ He even had to stop the printer heading each section with the word ‘chapter’. If the title reminds you of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, you’re on the mark, as Wright’s work was in part a response to what he saw as a ‘negative’ novel.
Such works are called lipograms, from the Greek lipogrammatos, ‘missing a letter’. Usually e is left out, no doubt because that’s the most frequent letter in most European languages and so presents lipogrammatists with their greatest challenge – for example, they can’t use such common words as the, we or are. It is no accident that the word for such a work was coined in Greek, since there are examples known from classical times of exactly this kind of wordplay; the Greek poet Pindar is reputed to have written verse without the letter sigma, because he didn’t like the hissing sound it made. Another writer, Tryphiodorus, rewrote the Odyssey without an alpha in the first book, a beta in the second, and so on through the alphabet (conveniently, the Odyssey has twenty-four books, the same as the number of letters in the Greek alphabet; or did that give him the idea?).
There have been numerous other such works down the centuries. Another famous modern example is George Perec’s French-language novel La Disparition of 1969, also written without the letter e. Remarkably, this was translated into English by Gilbert Adair in 1994 as A Void under the same constraint, for which he won the 1995 Scott Moncrieff Prize for French–English translation.
James Thurber wrote a story, The Wonderful O, about pirates who banned the use of the letter o, which is about the problem of leaving out a letter rather than an example of a lipogram.
Q. We had a rousing discussion over our second bottle of Merlot last night about just what it means to have the living daylights scared out of one. I’m hoping you can tell me what living daylights are, and where the expression comes from.
A. You’re not alone. Though the phrase living daylights is common in several fixed phrases, hardly anyone now knows what one’s daylights actually are.
Cruella De Vil terrified the living daylights out of children: the leering queen of furs, plotting to skin Dalmatian puppies to make a coat, was a surprisingly prescient lesson in the horrors of the fur trade and the importance of family.
The Times, 13 June 2008.
Daylights was used in the eighteenth century to mean one’s eyes, as a metaphoric extension from the function of the eyes, to see daylight.
I don’t use to be so treated. If the lady says such another word to me, d—n me, I will darken her daylights.
Amelia, by Henry Fielding, 1751. To darken one’s daylights meant to close up the eyes with blows, to half-blind a person through giving them black eyes.
It extended its meaning rather later to mean any vital part of the body, not just the eyes. So a sentence like ‘they had the daylights beaten out of them’ would be taken to mean the persons concerned suffered severe injury. There are many examples in the nineteenth century of expressions like ‘knock the daylights out of him’ or ‘scare the daylights out of him’.
In the later nineteenth century, the original term was expanded to living daylights. Perhaps daylights by then had become less clear in meaning, so that an extra word had to be added to restore its full force. It was unnecessary repetition, since one’s daylights were always alive, but logic has never been a powerful influence on the creators of words and phrases, or we wouldn’t have expressions like free gift.
The earliest example I’ve come across is this:
‘Jehosaphat!’ said the sportsman. ‘I’m not going to be insulted by a miserable rabbit,’ and he started to club the living daylights out of the beast with his gun.
The Bangor Daily Whig And Courier, Maine, 8 September 1890. This is from a brief tale about one Col. W. W. Foote, who ‘overcame a contumacious rabbit’ on the slopes of Mount Shasta in California, ‘where winter snows grow quite tall’. After shooting it and clubbing it without the animal’s moving, he found it had earlier frozen to death.
Q. A story on US television news about Washington’s ban on smoking in restaurants and bars and how it ended the era of politics in smoke-filled rooms mentioned the origin of lobbyist. It was said it originated with President Ulysses S. Grant, who liked to get out of the White House and often went to Washington’s Willard Hotel for brandy and cigars. Anyone who wanted access to the president to make their mark on politics would know to find him in the lobby there and President Grant was the first to refer to these power brokers as lobbyists. I hadn’t previously heard this. Is it correct?
A. No, not in the least. This tale has become so embedded in the subconscious of the US nation that it sometimes appears in quite reputable reference works. But it isn’t true; even perfunctory enquiries about the history of the word shows it can’t be.
You only have to look at the entry in the Oxford English Dictionary. The first example of lobbyist is listed as appearing in the Cornhill Magazine in January 1863. Ulysses S. Grant was president from 1869 to 1877, so the word was in use before he took office. A further nail in the coffin of the tale might be that the Cornhill Magazine was British, not American. But using electronic archives and casting my net wide for your delectation, I’ve been able to find examples of it in US newspapers rather earlier, including this:
This interest and this feeling were taken advantage of and subjected to a constant stimulation by a score of indefatigable lobbyists, who kept up an untiring attack upon the members, and especially upon the committee who had the subject in charge.
New Hampshire Gazette, 31 July 1849.
It would not be surprising to find still earlier examples. The job of the lobbyist had by then existed, unnamed, for many years (though third house, a humorous collective term for them, is known in the US from the 1840s). The Oxford English Dictionary’s first example of the collective term lobby for ‘persons who frequent the lobby of the house of legislature for the purpose of influencing its members in their official action’ is dated 1808. Lobbyism, the system of lobbying, dates from 1825. Both are recorded first in the US.
The original lobby was the one attached to the chamber of the British House of Commons, in which members could meet and talk to outsiders. This sense (and function) is recorded from the middle of the seventeenth century and was adopted in Congress when it was established more than a century later.
Q. After spending half an hour, I have been unable to locate the term loblolly boy, and would therefore appreciate your explaining its meaning, if you can. It is a term used in Patrick O’Brian’s marvellous book Master and Commander.
A. Patrick O’Brian uses the term many times in his sequence of novels about the British Navy in Napoleonic times, but here’s one from the book you mention, in which the ship’s surgeon Dr Stephen Maturin is talking to Captain Jack Aubrey:
‘I must go,’ he said, getting up at the sound of the bell, the still-feeble bell, that his new loblolly boy rang to signify that the sick might now assemble. ‘I dare not trust that fellow alone with the drugs.’
Master and Commander, by Patrick O’Brian, 1970.
Let’s start with loblolly itself. This was a medicinal food, a thick oatmeal gruel or porridge, perhaps with a bit of meat or some vegetables in it; other names for it were burgoo or spoon-meat. It was given to seamen recovering from sickness or injury, and so it belonged in the same category as that other supposedly restorative foodstuff, portable soup, which Patrick O’Brian frequently has Dr Maturin mention; this was soup that had been concentrated into a solid state (‘glass-hard’, O’Brian describes it at one point) to preserve it and make it easy to transport, usually in wooden cases.
The word may come from the dialectal lob, to bubble while boiling, and lolly, for broth, soup, or other food boiled in a pot, both recorded in the English Dialect Dictionary at the end of the nineteenth century. It’s almost certainly connected to lobscouse, originally a sailor’s dish of meat stewed with vegetables and ship’s biscuit. Abbreviated to scouse, it became attached to the English port city of Liverpool and to its dialect and inhabitants.
The loblolly boy was a lay assistant to the ship’s surgeon, often an assistant to the surgeon’s assistants, if he had any. One of his jobs was to feed the patients, hence his name, though he often had other duties as well, which sometimes led to him being referred to as the ship’s errand boy. Loblolly had another sense, a figurative dialect one of a rustic bumpkin, which reveals the loblolly boy’s position in the hierarchy of the ship – somewhere between the cabin boy and a ship’s rat. The term loblolly boy was often one of derision among the seamen. As John Masefield had a character say in Martin Hyde, ‘What’s a lad with good friends doing as loblolly boy?’
Q. I was in a shop recently when the girl behind the counter dropped something between the display cabinets. There was a police officer waiting in line and she said, ‘Do you think the long arm of the law can get this out for me?’ This has me wondering. Do you know the origin of the phrase?
A. These days it’s a dreadfully overworked cliché by which to describe the local police force, one that’s found in every English-speaking country; it’s often intentionally humorous, but sometimes otherwise:
The man was in a 55-mph zone and didn’t have a motorcycle operator’s license, and the long arm of the law was overhead in a Washington State Patrol airplane.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 28 June 2008. Avery long arm indeed!
It seems to have appeared around the middle of the nineteenth century:
‘Taking a drop too much.’ – A Mr Neville, of western New York, has married a Miss Amanda Drop, while having another wife. The long arm of the law dropped down on him, and walked him off to prison for bigamy.
Milwaukie Commercial Herald, Wisconsin, 8 July 1844. The newspaper’s title is correct: it’s using an old spelling of Milwaukee.
In the same period there was also make a long arm, to reach out to a great distance; later in the century another phrase appeared, the long arm of coincidence. Our expression clearly belongs with this set, all of them being based on long arm, a phrase that often appeared by itself and which meant the extent of one’s reach.
There was also strong arm of the law, which is older:
There are some print shops, and those in the most frequented streets of this metropolis, which occasionally shock all sense of decency by their exhibitions. Such public nuisances we should be glad to see removed by the strong arm of the law.
The Times, 16 September 1814.
So far as I can tell, strong arm of the law was used more widely in the US than the UK during the nineteenth century and always with serious intent (at least in the examples I’ve looked at). It, too, seems to have become a journalistic cliché. Might it be that long arm of the law was created as an alternative based on the near rhyme in its first word?
Both versions appear together here:
The gamblers… pursued their course with varying success, until the failure of a spirited enterprise in the way of their profession, dispersed them in various directions, and caused their career to receive a sudden check from the long and strong arm of the law.
The Old Curiosity Shop, by Charles Dickens, 1841. Dickens reused the phrase in Master Humphrey’s Clock in 1847.
Dickens is here putting together the two forms of the phrase, so suggesting both were already widely known by this date. But I can’t find an earlier example of long arm of the law, so it’s just possible that Dickens invented it, though its presence only three years later in the US newspaper quoted above suggests not. Whatever the truth of the matter, the long and strong arm of the law, though less popular than the others, became well known in the nineteenth century and has survived to the present day.